"You put him up to it," Ortahn said, not bothering with a questioning tone.

  "Who else? He didn't come up with such an elegant plan himself," Ildara replied, stepping out of the shadow as if the darkness itself were birthing her form. "That beast can't even remember his own name without a prompt."

  She still wore the high-necked dress, and her limp was now only hinted at in her gait. The coldheart skull served her more as an accessory than a support. Ildara stood opposite Ortahn, her gaze, as usual, seething with contempt.

  "So..." he began, not quite sure what to do with the started sentence. Fortunately, Ildara interrupted him.

  "A Faltessian boarler can never see the stars. That's how its head and neck are designed—or rather, its lack of one. They are born that way. Doomed by their physiology to press their snouts into the mud."

  "Of course, it can see them if it wants to," Ortahn retorted, understanding what the Black Blood witch was really talking about, and he had an answer for that. "It just has to dig a pit and sit in it. That way, it can gaze at every single star for as long as it likes."

  Ildara's face twisted with malice at this turn of conversation, but then the corner of her lip curled.

  "It won't be looking anywhere when the cursing butcher comes for it. Its heart will stop in twenty-three... twenty-four..."

  Ortahn collapsed to his knees, struck by a sudden heart failure. Thousands of sharp ice shards were clogging his blood vessels. He tried to strike the woman with an aether-whip, a blind imitation of her own weapon, but she casually waved a hand, and the whip obliterated the last light-line on the wall. A cloud covered the sky over The Pit, plunging everything into the morning gloom.

  "Two students got into a fight over some nonsense, and now one of them is dead," Ildara said with feigned sadness, interrupting her deadly countdown. "One word: men. Stupid, rough, aggressive cattle, if you want many words."

  Ortahn fell forward onto his hands on the warped floor. His consciousness was drifting away, darkness closing in on his vision, and a song of repose echoed in his ears. "She didn't move her hands in front of me... That means she cast the curse in the dark. Her countdown... so I'd die in a state of desperate thoughts..."

  "Ten... Nine..." Ildara counted solemnly, as if measuring the time to present her own gift.

  "Live," a distant, sad voice sounded.

  "Forgive me, Viya. Not this time. Even if I kill her, the curse will remain... If just for revenge..." But all of Ortahn's body's resources were going toward buying every extra moment of life. His magic was gone, retreated in the face of oblivion.

  "Six... Five..."

  "Darkness... is coming..." His heart had turned to a chip of ice, and the rest of his body was striving for the same state.

  "Lift the curse, you jririviska (female baresteether)!" Vitl's piercing shriek cut through the grim air.

  Ildara jerked, was knocked into the air by Vitl's unexpected, though weak, magical attack, and flopped awkwardly to the floor next to Ortahn.

  "Now that is a direct assault, cattle," she hissed in the direction the voice came from, raising her hands in a combat gesture to crush the insolent one.

  First, her nail phalanges snapped with a crack, just openly broke. Then it was the turn of the middle phalanges. The proximal phalanges broke in two places, as did the metacarpals. It wasn't a strike or an explosion, but methodical, result-oriented work.

  Ortahn had never heard such screams, even through the thick fog of approaching death. Ildara screamed as no one had ever screamed, instantly leaping from cold calm to absolute agony. Her hands were breaking in small, perfectly measured pieces. She lost consciousness when the destruction reached a quarter of the way up her forearms.

  The pain in Ortahn's chest also subsided, and for a moment, he thought he was dead. But someone's legs appeared in front of him, and someone strong pulled him by the shoulder, helping him up.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  "Forgive me, child, for taking so long," a calm and unfamiliar male voice said. "That was some new-fashioned curse, a complex weave."

  Ortahn raised his head and saw Taut's face. But this was not the empty Taut. His eyes were now filled with depth and understanding.

  "Taut, did you do that?" Vitl asked in horror, staring at the maimed Ildara. He winced in pain and nervously rubbed his own hands, clearly imagining her fate for himself.

  "Yes," Taut replied with a complete lack of regret. "Now she will have to learn to cast spells without hands, or part with magic forever."

  "Who are you, Taut?" Ortahn forced out, aware that he must look as stunned as a newborn baresteether.

  "Esh already told you," Taut replied, his voice warming. "I am Echo. She named me by my essence, a name truer than my real name. A natural-born magess."

  A blur sped past them and dove into the nearest corridor.

  "That's Samar!" Vitl yelled, chasing after him. "He musn't get to anyone! He'll turn us in! Stop, you mutarg (bad person)!"

  When they had disappeared, Ortahn turned his gaze back to Taut, to this enigma of a man who had pretended to be an empty space. Something about it seemed familiar to Ortahn.

  "My time is running out," Taut said, still supporting Ortahn. His voice was beginning to lose its strength, and the light in his eyes was fading. "And you must hurry. Tulila is a good girl; she will help. And your ?Roses? are the best one can count on in these times."

  "Thank you. And thank Vitl for me," Ortahn said, starting to run.

  "Go, child. You have yet to shine," Taut called after him, his voice growing weak and distant. "The whole world will see your flame."

  The door to the teachers' lounge burst open with such force, as if there were no magical lock on it, only a simple physical latch, and Ortahn stumbled inside. The teachers froze mid-action and stared at the intruder. Students never entered this place of their own free will, much less burst in with such forcefulness.

  "Tula," Ortahn yelled.

  Tulila, who had been sitting at a desk filling out some chancellery form with a murderous expression, instantly dropped all her hands and threw a wave of air beneath her, riding it to Ortahn. Her chair and desk exploded into splinters from the movement.

  "Who is in mortal danger?" she asked, grabbing the student by the shoulder and hauling him back into the corridor, not glancing back at her colleagues.

  The other teachers, after a stunned moment of confusion, returned to their business. The madness that had just occurred did not concern them. They had long since adopted MelLandra's nihilistic philosophy: "The less you know, the longer you'll live, and most importantly, the sooner you'll get off your shift."

  "Liberal," one teacher merely explained quietly.

  "Esh-Faya! The Laws took her!" Ortahn spoke quickly, barely catching his breath, imitating Esh's manner.

  "Not 'took'," she corrected him mechanically, her voice as flat as a blade. "Everything the Nephilim do is, by definition, lawful. Especially the Laws. That means she was arrested. From a legal standpoint."

  "What will happen to her?" A crack appeared in Ortahn's voice, one he could no longer contain. Without his friend, he had taken on the role of the emotional center, and in talking with Tulila about what had happened, it became real and important.

  Tulila stopped for a moment, then, with visible reluctance, continued walking and talking, staring straight ahead. "If it was indeed the Laws, the Chancellery will be overly cautious in her punishment. I think... she's facing the cube."

  "The cube?" Ortahn repeated numbly.

  "A hollow metal cube," Tulila explained, her voice sounding irritated, as if she were angry at Ortahn for making her explain such a thing (though in reality, she wasn't angry at him). "They will teleport her inside and hang it over the city. The cube will rotate slowly."

  "And what then?" Ortahn asked, somehow finding enough moisture in his desiccated body to break out in a cold sweat.

  "And this is my best student? Has despair made you completely stupid?" she spun on him. "That's it. You think that's not punishment enough?"

  "But..." Ortahn choked. "That's unjust! You can't get out of a cube without magic! How can they punish non-mages like that?"

  "The cubes were created only for non-mages, Ortahn," she replied calmly, as if in a lecture.

  Ortahn, after thinking, asked distantly, "What's inside the Chancellery?"

  "I don't know. I've never been there," Tulila said, looking away. "You've decided to save her, haven't you? Just like in those stupid fairy tales about the wandering wizardess who fights her way through armies of darkness to save the handsome prince from the evil witch's dark tower. Except, as usual, you've mixed up the gender roles. And an old, grumpy teacher is unlikely to stop you with reasonable arguments. She'll have to help you in another way. For example, by drawing as much attention to herself as possible."

  He looked at her. "You said you would lie for me, but nothing beyond that."

  Tulila smirked, her bared-teeth smile both grim and, in its own way, beautiful. "Very clever, Ortahn. Reminding a woman of her own boundaries at the very moment she's about to cross them for you."

  They walked through The Pit. Tulila cast a quick, appraising glance at the scale of the destruction and at the two bodies—Yaron's and Ildara's—which Taut had already laid neatly side-by-side, like two dreamer-friends gazing at the clouds or the stars.

  "Maybe I should call my 'Roses'—I mean, my classmates?" Ortahn suggested, hoping for strength in numbers.

  "Don't. Don't turn this into another male rebellion. It already smells too much of cheap tragedy. This will be a two-person operation. I'll create a distraction. As much as my hands and my nerve will allow. And you... you storm the evil witch's tower. It's better to make it a quick, quiet sortie. Your power, as I assume, should be enough. But don't take too long, alright? My audience with the higher-ups won't be eternal."

  Their gazes met for a moment—like two diverging beams of light that would never meet at this point again. In her living eye: determination and farewell. In his eyes: a storm and a fragile hope.