Chapter 47
Chapter Forty Seven
Four days later and the main courtyard still smelled like scorched skyglass.
Cassara stepped over a broken tile, its jagged edge faintly pulsing where residual mana hadn’t fully faded. The ward-line beneath her boots flickered once, dim but alive, slowly knitting itself back together like a wound starting to heal.
All around her, Vallemont was rebuilding.
Stone groaned and realigned overhead as floating scaffolding drifted past, carrying a pair of hex mages in reinforced harnesses. Their tools gleamed with protective charms, and sweat beaded on their faces despite the cool morning air.
One spoke incantations while the other traced repair glyphs along the shattered archway, his fingers leaving trails of silver light that sank into the stone. Above them, rune-wrought cranes hovered, lifting slabs of gray stone that should have required a dozen men.
Cassara pulled her coat tighter and kept walking, her boots crunching on fragments of crystal that caught the pale sunlight.
She paused near the edge of a collapsed terrace, its marble surface split clean through by the creature’s passage. Someone had placed a string of tiny windchimes along the broken railing. They jingled faintly in the breeze, a soft, high sound that didn’t quite match the destruction around them.
The contrast felt deliberate. Beautiful and broken, existing side by side.
Across the grounds, students moved in loose clusters, their voices carrying on the wind. Some walked in contemplative silence, others spoke in that tight, too-fast way that said they didn’t know what to do with the quiet moments yet.
The attack had changed everyone differently. Some had withdrawn into themselves, others had thrown themselves into helping with repairs, and still others seemed determined to prove that nothing had changed at all.
Cassara spotted Liri near the garden beds, sleeves rolled past her elbows, knees caked in dark earth as she helped a small group of underclassmen reset toppled stone planters.
Her usual bright chatter had been replaced by focused concentration, her hands gentle as she coaxed damaged roots back into soil.
Nym hovered close, wings glowing faintly as it fluttered from one wilted sprig to another, spreading tiny motes of healing light over the struggling plants.
A few paces away, Oliver stood at the base of a weathered pillar, scribbling frantically in a wide leather-bound notebook while Ilza extended a delicate claw over the exposed runes etched into the stone base.
His beast traced the ancient symbols with care while Oliver muttered calculations under his breath. His hair was a windblown mess that said he’d forgotten about food and sleep and possibly his own name in favor of documenting every detail of the magical aftermath.
Rett wasn’t in view, but she knew he was around.
Likely volunteering for perimeter watch or assisting maintenance crews with anything that required raw strength and steady hands.
That was his way. Practical, reliable, the kind of person who showed up when things needed doing and never asked for credit.
Cassara sighed.
Above, pale light filtered through a patchy cloudline, casting long shadows across the field that shifted with each passing cloud.
The damage to the dormitory towers had already been repaired, their walls sealed and reinforced with fresh protective glyphs.
Most of the academy’s outer defenses were stable again, humming with renewed power.
The groundskeepers had cleared away the worst of the debris, and new flowers had been planted where the old ones had been destroyed.
But nothing looked quite the same.
She could feel the change beneath her skin, in the way conversations paused when she passed, in how people’s eyes lingered on the faint shimmer that still clung to her irises. There was a weight to everything now, a heightened awareness that made ordinary moments feel significant.
Students paid attention to things they’d taken for granted before—the strength of the wards, the location of emergency exits, the importance of staying close to their teams.
She ran a hand along the courtyard railing, fingertips brushing stone still warm with restoration magic.
The surface felt different under her touch, denser somehow, as if the repair spells had added layers of protection that went deeper than the original construction.
Her own reflection caught for a moment in a shard of shattered glass that someone had missed in the cleanup, just long enough to see the faint prismatic gleam still lingering in her eyes.
Echo burn, Oliver called it. A side effect of magical overload, when a person channeled more power than their system was designed to handle. Temporary, hopefully. Most cases faded within a week.
But hers hadn’t dimmed yet.
And neither had the memories.
She could still hear the wind screaming in her ears as they’d flown through the storm.
The way the world had narrowed to pure light and instinct, everything else falling away except the connection between her and Flicker and the desperate need to survive.
The moment he had transformed into something magnificent and impossible, carrying her through the sky when she should have fallen.
The moment when she’d discovered what the two of them together were truly capable of.
Cassara lowered her hand and stepped back, her gaze sweeping across the courtyard one more time.
The academy wasn’t whole. Not yet. Cracks still showed in the older stonework, and some of the protective spells flickered with instability that would take weeks to fully resolve.
But in its brokenness, something new had taken root.
The bonds forged during the attack hadn’t vanished in the aftermath.
If anything, they had deepened, creating connections between students who might never have spoken before that night.
And maybe that was the point.
Not to emerge from chaos untouched and unchanged.
But to survive it with the people who mattered.
Together.
Cassara turned back towards the garden where Liri still knelt in the dark earth. She held a small silver trowel in one hand and a bedraggled shrub in the other, her tongue poking out slightly in concentration as she worked to coax the damaged plant back to health.
Her hair had mostly come free of its pale blue ribbon, copper strands catching the afternoon light as they framed her dirt-smudged face. Her sleeves were a disaster of soil smudges and grass stains, and her academy skirt bore the evidence of an entire morning spent crawling between flower beds.
“Almost,” Liri muttered to the plant as if it were a skittish creature that might bolt if startled. Her voice carried that particular tone she used with nervous animals and homesick first-years. “You just need a little lift, a little encouragement. There we go.”
Cassara didn’t move from her spot by the broken terrace.
Not yet. The sight of Liri working with such focused determination, bright and ridiculous and utterly unchanged despite everything they’d all been through, settled the restlessness that had taken root in her chest. Not because Liri wasn’t affected by what had happened.
She was. They all were. But because she refused to let the darkness dim her natural radiance.
After a long moment, Cassara stepped closer, her boots crunching softly on the gravel path that wound between the garden beds.
“You do realize final assembly starts in an hour, right?”
Liri glanced up from her work, eyes going wide with sudden panic. Dirt streaked her left cheek, and a smudge of something green decorated her chin.
“What? No, that can’t be right. Wait, are you serious?” She looked down at herself as if seeing her appearance for the first time, taking in the mud caked under her fingernails and the streak of decomposed leaf matter on her skirt.
“Oh no. Oh no, no, no. I was supposed to be helping with the east hedgerow repairs, and then someone mentioned that the west bed was completely lopsided after the attack, and I thought I could just fix this one little section, and…” She trailed off, gesturing helplessly at her disheveled state.
“Ugh, I can’t show up to the assembly looking like I wrestled a tree. ”
Cassara tilted her head, her expression perfectly deadpan. “The tree in this scenario definitely won.”
Before Liri could formulate a properly indignant response, Oliver’s voice cut in from a few paces away, carrying that particular tone he used when explaining something he found genuinely fascinating.
“Technically speaking, the trees didn’t wrestle anyone, but the residual flux in the east quadrant glyphs did spike enough to displace structural balance. Which is fascinating. Especially considering how the leviathan’s impact disrupted directional aether flow.”
He appeared beside them, his nose buried in his Codex as if this conversation had been going on for hours rather than seconds.
Liri groaned, a sound of pure exasperation. “Oliver. Assembly. One hour. Me covered in mud. Do you see the problem here?”
Oliver blinked, finally looking up from his research to take in her appearance.
“Right. Yes. Assembly. The final ranking ceremony.” He adjusted his glasses, considering.
“I still think it’s rather absurd to attempt to quantify individual worth using inconsistent combat performance metrics and completely arbitrary numerical ranking systems. But sure. Ceremony it is.”
Cassara gave him a look that suggested his philosophical objections to the academy’s evaluation methods were not currently helpful. “Arbitrary or not, it’s happening in exactly fifty-seven minutes. Don’t be late.”