Rena's vision narrowed to a single point and yellow ligh
Her long white hair sways and her red eyes stare at nox.
Nox stood fifteen meters away, a silhouette carved from storm and grin. The air between them tasted metallic and old. The trees around the clearing hung like sentries, leaves trembling in a wind that smelled of ash and river mud. Somewhere beyond the ring of broken trunks, the island whispered — the low, constant susurration of panicked wings and distant shouts fading into the night.
Rena's knees buckled as if the forest itself had given way under her. A current of mana slid through her, quiet and cool — an answering chord to the hot, jagged drum Drasiruth had beaten in her chest minutes before. The countercurrent felt like a hand smoothing a fevered brow. Her eyes fluttered; her limbs folded. For a breath, for a second, everything went soft and deep and unconditional.
She lost consciousness.
Ethan's shout cracked like a whip and then stilled. Lilia's face blurred with movement. Leona's shallow breathing continued like a fragile shell. The clearing froze in the shape of one heartbeat catching.
Nox did not move at first. He watched Rena fall with the casual curiosity of a cat watching a moth. The moonlight painted his features in a cruel, silver relief: fangs, slitted gold, the shadow-sheen of fur. Under that motionless mask, Zakaros — whatever old thing his voice carried — hummed like a moth inside a lamp.
A delicate crunch came from the underbrush.
Two steps, each careful, each small as prayer. Then a shape slipped through the trees and stood tall where silence had been.
A wolf. Not any wolf Rena had read about in books. Shizana was a creature of pale frost: fur silver as moonlight, eyes the clarity of glacier pools, breath angling into cold vapour that did not belong to the humid island night. Her ears were pricked, and despite the carnage nearby there was a dignity around her, the taught calm of a guardian who kept an old oath.
Shizana's gaze slid over the clearing to Nox and did not waver. Her body had the easy readiness of a trained sentinel; every tendon was a braid of restraint and muscle.
"Zakaros," she said. The name came crisp and low, her voice soft but threaded with authority, almost human in its cadence. "Stop playing with the children."
The thing in Nox's chest — the older voice — tightened like a drawn wire. For an instant, the boy's features contracted into amusement.
"Play?" he said. The word came out tasting of wire and coal. He narrowed his eyes. "Who are you to order me, white-furred thing?"
Shizana took one step forward. The grasses bowed with a tiny sigh where her paw touched ground. She did not bare teeth. She only looked. The look contained memory — of blood and of debts — and something older: respect.
"Zakaros," she said again. "Enough. You've gone too far."
Nox laughed then — a sound with too many teeth. But it lacked the feral clarity it had minutes earlier. The laugh was a ripple of Nox and Zakaros at once.
Zakaros shifted inside him like someone changing coats. The boy's shoulders eased, and a slow, almost gentlemanly smile arranged itself over those dangerous teeth. "Alright," he said. "I admit I overshot it. It gets dull otherwise. Rena is… promising. Useful. She burns well. The half-dragon blood sings. The phoenix heat is a pretty noise for an old thing like me."
Shizana's ears tilted. The moon carved a line of ice across her muzzle. There was a gentleness in her voice now — as if speaking to a disobedient pup — and a authority that did not yield. "There's a difference between useful and broken. She's not finished. You know that. You were there when the rain fighters came. You know what happens when they seed a wound to grow."
Zakaros' golden eyes glittered. He inclined his head as if accepting a truth he had long known. "Yes. She's fragile. She has a terrible future if someone fools with her foundations. You sound like you care," the old thing said, and that was absurd enough to make Shizana's expression tighten fractionally. Zakaros chuckled — not viciously now, merely amused.
Shizana's tone sharpened. "I am not interested in your theatrics, old shadow. We have a new development."
Zakaros' face flickered. The name pressed behind his teeth. He glanced sideways, then inhaled slow and careful, like a man reaching into memory. "Elizabeth," he whispered.
The mention of it was like a gust that knocked brittle ash from branches. The air altered. Even the black lightning that still hungrily licked the crater's edges paused in a cold ripple.
"Lady Elizabeth?" Shizana's voice had a tremor of something very nearly like awe. "And Tishara as well? Both returned?"
Zakaros' laugh was a razor edge softened by tired amusement. "Yes. After seventeen years." The number lay between them like an old, heavy coin. He bowed his head in a gesture that might have once been practiced for a king. "Lady Elizabeth saved my life when blood and lightning had me at an end. I owe her more than I can tally."
Shizana's fur bristled just enough at the memory. Her eyes glinted with ice-fire. "Then we must move. We cannot allow Rena to be exposed to everything that's coming. If Elizabeth is back in the palace — if the old blood stirs the way you say — then every secret, every shard of our histories will try to find a mouth to be spoken into. Rena cannot be a loose flame in that wind."
Zakaros studied her for an odd moment, the way a man holds a cup to see if it is warm. He smiled, complicated and soft. "Bah. The world ages faster than a man's bones, Shizana. You worry like the young. But you are right." He turned fully to the foxlike-wolf, and for the briefest of beats something like respect softened his wild features. "Rena is… more than a half-breed. She is complicated. If Elizabeth and Tishara are here, then the gameboard changes."
Shizana's ears dropped the slightest degree, and her tail flicked with a momentum like a thought. "What of the prince?" she asked. Her voice was careful. "Does Jin know?"
Zakaros clicked his tongue in a sound like a small, bitter bell. For the first time in minutes, the old thing's composure slipped. "The boy does not know," he said simply. The words landed with the soft thump of a stone into still water. "He knows nothing of his grandmother's return. He knows nothing of Tishara's step back into the corridors. He is oblivious; he is focused on training. He knows nothing of… of certain threads that cross behind the world."
[ Note: No one knows that Naoko is performing a devastating heart transplant on her son, Jin.]
Shizana's ice-blue eyes narrowed. "Then we must not call attention to Rena. Not now."
Nox — or Zakaros — smirked. "Oh?" His voice turned playful. "You think I'd put the girl on a platter?"
His fangs flashed. The thing in him tasted predation and amusement both. Shizana's hackles rose.
"You took a fall tonight," she said, blunt and direct. "You are large in your arrogance; you let a little thing like curiosity turn cruel. Needles in children. Playing with their tender parts. This is not necessary."
Nox' smile thinned. "It's not cruelty; it's a test," he said. "If a half-blood bows, if she yields to fear, she is weak. Weakness is a tool in the right hands."
Shizana's step drew nearer, just enough that fur brushed the blackened leaf litter. "You speak as if no one has torn you to pieces," she said. There was a weight in the observation that made Zakaros' expression falter. "Do not mistake survival for wisdom."
For a long breath they regarded one another in the shaking moonlight. The canopy above rattled; the island was awake with noises — the clack of branches, the pop of sap, the distant squawk of some water bird on high alert. A thin mist rolled along the ground and made their breaths visible.
From the trees beyond, muffled shouts and the scuff of boots echoed — the academy's volunteers, the guardians, the staff; men and women rushing toward the crater in a staccato of human noise. The world was waking up to its own wound.
Shizana turned her head and looked at the pile of bodies and the collapsed shapes of students. Her face darkened with something like pity. "She is—not one of us," she muttered. "Not wholly dragon, not human as they expect. She stands on a fault-line."
Zakaros' ears — if he had ears in the old sense — twitched. "Fault-lines are interesting places." His voice warmed with the scent of a conspiracy. "The world remakes itself at fault-lines. You and I have both been there, have we not? We have learned."
Shizana's breath steamed. She let the silence sit heavy between them, then widened her stance and tapped her paw on the earth — a small, crisp percussion. "We need to warn the palace," she said calmly. "Warn Elizabeth. Warn Tishara — quietly. Use the old roads, take a messenger that cannot be seen in the night. If the Queen moves, and the Rotchi matriarchs speak, then we fix what can be fixed before the broken things are used against the children."
Zakaros sighed, a long thing that sounded like embers cooling in a cup. He considered the forest — the crater, the fire, the scattered students — like a man looking at a map. "Yes." He nodded once. "Yes. We will do that." For a moment the old thing looked not like a harvester of the night but like a conspirator with a plan. "But Shizana — do not be sentimental. War is a blade. We keep our hands on the hilt and do not let tears unsteady us."
Shizana's ears twitched at the edge of an old memory. "I do not intend sentiment," she replied. "I intend precision."
They stood together in the black-and-amber light, wolf and wolfed boy, guardian and loud, dangerous relic. They were a pair of old things in the new storm, exchanging details that would move like currents behind larger tides. The woods murmured around them, but the moment was sealed — brief as it would be — by purpose.
Zakaros stepped closer to the crater's lip and peered down into the steaming mouth. The thing that breathed there shifted, a huge outline moving slow as tides beneath a curtain of smoke.
Shizana's eyes scanned the faces of the downed students, the rescuers in the distance — fragile human things, easily broken brooms in a very old house. Her fingers flexed. Her fur rippled. "Get the word to Elizabeth," she said. Her tone was small and urgent. "And tell her: guard the boy. Keep Jin from knowing until he absolutely must. If the palace wakes, then we are all under a new kind of light that shows what is sleeping."
Zakaros' grin thinned into something like acceptance. "So it begins," he murmured. For a moment — rare and honest — the teeth in his voice softened. "For once, I will be careful."
Shizana tilted her head and snorted once, an animal sound that was almost humour. "You will be careful, old shadow? A miracle."
He answered with a small, wry bow. "Miracles and precautions are not mutually exclusive."
The forest answered them with creaks and the low roll of a far-off tide. Ash drifted on the air like gray snow. The moon moved on, indifferent, while the two watchers in the dark made their pacts and set their plans in motion like hands on a watch.
Beyond them, the world of the academy clattered and cried and flared. Men shouted into the night with lanterns and makeshift torches. A chant rose and fell — instruction, grief, command — and Rena lay small and still, a sleeping lamp with dangerous cinders at its heart.
Shizana padded a small circle around the fallen half-dragon and settled. She did not sleep. Her eyes were like chips of ice, and she watched the nearest silhouettes until the first messenger was sent away on a secret path. Zakaros melted into shadow and moved as one with the smoke, heading east with a slow, deliberate swagger.
The island held its breath and, for the first time since the crater opened, the wind shifted. It carried the scent of iron, of wet earth, and beneath everything else, a faint glimmering scent like old coins and lavender — the palace's own hush starting to stir.
A single star collapsed behind cloud. Somewhere, unseen, someone made a promise.
The story had only begun to complicate; the pieces would move now with measured malice and guarded care. And beneath it all, the sleeping flame of Rena's new heart ticked like a clock nobody else knew how to read.
A cliff of noise rose in the distance — a messenger's call; hooves on wet ground. The gameboard tilted again. Zakaros' grin curved to full predatory width.
"Move," he said to the dark.
Shizana answered with a low, wind-borne sound, and before the words had time to reach the sleeping girl's ears, the world had already begun to stitch itself up for the next violence.
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Heat: Hello guys, how are you? I mean, I'm sitting now, and there are also things that Jin doesn't know about Astelle, and we will also see new things soon. I'm just trying to build the next scenario. Jin will return soon, but he will have a new adventure.