Panic did not scream.It compressed.The Frost Boar came through the treeline like moving terrain, its bulk tearing open the forest with the slow inevitability of something that did not need speed to kill.Trees shattered beneath its weight. Ice crawled up their trunks as it passed, frost snapping branches into splinters and sealing wounds in pale crystalline scars.It was larger than before.Not simply grown.Altered.Crystalline growth layered across its shoulders and flanks in overlapping plates that refracted light into fractured blues and whites. Each pulse of mana sent a visible tremor through the air, bending the space around it in subtle distortions.The ground froze solid beneath its hooves. Earth cracked under the pressure of its passage, seams racing outward in jagged lines.Riven inhaled sharply.“It followed us.”Fact.“Formation. Thane front. Cael left. Ilyra center.”The boar lowered its head.It charged.Thane met it.Shield locked. Stance wide. Spine aligned.Impact d

The first thing to leave was the pressure.It did not vanish.It withdrew.Slowly. Deliberately. Like a tide acknowledging it had pushed too far inland.Cael felt it before he understood it. The constant weight behind his eyes eased. His lungs stopped negotiating with the air. Breath became automatic again.The clearing did not snap back.It sagged.Trees that had leaned inward at impossible angles creaked as their trunks corrected. Branches shuddered and shed frost that shattered before reaching the ground.The earth stopped humming beneath their boots.The world was letting go.Riven stood still at the center of it, head slightly tilted, eyes unfocused. He was not looking at anything. He was listening.The sigils around his wrists flickered once. Then again. Then faded as ambient mana levels returned to something natural.“Flow stabilizing,” he said quietly. “No rebound. No secondary surge.”That should have been relief.It was not.The sky shifted next.The strained color that had

The room was designed for restraint.Stone walls. Sound-dampening sigils etched shallow enough to be felt rather than seen. No windows. No ornamentation. A long darkwood table sat at the center, scarred not by age but by use. Decisions had been made here that did not leave visible marks.Instructor Halwen Merrow stood at the head of the table.He did not sit.Across from him, Selene Vire adjusted the cuffs of her sleeves with precise irritation. Her posture was composed. Her eyes were not.Kest Vale leaned against the wall near the door, arms crossed, weight balanced casually. Nothing about him was casual.A projection hovered above the table. Terrain reconstruction. Mana flow patterns. Oscillation decay curves still unwinding toward baseline.Merrow spoke first.“They neutralized it.”No pride. No reprimand. Just fact.Kest exhaled through his nose. “They survived it.”Merrow’s head tilted slightly. “No,” he said. “They did not.”Selene looked up sharply.The projection shifted under

They were together for the first time without an audience.No instructors. No healers at the margins. No ward circles etched into stone.Just a row of benches in a sunlit colonnade overlooking the lower training grounds, the academy continuing below as if nothing fundamental had shifted.Riven sat with his back to a pillar, arms folded. His gaze moved constantly. Not scanning for threat. Cataloging.Voices below. Steel striking steel. The cadence of a drill corrected mid-count.Normal.Cael lay stretched across the opposite bench, boots hooked over the stone rail.“So,” Cael said, staring up at the sky. “We didn’t die.”Thane exhaled softly. “Insightful.”“I’m serious,” Cael said. “There was a very clear point where that stopped being survivable.”Riven did not answer.Hexis sat beside him, knees drawn up, chin resting on her hand. She had joined them without ceremony. No announcement. No visible strain.She looked steady.Too steady.“We didn’t just survive it,” Riven said finally. “

The end of the school year did not arrive all at once.It came in pieces.In instructors speaking more slowly, no longer racing syllables against bells, no longer treating every lesson like a contest with disaster.In lectures that drifted instead of snapped to attention, where pauses were allowed to exist without being filled, and questions were sometimes left unanswered on purpose.In assignments that ended with reflection rather than evaluation, where the question shifted from what did you achieve to what did you notice.And noticing, for the first time, was enough.The academy did not declare the year complete.It loosened.Corridors grew louder in the evenings and quieter in the mornings. Doors remained open longer. Training grounds held more conversation than correction.Hexis noticed it first in the light.It lingered now.Not just in courtyards, but in the narrow landings between towers, in ivy threaded through old stone, in stairwells worn smooth by generations of passing han