Professor Grimm's voice droned on, dry as the chalk dust clinging to his frayed robes.
"Rift zones," he intoned, tapping a yellowed fingernail against the cracked blackboard, "are fractures in the world's skin. And like all wounds, they fester."
Ezra's eyelids grew heavy. The lecture hall stank of old parchment and older sweat, the air thick with the breath of two dozen barely-awake cadets. Outside, the afternoon sun bled through grime-caked windows, painting everything in a sickly amber glow.
"Aether," Grimm continued, oblivious to his students' stupor, *"is the world's blood. And rifts? Rifts are where it hemorrhages."
Ezra stifled a yawn that tasted of copper and something darker. He knew about rifts. Everyone did. District Five's broken TVs had spat out enough grainy footage between bursts of static—blurred shapes moving too fast for the cameras, buildings collapsing in unnatural silence, the occasional scream cut short as the screen went black. The worst clips always ended the same way: with the camera shaking, the operator breathing too fast, and then—
Static.
Always static.
Not that it mattered.
The Last Wall stood between the districts and the wilds beyond, its barrier humming day and night in a frequency that vibrated in the teeth and haunted dreams. Ezra had grown up with that sound—a low, constant whine in the bones of the world, like a toothache you learned to ignore until the day it killed you.
Grimm's pointer stick cracked against the board.
"Pay attention, unless you wish to meet a riftspawn with your eyes closed!"
A ripple of forced alertness passed through the room. Someone in the back row snorted, the sound quickly swallowed by the oppressive weight of Grimm's glare.
"The creatures emerge in waves," Grimm said, sketching a crude spiral on the board. Chalk screeched. "First the small ones—scuttling, snapping things. Then the hunters. Then…"
The stick snapped in his grip.
A hush fell. Even Ezra straightened slightly.
Grimm's milky eyes swept the room, lingering on each face like a mortician assessing a corpse. "You think the Wall makes you safe?" he asked softly. "You think your precious districts are protected?" His laugh was the sound of dry leaves crushed underfoot, of pages torn from a sacred text. "The rifts grow wider every year. The barrier weakens with every passing moon. And one day..."
He let the words hang.
Outside, the barrier's hum pulsed—louder for a moment, almost like a heartbeat.
Then the bell rang, the sound jarring and far too cheerful for the silence it shattered.
As the cadets shuffled out with poorly concealed relief, Ezra lingered, his boots scuffing against the worn floorboards as he stared at the spiral on the board. What had looked like a simple diagram moments before now seemed to shift and twist in the flickering lamplight—less like chalk on slate and more like a gaping maw, like something hungry trying to claw its way through from the other side.
The classroom shattered into chaos.
Not the ordinary clamor of dismissal—this was something primal, the frenzied rush of vultures scenting blood. Ezra caught an elbow to the ribs as bodies surged past, his back slamming against the doorframe hard enough to crack bone. The air stank of sweat and something sharper—anticipation thick as slaughterhouse smoke.
Milo appeared like a startled rabbit, his arms full of crumbling textbooks, his spectacles sliding down his nose. Behind him, Silas drifted into existence like a wraith, already wincing at the cacophony. Golden hair curtained his face as his fingers pressed against his ears—not fast enough to block out the screaming.
"What's happening?" Ezra spat blood from where he'd bitten his tongue.
Silas's lips moved. It took Ezra a moment to parse the words beneath the chaos.
"A duel."
The word slithered down Ezra's spine.
"Between who?"
Milo answered, his voice cracking with reverence: "Soren and Rowan."
Ezra knew those names like he knew the taste of his own teeth after a beating.
Soren Nightingale . Rowan Annakin.
The twin scourges of Blackspire.
First-years whispered their names like prayers. Fourth-years crossed themselves when they passed in the halls. Even the professors watched them with that particular look—the one reserved for natural disasters barely contained.
The student tide carried them forward in a choking current of bodies. The courtyard had become a gladiatorial pit, the air pregnant with the metallic tang of anticipation and the musk of unwashed uniforms. Some enterprising third-year had scaled the pockmarked statue of Blackspire's founder, their boots grinding into the stone face of a man who had built this academy on bones. No faculty intervened. No voices called for order.
At the eye of the storm stood two figures, separated by ten paces of bloodstained cobblestones.
At the center of the madness, two figures stood apart.
Ezra knew predators.
He had grown up among them in District Five—knife-eyed boys with hungry hands, merchants who smiled while selling poisoned bread, the kind of men who would slit your throat for half a copper and call it charity.
But this—
This was something else.
He recognized the sharp angles of Rowan Annakin's face—the same senior who'd led them through the labyrinthine dorms that first night. The boy who'd smiled as he pointed out the bloodstains on the stairwell. Now that easy grin was gone, replaced by something far more dangerous. His messy brown hair curled just beneath his ears, damp with sweat despite the morning chill. Every muscle stood taut as a drawn bowstring, his predator's gaze locked unblinking on his opponent.
In his place stood something feral, something that made Ezra's pulse stutter—not in fear, but in primal recognition. A wolf, yes. But worse. A wolf that had learned how to open doors. Large. Untamed . Wild.
And then there was Soren.
Tall, though still a fraction shorter than Rowan, but built like a fortress—broad-shouldered, thick with muscle that spoke of relentless training rather than natural bulk. His long black hair was tightly braided, the plait falling like a rope down his back. A jagged scar cut from his left eyebrow down to the curve of his cheekbone, pale against his light brown skin, a brutal signature left by some past violence.
But his eyes—
Gods, his eyes.
A shade he'd never seen before—not just blue, not just violet, but something in between, like the sky caught between dusk and true night. They were unsettling, those eyes. Unnatural
Rowan moved like a blade through silk.
One heartbeat - stillness. The next - his fist shattered the morning air, knuckles cracking against Soren's jaw with the finality of a headsman's axe. Bone crunched. Blood sprayed in a crimson arc across the weathered cobblestones.
Soren's head snapped sideways. His teeth flashed red as he spat and grinned, the expression too wide, too sharp, too full of teeth to be human.
Then the world tore itself apart.
Soren's shadow peeled away from the stones like a second skin, twisting into something jagged and wrong. It moved with liquid hunger, all grasping talons and needle teeth, while Rowan pressed forward with another strike - a brutal elbow aimed to crush windpipes.
The students' screams curdled the air. Somewhere, a first-year vomited. The professors stood like statues, their eyes dark with something between pride and predation, quills scratching across parchment as they documented every broken bone, every spray of blood.
Ezra's breath died in his throat.
Rowan's chest bore deep gashes from Soren's shadow, ribbons of flesh peeled back. He didn't scream.
He laughed—a sound like cracking ice—and drove his knee into Soren's gut with enough force to lift him off the ground.
Soren hit the cobblestones, rolled, and came up changed.
His scars split open.
Not bleeding.
Writhing.
Darkness spilled from them like ink, tendrils of something alive, something hungry. His eyes bled from violet to abyssal black, the pupils elongating into slits.
The courtyard fell silent.
Even Rowan paused, his breath ragged, his grin faltering for the first time.
Then Soren moved.
Ezra understood with terrible clarity:
This wasn't a duel.
This was a revelation.
Blackspire didn't train soldiers.
It bred monsters.