Chapter 6 - Elias

They called it a “request.”

Which, coming from Professor Ashleigh Dana, meant I had about as much choice as a frog caught mid-leap in a freezing spell.

I arrived at the faculty tower just after sunrise, uniform crisp, hair already resisting the Everley-mandated grooming charm. The moment I stepped inside, I was met with the mingled scent of enchanted ink, fresh spell parchment, and faintly scorched lavender, Ashleigh’s personal magical signature.

She stood at the head of the long oak table, a mess of scrolls floating in chaotic orbit around her like moths too caffeinated to land. Her copper rune-threaded robes fluttered as she turned, eyes locking onto mine with a smile too sharp to be warm.

“Elias,” she said, voice airy and bright as ever. “We need your help with a bit of an anomaly.”

“Aurelian,” I replied flatly, not bothering to ask. “I heard.”

Ashleigh didn’t deny it. She just flicked her wrist, and a scroll snapped open midair between us. “The gate scan confirmed dragonblood. Four times. Same result.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And your solution is to… assign me babysitting duty?”

“Observation,” she corrected. “We need pattern assessments. Spell disruptions. Magical instability readings. You’re the best in your cohort.”

I already knew that.

Across the table, Professor Alaric Crowe murmured something about prophecy and “returning flame,” but no one acknowledged him. That was usually the safest approach. Julian Vireaux, the bloodline historian, merely scowled in a way that made him look constipated with contempt.

“I assume you’ve already ruled out tampering?” I asked.

Ashleigh nodded. “Headmaster Arx reviewed the logs personally. It’s genuine. The girl didn’t trigger the system. The system recognized her.”

I didn’t sigh, but my jaw tightened. Dragons were extinct for a reason. Power without discipline. Glory-seeking. Entirely too enamored with their own mythos. And now, apparently, one of them had waltzed past our most ancient wards wearing secondhand boots.

“Fine,” I said, brushing imaginary lint from my sleeve. “I’ll observe. Quietly. I assume no one else knows?”

“Only faculty,” Ashleigh confirmed, though I noted Pamela Batista’s absence from this meeting. That alone made me uneasy. If she was keeping out of sight, it meant she was already planning her next political move.

Ashleigh’s tone gentled. “We’re not asking for sympathy, Elias. Just a scholar’s eye.”

I gave a shallow nod and turned for the door. I’d do what was asked. Gather readings. Track magical surges. And if the so-called dragon turned out to be just another chaotic magical incident in human skin, I’d confirm that too.

But part of me… part of me was already bristling. Not with fear or excitement, but irritation.

Because dragons were not orderly, they did not fit into neat diagrams or runesets. They didn’t listen to reason or regulation. And I had no patience for myths in girl-shaped chaos.

Let the others whisper prophecy. I’d find the truth underneath the smoke. And if she was a fire hazard?

I’d be the one to extinguish it.

I cloaked myself in an Everley concealment spell, subtle, elegant, not the brutish nonsense the Hawthorne combat brats favored, and slipped into the upper alcove of the Great Hall. From here, I could see everything: the faculty seated in careful formation beneath the glowing chandeliers, the gathered student body fanned out in social clusters, and at the far rear entrance, the moment the anomaly herself stumbled through the doors.

Late. Of course.

She looked like someone who’d wandered into the wrong world and hadn’t yet decided whether to run or bite it. Hair tangled like she’d fought the wind and lost, cheeks flushed, cloak slightly uneven as if she’d put it on in a rush. But the uniform? Tailored perfectly. A spell fit, most likely. Expensive work for someone clearly used to hand-me-downs.

She paused under the archway, hesitation rippling through her. Then she stepped forward, straight into the lion’s den of social predators.

I saw the moment they caught her scent.

Briar Maddox, draped in calculated dishevelment, leaned in first. That smug, predatory gleam in her eye practically announced blood in the water. Selina Viremont, poised like a dagger disguised as perfume, ghosted in at her side. And finally, Juliet Blackmoor, soft-spoken and barbed like poisoned sugar, completed the formation.

A three-point covenant of cruelty.

They formed a semicircle around the dragon girl, their words inaudible from this distance, but I didn’t need to hear them. I saw the posture shifts. The tension. The way Nora’s shoulders squared slightly, even as her hands trembled by her sides.

Then it hit.

A pulse. Subtle. No lightshow, no chanting. Just… a thrum. Like the air forgot how to behave.

It started beneath her boots, embers in the leyline web. Her emotional spike sent a thread of flame-threaded magic skittering across the floor like wildfire hunting for form. The ground shimmered faintly. Not visibly, unless you were trained to see it. But I was an Everley. We see what magic tries to hide.

Student enchantments around her flickered. Pins on breast pockets, normally a soft, ambient indicator of emotional state, glitched like shattered rainbows. One poor second-year hiccupped mid-illusion and nearly dropped a floating tome. Another gasped as the temperature of his protective barrier spiked without cause.

The dragon’s magic bent the leyline lattice. Not just pressed against it, warped it. It was as if it was trying to rewrite the rules underneath our rules.

She wasn’t casting a spell. She was the spell.

I caught myself leaning forward, breath shallow. It wasn’t refined. Not even close. That magic wasn’t bound by rune or incantation. It moved on instinct. Fury. Fear.

And it was responding to her.

Emotion magic was erratic at best, infant-level stuff in the arcane world. But this… this was something else. It wasn’t that she didn’t know better. It was that the power didn’t care. It responded anyway. Obeyed her. Wildly. Recklessly.

And I couldn’t look away.

She murmured something to Maddox, too low to catch, but I saw the effect: the twitch in Selina’s jaw, the flicker of movement from Juliet’s hands. It wasn’t bravado. It was a warning. And they felt it.

So did I.

She was untrained. Untethered. Dangerous. And gods help me, I was intrigued. I should’ve felt contempt. Or caution. Or at the very least, academic curiosity.

But what I felt?

It was the slow, undeniable pull of possibility. Of chaos made flesh in a girl who hadn’t yet realized just how much of this school wanted her gone, or worse, contained.

And if she were a dragon?

Then maybe our myths had been far too small.

I kept my distance, of course. Observation, not interaction. That was the assignment, and frankly, my preference. I wasn’t here to befriend her. I was here to monitor the instability, document the edges of the anomaly, and report anything dangerous to the proper Everley channels. I told myself it was nothing more than that.

But that didn’t explain why I’d sat in on every class she was enrolled in since orientation.

Or why I started showing up five minutes early, just to watch the way she hesitated before entering each room, like the walls themselves might turn her away.

It didn’t take long for the professors to notice the oddity in their midst. She wasn’t subtle, not in posture, not in presence. Nora Carver, if that was even her real name, radiated like a misfiring ward stone. Too much energy, no grounding. Her spells clung to her fingers like smoke. Her aura shifted erratically, hot then cold, flickering across the arcane spectrum like a lightning storm trying to take form.

By the second day, someone, probably Professor Dana, had suggested a demonstration.

“Let’s see what you can do, Miss Carver,” Professor Fae said evenly during Fundamentals of Control. His tone wasn’t mocking, but there was caution beneath it, the kind only those who’ve seen spells go very wrong can mask so well.

Nora stepped forward like someone being led to the gallows. No flair. No arrogance. Just that familiar set to her jaw, tight, locked, like she was daring the room to look down on her. And they were. Gods, they were.

She lifted her hand.

And chaos obeyed.

First came fire, raw and golden, not the flickering orange of a student pyromancer, but sunlit and sharp. It danced along her palm, scorching the air.

Then, without pause, ice. Not a misty chill, but razor-sharp spears of crystalline frost that hissed against the floor as they met the flame.

The class froze. I even stopped breathing.

Water followed, spiraling between her fingers like silk. Then air, gusting out in a burst that rustled cloaks and scattered pages. Earth bloomed beneath her boots in a sudden surge of moss and vine. And finally… shadow.

Not darkness. Shadow. Living, curling, intelligent. It reached for her fingertips like it knew her name.

Six forms. Six elements.

Fire. Shadow. Ice. Earth. Wind. Magic.

Solari. Umbraen. Glacien. Terravyn. Velastra. Drakarae.

Impossible.

The clans were extinct. The bloodlines were lost or diluted into the void. Even if she were a dragon, which remained an absurdity of theory, there shouldn’t be this. Not all of it. No one had ever recorded a single dragon capable of drawing from all six bloodstreams. They’d been divided for a reason and balanced through separation.

And here she was. Shaky. Unfocused. No chant. No wand. Just raw magic bleeding out of her like breath.

The classroom held still for a beat longer than was polite. Then Professor Fae muttered something under his breath and dismissed the surge with a containment ward, nodding once, just once, and moved on.

The others whispered, of course. I heard them as I walked past: “Unstable,” “Show-off,” “She’ll burn out in a week.”

They weren’t wrong.

She was unpolished. Disgracefully so. Her spellcasting lacked form, foundation, and rhythm. Everything we trained for in Everley, she ignored or never learned. Her power responded to her moods like a pet she couldn’t control. And still… it answered her.

It should have irritated me more than it did.

And it did irritate me, gods, yes. The ease with which she summoned what took others years even to attempt was remarkable. The way the leyline responded to her presence like a favored child.

But beneath that irritation was something sharper.

Curiosity.

Not the academic kind. Not the kind I could write down in neat parchment reports and submit to the council.

No. This was messier. Personal.

She wasn’t just raw power.

She was resistance in a girl-shaped flame.

Defiant. Resilient. Even when she fumbled, she didn’t apologize. She stood straighter after every misstep, like daring the world to push her again.

I didn’t know if it was courage or recklessness. But for the first time in a very long time…

I wanted to understand her. Not study her. Not dissect her. Just… understand. And that terrified me more than any dragon ever could.

That night, I filed the arcane report the elders demanded. Standard protocol. It included everything they expected: the irregular leyline fluctuations during her casting demonstration, the disruption to ambient enchantments, the failure of foundational stability runes to compensate for her output. I worded it with precision. Cited measured pulse intervals and recorded flame signatures. I noted the risk of untrained elemental surges and suggested immediate structured containment sessions with senior spellcraft faculty. It was clean. Professional.

But I didn’t include everything.

I didn’t mention that her cloak, the one supposedly dormant for a century, reacted before her magic did. That its ember-lined fabric shimmered not with spellcraft, but emotion. That it pulsed with something deeper, older, like it remembered.

I didn’t report the echo in her voice, either. Just for a second. Faint, but unmistakable. Like sound amplified through an ancient conduit. Not loud, but layered.

And I certainly didn’t include the part where my cuffs, Everley-standard, rune-inscribed, emotion-neutral, warmed the moment her magic hit the air as if something in me recognized her, too.

Curiosity is not supposed to color observation. That’s what they drilled into us.

But as I sealed the report and sent it through the Everley channel… I couldn’t help but wonder what else she might awaken. In this school. In magic. In me.