From the rooftop of her dorm, Astral watched the slow, shifting dance of the veiled shields. In the oppressive darkness caused by deep overcast, the shields shone brightest. Hundreds of twinkling stars hovered across the campus, marking the locations of the beacons that controlled the barriers; the false twilight was unseen by human eyes.

The efficiency of the shield planning could only serve as a testament to her uncle's genius. The systematic placement of the beacons proved that her uncle had planned redundancies for the redundancies, redundancies. While fully operational, the campus enjoyed a multi-layered protection program. Top-side, the Council's Academy was the safest place to be. The roll-out of the protection systems must have cost a small fortune.

The result, the shields worked to keep the demons out. While observing the gentle sway of the veils, Astral wondered if it was right for her family to charge a premium for the safety of the people. Time and highly specialized expertise were needed to calibrate the shield technology. Even if someone of Damien's unique talents were willing to offer his services for free, the technologists and materials needed to fabricate the beacons were not cheap.

She missed her uncle. He was always happy to have her along when he calibrated the Serenity beacons. He knew so much about what Dezmond considered to be dark magic. Unlike his father, who chose to dismiss its existence, Damien was keen to learn more about it. The fruits of his research lead to the defensive program that served to protect millions of people on a daily basis. He believed that knowledge could be used to create or destroy, or sometimes both. "A sword can be used to kill or defend," he would say. "It's nature is depended on the person who wields it."

He attributed the shielding idea to her late aunt, who had passed away when she was only a couple of years older than Astral. Damien would sometimes stop in the middle of a lecture, sigh, smile and tell her how much she reminded him of his little sister. He valued her questions and patiently helped her work through some of her theories. Though she was honored to be considered brilliant in arcane workings, she couldn't help but feel like she was living in her late aunt's shadow. Unlike her aunt, she sought to suppress her power. Her uncle would have no part in helping her achieve that end.

The shields were Notes idea, but the inner workings had been Damien's obsession since her passing. These days, there were a handful of working large scale models, all a little more refined than the last.

Since the disaster in Clearwater, so many years ago, Astral lived inside the safety of her family's wards. It was a gilded cage, and she knew it. It hadn't been obvious at first to her six-year-old self, but she wasn't blind to the distress her presence had brought to her grandfather.

Her six-year-old self had become numb to everything. Her grandfather couldn't bring himself to understand that she could see the demon dance at the entrance to their house and press their ugly faces against her bedroom window. He refused to hear anything about the things that lurked under her bed or the creepy monster who would peek out at her from her closet. She knew early on, there was no escaping what she had become. She feared what would happen when the monsters came for her when they tired of tormenting her, surely they would. When she woke from her nightmares, would she find her grandfather dead, life and soul sapped from him so that she could cleanse the house, her cage.

She couldn't bring herself to speak to anyone. They didn't understand. They didn't want to understand. They feared her. It was easy to be forgotten when she didn't make a sound. She could play quietly in a room, listening to her grandfather find ways to deal with her. He couldn't risk the usual process, she was a survivor after all, and survivors meant certain doom wherever they went. She often wondered why he hadn't sent her to the Red Order; treating survivors is what they did.

Instead, late one particularly wet Spring afternoon, Mathias arrived at their door. She hid behind the banister of the second floor, peering down as Dezmond greeted the Master Hunter. She wanted to cry. Dezmond was giving up on her. Mathias was going to take her to the people who locked the people of Clearwater up, left to be eaten by demons.

Soaked to the bone, Mathias shed his coat and smiled up at her. He rummaged through his suitcase and produced her teddy bear. She cried, running down the stairs to fetch her lost companion, relieved that Sergeant Scruffy hadn't been amongst the casualties.

"What do you say?" Dezmond urged as any parent would.

She couldn't voice the joy or articulate how much safer she felt knowing that her teddy would be able to fend off the things that every child knew was real. She wailed as she clung onto Mathias as tightly as she could. She remembered how he held her until she fell asleep, whispering to her while stroking the back of her head, "Everything is going to be okay. I promise."

These days, she couldn't help but feel that he was waiting for something to fall into place. Maybe he felt it too. Maybe he knew that she had lost pieces of herself in Clearwater, and they were waiting for it those piece to return. If anything, he had been nothing but patient with her.

It was that Summer Mathias took her into his home and introduced her to William, who immediately took a disliking to her. She couldn't blame him, it was the nature of what she had become. She was a threat to him, and he knew it at a primal level.

She learned last year that Mathias was counting encounters. He showed her how he reported his findings to the Red Order, emphasizing his need to remain. "It's important to not lie about the findings. I work with the local security division to track crime rates and unsolved murders to see if there is a correlation between my work and theirs," he explained. "It's too easy to blame demons for a variety of things. Sometimes, bad people do bad things. But sometimes bad people can be persuaded to do the bad things that they're pre-disposed to doing."

She went through the data at a glance, as he had expected. He did his utmost to be open and honest with her, even if the truth hurt. He didn't need to explain the data to her, she saw it right away. The number of demonic incidents increased over the course of her stay with him. It was slow at first, an incident every few weeks. The following year, the numbers changed to once every couple of weeks. This past year, they got through a week without incident before attacks occurred nearly every other day. How long would he be able to keep Clearwater safe with her around?

She was a danger to him and his family, but she couldn't voice her fears. Maybe if he thought she was ungrateful, he'd stop wasting his time on her, and he could stop putting his life in more danger than he needed to.

It was funny how watching the veils made her think of such useless things. What good would come of dwelling in memories?

She sulked, sagging in the darkness as the ratty old teddy bear in her lap worked on sowing its arm back on. The students had no idea of the reality of the threat beyond the shield, a generation of people too spoiled to cherish the freedom they enjoyed.

In the dead of the night, Astral could make out the sleeping souls of the students as clearly as though they had left their dorm room light on. The campus resonated a slow and steady pulse made up of soft hues of pleasant dreams. They slept, dreaming of their selfish wishes and shallow worries while she watched over them. She envied them. What she wouldn't give to be a normal girl, with a normal life. Instead, she had orders to execute, and failure wasn't an option.

Astral pat her teddy bear on the head. "I'm going to make my rounds," she told the bear. The bear stopped his threading to peer up at the teen with dark optic eyes. He held up his thread and needle obligingly. She pulled the thread tight against her finger, calling to the particles in the fiber at her fingertip and willing it to break apart, as though it had never been whole. The thread broke apart at her gentle command, allowing for plenty of room to tie it off. There was a trick to tying off the thread, but she could never get it right, opting instead to tie it into four knots and hoping that the thread would hold.

Her bear moved its arm, testing its mobility. Satisfied, it nodded. It scrambled up her arm, over her shoulder and nested itself in the hood of her long, dark coat. The nightly practice of quickly changing from her school uniform to her battle gear had become strangely exhilarating. Switching out of her uniform was like shedding a false skin, the illusion of what she wanted people to see so that she could navigate amongst them unnoticed. Three days into the school year, she still wasn't sure about the appropriateness of concealed weapons. As a Hunter, it made sense to have weapons stashed on her person. But as a student, the tools of her trade would mark her as a troubled student who posed a serious threat to others. She could create weapon stashes across the campus, but the security scans would ensure their short-lived existence. She would have to rely on other assets to aid her through these unique trials.

Magic was the natural solution, but it was not a talent she was willing to depend on beyond the basic cloaking spell. It was entirely likely that her grandfather had placed her in this precarious position in order to force her to reveal the depth of her talents. As a sorcerer himself, he would know that magic came at a price, especially the sort of power she used to cleanse Clearwater. She prayed that if she did her job right, it wouldn't have to come to that.

She didn't trust her grandfather. His soul was colorless, constant and unchanging. If she had to guess, she'd say that he had grown accustomed to his masks and to the role he played to each audience. She wondered if he had lost himself along the way in an effort to focus on the big picture. She feared he was trying to do the same to her. She worried that he was succeeding.

She couldn't help it. Attending an Autumn dance and fussing over dresses, shoes, and hair, seemed so pointless if a demon decided to make a feast of the hormone-fueled event. 'I just have to accept that I will never be that ignorant of the truth,' she sighed. The very thought of a dance made her pulse race. What are the viable entrances for a demon attack? What demons could she expect? Can she place makeshift wards? If so how quickly could she get them active? Would they be strong enough? What were the evacuation paths for the students? Would these same routes be used for the demons? Where are the secured facilities? Was there an escape route within the facilities? She'd have to review the maps and research the guidelines set-up by the faculty and dig deeper to see what had been used in previous incarnations of the school.

She doubted that she could take her mind off the hunt. 'It would be a mistake to do so,' she reminded herself. 'I'm here to protect them. They can't afford to have me forget what I have become.'

She stood at the edge of the building pondering a solution. "It might help if we recruited student mementos, assuming they brought any. I'd start with the first years." The bear shifted itself to hang over her shoulder as he listened. "We need eyes and ears all over the campus." She didn't know exactly why teddy bears came to life around her or when it started happening. Sergeant Scruffy had always been there with her, long before she and her father moved to Clearwater. She remembered teaching him about the evil legion of dust bunnies that lived under her dresser, the monster in the closet, and most importantly about the monster under the bed. By all accounts, Sgt. Scruffy was a battle-hardened warrior against the things children fear the most; he was a good teddy bear.

Astral scratched Sgt. Scruffy's head. "It's been a long week for me too," she cooed. "All the tricky bits are settled, for now at least."