20. Asha
Asha
Blackridge says nothing as he leads me through the Admin building.
I dislike that more than questions.
The corridors here are quieter than the tower. No students, gossip, or restless magic sparking off every idiot with a temper. Just black stone, silver ward-lines worked into the walls, and doors that look built to keep things in rather than welcome anything at all.
My pulse has settled, but the rage hasn’t. It sits low and hot, chewing through me while I replay that flash of purple under my hands. Mine. So close, I could have screamed.
Blackridge stops outside a narrow door banded in silver and opens it with a touch of his hand.
“Inside.”
I walk in on principle as if this is my choice.
The room is small. A desk. Two chairs. One long window looking out over the dead-lit courtyard, though the glass is veiled with wards thick enough to turn the outside world into a haze. Shelves line one wall, full of files, old books, and locked cases that hum faintly with protective magic.
An interrogation room dressed up as an office.
Blackridge closes the door behind me. The latch clicks. Final.
I turn slowly and face him. “If this is where you try to terrify me into obedience, you should know I’ve had better attempts.”
His expression doesn’t shift. “If I wanted obedience, Miss Asha, you would already be on your knees.”
I lift an eyebrow. “Bold opener.”
“It was a statement, not an invitation.”
“Pity. I was about to be impressed.”
He moves past me and takes the chair behind the desk, with cold authority and old power. He doesn’t gesture for me to sit. I take the other chair anyway and make myself comfortable out of spite.
For a moment, he just looks at me.
I let him.
He’s trying to unsettle me with silence again. It works on lesser creatures. On me, it mostly makes me want to throw things.
“At least ask the dramatic questions,” I say. “What did you do? What did you see? What eldritch fuckery have you dragged into my precious academy? You know. The classics.”
Blackridge sets one hand flat on the desk. “What happened in your room?”
“Your building had a fit.”
His eyes stay on mine. “Try again.”
“Your lockdown upset the architecture.”
“Miss Asha.”
The use of my false name in that flat tone does unpleasant things to the air. I smile anyway. “Headmaster Blackridge.”
His gaze flicks once to my face, then settles with more weight.
“I am not your enemy, Miss Asha. You were sent here for a reason, and I am trying to get to the bottom of it. A breach struck the outer wards. At the exact same moment, something flared in your room strongly enough to make SilverGate scream through every stone on this campus.” His voice stays level.
“So I will ask once more. What happened in your room?”
I tip my head and consider lying harder just to be difficult.
But I’m tired. I’m tired of the lies when I’m a teller of the truth.
I abhor deceit and find it a bore. I haven’t been in a position to have to lie in centuries; my truth has the power to back it up.
Since arriving here, I’ve done nothing but lie.
Some of it is not my fault, but some of it is by design.
That doesn’t mean I trust Blackridge. It doesn’t mean I don’t.
It means I’ve been here a day and I’m already tired.
“I can’t tell you what you want to know.”
He sighs, and I swear his patience snaps audibly. “Miss Asha—”
“No, I mean, I can’t tell, not that I won’t. Big difference.”
“Oh?” he raises an eyebrow.
“My magic is incompatible with this realm. That includes my name, their names—the ones who banished me.”
His usually blank expression shifts slightly. “Banished.”
“Yes. Banished. Exiled. Forced out.”
“I’m aware of what banished means. Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m not a twenty-one-year-old low-level witch, and it’s starting to piss me off.”
“Do you expect me to do something about it?”
That… I should’ve known. “I see.”
“What do you see, Miss Asha?”
“You either think I’m lying, or you have zero interest in helping me get home.”
“Where is home?”
“You aren’t getting that. Deliberately. This was a mistake.” I rise, ready to leave.
“Sit,” Blackridge says, and against my will, I sit.
“Don’t use your magic on me, Headmaster,” I warn. “It makes me tetchy.”
“And you are in no position to do anything about it.”
I grit my teeth. “So you see my dilemma.”
Blackridge steeples his fingers and regards me as if I’m a problem he hasn’t decided whether to solve or preserve.
“Your dilemma,” he says, “is that you have arrived in my academy carrying power you cannot use, knowledge you cannot share, and enemies you cannot name. Mine is that every ward on these grounds reacts to you as if it cannot decide whether to open or kill.”
“Charming place you’ve built.”
“It has kept this academy standing, and believe me when I say that it is no mean feat. What is out there is... unpleasant, Miss Asha.”
“I know what unpleasant is. I am unpleasant.”
“On that we can agree.”
I try not to take offence because we mean completely different things. He sees a bratty bitch who is a pain in his arse. He has no idea.
“Then let’s try a different method.” He reaches into a drawer and sets a thin silver disk on the desk between us. Runes crawl across its surface, then settle. “Put your hand on that.”
I look at it. “What does it do?”
“It measures distortion.”
“That sounds invasive.”
“That is because it is.”
“Is this the testing phase? You’re done watching, so now you intend to dissect me?”
“I have no intention of dissecting you, Miss Asha. That would be counterproductive.”
I stare at the silver disk and consider smashing it through his window. The wards in the glass would probably spit it back into my face, which would be embarrassing. Also painful. I’m trying to avoid both.
“If I touch that,” I say, “what exactly does it measure?”
“The degree to which your presence distorts local magical structure. Pressure on ward-lines. Incompatibilities in energetic patterning. Foreign resonance.”
“Foreign resonance,” I mutter. “How academic.”
“Would you prefer frightening language?”
“I’d prefer useful language.”
His dark eyes hold mine. “Fine. It tells me how dangerous it is to keep you here without preparation.”
That gives me pause. Not because of the danger. I already know I’m dangerous. It’s the keep you here part that needles. I’m not a parcel to be stored.
“Am I allowed to decline?”
“You are allowed many things. They simply come with consequences.”
“Such as?”
“A more restrictive environment.”
I smile without warmth. “So kind of you to phrase imprisonment politely.”
“It would still be preferable to allowing an unstable unknown force to trigger another academy-wide breach.”
“That wasn’t my fault, exactly. Something wanted me home.”
“Something?”
“My magic.”
He blinks. “Put your hand on the disc.”
I don’t move.
Blackridge’s expression doesn’t alter. The silver disc sits between us, runes waiting, the whole room holding its breath like it thinks I’m about to do something dramatic.
It’s not wrong.
“If this blows up in our faces,” I say, “I’m going to enjoy it enormously.”
“Noted.”
I glare at the thing for another second, then put my palm on the disc.
Cold bites at my skin. It’s not painful, but it’s clinical. The runes wake in a sharp burst of silver and begin to crawl beneath my hand, circling my wrist, mapping something under the surface. The disc hums. The wards in the room answer.
Then my body locks. I suck in a breath.
The silver under my hand flashes white, then bruises purple from the centre out.
Blackridge goes still.
The disc cracks.
A line splits clean through the middle, then another, spidering under my palm. Purple light leaks through the fractures, thin at first, then stronger, pushing against the silver in ugly little pulses. My chest tightens. Pain under my skin rises in answer, too big, too furious, too familiar.
Mine.
“Remove your hand,” Blackridge says, very calm.
“I can’t.”
That gets him out of his chair.
He rounds the desk in one smooth movement, power already gathering around his hands. “The disc is trying to bind to your resonance. If you fight it, it will get worse.”
“I’m not fighting it,” I gasp. “It’s fighting me.”
Purple light surges through the cracked silver and races over the desk in branching lines. The wood blackens under it. The runes on the disc writhe, losing shape, reforming into symbols I know with a sick jolt of recognition even if I can’t say their names aloud.
Home.
It knows me. It knows what I am.
It tears through me so hard my vision blurs.
Power slams outward in a violent pulse. The chair slams backwards with me still in it, and my head bounces off the stone floor. Pain cracks through my skull, hot and immediate, but it is nothing compared to what tears under my skin.
I gasp and arch off the floor as purple light pours out of me in jagged bursts.
It rips through my arms, my ribs, my throat, every part of this body that isn’t mine straining around something too vast to hold.
The wards in the room shriek. The window goes white.
Files explode off the shelves. Glass rattles hard enough that I expect it to burst.
Blackridge is above me in an instant.
“Stay still.” His hand lands on my shoulder, not gentle, just firm, and black-silver magic lashes out from his other hand in clean lines over the floor.
It catches the purple spilling from the ruined disc and pins it back from the walls before it can sink into the stone.
He isn’t trying to stop me. He’s stopping the room from becoming a crater.
The thought comes through a haze of pain and fury. I cling to it because the alternative is drowning in the flash of recognition those symbols lit inside me. I claw at the floor and try to breathe through the feeling of being split open from the inside.
It won’t fucking stop.
The purple force pours through me in brutal waves, each one dragging fragments of memory behind it. My throne under storm-black skies. Gold at my feet and blood on white stone.
I scream, furious at the loss of control more than the pain.
Blackridge drives more of that black-silver magic into the floor. It spreads in a hard circle around us, walling the room off in layers. The pressure changes instantly. My power still fights, but now it hits barriers instead of the rest of the building.
“Look at me,” he snaps.
I drag my gaze to his. His eyes are flat and steady. Too calm for a male kneeling next to what should by now be a crater in his office. “You need to stop reaching for it.”
“I’m not reaching. It found me.”
Another pulse tears through my chest. My back arches again, and the false body shakes around the force trying to punch through it, and for one wild second, I think this skin is about to split apart for good.
Then something cold hits the centre of my chest.
Blackridge’s power.
It slams into me with a brutality that makes me groan, forcing channels through the chaos, driving the flood away from the weakest points in this pathetic body before it can tear me open. I choke on another scream and dig my nails into the stone hard enough to break them.
“Do not let it drag you into memory,” he says, every word clipped and absolute. “Anchor.”
“My body is the problem,” I snarl, barely getting the words out. “It’s too fucking small—”
“I know.”
Another violent surge rips through me. Purple light lashes off my skin and slams into the black-silver barrier he has thrown around us. The whole room judders. Somewhere behind the roaring in my ears, glass cracks.
My vision doubles. For one terrible second, the room vanishes, and I see white stairs slick with blood, a severed crown at the foot of them, and my hand closing around a throat that is not Blackridge’s, gold bracelets wet red to the elbow.
I snarl and wrench myself back before the memory can swallow me.
The magic dies, the cold retreats, and darkness descends.