And horror…
Because something is soaring through the air.
It moves in a graceful arc, rotating slowly enough that I can track its features. Hair streaming like a banner. Expression frozen in surprise that will never resolve into understanding. Eyes still open but already empty of everything that made them more than mere organs.
Raven's head.
The sound it makes hitting the ground is eerily mundane—a soft thump like dropping a melon, followed by a rolling that draws our horrified gazes as it travels several feet before coming to rest.
Face up.
Still surprised.
Still dead…
Then comes the second sound—liquid hitting earth with force, the particular splatter of arterial spray released from sudden severance. The body, still standing for one impossible moment, fountains crimson from the perfectly clean cut across the throat.
Then it falls.
The thump of the body is louder than the head, carrying more weight in every sense. It doesn't bounce or roll—just impacts and stays, limbs splayed in the graceless arrangement of death delivered too quickly for the nervous system to process.
Silence follows.
Not peaceful silence but the horrible quiet that comes when even breathing seems too loud, when the world holds its breath waiting to see what follows such casual violence.
None of us move. None of us dare breathe. The shock of what just occurred seems to need time to sink in, to transform from impossible image to accepted reality.
When someone finally speaks, it's not Professor Eternalis but Mortimer.
"And this is what you meant."
His voice carries an odd tone—realization mixed with something that sounds disturbingly like awe. As if he's witnessing a theorem proven rather than a life ended.
Zeke speaks next, his words confirming what they'd discussed earlier but with new, terrible context.
"And this is why shortcuts never leave you victorious."
The statement hangs in the air like judgment made manifest.
Then Damien screams.
The sound tears from his throat with raw emotion—terror mixed with shock mixed with rage boiling over into something primal. He scrambles to the ground, falling to his knees beside Raven's body, hands reaching out to shake shoulders that will never respond.
"Raven! RAVEN!"
He's shaking her corpse with increasing desperation, as if enough force might reconnect head to body, might restart a heart that's already emptied itself across the Academy grounds.
The others in his posse stand frozen, faces masks of shock that mirror our own. They came here expecting shortcuts to power. Instead, they're witnessing the price of cheating death—death collecting what it's owed with interest.
Atticus is the first of us to find voice, asking the question everyone's wondering but can't quite form.
"Is she actually dead?"
The question sounds absurd given the separated state of head and body, but in a world of magic and resurrection, of healing and transformation, death isn't always as permanent as it appears.
When no one answers immediately, I look to Zeke, my whisper carrying far too loudly in the unnatural quiet.
"If she's a feline, doesn't she have nine lives?"
