31. Asha
Asha
The undead are fucking everywhere.
They keep rising from the courtyard stones with the kind of theatrical timing that makes me want to applaud and then kill whoever arranged it. Bone hands punch through seams in the cobbles. Grey fingers claw at nothing. Empty faces turn towards us, eye sockets lit with dull blue flames.
SilverGate really does love a spectacle.
Leith stands ahead of us, the midnight spear in his hand, his dark magic pouring out in a controlled wave. It hits the first line of corpses and stops some of them mid-lurch.
Hale steps in front of me again, spear in one hand, hellfire building in the other. The fire doesn’t come easily. The spear suppresses it, drags it down into a smaller, angrier flame, but he forces it up anyway through sheer arrogance.
That’s my hellhound.
The first undead creature lunges.
Hale punches fire into its skull. The thing bursts apart in a spray of ash and old bone. Another two take its place.
“Leith!” I shout.
“I’m working on it,” he snaps, which tells me exactly how bad this is because Leith doesn’t snap unless the universe has personally inconvenienced him.
Tobin moves to my other side, silver light already threading between his fingers and blasts a corpse headed our way.
Hale growls, blasting another skull apart.
Leith’s magic hits the second wave harder. Several undead drop instantly, collapsing into piles of bone. The rest keep coming.
“They’re anchored to the courtyard,” Leith says. “Not raised from graves. Constructed response. They’re defensive dead.”
“Defensive dead can fuck off,” I say, and shove my pathetic blue spark towards the nearest corpse.
It staggers.
That’s it.
It fucking staggers.
I stare at my hand. “Well, I’m terrifying. Someone alert the bards.”
Hale swings the midnight spear in a brutal arc. The tip catches the undead thing across the chest, and the corpse unravels. The blue flame in its skull winks out, and the bones drop lifelessly to the stones.
He pauses for half a second.
“Nice,” he drawls.
Tobin’s head turns sharply. “We probably shouldn’t—”
Hale roars and swings again, which makes me chuckle before I duck as a bony hand flies towards my head from a dismantled corpse.
“Or ignore me and use them anyway,” Tobin mutters and uses his magic to shear through the next three bodies at the knees.
They collapse, dragging themselves forward with finger bones scraping against the cobbles.
“Disgusting,” I say, kicking one in the face. Its skull snaps sideways, then corrects itself with a clack. “Oh, fuck you.”
The ground shudders again.
More rise. Hundreds.
The courtyard becomes a field of dead things hauling themselves out of the academy’s stone guts, all turning towards the midnight spears with awful, single-minded purpose.
“They want the weapons,” Tobin says.
“That’s obvious, but they aren’t getting them,” Hale snarls, slamming the spear down through the skull of a corpse that gets too close. The body unravels into dust so fine the wind steals it instantly.
Leith drops to a crouch and slams his hand against the ground.
Every corpse, ghoul, and skeleton stops dead.
No one breathes.
The ground quakes under our feet, but Leith holds them steady.
“Obey,” he says, and his tone leaves absolutely no room for argument. He doesn’t need to roar, or shout, or whisper. It’s said in a normal tone, and it is also one of the hottest things I’ve ever seen.
The courtyard answers him with submission.
The blue flames in the dead eye sockets dim at once. Bone heads bow, and grey hands release the cobbles. Hundreds of undead sink to one knee across the courtyard in a ripple of reluctant obedience.
Everything goes quiet.
Leith stays crouched, palm flat against the stone, midnight spear gripped in his other hand, almost as if he had forgotten it was there. His dark power crawls through the courtyard, threading through every corpse, every brittle spine, every constructed command SilverGate shoved into them.
Hale turns his head slightly. “Well. That was fucking impressive.”
I hiss for him to be quiet, but my eyes stay on Leith. “Can you hold them?”
“For now,” he says.
A cold pull moves through him and drags at everything dead beneath the academy stones. SilverGate didn’t raise a dozen guards. It woke a burial layer.
A very large fucking burial layer.
The kneeling corpses tremble. Some fight the command, fingers digging into the wet stone. Their blue flames flare, then dim when Leith presses harder.
“We need to move now before the academy decides to escalate,” Tobin murmurs.
None of us moves.
None of us wants to even breathe right now.
“Escalate from an undead army?” I whisper. “What’s next? A dragon with administrative authority?”
Hale shoots me a look that says I’m not far off the path with that one. It gives me pause. Dragons, where I come from, are horrendous, hideous beasts. I won’t say I’m afraid of them, but I would definitely advise before pissing one off.
Leith rises slowly. The dead rise with him.
Not all the way, but enough to shift, to turn, to make a corridor through their kneeling ranks.
Bones scrape stones and heads bow lower as we pass.
The blue flames die out when they get too close to me.
They recognise something in me that this charm is failing right now to cover up.
I keep my chin high and walk through the dead like I meant for this to happen.
Like we haven’t got stolen divine weapons, one half-controlled undead battalion, and a headmaster who will probably appear any second with that judgmental stare of his.
The Bell Tower stays silent.
That worries me more than the undead.
Hale walks on my right, spear held low, fire flickering stubbornly in his palm. Tobin keeps to my left, silver magic coiling around the three spears in careful bands, not binding them, just measuring their output. Leith follows one pace behind us, and the entire courtyard of undead things follows.
A whole fucking procession of academy undead dragging themselves after Leith as if he has accidentally acquired a fan club from the grave.
I glance back once and immediately regret it. “Leith. Why are they following us?”
“Because I told them to obey,” he replies.
“And did obey include following?”
“It apparently interpreted it broadly.”
Hale makes a noise that is almost a laugh. “You have pets.”
“I have a problem,” Leith corrects.
Tobin’s magic tightens around the spear in his hand. “We can’t take an undead battalion into the residence tower.”
“Facts,” I mutter.
“We also can’t leave them roaming the courtyard. We need to give them back to SilverGate.”
“Back to Blackridge, you mean?” Hale asks.
“No, I don’t think these are Blackridge’s. They belong to SilverGate.”
“But he didn’t stop them from attacking us.”
“Nope,” Hale reinforces. “Which makes him as bad as if he had sent them after us.”
The undead stop moving.
So do the guys.
I blink.
Leith’s head turns slowly towards me.
“The four of you are going to send me to my grave an eternity too soon,” Blackridge drawls.
“Yeah, well, you are going to send me to my grave before I get out of here. And then I will haunt you until the end of time. How does that sound?”
He gives me a flat stare. “Delightful. I can assure you, you will get bored long before you wear me down.”
We glare at each other. He’s probably right, though. It sounds super boring, and nothing fazes him, so why I even bother with the empty threats is beyond me at this point.
Blackridge looks past me to the undead frozen across the courtyard.
His expression doesn’t improve.
“You removed restricted and dangerous weapons from a sealed chamber,” he states.
“Depends on the angle,” I say, just to annoy him.
“The angle is three students and one unregistered goddess standing in my courtyard with contraband weapons and an illegally commanded defensive burial response to that theft.”
Leith’s voice stays calm behind me. “Illegally commanded?”
“You overrode academy authority.”
“They attacked us.”
“They attempted to recover stolen property.”
Hale’s fire flares. “They attempted to tear us apart.”
Blackridge’s eyes cut to him. “If you are that concerned about it, you shouldn’t have stolen the weapons.”
The man has a point. It’s no good crying over a defensive system we purposely made come to life.
I take a breath and decide diplomacy deserves a fair shake. “We borrowed them. We planned to return them.” Not quite the truth, seeing as we won’t be here to do so, but intention matters.
His attention shifts to Leith.
Leith says nothing. The undead remain locked in place behind him, their dead obedience pressing against the courtyard with a tension even I can feel.
“You can release them, Mr Leith,” he says.
“Why? So they can attack us again?”
“They won’t.”
Leith gives him a grim stare but does as he asks.
Blackridge immediately returns them to the ground with a simple waggle of his fingers.
SilverGate’s system, my arse.
I stare at his hand. “That looked suspiciously like ownership.”
“And this looks like you sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong.”
Give the man a medal for stating the obvious. But it still needs pointing out so he knows I know.
“It’s a talent. I’ve cultivated it over centuries.”
He holds my gaze. He knows what I’m doing now, and I know he knows. This is now a standoff of who is more powerful, and sadly, it isn’t me. Not yet, anyway.
Blackridge doesn’t blink. “The weapons are not yours.”
“We are aware. As I said before, we are borrowing them.”
His jaw tightens. It’s the most expression I’ve ever pulled from him in one conversation, and I feel a small, petty triumph about that.
“You intend to use them to force the gate,” he says.
“I intend to use them to go home. If the gate requires forcing, that’s the gate’s problem.”
Tobin shifts beside me, his magic folded down tight.
I know that posture. It means he’s calculated the next three moves in this conversation and is waiting to see which one I pick.
Hale stands at my right with the spear at his side and his fire running steady and controlled now that the undead have gone back into the stone.
Leith is behind me, quiet and cold, still carrying the residue of what he just did to an entire courtyard of dead things.
Blackridge looks at the spear in Leith’s hand for a long moment. Then he looks at me.
“You have two days,” he says.
I blink. “For what?”
“The eclipse completes in two days. Not three.” His voice carries no apology for the revision. “I miscalculated the outer arc. Or rather, the outer arc accelerated. The orrery in the Astrology Tower corrected itself at three this morning.”
It strips the air out of the courtyard.
Two days.
Tobin absorbs it beside me. The bond shifts as he recalculates everything we’ve planned against a shorter window. Hale’s fire spits once against the wet courtyard air. Leith says nothing, but the silence behind me sharpens.
“Why are you telling us?”
Blackridge holds my gaze for a moment too long. What crosses his face isn’t regret—he’s too controlled for that. It isn’t calculation either. It’s too unguarded, too brief. It lives in the narrow gap between the two, and I don’t trust it for a second.
“Because if you fail,” he says, “the eclipse completes regardless. Every gate opens. Every boundary bleeds, and whatever comes through won’t distinguish between the guilty and the innocent.”
“And if I succeed?”
“The gate closes behind you. StormGate seals. The eclipse completes without a breach point.”
I stare at him. “You need me to leave.”
“I need the gate to close cleanly before all hell breaks loose.”
“So I’m a complication that you don’t want around.”
“That is what you have always been, Miss Asha.”
“Noted and understood. Do you have any idea how we get that gate to open?”
“You already know. That’s why you have the spears.”
He vanishes, leaving the spears with us, which I suppose is a good sign.