Chapter 7: Counterattack and Wildflowers
Elora's POV
The shattered crystal orb dissolved into a fine crimson dust that drifted through the air like snow from some grotesque winter. The instructor's face, ordinarily composed into a mask of cold authority, was twisted now with a shock so profound it bordered on fear. He stood sheltered behind his blue ward, his eyes fixed on me, the hand gripping his staff trembling at the knuckles.
The courtyard had gone utterly silent.
The noble apprentices who had been laughing at me a moment before now stood frozen, eyes wide, stumbling backward as though the ground beneath them had shifted. I remained where I was and did not move. My palm still hummed with a raw, dull ache — the residue of the Covenant Flame that had just torn through me — and when I looked down at the glittering powder scattered across the stone, something loosened in my chest that I couldn't quite name.
"H-heretic!"
A noble boy in a scarlet robe stabbed a finger in my direction and shrieked, his voice cracking on the word. "That's heretic power! The Grand Inquisitor was right about her — she's a monster!"
His scream hit the crowd like a spark dropped into oil. The courtyard erupted.
"Instructor, drive her out! She'll kill us all!"
"How can a creature like that be allowed to stay in Arcanum!"
"Lock her back in Greystone's dungeon where she belongs!"
I raised my head and looked at their faces — the wide eyes, the open mouths, the stumbling retreat — and felt nothing in particular. Monster. Heretic. In the lower city, when someone wanted you dead, the only thing that kept you breathing was being more dangerous than they were. It seemed the rules here were no different.
The instructor recovered himself by degrees. He lowered his ward, cleared his throat, and drew his composure back around him like a garment. "Silence!" The word cracked across the courtyard, and then he turned his gaze on me — a gaze that held disgust and fear in equal measure, but beneath both of those, something else: the particular wariness of a man confronted with a force he cannot calculate.
"Elora." His voice was tight. "Your potential exceeds conventional measure. That does not give you license to act without restraint within Arcanum. Your magic is dangerously unstable, and until you have learned to control it, you are barred from all combat-practical courses." He paused, letting his eyes move briefly across the indignant faces surrounding us. "Furthermore, you will continue to be housed in Greystone."
I said nothing. I had expected nothing else. As long as they didn't expel me, as long as they didn't take my dragon, it made no difference where they put me.
After the assessment ended and the crowd dispersed, the noble apprentices gave me a wide berth as they left, as though proximity to me might be contagious. Nyx drifted over, her green eyes carrying a quality of light I couldn't easily read.
"That was impressive," she said quietly.
"It was just a curse," I told her, and turned toward Greystone.
The days that followed were like walking across thin ice — each step met with something sharp waiting beneath the surface. Barred from combat-practical sessions, I was confined to theory lectures and magical history, and in those classrooms I became the fixed point around which every noble apprentice's resentment orbited. They didn't dare move against me openly; the memory of the shattered orb still lived behind their eyes. But there were other methods, and they were not shy about using them.
My textbooks were torn apart and thrown into the drainage ditches. The coarse food I collected at the dining hall was laced with grit and dead insects. Walking the corridors, I would catch a hidden tripwire with my foot and go down hard against the stone floor, and the low laughter that followed would curl around me like smoke.
"Look — the gutter rat's rolling in the dirt again."
"A worthless nobody who can't even detect a basic snare."
I never answered them. I got up, brushed the dust from my clothes, and kept walking. The bruises on my knees hadn't faded before new ones formed over them, but compared to what the underground had taught me about pain, this was nothing worth accounting for.
Until the afternoon in the greenhouse.
It was a session on magical herbology, held in the glass structure behind the academy's main buildings. The air inside was dense and hot, thick with the smell of exotic growth, and I was crouched in a far corner working through a tangle of thorned vines as the instructor had directed, when the sound came from behind me.
"Oops!"
The exclamation was theatrical, almost cheerful — and then a basin of scalding lava-water, used to irrigate fire-aspected plants, came pouring directly down toward my back. I threw myself sideways on instinct, fast enough to matter but not fast enough to escape it entirely. The water caught my left shoulder, burned straight through the rough grey fabric of my robe, and kept burning.
I pulled a sharp breath in through my teeth and held it there. The pain was immediate and precise, a deep searing that radiated outward from the wound, and the smell of scorched skin reached me before the full sensation did.
I turned around.
It was the same scarlet-robed boy who had pointed at me in the courtyard and screamed the word heretic. He stood holding the empty basin, his face arranged into a smile of deliberate malice. "So sorry about that, Elora," he said, drawing the words out with obvious pleasure. "My hand slipped. Don't you know how to throw up a ward? Oh, right — you don't have any real magic, do you? Ha!"
The laughter from the surrounding apprentices rose and fell around him. The herbology instructor frowned, briefly, and did nothing. To all of them, I understood, I was a subject of study at best and a source of amusement at worst — something to be used and discarded at their convenience.
The pain in my shoulder burned along my nerves like a lit fuse.
I stood up slowly. The left side of my body was trembling from the injury, but I straightened my spine and kept it straight. I looked at the boy in the scarlet robe. His eyes were full of contempt and the absolute certainty that I would absorb this the way I had absorbed everything else — quietly, without recourse, like a beaten dog that had learned not to bite. He believed that because he had never met anything like me. He had never seen what grows in the lower city's wreckage: something that, when you put your boot on it, doesn't die. It just waits until it can reach your ankle.
I started walking toward him without a word.
The smile on his face stiffened. Something in my expression must have reached him, because he took one involuntary step back. "What do you think you're — "
I didn't answer. I crossed the remaining distance between us in three fast strides and threw myself directly into him.
The impact drove us both into a rack of thorned vines. The structure collapsed under our combined weight, spilling soil and spiked branches across us in a cascade. He screamed — a high, genuine sound, nothing like the theatrical noises he had been making before — as the thorns tore through his velvet robe and into the skin beneath. I barely registered the ones finding their way into me.
I got a knee over him, grabbed his collar with my good right hand, and drove my elbow into the bridge of his nose.
The crack was clean and unmistakable.
Blood came immediately, spreading warm across my face. He dissolved into sobbing, thrashing, incoherent noise beneath me, and then hands were grabbing at me from behind — older students, the herbology instructor's voice somewhere above it all — and I was hauled off him and slammed to the ground. A boot connected with my ribs during the struggle, and the pain that detonated through my side nearly took my vision with it. I bit down on my tongue hard enough to taste copper and made no sound.
They pinned me against the dirt floor, one side of my face pressed into the soil. But I turned my head and looked at the noble boy lying a few feet away, bleeding and wailing, his magnificent robe ruined, his composure entirely gone.
I smiled at him — a slow, blood-streaked smile — and said, in a voice that came out quieter than I intended and carried further than I expected: "Watch where you're walking next time."
