Chapter 45 #2
Cassara’s stomach twisted. She’d seen these maps during safety drills, but never lit up like a battlefield.
Auren snapped a switch on the wall, his voice barking through the comms: “We need a threat sweep. Full spectrum. Tuning high-range elemental sensors.”
A nearby technician answered without looking up from her console. Sweat beaded on her forehead despite the cool air. “Already tried. It’s not showing up.”
“What do you mean it’s not showing—”
“It’s not on the map!” the tech snapped, frustration bleeding through her professional composure. “It didn’t appear until the perimeter failed. No trace before that. No glyph fluctuation, no aether anomaly, no forecasted elemental surge. Nothing until it was already here.”
How was that possible?
It hadn’t tripped a single defense until it had entered Vallemont’s supposedly impenetrable barriers.
Cassara felt a chill sweep over her that had nothing to do with her soaked clothes.
Every first-year learned about the academy’s legendary defenses—layers of detection magic that could sense a hostile pigeon three miles out.
Cassara heard the door slam open again. This time it was Nareen, soaked and furious, stepping into the alcove with her coat clinging to her like a second skin.
She froze at the sight of Cassara and Gideon, her eyes flicking between them with a question she didn’t voice, but said nothing, turning instead to Auren.
“What the hell is going on?”
Auren kept his eyes on the readouts, but Cassara saw his knuckles whiten as he gripped the console edge. “Tempestrix. Mid A-class. Air elemental. It came in under the radar. The wards didn’t catch it.”
An A-class Leviathan. She’d only read about creatures of that magnitude in theoretical texts, creatures that required full tamer squads and military-grade containment protocols.
Nareen swore. “Half the seasoned tamers are in the field evaluating fourth years. They’re not due back until morning.”
Auren shook his head. “The nearest reserve unit is thirty minutes out. More for a full squad.”
Nareen swore again.
Thirty minutes was too long.
Outside, the storm howled with renewed fury—and something deeper screamed with it. The building shuddered, and somewhere in the distance, Cassara heard the crack of splintering stone.
Auren didn’t hesitate.
He turned from the readouts, eyes already scanning the hall like he could see through the stone itself, calculating distances and tactical positions. “We’re out of time. Follow me.”
Cassara and Gideon obeyed without a word, falling in step as he led them back into the storm. The door slammed open under his palm, and rain rushing in as thunder cracked overhead. The sky hadn’t stopped breaking since the leviathan appeared.
Across the main courtyard, figures clustered at the base of the central stair—the sharp outlines of third-year tamers, half-geared, wide-eyed, waiting for instruction.
Most hadn’t even strapped on their aether shards yet.
Their beasts huddled close, sensing the wrongness in the air.
A drake’s scales rippled with nervous energy.
A wind sprite flickered in and out of visibility, too agitated to maintain solid form.
“Five minutes!” Auren’s voice cut through the roar of the wind like a blade. “Gear up. Meet me in the south training yard. I want a full sync briefing before we engage.”
Some moved immediately, years of training overriding their fear. Others hesitated, casting nervous glances skyward at the churning mass of clouds that seemed to pulse with its own malevolent life.
He didn’t wait to see who listened. Cassara and Gideon followed him through the entry hall as he pushed the doors open again and pointed them toward the east corridor.
“You two—get back to the first-year commons. Keep everyone inside and calm until we call for evac.”
Gideon nodded, but Cassara’s mouth parted, a protest forming. The words built in her throat—she wasn’t helpless, she could help, she had Flicker—
Auren cut her off with a look. Not cruel. Not dismissive. Just focused. The look of someone who had already calculated every variable and reached his conclusion.
“This isn’t your fight, not yet,” he said, firm but not unkind. “Your cohort needs you. Go.”
He vanished back into the storm, his figure swallowed by sheets of rain within seconds.
Cassara stood frozen for a heartbeat longer, the wind tangling her hair and water stinging her skin like tiny needles. She didn’t argue—but she wanted to.
Gideon caught her arm gently, already turning toward the commons and pulling her with him.
She didn’t resist.
Not yet.
The common room was in an uproar when they arrived.
Students were shouting, crowding the windows, craning for a better look at what was happening in the storm beyond. The protective illumination that usually bathed the commons in steady blue now stuttered and dimmed, casting everything in sickly, uncertain shadows.
Cassara barely had time to catch her breath before a voice called her name.
“Cass!”
Liri shoved her way through the nearest knot of students, eyes wild with relief and fear in equal measure. Nym flitted restlessly around her head, wings pulsing in tight, agitated beats that scattered rainbow sparks. “Are you okay? We heard something scream—it wasn’t a drill, was it?”
The hope in her voice made Cassara’s chest tight. She opened her mouth, searching for words that might somehow soften the truth. No words came out.
Oliver arrived next, nearly slamming into them, his Codex bag dragging off his shoulder, books and components spilling across the floor.
Ilza crawled in twitchy half-climbs along his arm, her usual graceful movements replaced by nervous scuttling.
“Glyphs are collapsing. I was tracking the perimeter nodes—they’re falling inward.
That thing didn’t strike from above. It snuck in. ”
His voice cracked on the last words, the implications hitting him even as he spoke them. If something could slip past Vallemont’s legendary defenses undetected, what else might be out there?
Rett trailed after him, silent but tense, jaw tight with the kind of controlled fear that came from understanding exactly how bad things had become. Skelli’s plated tail tapped nervously against the floor behind him, each strike creating tiny sparks against the stone.
Gideon raised his voice, cutting through the growing panic. “Everyone, off the windows. Stay clear. This is a level-red threat. If you don’t have an assigned duty, hold position and wait for instructions.”
That got some attention. The official terminology, the command in his voice—it made the situation real in a way that whispered rumors couldn’t.
Students began pulling back, reluctantly at first, but with growing urgency as the implications sank in.
Someone had finally checked the Crestboard—which had just locked into full emergency mode, its usual cheerful announcements replaced by stark red warnings.
Talia appeared from deeper in the room, already half-geared despite the chaos, her dual pistols holstered at her hips and a determined gleam in her eyes that reminded Cassara why she’d made it this far at Vallemont. “What’s happening? And don’t tell me it’s just a storm.”
Cassara started to answer—
And the world exploded.
The shriek that followed wasn’t from the sky. It was closer.
Much closer.
A concussive burst ripped through the wall behind them—not a direct hit, but something that sounded like a mountain had just slammed into the adjacent tower.
The impact sent shock waves through the stone, the ground lurching beneath their feet.
Stone screamed as wards buckled under pressure they were never designed to withstand, and the windows didn’t just rattle—they cracked.
Spiderweb lines of stress split across the glass in jagged veins, each fracture spreading with audible pops.
A second impact hit lower, closer to the foundation. The lights sputtered and died, plunging half the room into darkness before the emergency glyphs kicked in, bathing everything in harsh amber.
Students screamed.
“Get down!” Gideon shouted, dragging Cassara behind a reinforced support column as pieces of the outer frame buckled inward with a groaning roar that sounded like the building’s death cry.
From outside came the unmistakable sound of something massive landing—wet and wrong and impossible. It didn’t shake the ground like falling stone or crashing timber.
It bent the air.
Cassara’s ears rang again. This time, not from noise but from pressure.
The kind of pressure that came from being too close to something that existed on a scale beyond human comprehension. Her vision blurred at the edges, and she tasted copper.
The Leviathan was here. Not coming. Not breaching.
It had arrived.
The walls groaned again, a sound of structural surrender that made her stomach drop. Somewhere above them, she heard the crash of falling masonry.
Smoke or dust—or maybe the lingering residue of disrupted glyphwork—began to spill from the far corridor, curling like ash around the windows. The air grew thick and acrid. Cassara coughed, the taste of aether static thick on her tongue, metallic and wrong.
She didn’t remember standing. One second she was crouched behind the column, listening to the panicked breathing of her friends, and the next she was moving, weaving between half-panicked students as they scrambled for cover or tried to push toward the stairs.
Her legs carried her forward without conscious thought.
She reached for him instinctively—and found nothing. The aether shard wasn’t with her. Flicker wasn’t with her. And yet the pull toward the window didn’t fade.
“Cassara!” Liri’s voice caught behind her, sharp with panic. She felt Liri’s hand catch her sleeve and shook it off. “Where are you going?”
The question barely registered through the buzzing in her head, the pull that dragged her toward the windows.
The glass was nearly shattered. Lines of fracture cut through the rain-slick surface like veins in ice, distorting the view but not blocking it entirely. She pressed her palm against the cold surface, ignoring the way it flexed under the pressure.
She could still see it.
Out there, at the edge of the northern courtyard, the Leviathan moved.
It was so much larger now.
No longer a distant shimmer in the clouds—but real, terrifying, and impossibly close.
Its serpentine body hovered above the cracked flagstones, coiled midair as if gravity had given up trying to claim it.
The translucent plates that covered its hide refracted the failing magelight around it until it looked like it was made of broken sky and liquid lightning.
A ripple passed down its spine—storm-spines flaring like the fins of some impossible fish swimming through air instead of water.
Then its mouth opened.
No sound came.
Not at first.
The silence stretched, pregnant with potential energy, and Cassara felt her lungs seize. Even through the fractured glass, she could see into that maw—see the swirling vortex of compressed air and electrical discharge building in its throat.
And then—boom.
A rolling pulse of compressed air slammed against the building like an invisible wave, sending fresh cracks through the stone, through the windows, through the very air itself. The impact lifted Cassara off her feet for a heartbeat, suspended between earth and sky.
Cassara’s balance wavered. She caught herself on the windowsill, breath shaking, her palm slick with sweat. Around her, students cried out as the wave hit them, some falling, others clutching at furniture or each other for stability.
Through the chaos, one thought cut clear—
They weren’t going to hold it back.
Not from inside. Not with half the senior tamers gone. Not with students who’d barely learned to sync with their beasts.
Auren’s voice echoed in her memory, steady and certain.
This isn’t your fight, not yet.
But that was a lie, wasn’t it?
The fight had already found her, had found all of them.