“—Wait,” the boy said, stopping short. “There’s… three suns?”

  Lira slowed without turning. She had heard that tone before—wonder tipping into panic, the mind scrambling to reorder everything it thought it knew. Behind her, Jiv lounged on the stone bench as if the world had always been like this, knife flashing rhythmically as he shaved curls from a block of pale wood.

  “Yep,” Jiv said cheerfully. “Surya’s the loud one—bright yellow. Rohini’s softer, white as ash. Kali’s the problem.” He tilted his head, eyes flicking skyward. “Burnt orange, drags shadows sideways. They move out of sync, so dusk kind of… smears. Night’s rare. Twice a year, if the skies feel generous.”

  The boy squinted up, shielding his eyes. Three suns hovered at different angles, never quite agreeing on where the day should end.

  “You get used to it,” Jiv added, not looking up. “Or you don’t. Either way, it keeps shining.”

  “And the time thing?” the boy asked, voice thinning. “Six years here is… twenty-five outside?”

  “Approximately,” Nandini said. “It varies.”

  The boy swallowed. “But… seniors go on expeditions. Leaders. Some of them are gone for months. Years. How does that work?”

  Jiv finally glanced up, smirk sliding into place like armor. “Ah. You’ve reached the part where the rules stop being scary and start being inconvenient.”

  The boy frowned.

  “Short answer?” Jiv continued. “You don’t experience AstraVana the same way forever. Time distortion hits hardest in the first years—when the Institute is still… teaching you how to exist inside it.”

  “And the long answer?”

  Jiv’s grin tilted. “Legal ways. Very boring. Paperwork, wards, supervised exits.”

  He leaned closer, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “And illegal ones you won’t hear about until you’re stupid enough to try them.”

  Nandini shot him a warning look.

  “Relax,” Jiv said lightly. “I’m not recommending anything. Just saying—by the time you’re allowed off long-term expeditions, time won’t slip through your fingers quite so easily.”

  The boy nodded, still pale but no longer panicked.

  “First years always take it the worst,” Nandini murmured as she moved on.

  “Then they level up,” Jiv added, already wandering away. “Make friends. Break a few rules. Learn which clocks matter.”

  Lira kept walking.

  Fear still clung to the air—chalk dust, sweat, homesickness sharp as cut lime—but beneath it now ran something steadier.

  Not certainty.

  Understanding deferred.

  He wandered off soon after, shoulders tight, steps uncertain.

  Jiv chuckled. “I remember my first year. Purva tried running across Bluefire after realizing she’d miss her little brother growing up. Turns out the bridge didn’t support emotional decisions.” His Orion tattoo shifted as he gestured, casual over tragedy.

  Lira walked into the institute which opened around her as it always did, unfurling from the central courtyard in living branches.

  To her left, Sky Arena spiraled upward, stone platforms coiling toward the peaks. Above them drifted the dormitories—wood and stone suspended by unseen currents, swaying gently like roosting birds. She still remembered the night a Sky Wing student tried sneaking out after curfew. The entire dorm had dropped thirty feet in offended silence. The screaming had echoed off the cliffs until dawn.

  Straight ahead rose Heart Hall, its lattice roof strangled in flowering vines that bloomed in colors no season owned. Festivals lived there. Declarations. Punishments delivered beneath petals that listened.

  Beyond it stretched the gardens—half-tamed, half-wild. Thorned paths, glowing fruit, and creatures that wandered where they pleased. Yalli lingered there often, lounging like bored royalty, watching students with predatory amusement. They tested courage,occasionally stealing homework, and waited for mistakes. One first-year had bolted at the sight of a flicking tail; it took him months to outlive the laughter.

  To the right, Earthstep Arena descended the mountain in wide terraces of living rock. Classrooms carved directly into stone, their floors etched with mantra-circles worn thin by duels and failure. Lira still avoided one alcove where she’d once misjudged the interaction between distilled emotion and volatile phials. The scorch marks remained. So did the instructors’ caution.

  And beyond all of it—always watching—the very Ancient and sacred Vana waited.

  Its edge shimmered, patient as breath. Students weren’t allowed inside unsupervised. Even the reckless obeyed. Mostly.And those who wandered too near looking for laughs and escapes had come back wrong—dazed, disoriented, thrown bodily from the trees while the forest threw insults in their own language.

  Some didn’t come back at all.

  AstraVana liked to pretend it was orderly. An ancient finishing school where students learned to coexist, despite their affinities clashing like exposed nerves. Everyone had one—mana bound to temperament, memory, instinct. A battery you were born holding, whether you liked its charge or not.

  Sixth-years earned expeditions beyond the wards. “Helping the Veils,” the instructors called it. Which usually meant keeping elders from going rogue and tearing holes in reality out of boredom.Because someone got to do it.

  Lira had just turned the corner toward her Mana Control class when the feeling hit her—subtle at first, a prickle beneath the skin. Wrong.

  The wards along the columns were shuddering, their sigils flickering as they struggled to hold steady around a group of students learning to rein in their energies. One of them—too young, too eager, likely a first-year—pushed harder than they should have.

  The air answered.

  Sound warped, pressure twisting it into violent little spirals that skittered across the floor. Wind bucked and clawed, pulling at robes and hair as if searching for a way out. The wards screamed as they inverted, sigils folding back on themselves, devouring the very boundaries meant to contain them.

  Chaos slammed into her senses—despair, annihilation, sharp and unmistakably wrong.The wards were being tampered with.

  Pisacha.

  It had to be.

  Instinctively, she spun her scent-web, laying calm over the room like a second skin.

  For a heartbeat, it almost held.

  Then a shadow-call flared—someone panicking, pulling too hard—and the pressure fed back into the containment lattice. Lira felt it tear through her craft, shredding every thread of quiet she had woven. Air screamed as raw power folded inward. First-years cried out as mantras went feral, snapping back at their casters.

  Too much.

  She can’t hold this.

  Her magic faltered—born of emotion, overwhelmed by destruction.

  The hall convulsed. Heat slammed into frost. Stone split.

  Stillness followed.

  A suspended moment, breath caught in the room itself.

  Magic froze mid-surge, lightning locked in the air like veins of glass.

  At the center stood Aadyan.

  Her childhood friend.

  Hands raised, palms out. Blue-silver light bled through his skin, geometric and exact, sketching a perfect sphere around them. His silver wrist cuff glowed white-hot. Blood traced slowly from his nose, unnoticed. His hair had come loose, dark strands sticking to his sweat-slicked neck, his shirt clinging to trembling muscle.

  Inside the sphere were Lira, three dazed first-years—and him, anchoring it by sheer will.

  Beyond the boundary, chaos tore loose. Instructors shouted. Wards screamed. Time stretched thin and uneven.

  Lira met his eyes.

  Gold. Molten. Consuming.

  Fear punched through her chest.

  “Aadyan—”

  “Don’t move.” His voice scraped raw. “I can’t expand it. I can only hold.”

  “How long—”

  “As long as it takes.”

  The first-years whimpered. Lira moved quickly, checking them by touch—breath shallow but present, pulses racing beneath her fingers. She turned back to him.

  He was shaking now, sweat soaking his skin, the light beginning to fracture.

  “Lira,” he whispered. “It’s failing. I can’t hold it much longer.”

  “It will.”

  “You take the first-years out,” he said, the words sharpening into command. “Until the containment team arrives. I’ll—”

  He stopped. He didn’t need to finish.

  “Aadyan.” Her voice cut through the hum. “Look at me.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Look at me.”

  He did. Barely.

  She crossed the few viscous feet between them, the air resisting every step, and pressed her palm to his cheek. His skin burned beneath her touch.

  “You’ve held this long,” she said softly. “You’ll hold it until it’s done.”

  “I’m not strong enough.”

  “Then let me anchor you.”

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  She closed her eyes and drew her gift inward—threading it into him instead of the air. Focus. Precision. She bound his fear into clarity, shaping desperation into control.

  “You’re not alone,” she whispered. “Feel me. I’ve got you.”

  His breathing slowed. The light steadied.

  Outside the sphere, Headmistress Iravati’s voice cut through the hall.

  “Secondary containment—now!”

  The wards locked together. Magic folded back, swallowed by order. Aadyan’s sphere held—

  and held—

  until the storm collapsed inward.

  The Stillpoint broke.

  He fell.

  Lira caught him.

  They went down together amid fractured stone and the heavy silence after disaster.

  “Did we—” he rasped.

  “Everyone’s safe,” she said, holding him without realizing she was. “You saved us.”

  “We,” he murmured. “You anchored me.”

  His pulse thundered beneath her fingers, too fast, burning itself hollow. Healers rushed in, voices overlapping, hands pulling them apart—but for two breaths, they stayed as they were. Her hand in his hair. His blood warm against her shoulder.

  I would have gone insane without him.

  Then, quieter—

  He nearly did because of me.

  The thought rooted deep.

  When they finally took him from her arms, he was unconscious. His eyes had faded back to brown. Yet when Lira closed hers, she still saw gold.

  Aadyan didn’t wake for two days.

  When he did, Lira was still there, book open and unread.

  “You stayed,” he croaked.

  “For a second-year student,” she said without looking up, “that was marvellous. The instructors are calling it impossible. You don’t get to break after that.”

  “Noted.”

  Silence settled, weighted but alive.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  “For what?”

  “For believing I could hold it,” he said, voice breaking. “When I didn’t.”

  “I always believe you, Aadyan.”

  “Even when I can’t?”

  “Especially then.”

  His hand found hers on the blanket. Quiet. Steady. Not romantic—just truth.

  Some anchors, once set, were never meant to lift.

  The courtyard was in chaos again. Of course it was.

  By the time Lira and Aadyan reached the archway leading from the infirmary grounds, the air had splintered into sound—shouts, mantra-fire crackling, and the wretched screech of something that was neither human nor beast.

  The pisacha thrashed between columns of light, caught halfway between this world and whatever shadow it had crawled out of. A dozen containment glyphs flared around it, faltering, reforming, straining to hold something that refused to stay shaped.

  Two yalli—guardian spirits of the Institute—materialized at the edges of the courtyard, their forms rippling like molten gold over scale and fur. They did not rush in.

  They watched.

  Amused. Assessing.

  Then they moved.

  The yalli lunged together, timing perfect. They caught the creature mid-turn, claws tearing through mist and malice alike. The air split with a sound like rusted iron being ripped apart, and in one fluid, impossibly elegant motion, they dragged the pisacha backward—straight toward the treeline of the Vana.

  The forest opened.

  And closed again, seamless and silent.

  Only the smell of burnt salt and the echo of a dying scream remained.

  Around the courtyard’s edge, first-years huddled together, wide-eyed and pale. Fourth-years stood behind them, equal parts fascinated and unsettled, pretending they weren’t watching every second. No one spoke until the last flicker of light sank into the soil.

  Jiv finally muttered, “That’s one way to clean up.”

  Lira exhaled slowly. “Was it the pisacha that caused—?”

  “Yeah,” someone said from behind them. “Slipped through the eastern wards last time.”

  Of course it had.

  They moved through the aftermath together. Aadyan walked quietly, still recovering but alert, his gaze tracking the wards as they knit themselves back into place. Lira fell into step beside him, her fingers brushing the new scar across her palm—one she hadn’t yet let the healers erase.

  She looked up just as a figure emerged on the opposite stairway.

  Fire moved differently around him—not flaring, not announcing itself, just present, coiled close to skin. The sight tugged at something in her memory.

  Rare, her father’s voice supplied unbidden. Fire wielders don’t surface often. And when they do—watch them.

  He wasn’t a first-year by bearing alone, but the cut of his uniform marked him as new. Too new for that kind of control.

  For one suspended heartbeat, the courtyard seemed to slow.

  Their eyes met across the open space—his sharp amber locking onto hers, heat glinting beneath like something banked rather than spent. Sun-warmed stone caught the bare soles of his feet, curls falling loose around a face that hadn’t learned restraint yet.

  Recognition slid into place without permission.

  What is this pull?

  Something deep in her chest tightened, ancient and sudden, as if a thread had gone taut.

  A voice cut through the hush.

  “Aresh!”

  The name carried, sharp and certain.

  The wards’ hum dipped, the world holding its breath for a fraction too long.

  Lira exhaled, too late. She hadn’t realized she’d stopped breathing.

  “Someone you know?” Aadyan asked, tone light, eyes sharp.

  “Just—someone I haven’t seen before,” she said, though her gaze lingered a fraction too long.

  “Hm.” His hum carried thought, not agreement.

  They kept walking.

  The garden fountains murmured with gossip as usual. Second-years clustered along the marble edge, books forgotten, voices overlapping. Lira and Aadyan passed close enough to catch fragments.

  “…heading east again, toward the border forests—”

  “Acharya Mihir? Why there? Those wards are still sealed from the last breach—”

  “Exactly. He’s following the echoes. Heard something’s whispering along the old ward-lines.”

  “Meaning he won’t be around much this year.”

  “Meaning,” another voice added solemnly, “our assessments just got harder.”

  Aadyan’s brow lifted slightly. “The eastern borders again. Mihir doesn’t spook easily.”

  “Maybe the breaches are getting worse,” Lira said, thinking of the pisacha.

  “Or,” Aadyan replied quietly, “someone’s helping them through.”

  She glanced at him, but he didn’t elaborate. The silence between them wasn’t uneasy—just watchful. Predictive.

  They reached the crossroads between the alchemy wing and the lower training rings when a clipped voice snapped across the path.

  “Lira Kaul!”

  She stiffened and turned to see Chief Healer Guru Devika striding toward her—unhurried, unstoppable, that particular healer’s gait born of too many long nights and too little patience. Her shoulder-length hair was pulled tight into a bun, healer’s tattoo flashing on her wrist.

  “You were meant to report to the distillation lab an hour ago,” Guru Devika said, eyes narrowing. “Do you imagine essences extract themselves?”

  “I—was just—”

  “Walking?” Guru Devika supplied. “Excellent. You’ll be walking faster. Come.”

  Lira shot Aadyan a silent plea. Save me.

  He didn’t bother hiding his grin, dimple flashing. “Enjoy your lesson.”

  “Traitor.”

  “Anchor-bearer,” he corrected mildly. “Different job description.”

  She huffed, but couldn’t stop herself from smiling as Guru Devika hauled her down the hall toward the scent labs.

  Aadyan watched them go, then turned toward the lower terraces.

  Across the stone bridges of Earthstep Arena, a group of older students waited. One leaned casually against a pylon, slender and smug—Shreyas, fourth-year duelist prodigy and eternal thorn. Beside him stood Mentor Amar Bhist, black training robes immaculate, expression unreadable.

  As Aadyan approached, Shreyas flicked his wrist. Lightning sparks snapped into a circle that reassembled itself into a combat ward.

  “So,” Shreyas called, “you’re the one who stopped a Stillpoint. Let’s see if you can stop me.”

  Aadyan sighed, almost fondly, as he set his satchel aside and rolled his shoulders.

  “After nearly dying,” he said, “this might even feel like rest.”