The memoryshatters.
I blink, disoriented by the sudden return to present.
Whoever forsake us…so we were betrayed. We had to run…but mom cursed them. Sickness…would that mean…Elena…she…
I'm still on the boat, still child-sized, still holding Gabriel's hand.
But I'm alone.
The realization hits with the particular terror of abandonment made real. Gabriel is gone—not just from beside me but from everywhere, pulled back into whatever space he occupies when not manifested.
What’s more terrifying?
I'm no longer at the shore.
The platform with the others has somehow become distant, separated by water that has no right to be there. They're fighting against something I can't see—a barrier of pure force that makes the air around them ripple like heat waves.
I can see their desperation in every movement. Cassius's shadows slam against the invisible wall with enough force to shatter stone, but they simply dissipate on contact. Atticus's blood weapons strike and dissolve. Mortimer's dragon fire spreads across the barrier's surface but can't penetrate. Even Zeke's ice, usually so effective at finding cracks, simply slides off like water on glass.
They're screaming something—mouths open, faces contorted with urgency—but no sound reaches me.
The silence is absolute, as if I exist in a bubble separate from their reality.
That's when I notice the motion.
The boat is spinning.
Not quickly at first, just a lazy rotation that could be dismissed as current. But as I watch the platform rotate past again—and again, faster now—I realize what's happening.
The water beneath me has become a whirlpool.
The surface remains deceptively calm, but I can feel the pull now. Centrifugal force trying to drag the boat toward the edges while the center drops away into depths that shouldn't exist.
"Help!" The scream tears from my throat with child-pitch that makes it even more desperate. "HELP!"
But they can't hear me.
Can't reach me. Can't save me.
I'm alone with water I don't understand and a fate that's approaching with the particular inevitability of physics.
Another memory surfaces—not violently like the first but with the gentle insistence of truth ready to be acknowledged.
We're walking through the Academy halls—before the destruction, before Elena's betrayal, when the world still made sense.
Father leads while Gabriel and I follow, our small hands clasped together because that's how we always walked—connected, inseparable, two halves of something that didn't yet know it could be broken.
"Daddy!" My voice pipes with indignation that only a child can achieve. "That's not fair! The Academy is just for boys? That's racist!"
Gabriel groans with the particular exhaustion as if he’s the older sibling—even though we're twins, he emerged second but doesn’t mean it doesn’t stop and try to reverse the roles.
"Where did you even hear that word? And it's 'sexist,' not 'racist.'"
I huff with six-year-old certainty. "I read it in the dictionary!"
The lie is obvious—I can't read yet, dictionary or otherwise. But I've heard adults use big words when they're upset, and this seems like a situation that deserves big words.
"Now Daddy, answer!"
