6. Asha
Asha
Ness stares at me with something that doesn’t resemble pity, but it’s pretty close. “What’s blocking you?” she asks eventually.
I give her a blank look. “Currently? Everything.”
Her pale eyes narrow clinically. That somehow makes it worse. “Your power spikes too high, too fast, then collapses. It isn’t low. It’s constrained.”
I school my face into bored contempt. “Congratulations. You’ve noticed I’m exceptional.”
“I noticed you’re unstable.”
“Careful,” I say softly. “That almost sounded insulting.”
“It was meant to.”
I like her a bit more for that, which is deeply irritating.
She gives me a smile which appears genuine as she steps back to grab her bookbag and follow the rest of the students out of the arena.
I take my time. My next class is going to be more humiliating than this one.
Advanced witchcraft.
I’m not even a fucking witch. I’m a goddess. My power transcends witch magic, and yet, here I am banished and recreated into a body that cannot hold my power.
I shoulder my bag and stalk out behind everyone else, trying not to think about the fact that some polished fae stranger has just diagnosed my magic better than I have.
The courtyard outside the arena is packed. Bodies move in every direction, with clipped voices and sharp laughter. I let the current drag me a few steps, then cut across it and head for the North Tower.
The route takes me through a long covered passage open to the courtyard on one side.
Grey darkness presses through the arches.
The gates loom in the distance, still smug and sealed.
I look at them for half a second too long and feel that same bite of ward-magic against my skin, warning me off before I even get close.
That is not my way out. I need to find a hole. A pinprick in the wards nearest the forest where animals brush too close and have worn them down. The obvious route is not the one to take in this instance.
The North Tower rises ahead, constructed of black and silver-veined stone, with windows too tall and doors too heavy. The place likes grandeur. It wants everyone entering to feel small.
Unfortunate for it, I’ve made a life out of refusing.
Inside, the air prickles with layered wards, and books older than some civilisations line the walls from floor to ceiling.
That gets my attention.
The entry hall opens into a circular chamber with a domed ceiling painted in silver constellations that shift. Staircases branch off in three directions. Students peel away up each one with the ease of creatures who belong here.
I pull the timetable from my bag and scan it again.
Advanced Witchcraft, Third Circle Lecture Hall.
A brass plaque beside the centre stair reads Third Circle in elegant silver lettering. The tower hums under my feet as I climb, each step answering the next with a faint pulse of warded power. It’s defensive, academic, and old.
By the time I reach the third level, my attitude has settled into something colder. More useful.
The lecture hall doors stand open. Students file inside, most of them already talking in little cliques that make me want to set every last one of them on fire.
The room is arranged in a descending half circle, tiered benches facing a sunken demonstration floor carved with silver sigils.
Candles float overhead in a slow orbit. At the centre of the floor sits a black stone table with restraint rings set into it.
I choose a seat halfway up and at the end of a row. Tactical. If this turns into an ordeal, I want a fast exit and clear sightlines.
Sitting down and rummaging around in the bookbag for a textbook, a notepad and a pen, I feel a familiar presence enter the room. I look up before I can stop myself and grimace quickly.
“You,” I snarl as Tobin smirks and takes the seat next to me.
“Me. And you’re in my seat.”
“Tough shit. It’s my seat now.”
“Ah, Saga Minima, you are going to get yourself killed in this place.”
“By who? You?” I scoff. His insult of calling me ‘the smallest possible witch’ in a language I could run rings around him in, is the biggest insult this arsehole academy has thrown at me so far.
His silver eyes flick over my face, amused in a way that makes violence feel like a perfectly reasonable response. “You could try not being insufferable for ten minutes.”
“I could also throw you down those stairs and improve the room.”
“That would require follow-through.”
“Oh, I’ve got plenty of that. It’s my magic that’s currently being a cunt, not the attitude behind it.”
That catches him. His expression alters by a fraction. Interest, sharper now. “Dirty mouth for such a small witch.”
Before I can tell him to rot in the hell dimension of Vaska, the doors slam shut of their own accord.
Every conversation in the hall dies.
A female strides down to the demonstration floor in layered black robes edged with silver thread. Her hair is white, cut to her jaw, and she has a beauty that looks carved from disapproval. She doesn’t rush. She doesn’t need to. The room bends around her attention anyway.
“Open your texts,” she says. “If you don’t have one, steal one. If you can’t manage that, drop the class and spare me the disappointment.”
I like her instantly.
Books thud open all around me. I pull mine closer to me on the desk and stare at the cover.
Advanced Witchcraft: Channelling, Constraint, and Catastrophic Failure.
Well. That feels pointed.
The professor lifts one hand, and silver script burns itself across the blackboard behind her in bright, precise strokes.
Constraint is not weakness. Constraint is survival.
A nasty little ripple goes through the room. I sit back and stare at the sentence with all the enthusiasm of a creature being handed her own obituary.
The professor turns to bore her gaze into mine, hands clasped behind her back. “I am Professor Sable. If your power exceeds your vessel, your vessel breaks. If your vessel breaks, you die. If you do it in my lecture hall, I will be irritated. Are we up to speed?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I mutter because fuck. She is badass.
“SilverGate attracts excess,” she says, pacing the edge of the demonstration floor. “Too much power. Too much ambition. Too much ego. The weak burn out. The foolish rupture. The rest learn control.” Her eyes sweep the room, cool and merciless. “Open to chapter three.”
Pages turn with magic.
Mine does not.
Tobin glances at my unopened book, then flips it open for me with two fingers.
I look at him. “Did I ask?”
“You looked confused.”
I consider stabbing him with my pen, but decide Sable will probably be less restrained with my outburst than Vey was.
Professor Sable speaks, and the entire hall sharpens around her.
“Most of you were taught to channel power by quantity first,” she says.
“That is why most of you are clumsy. Quantity is for children and warlords. Precision is for survivors.” Sable draws a circle in the air with one finger.
Silver light hangs there, then divides into six rotating lines, each one thinner than the last. “Power enters the body. Power seeks expression. If the vessel is inadequate, expression becomes damage.” She lets the lines spin faster.
“What is the first rule of constrained channelling?”
Half the class answers at once. “Never force a vessel past its tolerance.”
She nods once. “Good. Some of you may yet avoid exploding.”
Tobin turns a page beside me.
I don’t look at him. “If you keep being useful, I’ll start to suspect a head injury.”
“Try gratitude. It wears better.”
“On me? Never.”
His quiet laugh gets under my skin in a way I find hot.
Arsehole. He isn’t supposed to find me amusing. He is supposed to find me terrifying and cower at my feet.
Sable gestures, and the black stone table at the centre of the room hums to life. The restraint rings unlock with a clean metallic snap. “Who would like to demonstrate what happens when raw output exceeds structural capacity?”
Tobin’s hand shoots up.
Of course it does.
I roll my eyes, but Sable’s gaze moves over the room and stops on me with the kind of inevitability that makes me want to swear. “Miss Asha.”
Tobin turns his head, silver eyes bright with amusement. He purposefully drew attention to me sitting next to him.
“Pray for your own survival,” I mutter, pushing to my feet.
Every eye in the room follows me down into the pit. It’s like pressure against my skin. Curiosity. Anticipation. The ugly thrill of watching someone else be the example.
I step onto the silver-carved floor and stop beside the stone table.
Up close, the restraint rings look less theoretical and more personal.
Sable watches me without blinking. “On the table.”
I look at the rings. Then at her. “You do know I’m not volunteering for public humiliation.”
“You’re already achieving it,” she says. “This is the educational portion.”
Laughter echoes around the room.
I’ll slay you all.
I sit on the edge of the table instead of lying down. “If anyone straps me to anything, I will become very unpleasant.”
“Become unpleasant?” She gives me a knowing smile that I’m not sure is a good sign or a bad one. “Lie back.”
The room waits for me to refuse.
I consider it. I consider a lot of violent things in one neat little burst, then I lie back on the stone because I’m not giving everyone, especially Tobin, the satisfaction of seeing me dragged into place.
The surface is cold through my clothes. The rings sit open at either side of my wrists, my ankles, one at my waist.
Sable doesn’t fasten them. “Hands at your sides.”
I do it slowly. “If this kills me, I’ll complain to Blackridge.”
“If it kills you, I’ll note that your ghost may be vengeful, and to keep an eye out.”
Tobin laughs under his breath somewhere above me. It irritates the fuck out of me that I can pick it out of the other chuckles.
Sable steps to the head of the table and places two fingers just above my sternum, not touching, just hovering. Power prickles through the air at once. Precise, thin and completely not fun.
“Channel,” Sable says.
“That’s your whole instruction?” I ask. “A bit optimistic.”