Riiiiiiip!
A sound like fabric being torn by giant hands filled the air, and then the world broke.
Boom!
The faculty building exploded outwards, stone and mortar from centuries of architecture hurled in every direction as something forced its way into existence from beneath.
The ground heaved upwards in a wave, cracking open like an eggshell, and from within that rupture, a tower of pure white stone drove itself into the sky.
It speared into the air in silence, which was somehow worse than if it had made any noise at all.
The sheer displacement of air sent those who had regained their feet staggering.
Dust and debris rained down in a curtain, and for a moment, nothing was visible through the cloud.
Then the crack came.
Every head turned skyward as the wards that had stood for centuries ignited, being visible for the first time in a long time.
The vast geometries of interlocking light blazed white across the entire sky above the academy like a map. They held for one breath.
Then they shattered.
The light didn’t fade. Instead, it burst, fragmenting outwards from a dozen points at once, and the pieces dissolved before they reached the ground.
The sky above the academy was open. Unprotected. Bare in a way it had not been in living memory.
In the silence that followed, no one moved.
The monolith stood where the faculty building had been. Its stone was the colour of old bone, and at its base gaped a wide opening that led into darkness so plete it seemed to swallow the torchlight reaching towards it.
One by one, people began to pick themselves up.
Cecilia moved first, not to the monolith, but towards Arlo.
She dropped to her knees beside him without hesitation, both hands pressing against his chest as healing light pooled beneath her palms.
His body had taken more than it should have been able to survive. She could feel the damage in the way his mana responded.
It felt sluggish and fractured, like trying to read a page that had been torn apart and only roughly reassembled. She worked quickly, her jaw tight, her eyes not leaving his face.
Principal Kael ignored his grandson, knowing his life was in good hands, walking forward instead.
His footsteps crunched over shattered stone and broken glass, unhurried, as if his body was moving while his mind had not yet caught up to what it was seeing.
He stopped before the monolith and looked up at it, his expression one of shock. They’d almost done it. And right at the last moment, it had all gone to shit.
After a few seconds, he turned away.
His eyes then landed on the person sprawled at the base of the steps. The person who had opened the spatial rift.
He approached slowly. The light was poor, but it was enough.
As he registered just who it was, his eyes opened wide, and for the first time in a long time, Principal Aldred Kael looked genuinely shaken.
Of all the students. Of all the people in this academy.
He had constructed possibilities in his mind the moment he’d seen what was happening. He’d cycled through names and faces and motives, and not one of them had been this.
Noah Webb lay unconscious on the cracked ground, blood dried dark across his face, his chest barely moving.
Kael stared at him for a few seconds, something plicated moving behind his eyes.
Then, from within the darkness of the monolith, came a roar.
Everybody immediately snapped to attention.
Chills crawled down spines before minds could even process why. Then the recognition came, and it was as if they’d just been splashed with a bucket of ice-cold water.
Most of them had been present when the dragon attacked the capital. Others had been close enough to hear it from a distance, and that meant close enough for the sound to imprint itself somewhere beneath conscious memory.
That was the kind of roar that wasn’t easily forgotten.
While everyone else stood in shock, Kael was already moving.
"Get the students to the bunkers!" His voice filled the air, snapping the gathered staff out of their paralysis.
"I want all of them in the bunkers. Move now and don’t stop moving until they’re underground!"
A cluster of staff broke away immediately, moving towards the residential buildings.
"You! Contact the Investigation Authority and the palace." He didn’t wait to see if the guard acknowledged it.
"Tell them a dragon monolith has emerged on academy grounds. Tell them we need military support and we need it immediately."
He turned, his eyes finding the bat instructor across the debris field. "Oliver!"
Professor Oliver was already straightening, his expression shifting into something hard and prepared.
"Organize the guards," Kael ordered. "Form a line between the monolith and the student buildings. Anyone present with bat capability, offensive affinities, or barrier skills. You have thirty seconds."
Oliver nodded once and began shouting names.
Kael turned back to the monolith, just in time as a cone of fire descended.
The white-hot flame erupted towards him from within the darkness of the opening in an instant, wide enough to swallow a dozen people whole.
Kael’s hands were already raised.
A portal tore open in the air before them, and the cone of fire bent into it as if it had always been going there.
The heat passing through was still immense, as the rubble on either side of the portal’s edge glowed orange, then red, then began to melt, the stone running like wax down the broken steps.
Several people stumbled backwards from the heat radiating from it alone.
Kael held the portal open, teeth clenched and arms trembling faintly with the sustained effort of redirecting that much raw destructive force.
The fire kept ing, and the seconds passed like minutes.
Then, finally, it stopped.
The portal collapsed, and the sudden silence was almost as shocking as the fire had been.
And then the dragon walked out.
It emerged slowly, as if it had all the time in the world and knew it.
It stood ten feet tall at the shoulder, its body more than three times longer than that from the blunt curve of its snout to the tapered end of its tail.
Its scales shone gold, each scale catching the light of the burning rubble around it and throwing it back brighter. Its eyes were a bright red, and they moved across the gathered mages with an intelligence that was unsettling.
Its membrane-like wings were attached to its forelegs, rippling as it stepped out into the open.
Then, pushing itself up on its forelegs, it rose.
Its neck stretched, its chest expanded, and it roared.
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