"Ahhh~"

Ashworth sighed, settling deeper into the chair with a boneless, unhurried capitulation he had spent the last thousand years perfecting into an art — the art of sitting down — and had finally decided tonight was the night to demonstrate his complete and utter mastery of the discipline, because if the universe insisted on being this tedious, one might as well excel at the small things before it remembered to kill you.

The academy was uncommonly quiet.

Unlike most evenings — when the corridors thrummed with the residual chaos of a thousand richest families kids and Legacy children with the hundreds of Immediates who treated the institution as a combination of battlefield, catwalk, and social experiment in how many creative ways one could ruin a rich kid family before break — tonight, Ashford Elite Academy existed in a state of near-sepulchral stillness that felt less like peace and more like the entire campus was holding its breath, waiting for the screaming to start.

The moonlight performed its obligations with characteristic diligence, leaving nothing unattended, pouring through the tall arched windows and across the marble halls and scrubbing every surface clean of shadow with the prim thoroughness akin to a janitor who took pride in illuminating rooms nobody was present to appreciate — because the dead don’t tip, and the living were currently too busy pretending they still had futures worth polishing.

Shadows grew longer or shorter as the celestial body traversed its arc — stretching from the bases of trees and buildings and stone colonnades like dark fingers reaching for something they could never quite grasp.

Perhaps the last scraps of innocence or a decent pension plan, before compressing back into their origins as the moon ascended higher, pressing the shadows hard and flat against the structures that cast them, as if even the darkness was exhausted from trying and had decided to lie down and wait for better opportunities.

Unlike most times, the academy was devoid of students, janitors, pedagogues, and administrative personnel. The week’s recess had emptied the campus with the efficient totality of a fire alarm — or a very well-timed mass execution — leaving behind only the security and two individuals who, by any reasonable interpretation of the concept of time off, should not have been here either.

Ashworth lifted his beer and took a measured, contemplative sip — deliberate, unhurried, treating the alcohol like a meditative practice rather than a recreational one, because at his age and his powers, getting properly drunk required more commitment than the universe usually bothered to reward.

He set it back on the table...

...And stared at her.

Dravenna sat behind her desk — or rather, behind her throne. It was technically an office chair. Ergonomic. Expensive. The kind corporations purchased for executives whose lumbar regions generated more revenue than entire departments.

But she had ensured — with quiet, implacable insistence, because furniture was merely another medium through which power communicated itself, preferably while making visitors quietly reconsider their life choices — that her chair always made a statement.

Anyone entering this room would comprehend, before a single word was exchanged, that the occupant of this chair owned every brick, every window, every molecule of the institution it presided over... and was merely deciding whether to let the building keep breathing.

She was on her tablet scrolling with detached, half-attentive rhythm — her mind only partially invested in whatever the screen was providing, the rest occupied with matters the tablet could not display:

Like the precise angle at which a Heavenchild’s spine would snap most satisfyingly.

Sometimes it made Ashworth wonder how being the Dean made her feel.

He was reasonably certain that for the last years — the years of silence, collared obedience while watching the Heavenchilds treat her academy like a personal playground for their psychopathic progeny — all she had wanted was to eviscerate a Heavenchild or two to satiate a bloodlust that had been accumulating compound interest at a rate that would make sharks weep with envy and call her a natural.

Now that she was free, though — free to be what she was, and bare teeth she’d been filing down for years with the patience of a saint who had finally been given permission to start the massacre — she looked almost happy. Poised. Vigilant.

Dravenna had the stillness of a predator caged and released, sitting now at the mouth of its den while watching in intrest at the treeline with patient, delighted anticipation, wanting something to wander too close — preferably something still wearing a Legacy crest and stupid enough to believe the recess meant safety.

She was waiting for any Legacy to make a single misstep so she could remind them that years of filed-down teeth did not mean the fangs had gone dull; they had simply been waiting and sharpening themselves against the inside of her skull.

And now the false peace that had protected the boy and his ilk was cracking at the edges, and Dravenna intended to be the first thing that crawled through.

Ashworth took another sip, the beer tasting faintly of irony and old blood.

He wondered, not for the first time, whether the Phei even realized the dome around him was no longer the academy’s but something else now, colder and had learned to bite back for him.

The moon shone from the far side of the window — the same window where Phei had once stood before their mutual combustion had rendered architectural observation irrelevant — and struck her from behind like a verdict rendered in silver:

It cast a luminous halo around the silver cascade of her hair that transformed her from merely devastating into something approaching divine pornographic, if such a thing existed...

...A madonna painted in moonlight and barely concealed fury — the breed of saint who would smile while she gutted you for daring to pray to the wrong god.

"Say, Jade Dr—" He caught himself and started again. "Dravenna. How is it that we — the leaders of this institution — are denied respite after granting the brats a week’s holiday? We’re here. Working in an empty academy on a night that even the moon seems to be taking at a leisurely pace."

She paused her scrolling, lifting her jade slitted, faintly luminous eyes that had once made legacy boys of her generation sweat and were currently reviewing a spreadsheet with the same expression she once reserved for battlefield — and regarded him the way she regarded any question she considered beneath her intelligence but would answer out of courtesy, because crushing an Immortal’s ego required more effort than it was usually worth.

"Old man. The answer is embedded in your question." She returned her gaze to the tablet. "Also — after all your years of solitude. Sequestered away like some elusive Immortal Sage in a mountain no cartographer bothered to chart; these mundane activities should be a benediction of a sort, no?"

He shook his head. "The only human endeavour I wish to engage in is drinking beer."

"You’re already doing it."

"Spending money. I have an exorbitant quantity of it."

"You purchased a beer, didn’t you?"

"And betting."