Julianna POVThe clinic was quieter now, though the smell of herbs and the faint groans of the wounded filled the air. I sat at the edge of the bed, Lyra beside me, her arms still looped tightly around mine like if she let go, I’d vanish.For a long while neither of us spoke.Finally, Lyra broke the silence. Her voice trembled. “Julie… I thought… I thought you hated me. After what happened with Kira. I thought you’d never forgive me.”Tears blurred my vision. “I didn’t hate you, Lyra. I was angry, yes. But hate? No. Never. You were my first real friend here. You… you were my family. And when I saw you die—” My throat closed. “It felt like I’d lost everything.”Lyra’s lip quivered, guilt heavy in her eyes. “I made mistakes. I was stupid. I’m was sorry.”I grabbed her hands, squeezing them tight. “You don’t need to say sorry. You’re here now. That’s all that matters. You’re alive, Lyra. Do you know how terrified I was? I thought I’d never hear
Lily POVAfter Julianna’s overwhelming display of power, silence fell. The Netherveil’s creatures were gone, sucked back into the abyss, but the devastation remained. The school lay in ruins, broken stone and charred wood scattered across the grounds. She had saved us all… and then collapsed.The battlefield was silent, but Julianna’s body told another story. She had fainted the moment the last ripple of her magic vanished. Her hair, once pure black, now had streaks of silvery white running through it like cracks in the night. Not all of it—just enough to be impossible to ignore. This also happened when she saved Scott during the fight against Kira but this was worst.I knelt beside her, my heart heavy. Her hair — strands of it had turned white, shimmering faintly like snow. “I warned her not to use her powers,” I whispered, brushing strands of white hair away from her pale face. “But… I’m glad she did.”Chairman Johnson carried Scott and Kaid, both unconscious and bloodied, his usual
Dominic Blackwood POVYears passed, though I could never measure how many. Time had no meaning after Seren’s death.I still taught at Paranormal High for a while. My lectures were flawless, my discipline unbending, but my students whispered about me behind my back. “Cold,” they said. “Cruel. No one can please him.”They were right. I had lost the capacity for joy. Every smile, every laugh from a child in those halls was a reminder of what had been stolen from me.I was not a man anymore. I was a wound dressed in robes.And yet, I endured. Because to stop moving would mean to remember.Johnson tried to reach me. He visited often, dragging me out of my chambers, forcing me to eat, to walk the gardens.“She wouldn’t want this,” he said one evening as we stood by the willow trees. “Elira and Seren… they’d want you to live, not just survive.”I looked at him then — his face lined with sorrow but still warm, still alive. He still had his fire, his friendships, his hope.“I can’t,” I whisper
Dominic Blackwood POVThe halls of Paranormal High smelled of rain and parchment the night I cast my final exam spell. The auditorium echoed with the hiss of magic circles, dozens of students attempting their incantations, but my focus was sharp as a blade.The runes I carved in the air glowed pitch black — dangerous, volatile, but controlled. Controlled by me. My magic was silence, command, inevitability. When the final sigil burned itself into existence, the room went dark, every candle snuffed out.And then, one by one, each flame reignited, brighter, whiter. A perfect execution of Umbralis Lux, the forbidden counterbalance of shadow and light.Professor Halden’s monocle nearly fell off. “By the gods,” he whispered. “Perfection.”The others clapped nervously. None of them had dared attempt the spell. None except me.At the back of the hall, my friend Samuel Johnson — tall, broad-shouldered, still boyish in his grin — clapped the loudest.“That’s my Blackwood!” he shouted, his voice
Lily POVWe fought like the sky itself was falling.I’d organized the students into wings and lines the way I though was best. “Air, land, shield, healers,” I barked, pushing them like chess pieces. “No one breaks formation!” For a while, it worked. For a while, the monsters stalled under our spells.But then the final barrier cracked.A sound like glass breaking inside my skull. The wards around the courtyard split into glowing fragments, tumbling down as harmless light. A flood of beasts poured in, skeletal things with claws like scythes, wings made of screaming shadows.One in particular—a tall skeletal thing with too-long arms—drew my eye immediately. Some part of me knew, before it happened, that it would be the one. The one that broke us.And it did.Lyra was a blur, moving to intercept it as it crashed through our line. She slammed into it with everything she had left, fists wreathed in violet flame. She should have had backup. She should have been able to dodge. But she’d thro
Scott POVWe pushed back into the heart of the wreckage with everything we had left. The air tasted of ash and ozone; the night sky above the school was stained with a crimson column of light, like a wound in the world. Monsters still swarmed—rotting wolves, shadowing bats, things with too many teeth—but Kaid and I cut through them.“Lily’s potion actually works,” I panted, ducking a snapping maw and sending a flare of fire into its throat.Kaid didn’t smile. “Don’t waste your energy. Save it for Dominick.”We had to get to the door. If we stopped that thing from widening whatever tear it had made, maybe we could hold on long enough for reinforcements. Maybe.The doorway loomed before us again like some black cathedral. For a moment I thought the smoky glow inside would swallow us whole. Then Johnson stumbled into view—half-collapsed, breathing like a thing that’d been dragged through a furnace. He looked worse than I’d ever seen him, scales dulled with soot. Even like that, he lifted