Chapter 46
The fiercest storms are not born from skies, but from within.
—“The Tempest of the Hollow King,” from Tales from the Breath of Stone
The final duel of the year is to be held in the Garden Grove—between Whittaker’s fourth-year earth-wielder Beatrice and the Vikhrostrum wind master, Vihar.
The Garden Grove doesn’t seem like a place meant for violence.
It is a place that smells of crushed basil and spring blooms, not blood and fury.
The courtyard at its heart has been cleared: sand freshly raked, vines pulled back.
The air feels alive with expectation. Professors line the perimeter.
Even the fruit trees and insects that would normally buzz around us fall silent.
Beatrice stands at the center, bare feet planted in the soft earth. Her curls are pulled into a loose knot, her sleeves rolled to the elbows. Nothing about her looks dangerous—until you see the stillness in her stance. The patience. Like stone waiting to shape itself.
Across from her, Vihar prowls forward, a tempest incarnate, his hair tossing around like ocean surf during a storm. His coat snaps sharply at his knees as he steps forward, eyes flashing. There is no patience or kindness in his gaze—only determination.
No one has forgotten what Jin Feng did to Teo. And no one is expecting Vihar to hold back.
Professor Bram Graves, the earth Magick dueling professor, raises his hand. “Begin.”
Vihar doesn’t wait. A surge of wind bursts through the grove, flattening herbs, snapping stalks, tossing petals like confetti. Beatrice braces low, sliding backward as the first wave of wind hits. But she doesn’t panic—she moves with purpose, trailing her fingers through the sand.
A mound of earth rises to meet the next blast. It doesn’t stop the wind, but it bends it—sending it sideways in a burst of thyme and dust.
Vihar scowls, lip curling in disgust. “I thought Whittaker trained warriors. All I see is a gardener.”
Beatrice shifts left, toward the cracked herb bed. Her fingers curl, and beneath the sand, root systems begin to stir.
Vihar strikes again, wind slicing a clean arc toward her torso. But Beatrice drops—and the ground drops with her. A hidden trench splits open beneath him. He stumbles mid-lunge and crashes sideways, half his momentum lost.
Gasps echo from the students lining the grove’s stone walls.
Beatrice rises slowly, the earth closing behind her. “You’re loud, like the wind you control. You’re used to everything bending to you,” she says. “But you aren’t careful. There is a time for action and a time for patience.”
Vihar sneers, cold, calculating. “Let’s see how careful you are after I destroy you and your garden.”
He lifts both arms—and the wind howls. It tears across the grove like an invisible beast, shredding leaves, snapping vines off their trellises. One blast shatters a large glass pane in the greenhouse. Another sends a raised bed crashing sideways.
The glass.
A cruel gust sends the broken shards slicing through the air, hurling them around like wild knives, uncontrolled and indiscriminate.
Beatrice barely has time to react. A wall of stone surges between her and the attack, the wind exploding against it. The glass flings sideways.
And then—
A scream.
My heart stops.
Because I know, even before I turn to look, who it is.
Amelia.
She was standing near the aqueduct edge. Too close. The wind slammed her against a lattice frame, crumpling her like a broken doll. Shards of glass piercing her body, her limbs flailing at different angles, a sick image of a marionette with strings tangled around her in violence.
Beatrice cries out, running to her. Vihar sees but doesn’t care. His hands rise again, wind already spiraling for another blow.
Time seems to freeze.
And something inside me snaps.
The broken aqueduct’s runoff swirls around my boots.
I don’t think. The water obeys me before I even tell it to.
It licks upward, coiling into the air like breath made liquid, wrapping my arms in a shimmer that catches the sun and fractures it.
The next strike isn’t wind. It’s water.
The current screams as it moves, a whip of heated water that hisses through the broken grove and slams into Vihar, knocking him off his feet. He catches himself in midair—but I don’t give him time to recover.
I raise my arms, the water following—coiling upward, lashing forward like something hunting.
He throws a gale toward me. I don’t even try to move.
The water swallows it and him completely. It wraps his arms, his chest. Freezing to ice in a single breath.
He thrashes—and I squeeze tighter.
A thread of water finds his mouth just as he begins to shout. The sound cuts off. The water surges in. And down. His body jerks, eyes wide, bubbles shattering against the cold.
I stand there and watch, my pulse a steady drum, my fingers trembling—not from weakness but from choice.
Part of me wants to stop it. To ease my grip, to let him breathe.
But part of me doesn’t.
Because it isn’t just him anymore. It’s every Magick who took things from me. Every hand that hurt my father. Every blade raised against those like my family.
The water isn’t just drowning him—it’s drowning them. All of them. And gods help me, for one terrible heartbeat, I want it to.
“Enough!” Headmaster Thorne’s voice cracks across the courtyard like a thunderclap.
Professors Graves and Ashar are already moving.
Shields form in a flash, severing the magick before I can respond.
Vihar collapses, coughing, sputtering, drenched and shivering in the sunlit sand.
He looks shaken. The brush with death clings to him in the form of thin icicles still hanging from his coat.
The water hisses as it falls away, not satisfied. Or maybe it’s me that’s not.
The grove is silent except for the broken trickle of the aqueduct. Professor Ashar is staring at me as if I’m a piece of a puzzle he wasn’t aware he was missing. His head is tilted to the side, his eyes cold, a question in them.
Amelia groans from where she lies, half sheltered beneath a lattice beam. Rozsen and Elliot are already with her. Peter crouches beside them, anxious and worried as he holds Amelia’s small hand in his. Ian stands over Vihar, fists clenched, vibrating with fury.
“She’s okay,” Elliot says, her voice shaking. “We’ve got her.”
“She’s not okay,” Ian snaps, anger bristling, fire magick sparking at his knuckles. “He could have killed her!” But Professor Kael is there, holding a hand up to Ian, a command to stand down.
Then the whispers start. Everywhere. All around me. I can hear them beneath the buzzing of the crowd.
“Did you see what she did?”
“The water—did you see how it moved?”
“Did she mean to do that?”
I can feel my squad’s eyes flicking between Amelia, Vihar, and me. A mixture of awe and disbelief and something else… Fear.
At the power I just displayed.
Rozsen’s look is sharp, almost accusatory.
Not anger, exactly, but hurt. That I didn’t trust her to know this part of me.
But even through the sting of her gaze, I feel the pride behind it.
Of watching me finally let go and show what I’m capable of.
Like she’s always known it was there, under the surface.
I stare at my hands. They’re still wet, still vibrating faintly with residual magick.
Water shimmers on my wrists like silver veins.
The sapphire of my ring glistens, the water clinging to it like a veil.
Water didn’t just come when I called—it surged, with more force than I meant. More instinct than control.
I feel Gavrail before I see him, standing next to me, shoulders squared. His gaze is focused, a lethal stillness echoing in the space he takes—eyes fixed on Vihar like he’s already planning the next move if mine didn’t land hard enough.
Noa moves through the crowd in seconds, silent until he’s standing in front of me. “Celeste.”
I flinch. I don’t look away from my hands.
“You almost…” He touches my wrist, his voice quiet, gentle—but edged. “Are you okay?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.” My shoulders tense, shame suddenly curling cold in my chest.
“She nearly drowned a student,” Professor Graves barks, stepping into the ring. “In front of half the school.”
“Because you let it get that far,” Gavrail says coldly, taking up a defensive stance next to me. “Maybe don’t lecture the one who stepped in when you should have.”
Graves stiffens, but doesn’t respond.
Gavrail doesn’t move. He just stands there, an immovable force. Vihar won’t meet his eyes—neither will anyone else.
The whispers continue. Students around the grove watch the scene unfold with wide eyes. Some are pale. Some look thrilled. One girl from Vikhrostrum mutters something in a different tongue before backing slowly toward the archway.
“Celeste Farris.” Thorne’s voice rings out. Clear. Authoritative. “My office. Thirty minutes.”
I turn, slowly. The water is already evaporating from my arms, but the mark it leaves is unmistakable.
The Garden Grove, once vibrant with the new life of spring, now stands bruised and broken—flower beds overturned, trellises cracked, petals scattered like ashes.
And in the center of it all—me.
Thorne is standing there, arms at his sides, looking at me with a mixture of curiosity and something else, something darker—and there it is, just behind his eyes: a flicker of something that almost looks like… satisfaction. Like I’ve just proven a point I didn’t know he wanted me to make.
Wet footprints follow me as I walk away, the whispers still rising like wind in my wake.