32. Tobin
Tobin
Two days.
I run the revised calculation three times in the space of two seconds and arrive at the same answer each time. The orrery didn’t accelerate arbitrarily. The outer arc shifted because the eclipse isn’t responding to a fixed celestial cycle. It’s responding to the breach point.
To Asha.
Her presence here is pulling it forward.
I don’t say this out loud because we are standing in a courtyard before breakfast with stolen weapons, a residue of undead in the stones beneath our feet, and a goddess who is already holding herself together through pure refusal to do anything else.
Adding this particular variable to her immediate awareness will not improve the situation.
“Two days,” Hale says.
“I heard him,” Asha mutters.
“Just confirming we all heard the same catastrophic timeline.”
“We did,” Leith says. He’s looking at the ground where the last of the undead went back into the stone.
His dark magic has retreated to a low hum at his edges, but I can feel the residue of what he did through the bond.
The sheer scale of it. He commanded every corpse in a burial layer that was built to protect SilverGate, and he did it without ceremony or visible effort.
It’s impressive.
It also brings me one step closer to believing he and Blackridge aren’t that far apart in classification. Blackridge isn’t a reaper, but Leith is so much more.
“Look,” I state, pushing that aside for another day. “This isn’t that catastrophic. It’s twenty-four hours earlier than we anticipated.”
“We can do a lot in twenty-four hours, though,” Leith says. “So it’s not ideal.”
“None of this is ideal,” I say, turning to him. “We work with what we’ve got.”
“Or I stay here,” Asha says lightly, but her expression gives her away. She’d rather die on a pile of burning logs. “Fight the fight that this eclipse is going to cause.”
“With what, exactly?” Hale asks, and he only gets away with it because he adores her, and she knows it. He proves it constantly. I’m lagging behind in this area, but I’m really just not sure what I have to do to prove to her I’m in this completely.
“Okay, ouch, but I’ll allow it,” she mutters.
“We aren’t letting you give up,” I state. “You are going home. We have two days. We have the spears. We know where the ground anchor is. We know where the gate opens in the sky.”
“And we still need to get my body out of the Well,” she says, and the lightness drops out of her voice completely. That’s the one we keep circling and not landing on. Everything else has a method. The Well has a problem.
I turn the midnight spear over in my hand and think about what I know of the Shadow Well’s architecture.
It isn’t a prison, not technically. It’s a repository.
A place where things of significant power are stored when the realm doesn’t know what else to do with them.
SilverGate didn’t bury Asha’s body out of malice.
It buried it out of instinct, the way a system protects a volatile element it can’t process.
The problem is that the Well’s protections aren’t designed to keep things in.
They’re designed to keep things out.
Which means anything reaching down into it from above would be resisted with everything the academy has.
“You have to die,” Leith states. “I said it before; I stand by it.”
“Die,” she says, deflated as fuck. “Sounds awesome. How exactly do I resurrect back in my own body?”
“Possession of your real body. You are a goddess. It will either accept you, and you will be whole again, or it will reject you, and we will be back to square one, but with you dead. Up for it?”
“Wow,” I state. “That’s really fucking… wow.”
“He’s right,” she says slowly. Carefully. “We don’t have time to come up with an elaborate plan that still might not work.”
“So we kill you twice?” I point out.
“You won’t kill me when you send me back.”
“How do you know?”
That is met with silence.
She doesn’t answer because she can’t. None of us can. The silence stretches across the wet courtyard until Hale breaks it the only way he knows how.
“We’re not killing you twice,” he says. “We’re killing you once and sending you somewhere better. That’s basically a favour.”
“Hale,” I say.
“What? It’s optimistic.”
“It’s reductive.”
“Same thing before breakfast.”
Asha ignores both of us and keeps her eyes on Leith.
Something passes between them that I can’t fully read through the bond.
A negotiation conducted entirely in silences and held eye contact.
She trusts him on this. Not because he’s made her feel safe, but because he’s the one person in this group who has spent his entire existence at the precise boundary between alive and not, and he hasn’t lied to her yet.
“Walk me through it,” she says.
Leith turns the midnight spear in his hand once. “You die in this body. The witch shell releases your essence. Your essence drops directly into the Well because that’s where your real body is. The body accepts you because it belongs to you. You wake up whole.”
“And if the Well resists the transfer?”
“I’ll be there.”
She stares at him.
“Even if this is successful, how do we get her goddess self back up to the courtyard without SilverGate annihilating her on the spot?” I ask.
“That is a very good question,” she says. “I know who I am in that body, but taking on a realm that wants me dead might not be in my wheelhouse.”
“Wow,” Hale says, stepping back, his hand on his chest. “Did you just actually have some humility?”
“I’m growing. Fuck off,” she mutters, her cheeks flaming red.
Leith tilts his head, and I think I see something close to amusement in the set of his jaw, though it doesn’t reach his eyes. “SilverGate won’t annihilate you. Not once you’re in your real body.”
“You sound very certain about that,” she says.
“I am. The academy doesn’t know what to do with a goddess in a witch shell.
It’s been poking at you because you’re an anomaly.
A filing error. Something that doesn’t belong in any category it has.
” He looks down at the spear in his hand.
“But a goddess in a goddess body, with a gate to her own realm open above her? That’s a departure.
SilverGate will step back because it won’t have a choice. You won’t be its problem anymore.”
Asha looks at me. “Do you agree?”
I want to say no because the plan involves her corpse on the stones.
Instead, I do the useful thing. I think.
“The logic holds,” I say. “If your essence releases cleanly, it should follow the strongest sympathetic pull. That pull is your original body. The Well won’t need to be opened from the outside because the transfer won’t be external. It will be internal.”
Hale stares at me. “Say that again without making me want to hit you.”
“She dies. Her soul falls. Her body catches her.”
Asha makes a face. “See? You can do simple.”
“I despise simple.”
“You and simple have never been introduced.”
Leith’s attention stays on the courtyard stones. “The danger is the moment between.”
I nod. “Yes.”
Hale turns on me. “What moment?”
“The moment after the witch body dies but before her essence reaches the Well. If Yseld has reconstituted enough to interfere, that is when she’ll strike.”
Asha’s expression sharpens and turns cold. “Then we do it before she pulls herself together.”
“We don’t know how long Hale’s fire dispersed her for,” I say. “It could be hours. It could be less.”
“So we do this underground? At the Well?” Hale asks.
“No, because the three of us can’t get up here quick enough to see the ritual through.”
“You can if I’m back in my body. I can move us,” Asha says.
“Assuming your body doesn’t reject you or your ability to use your powers,” I point out. “I’m not being a dick, just trying to think of the variables.”
“But surely that won’t matter then,” she argues. “If my real body rejects my essence, no amount of stabbing me with midnight spears and intent is going to get me back home.”
“Also true.”
“We still need a controlled death,” Leith says.
Asha looks offended. “As opposed to what? A messy little accident?”
“As opposed to Hale panicking and setting the courtyard on fire while he tries to catch your soul,” I add.
Hale points the spear at him. “I won’t panic.”
“You absolutely will,” Leith says.
“I’ll panic efficiently.”
“That’s not better,” I say.
Asha presses her fingertips to her temples. “Can we focus on the part where I’m agreeing to die again before breakfast? Because, weirdly, I’d like the details.”
I turn the problem over again. The courtyard anchor beneath us.
The Well beneath that. The sky marker above.
Three points in a line, if we treat SilverGate’s architecture as symbolic rather than physical.
Which it is, mostly. The academy doesn’t respect distance when narrative structure feels more dramatic.
Annoying, but useful.
“We do it here,” I say.
Hale’s head snaps towards me. “You just said the moment between is dangerous.”
“It is. That’s why we don’t give it distance. We make the courtyard the killing point, the anchor point and the launch point.”
Asha lowers her hands. “Explain.”
“The original exile ended here. Your body fell through the breach Yseld and SilverGate created, but your essence ended up in this created witch shell. This time, we make the same place do the opposite job. We kill the shell at the anchor. Your essence drops. Your body catches it and returns to us here. Then we use the spears to invert the exile and launch you up through the same wound, towards StormGate.”
Asha stares at me. “You make it sound easy.”
“It’s not.”
Hale looks down at the wet stones under our feet. “So we’re doing this here.”
“At the exact point of arrival,” I say. “The academy has already accepted this spot as the place where Asha entered. We force it to accept it as the place where she leaves.”
Leith’s eyes lift to mine. “And I handle the death.”
I nod stiffly.
Asha looks at Leith with an expression I don’t enjoy trying to interpret. Trust, fear, maybe acceptance. It’s a dangerous combination.
I dislike it on a level I don’t have language for.
I can solve violent problems. I can dissect ancient wardwork, invert hostile magic, map celestial mechanics under pressure, and hold a ritual pattern in my head while the world tries to cave in around us.
I cannot make myself feel calm about Leith killing Asha.
Even if it is necessary.
Especially if it is necessary.
Hale’s fire climbs his arms in a hot, furious ripple. “No.”
Asha turns to him. “We do not have time for you to have a possessive breakdown in the courtyard.”
His eyes burn. “Call it what you want. I’m not standing here while he kills you.”
“You’re not standing here,” she says. “You’re helping send me home.”
The bond flashes with rage, fear, and something raw enough to make my magic stir in response.
“I know I’m not staying in this body. I know Yseld wants what belongs to me, that the eclipse is coming faster because I’m here, and if we keep debating the most emotionally acceptable version of this plan, we’ll run out of fucking time.”
“Facts,” I state.
“So when?” Asha asks, ignoring Hale now and getting down to business.
“Five AM tomorrow.”
“When the wards are laziest,” she murmurs.
“Precisely.”
She nods once and turns to Hale. “Breakfast. Let’s go.”