Meditating cross-legged on the simple wooden bed, Jiaola's husband opened his eyes. A ring of memorabilia—portraits, books, a wedding ring—surrounded him, empowering the spell he was casting. Orbs of witchlight hovered around his shoulders, illuminating the warded safe room. His eyes were tired as they met Jiaola's, then mine.

"I'm in a time loop," Sansen said, exhausted. His eyes were unfocused—a side effect of his oracular trance. "I keep trying to look into the future, to find a way out, but Odin... he kills us. In the future. Over and over, he kills. We can't stop him. We can't stop him we can't stop him we can't stop him—"

I shook my head. "It's okay, Sansen. You and your husband have done enough."

Jiaola squeezed his husband's hand. "Come on, Sansen. Don't run out of hope just yet. I've notified the city guard, and the Academy's on their way."

His idea of notifying the city guard was firing a pillar of light a hundred meters tall straight into the air, then browbeating the watchmen who'd come to find out what was going on until they sent the head of the watch over. I couldn't deny that it was effective, I suppose.

"You can't let them take you to the Academy," Sansen suddenly said, lurching out of the ritual circle to grab my wrist. The light of hope in his eyes had reignited, and by the glazed look in his eyes I could tell he was looking at a place and time far from now. "Odin is here. He's already here."

"Shh, shh, it's okay. You're in the future. It hasn't happened yet," Jiaola said, kissing Sansen. I blushed and looked away.

"No, you don't understand. He's—"

The wards of the safe room buzzed, and Jiaola stood. "I'll get it," he said. He gestured at the safe room wall, and a doorway folded into existence from nothing. I stayed with Sansen, trying to console the witch of hope.

A moment later, Jiaola stuck his head back into the saferoom. "It's a representative from the Academy."

Witch Aimes stepped into view of the safe room, giving the wards a disdainful look before casting a spell and crossing the threshold. The space around her body blurred as the wards pulsed once—then fell still. Jiaola gave Witch Aimes a shocked look as she scowled at the two other witches.

"What is this, a fourth-year's attempt at a warding scheme? A demon is coming for our students and this is the defense you put up?" Witch Aimes pointed at four spots in the wards where various trinkets and necklaces and even a stray feather had been placed. "I could take down this whole system if I struck the souls of those nodes. Who are you people, anyway? Flunkees from the Academy?"

"They're self-trained," I snapped, "which I'm sure you'd know, since you've been having your empaths stalk me for the past year."

Witch Aimes frowned. "Empaths... stalk you?"

"Yeah," I said. "The animal spies that keep following me around the city. The big black birds and stuff. They're... they're... yours, right?"

The safe room fell silent.

"Odin's already here," Sansen whispered again, clutching at the air. I suspected that getting repeatedly killed in futures that never were was... not exactly gentle on the old man. "He's coming to kill us all."

"Right, well, fuck that," I said. "Look, Odin wants me, I'll give him what he wants. It's not worth letting you get hurt."

Witch Aimes gave me the condescending glare that I usually associated with failing a test or turning in an essay a week late. Today, I found it oddly reassuring. "Did you really think you were that special? Odin's not just after you. Reports have been rolling in from the whole student body—and what's worse, absences."

Oh. Well. Fuck that even harder. "Why the hell didn't you tell me?"

Witch Aimes slapped me. "You are a student of the Academy, Cienne." Jiaola's eyes narrowed, and he cast a spell, solidifying the air between Witch Aimes and I into solid stone—but once more, the space around Witch Aimes shifted, and suddenly we were both standing on the same side of the wall. "It was your duty to report activity such as this to us—and it is our duty to protect you from the people and ideas that would do you harm." She gave Jiaola and Sansen a dark look as she delivered that last line. "No matter. We're taking you—and the rest of the student body—to shelter. Real shelter, with competent guardians, not this riffraff."

"Don't you dare," Jiaola began, but Witch Aimes pointed and a flickering distortion charged at Jiaola. Before he could react, it swallowed him whole, and he vanished.

I flinched. "What did you—"

"Shifted him to my private dimension."

"The place you keep goblin corpses?"

"Among other garbage, yes. He'll be fine; humans can handle a minute or so without oxygen." She strode out of the room, towing me along with her, then pointed as she left; Jiaola's unconscious form popped out of nothing and slumped onto the floor. I caught a glimpse of his soul—still firmly attached to his body, thank the rifts—as Witch Aimes took me outside. It seemed like she'd been busy collecting students from wherever they'd been scattered to over midyear break; a crowd of confused and nervous Academy students was already waiting in the streets outside. She led us into a nearby chapel before speaking.

“Attention, children!” Even the disciplined students of the Silent Academy were shaken up by the news of the upcoming conflict, and Aimes’ voice wasn’t up to cutting over that babble. So she made a pulling motion with one hand, and a miniature thunderclap formed over her palm, shocking everyone in the room into silence. Witch Aimes cleared her throat. “As you may know, a band of intruders, led by the demon known as Odin, has infiltrated the Silent City, with declared intent to do violence.”

“Is this where you mobilize the students to arms?” I asked.

Witch Aimes frowned. “What? Cienne, you are children. What kind of school would let its students go into battle? No, all of you will be headed to the concert hall. It is one of the few places large enough to safely contain this many witches, and the faculty are competent enough to protect the facility in the time it takes for the city guard to mobilize. I will be escorting you to your final destination.” Gee, thanks, Aimes, great phrasing. “Now, each of you find a friend and make sure nobody gets lost while I take roll…”

Enemy witches were converging on our location and Witch Aimes was taking roll. Yeah, we were all going to die.

“Hey.” A soft voice came from behind me. I brightened up. Lucet. “Wanna make sure I don’t get killed?”

I smiled. “Long as you do the same for me.”

Once everyone had stopped milling around, Witch Aimes held out a hand and—to my surprise—withdrew a spear from her private dimension. It looked more like a cherished heirloom than a functional weapon, but… in the hands of a witch, one could very much become the other. A complex and grim set of emotions flickered across her face as she held the spear. “In order to safely transit between here and the concert hall, we shall be taking a route through altered space. I will be inscribing a circle in the ground. Please stay within its boundaries until I have finished. Do not hold your breath; I will supply air once we are on the other side.”

Great. That didn’t sound ominous as hell or anything. I edged a little further away from the circle’s perimeter as searing heat outlined the edge of a wide circle before I heard someone snicker.

Of all the things I didn’t need right now, Iola was pretty close to the top of the list. He smirked at me, malevolent glee radiating off his hair like a halo, and said, “There’s the rat who stole my girlfriend.”

I started to speak, but to my surprise, Lucet had me covered. “I’m not your possession, Iola. I can spend time with a friend if I want.”

Iola balled his fists, anger leaping behind his eyes—then, worse, a glow of cruel joy. “You know what? I don’t have to listen to your shit.”

The circle finished closing. Witch Aimes said, “Please stay inside the circle as I complete the transition.”

Iola grinned as he turned to me. “Nobody has to listen to you anymore.”

Oh, crap.

I was moving before he even finished the sentence, but he was twice my weight and I was already on the edge.

Iola shoved me out of the circle as Witch Aimes whirled around, shocked.

Then the spell completed, tearing my only protector away and leaving me alone in the chapel.

That was when the screaming started.

Odin’s invasion had begun.

###

It was all too familiar, knowing nobody was going to save me while walking avatars of destruction roamed the earth. I was just one student, and a problematic one at that—the militia would be busy defending civilians and hunting down rogue witches, while the faculty would be making sure they protected the students they still had. I didn’t even blame them—if Witch Aimes, for instance, doubled back to get me, she’d risk the hundreds of students entrusted to her care getting stranded or killed while she was away.

It was right that I would be left behind. It was familiar. It was home.

And I hated it to my core.

I’d fallen back on age-old principles—if the enemies couldn’t find you, they couldn’t kill you. Of course, if someone flooded the chapel or just wiped it off the mountainside entirely, I’d be dead, but the shrinking spell I’d cast would make me pretty hard to find, even for a witch’s keen eyes. I couldn't get a good idea of the full scope of the invasion, but it was evident that Odin hadn't come alone. Twice already, I’d held my breath in terror as witches in Redland traditional riding clothes walked through the chapel, once laying down some kind of passive spell, the other time checking on it. Whatever it was didn’t seem to kill me, so I simply waited for the onslaught to be over—

Space warped in the chapel center, and Witch Aimes materialized, spear in her hands.

Immediately, the spell the Redlanders had left behind activated, letting out a piercing thunderclap. Witch Aimes cursed and started to retreat, but it was too late—a tall, barrel-chested person in Redlands furs had already entered the chapel.

“Odin,” Witch Aimes snapped. “You disgusting riftcrawler. Evict yourself from this mountain before I evict you myself.”

Odin tipped their head in acknowledgement. “I’ve heard of you, Witch of Warp and Weft. I’m just here to save the Redlands. I wish your students no harm—quite the opposite, in fact. Stand aside and lay down your weapon, and I will promise to do the same to y—”

“Like I’d trust the word of a demon.” Witch Aimes shifted stance, narrowing her eyes, and said, “Prepare for—”

She never got to finish her sentence. Odin flicked a hand, and three rays of mournful frost cracked the air in half, beams of witchcraft that turned water to ice and flesh to dust.

But Aimes, even taken off-guard, was still a witch of the Silent Academy, and the beams swerved around her body, as if she’d twisted space itself into her own personal suit of armor. She recovered quickly, planting her spear into the ground with an arrogant stance, and sent a half-dozen bullets of warped space at Odin, darting distortions that charged like hunting hounds.

Odin stepped back, hurling another one of those flash-quick beams of frost at a seemingly empty patch of space, and Witch Aimes cried out and clutched her forehead as something I couldn’t see shattered. Her attack spells went haywire, and Odin wasted no time in following up with a howling vacuum that threatened to suck my teacher into the void—but once again, her impenetrable armor bent the oppressive attack away from her.

“Your defenses are as impressive as I was told, Witch of Warp and Weft,” Odin mused, sealing the vacuum spell and stepping back warily. In a strictly mundane fight, the taunts would have been wasted breath, but a battle between witches was as much a mind game as it was a contest of might. If Odin could shake her emotional stability, her spells would unravel as well. “But you are as green as a leaf before fall. You’ve never faced a true peer in witchcraft before, have you? Only massacred the helpless who your leaders told you weren’t people?”

Witch Aimes leaned on her spear, glaring at Odin. “Fuck you,” she spat.

Great. This was my erstwhile defender. A schoolteacher whose idea of psychological manipulation was throwing crude insults at a veteran killer. Really boosting my confidence, Aimes.

“As I said,” Odin continued as if Aimes hadn’t spoken, “there needn’t be any further conflict between us. Retreat to wherever you’ve taken your students, and we won’t—”

“I left one behind,” Witch Aimes interrupted.

Odin paused. “I—”

“I left a child in a warzone,” she continued, snarling, getting to her feet. “A helpless, imbecilic child who it is my job to re-educate and protect from the Redlands. To protect from monsters like you, in body and idea.”

Said helpless, imbecilic child didn’t exactly appreciate being re-educated, but I’d take it over a freezing death. Odin took one look at Aimes’ eyes and must have decided that speaking further was beneficial in some way, because they said, “Are you so scared of us that you have to protect children from our very ideas? Frankly, I don’t think you’re in any state to protect yourself, much less—”

“SHUT UP.” There was no flash of light, no gesture, not even a fireball. The only warning Odin got was their skin suddenly burning as Aimes surged forwards. A cloak of cold extinguished the effect, but the Witch of Warp and Weft was already striking with a spear that was not a spear but a memory, a memory that was not a memory but a spell, and even though Odin shattered it with a snap of frost, its memory lived on to plunge towards their chest—

With a swing of their exhausted hand that left them teetering with wild energy, Odin slammed the ceiling down on Aimes, burying her and her spear seconds before they would have sliced them in two. A spear-shaped hole jutting through the stone stood testament to the cutting power of the spatial distortion that Aimes’ spear had become.

Without checking to see if she was dead, Odin fled. I didn’t blame them—those skin burns looked lethal. Before I could decide whether to come out of hiding or not, with a groan of shifting rock, Aimes stood up, the detritus of the crash sloughing into nowhere as she cast a spell. Something had, somehow, pierced her armor of twisted space, because her scalp was bleeding and her spear was snapped in two, but she still stood.

I broke out of hiding, ending the spell, and skidded to a stop. Witch Aimes glared at me, eddies of dust still following strange currents around the ruins of her armor.

“I can expla—”

“You,” Witch Aimes snapped, “are in so much fucking trouble, young man.”