Chapter 24 Three Years Later
Three Years Later
Skye
The cottage sits just off the eastern edge of Phoenix Sanctuary's grounds, close enough to see the main building's towers through the trees, far enough that the noise of six hundred students doesn't reach the front porch.
I found it three months ago, an abandoned groundskeeper's residence overgrown with ivy and listing slightly to the left.
Jade took one look at the kitchen and declared it ours.
Ambrose had ownership contracts drawn up within the hour.
It's become something we didn't know we needed.
A place to be ourselves without the weight of being the six who saved the world.
Students see us as symbols. Faculty treat us with deference that borders on reverence.
The cottage is where Jade burns dinner and Harlow leaves his boots in the doorway and Ambrose falls asleep at his desk with contract threads still glowing between his fingers.
It's where Rumi meditates in the garden at dawn, his golden aura carrying its dark threads in a balance that looks almost peaceful from the outside.
Where Stellan and I argue about curtains with an intensity that suggests neither of us has ever had the luxury of arguing about something that doesn't matter.
The cottage also serves a practical purpose.
The main building's classrooms work for most students, but some of the new arrivals need more space, more quiet, more individual attention than a standard session provides.
The ones whose essence manifests in ways that scare them, the ones who've been hiding for so long that being told their magic is welcome triggers panic instead of relief.
We teach them here, in the cottage's converted sitting room, where the windows look out on the garden instead of a corridor full of other students.
Today I'm working with a young man named Eli whose essence defies classification.
It manifests as sound, a resonant hum that vibrates through everything he touches, shaking objects off shelves and cracking windows when his emotions spike.
He arrived at the sanctuary two weeks ago with cotton stuffed in his ears and his hands wrapped in cloth to muffle the vibrations.
He hadn't voluntarily spoken in three years because his voice amplified the effect.
"Try again," I say. "Let the hum build. Don't suppress it."
Eli closes his eyes. The hum rises, filling the room with a vibration I can feel in my teeth.
The dark threads in my bonds resonate with it, which shouldn't happen but does, the darkness inside me responding to his essence with a frequency that makes my chest tighten.
The window behind him rattles in its frame and a cup on the side table begins to slide.
"That's good," I say. "Now pull it back. Don't cut it off, just reduce the volume."
He tries. The hum drops, wavers, then spikes. The cup shatters. Eli's eyes fly open, horrified, his hands coming up to cover his mouth as though he could shove the sound back inside.
"The cup doesn't matter," I tell him. "We have a lot of cups."
"I can't control it."
"You can't control it yet. There's a difference."
Jade appears in the doorway with a dustpan before I need to ask, sweeping up the shards.
He catches my eye as he passes, checking in through the bond.
I'm fine. The darkness spiked when Eli's hum resonated with it, but it's settling back to its usual persistent hum.
Jade nods, and disappears back toward the kitchen.
We work for another hour. Eli manages to hold his hum at a stable volume for twelve seconds, which is eight seconds longer than yesterday's best. The windows survive.
When the session ends he pulls the cotton from his ears with shaking hands, looking at me with an expression I've seen on dozens of students since we started teaching here: the fragile disbelief of someone being told for the first time that the thing they're most afraid of might not be a curse.
"Same time tomorrow?" I ask, giving Ell the choice.
"Same time tomorrow," he echoes, his voice resonating through the room with a warmth that isn't quite a hum, more like the lingering note of a bell that's been struck gently. The windows don't rattle. Progress.
I walk back toward the kitchen where Jade is cooking and Stellan is supposed to be helping. The smell of something burning reaches me before I clear the hallway.
"Stellan?"
A shriek sounds from the kitchen and I round the corner to find Stellan staring at a pan of what was probably meant to be sautéed vegetables, now charred beyond recognition.
Dark smoke curls up from the blackened mess, and the fire in Stellan's hands carries an extra edge of shadow that tells me exactly what happened.
His flame surged with the darkness, ran hotter than he intended, and incinerated everything in the pan before he could pull it back.
"I thought I'd use my fire to conserve some power," he says, his voice pitched between frustration and embarrassment. "The dark threads flared and I lost the temperature for a second."
Jade inspects the damage. "That's the third pan this month."
"The darkness doesn't understand low heat."
"The darkness doesn't understand a lot of things. That's why we don't let it cook."
I hold back a nervous laugh, unsure of how to truly respond because as horrifying as this is, it’s also a little funny seeing Stellan’s face scrunched up because he burnt the vegetables.
Rumi appears from the garden, drawn by the commotion, golden aura pulsing with amusement he's not trying very hard to hide.
Ambrose looks up from his contracts at the dining table with one eyebrow raised.
Harlow materializes from somewhere, presumably the death realm based on the temperature drop that accompanies his arrival, surveys the smoking pan, and says nothing, which from Harlow communicates more than any comment would.
Stellan looks at the ruined vegetables. Then at his hands, where the dark veins pulse through his golden fire. Then at us, the five people watching him with varying degrees of sympathy and amusement.
"It's fine," he says, and his mouth twitches. "We'll be okay."
Nervous laughter ripples through the kitchen.
Not because it's funny, not entirely. Because the alternative to laughing is acknowledging that the darkness in Stellan's fire just destroyed dinner the same way it will eventually consume him, and that's not something any of us can look at directly for very long.
So we laugh, and Jade rescues what he can from the pan.
We'll be okay. For now, for tonight, for however long we have, we'll be okay.