Outside, distant voices swell—shouts and laughter sliding through the window cracks, the campus building toward eruption.
“They’re going to tear the Caldera apart for seats,” Ching says dryly.
“Are you going?” I ask before I can stop myself.
His mouth quirks. “I’ve seen enough duels to last three lifetimes. But yes. I’ll be there.”
He tests the mixture between two fingers. It glitters faintly, cold light kissing his skin.
“Good.” He starts pouring the salt into small silver tins.
A sharp clang cuts through the air—the Caldera bell.
Not a polite chime. Not a school bell. An ancient strike of metal that vibrates straight through my bones.
My head snaps up. Ching’s gaze meets mine, and for a moment the sternness softens into something like understanding. His eyes narrow—assessing, not unkind.
He reaches past me, grabs my coat hanging on the back of my chair, and shoves it—and a small tin—into my arms. “Go,” he says briskly. “Before the good seats are gone and you spend the duel staring at the back of someone’s head.”
I huff a breathless laugh, grateful and terrified.
His voice drops as he nods at the tin. “Keep that with you. Spectacle has a habit of becoming consequence.”
My throat tightens. I nod and tuck the tin into my pocket.
The halls are chaos now—Whittaker pouring toward theCaldera like a river breaking its banks. Students shoulder past each other, laughing, shouting bets, calling names. A group of first-years are already breathless, faces flushed with the thrill of being allowed into something ancient and dangerous.
Outside, the air bites cold, snow starting to cling to the ground. The path down is a stampede. And in the distance, between bare trees, the stone colosseum plunges into the earth like a circular scar—ancient, blackened by time, waiting.
As I move with the crowd, the tin of Weldver Salt knocks against my thigh with every step. A small, cold reminder.
This isn’t just a show.
It never is.
I think of Noa.
And I start to run.
* * *
The Caldera is already packed,every seat and ledge filled with students and professors alike. Excitement hangs in the air—dense and electric, so thick you can almost feel it. At the rim, a video recorder stands at attention, its spear-and-sun emblem spinning. Service magitech: technology powered or enhanced by magick—neutral in theory, never in practice. The operating officer’s black uniform gives him away. Another reminder that the Service is watching. Always.
I barely find a place to stand before a torrent of fire sweeps through the center of the arena. Noa—a shock of brown hair, that familiar stance, flame coiling around his arms like lassos of fire. My stomach drops.
His opponent stands with his back to me—the student from Vikhrostrum, tall and lean-muscled, his movements smooth and silent. There is something deliberate about him, the way he carries himself—calm, calculating, deadly. Like someone who doesn’t need words to command power.
Noa launches bolt after bolt of fire, but the Vikhrostrum delegate matches him without flinching. One moment the student is stepping back from a particularly vicious arc of fire, and the next he conjures something I thought impossible: two large snakes with the blackest scales slither forward, extinguishing the flames as they strike. At first I think they are actual snakes—some sort of rare creature magick—but then I see how they shift with the light.
As they circle each other, something in the way Noa’s opponent moves tugs at me—a nagging sense of familiarity, sharp and insistent. His hair, a dark ash-brown. His stance. His silence. The hair on my neck rises as my unease deepens.
Noa presses forward, whips of fire lashing out, but I can see the sweat beading along his brow. He is working for every inch of ground—and that is new.
Suddenly, a tendril of black snaps around his ankle and yanks him down. In the same instant, the entire arena goes black. Not dim. Utterly, suffocatingly dark. As if someone has smothered the sun behind the mountain peaks.
It is then that I realize. They aren’t snakes. They aren’t ropes. They areshadows.
The Vikhrostrum student is a shadow Magick.
