The training yard baked beneath a merciless sky, the air shimmering like oil over flame. Ezra watched from the shadows of the colonnade, his own muscles trembling in remembered agony as his classmates collapsed one by one onto the scorching stones. Their uniforms clung to sweat-slicked skin, faces flushed scarlet with exertion. Some didn't rise again, their chests heaving like beached fish as they gasped for air that burned going down.
Master Vaun moved between them like a reaper through wheat.
His staff cracked against backs that bowed too slowly, against legs that failed to lift. The sound was dry and final—thwack—like kindling snapping. A girl with singed eyebrows crumpled with a choked sob. Vaun's shadow fell over her, his voice colder than the sun was hot.
"Again."
Not a command.
A death sentence.
The students staggered upright, their limbs shaking, their eyes glazed with the kind of exhaustion that sank into bone. One boy retched bile onto the stones. Vaun's staff found his ribs—thwack—and he straightened with a whimper.
Ezra's fingers curled into fists against his thighs. He knew this dance. Had lived it in District Five alleyways when the summer sun turned cobblestones to griddles. Knew how the heat could peel a man's sanity back layer by layer until only the animal remained.
But this—
This was different.
Because Vaun wasn't just breaking them.
He was seeing what they'd become when broken.
Ezra exhaled.
The sun climbed higher.
The students fell faster.
The lesson had begun with the Second Ashen War, but now Krill's gnarled fingers traced the faded borders of the Isle of Noctis on the war map, his yellowed nail catching on the inked coastline like a knife worrying at a scar.
"The Extinction," he said, the word dripping like poison from his tongue, "was signed by the nations on the 27th day of the Ashen War's third year." His milky eyes swept over the students. "Not one representative from Noctis was present at the signing."
A fly buzzed against the warped window glass.
Krill's pointer stick cracked against the map. "They called it a military necessity. A purification.'" His lips twisted around the word like it was rotted meat. "But we historians know better."
He limped toward the blackboard, his boots leaving dark prints that might have been mud or something else entirely. When he turned, his face was shadowed by the flickering gas lamps.
"The Duskborns saw too much. Knew too much." A pause. The stick snapped in his hands. "So the great houses made sure no one would see their eyes again."
Ezra's stomach turned. The inkwell on his desk trembled.
"By dawn on the 28th day," Krill continued, voice like gravel in a grave, "every man, woman and child on Noctis was dead. Their libraries burned. Their histories erased." His ruined smile showed too many teeth. "A clean execution, by imperial standards."
The classroom held its breath.
A student in the front row flinched. Krill didn't seem to notice. His milky eyes had gone distant, fixed on some point beyond the classroom walls—beyond time itself.
"The fleets came at dawn," he continued, his voice dropping to a whisper that slithered between the desks. "Not one ship, not two—but seven . Enough to blot out the horizon. Enough to make the sea itself tremble beneath their shadows." His gnarled fingers spread across the map, blotting out the island completely. "They cut the messenger ravens first. Clipped their wings and let them drown. Then the signal fires—smothered them in wet sand before they could be lit."
He lifted his hand. The island reappeared, untouched on the parchment. A lie.
Ezra's stomach turned. The inkwell on his desk trembled, a single black drop bleeding onto the wood.
"They burned the libraries," Krill said, his voice hollow. "Drowned the scholars in their own ink. Strung up the children in the town square like festival lanterns and let the crows pick them clean." His throat worked around something unspeakable. "The tides carried the ashes for weeks afterward. Some say if you sail to those waters at midnight, you can still hear—"
A book slammed shut somewhere in the back of the room. Krill didn't react.
"The great nations made sure no histories survived. No songs. No last words." His yellowed nails scraped across the map's surface, leaving faint, ragged trails in the parchment. "Just... silence."
The gas lamps flickered. Outside, the wind howled through the academy's towers like a thing in pain, rattling the windows in their frames. Rain began to streak the glass, distorting the world beyond into something blurred and uncertain.
Krill turned to the window, his reflection fractured in the rain-smeared pane. "But darkness," he murmured, "has a way of surviving its own extinction."
The days after the duel passed in a haze of ink-stained fingers and sleepless nights. Ezra moved through the academy like a ghost, his footsteps silent against the ancient flagstones, his mind still echoing with the memory of Soren's shadow peeling from the cobblestones like a living thing.
He studied until his vision blurred, poring over forbidden texts in the library's deepest alcoves, searching for any mention of what he'd witnessed. But the answers weren't in books.
So he walked.
He traced the academy's hidden veins—the overgrown cloister where the statues wept rust-colored tears, the abandoned alchemy lab where the air still smelled of charred flesh and regret. And sometimes, when the weight of Blackspire's secrets pressed too close, he found Theodore.
The man was sprawled across the roof of the old bell tower like a discarded coat, one leg dangling over the edge, a bottle of something dark and pungent clutched loosely in his hand. The sunset painted the sky in bruises—purple and gold and the deep red of a freshly opened wound.
Ezra hauled himself onto the ledge, his muscles screaming from another day of brutal training. Theodore didn't turn, but the corner of his mouth twitched.
"You're like a stray cat," Theodore drawled, taking a swig from the bottle. "Keep showing up, might have to feed you."
Ezra wiped sweat from his brow. "I want you to teach me."
Theodore went very still. Slowly, he turned his head, his dark eyes glinting with something dangerous. "Teach you what, exactly?"
"Whatever it is that keeps you alive in this place."
A beat of silence. Then Theodore laughed—a low, humorless sound. He took another drink before answering. "I don't teach students."
"Why not?"
"Because students die." Theodore's voice was flat. "And I already have one idiot to babysit."
Ezra knew who he meant. The human wildfire who'd carved his name into Blackspire's walls with a blade made of his own bones. The one even the professors watched with wary eyes.
Theodore sighed, running a hand through his messy curls. "Kid's feral. Can't control him. Can't stop him." He shot Ezra a look. "You really want to sign up for that?"
Ezra met his gaze without flinching. "I want to survive."
The wind howled between them, carrying the distant sound of screaming from the training yards. Theodore studied him for a long moment before tossing the empty bottle into the void below.
Theodore's grin was a blade in the dusk.
"So tell me, dear Ezra,"he purred, "what do you know about the gods?"
Ezra froze.
He'd never noticed before—how Theodore's eyes weren't human. Not entirely. The pupils were too vertical, too hungry, the irises a dark, moss-flecked green that swallowed the fading light. They pinned him now like a specimen to a board, unblinking. Reptilian. Wrong.
Ezra's throat went dry. "They abandoned us," he said, the old catechism bitter on his tongue. "They embodied the sins that drowned the world."
Theodore laughed, soft and venomous. "Oh, you sweet, stupid child." He stepped closer, the roof tiles cracking under his boots. "They didn't abandon us."
Theodore's laughter was a serrated thing, cutting through the twilight.
"Oh, you sweet, sweet stupid child,"he crooned, stepping closer. The roof tiles splintered beneath his boots, cracks spiderwebbing toward Ezra's feet. "You want me to teach you things that don't even have names? Things that slithered into this world through the cracks between dead gods' ribs?"
Ezra's pulse hammered against his throat. He could smell Theodore now—ozone and wet earth, the scent of a storm about to break.
"That fragile little mind of yours—" Theodore tapped Ezra's temple with a cold finger, "—will it snap when you see your first riftspawn? Or will you piss yourself when the Blood Moon Trial comes crawling up from the catacombs?"
A pause. Ezra's breath hitched.
Theodore's slit-pupiled eyes dilated. Then—
"Don't tell me," he whispered, "you've forgotten the Trial entirely."
Ezra's stomach dropped.
Theodore's fingers dug into Ezra's chin, forcing his gaze upward to where the moon hung - already tinged with the faintest blush of coming carnage.
"Ten years," Theodore hissed, his breath reeking of iron and something fouler. "Ten years the Trial has slept. And you—" His claw-like nails drew blood, "-you curled up in your library like a mewling kitten, forgetting this academy was built on screams."
The wind howled through the tower stones, carrying with it the distant sound of rattling chains from the catacombs below. Ezra's stomach twisted as Theodore leaned closer, those serpentine eyes reflecting twin crescents of bloody light.
"The Trial doesn't care about years. Doesn't care about ranks."A cruel smile split Theodore's face. "Last time it woke? It took a headmaster first. Ripped him apart from the inside out while we listened to his bones sing."
Somewhere in the darkness below, a pipe burst. The resulting echo sounded disturbingly like laughter.
"Pathetic child," Theodore whispered, finally releasing him. "Pray it wants meat more than minds this time. You'd last longer that way."
Then, as he turned around to leave he stopped.
"Meet me tomorrow night. Rooftop. Don't come late—" A pause, just long enough for Ezra's pulse to stutter. "—or I'll change my mind."