Collin parted his lips to wish him luck, but the guard’s gaze cut through the air like a saber.
Fine. His mouth was desert-dry anyway.
The door shut behind Lekyi.
Silence thickened again.
Collin checked his watch. The minute hand had moved—barely. He checked it again, thirty seconds later, willing the sliver of metal to inch forward. Still barely. Time here wasn’t broken—it was warped, bending like glass left too long in the sun, curving inward toward some terrible center.
He looked around. James had his chin tipped upward, staring at the ceiling like it might blink back. Tym’s fists clutchedhis waistcoat so tightly the fabric strained. Their silence wasn’t passive—it was sharpened, held taut like wire.
Whatever this was, it was collective. A quiet disassembling. The kind that didn’t show up in screams or sobs, but in how breath slowed, how stillness turned violent.
The room had teeth. The air shifting like muscle. The shape of something unseen locking into place. The jaws were closing, and they were all inside the beast.
Half an hour later, the door creaked open and Lekyi stumbled back into the hall. His shirt clung to his back with sweat, his face slick and colorless. He didn’t speak. Didn’t so much as glance their way. He just strode for the front doors, jaw locked, spine stiff—but something in his step faltered like he was still catching his breath.
Collin tried to read him. Nothing. A grim silence and a ghost of pain in the way he moved. God, what were they in for?
A few aching minutes later, the door opened again.
“Niall of Black Timber Forest.”
Niall threw a wink at Uriah—casual, but a hair too quick—and vanished through the sunlight.
He returned twenty minutes later, lip split and one eye blooming purple. His shirt was torn across one shoulder. Like Lekyi, he said nothing. Just passed by with a bowed head and bloody hands. Gone.
Collin’s stomach twisted in on itself. Sweat beaded at his hairline. What in the name of the gods were they being asked to do? Sparring, sure—but that didn’t explain the blood. The silence. Were the guards being told to maim them? And what of the Daughters of Venus? Delicate, unarmed girls in laced bodices—what had they walked into? What about Dragonfly?
His thoughts spiraled.
“Collin of Chroma.”
The voice cracked through the chamber like thunder.
He flinched hard. His name echoed and wrapped around him like a trap snapping shut around his foot.
This was it.
His chest seized. Heart slamming into his ribs, sweat slicking his palms, he reached for Lumen and his old bow. His knees didn’t feel like his own—more like reeds trying to fake solidity. Each step toward the doorway felt like a betrayal of self-preservation.
The door waited—a mouth about to swallow him.
Then it closed behind him with a heavy, echoing thud.
Sunlight stabbed into his face. He blinked against it, expecting a sword, a blow, a voice barking!But there was only a patch of worn grass—the schoolyard.
Captain Sol stood in the center, arms folded. Three guards leaned against the wall, utterly still. A table nearby bristled with weapons: bows, blades, a spear leaning like it had seen better days.
“Is your name Collin of Chroma, son of Jiah of White Wood?” Sol asked.
Collin’s throat closed. The man’s voice sounded colder out here, like it had absorbed the chill off steel.
“Yes,” he managed.
“What weapons do you have?”
He held them out—Lumen and the bow—without a word.
