The next few hours pass in a surreal blur of activity.
We're not the only survivors. A handful of others emerge from the rubble—Michael, who'd been studying in the library's lower levels; Leah and her brother Archie, who'd been hiding in the laundry room; a few others who'd been lucky or just in the right place at the wrong time.
The number is pathetically small.
Out of hundreds, maybe a dozen of us remain.
A dozen.
The Order is gone.
Not just the building, but the people, the knowledge, the legacy. A thousand years of history, wiped out in a single night.
The feeling is... hollow. An emptiness so profound it feels like a physical weight in my chest.
Amelia moves with a quiet efficiency, organizing the few who are able to work, searching for survivors, collecting what few supplies we can salvage. Flynn, for once, is quiet, his usual boisterous energy replaced by a grim, determined focus as he helps clear debris, his enhanced strength making him invaluable.
I...
I just stand there, watching.
It's what I do best, after all.
Stand back and do nothing.
But it's different now. It's not laziness, not apathy. It's... a kind of paralysis. My mind is racing, trying to connect the dots, to make sense of the impossible, but my body refuses to move.
The island attack. The humanoid Gloom Dweller. The glyph in Thomson's hand. The untouched rooms.
And my power.
The power that shouldn't exist.
The power that's the only reason I'm still alive.
It's not a gift. It's a curse. A cursed, malleable goo that Gloom Dwellers naturally create and wave to their purposes.
And I control it.
Not for the first time, the crazed thought that I am somehow a humanoid Gloom Dweller like that one on the island slithers into my mind. Maybe I'm a monster, and I just don't know it. Maybe they left my room because they recognized one of their own.
I push the thought away, disgusted with myself.
It's a stupid, selfish fear, and it can't be right. My room wasn't the only one spared.
This isn't about me. It's about them. About the Gloom Dwellers. About a new enemy, smarter and more dangerous than anything the Order has ever faced.
An enemy that, quite suddenly, we have almost no hope of facing. We are, all of us, a dozen lost children standing in the wreckage of a fortress that has fallen.
The sun climbs higher, burning away the last of the morning mist. The full scale of the devastation becomes painfully clear. The Order, the ancient, unassailable Order of Light, is nothing more than a tomb.
Perhaps we should be comforted that the strongest of us survived, simply because of the nature of the feint.
But that strength feels like nothing when there are so few left, and even the instructors look shattered. The Chief Exorcists, the strongest of the strong, must have been here. They're gone.
Even though...
They lured away most of the fighters who were still active, the Chief Exorcists were here, right?
But they're gone and so then...
The thought is enough to make me want to crawl into one of these open graves and never come out.
Flynn finds me standing by the ruined entrance, staring out at the world beyond the Order's walls—a world that suddenly seems so much larger, so much more hostile. He says nothing, just falls into step beside me, leaning against the scorched stone.
"This is... bad, right?" he asks, his voice uncharacteristically subdued.
I glance at him. His usually bright blue eyes are clouded with a confusion I've never seen in him before. It's like someone has shattered the entire foundation of his world and he's still trying to figure out which way is up.
"Worse than bad," I say, my own voice hollow. "It's over."
I think he's going to argue. Flynn always argues, always looks for the bright side, always believes in the impossible. It's what makes him so infuriating and, in a strange way, so dependable.
Instead, he just nods slowly, his gaze fixed on the horizon. "Yeah," he says softly. "I think you're right."
A profound sense of wrongness settles over me. Flynn agreeing with my bleak assessment is a worse omen than any burning building.
"There's got to be something we can do," Amelia's voice cuts through our shared despair. She walks toward us, her face smudged with soot but her posture straight, her expression a mask of grim determination. "We can't just... give up."
"What's there to not give up about, Amelia?" Flynn asks, turning to face her, a hint of his old frustration creeping back into his tone. "Look around! The Order is gone. Everyone is dead! What are we supposed to do? Build a treehouse and hope they don't find us?"
"We're still here," she insists, her green eyes flashing. "We're still alive. As long as we're alive, there's hope."
"For what?" I ask, the words coming out sharper than I intended. "Hope that the next wave of super-intelligent Gloom Dwellers takes pity on us? Hope that the few of us left, a handful of half-trained kids and a couple of instructors, can somehow win a war that an army of fully-fledged exorcists couldn't even see coming?"
Amelia flinches at my harshness, but she doesn't back down. "I don't know, Caden! I don't have the answers! But I know that giving up is not an option. It's not who we are. It's not what the Order taught us."
"The Order is dead, Amelia," I say, my voice flat. "Whatever it taught us doesn't matter anymore."
"Then lay down and die."
I freeze at the sound of the Classmaster's harsh, mocking words. He stands behind us, his form a dark silhouette against the bright, morning light, a specter of grief and fury. He walks toward us, each step deliberate and heavy, as if the weight of the entire world is on his shoulders. His gaze is fixed on me.
"You've sought long to find a way to give up, haven't you? Now's your chance. Crawl into a grave and bury yourself." Thomson stops directly in front of me, his eyes burning with an intensity that makes my blood run cold.
But it's not the stern, disapproving look he used to give me in class. It's something else. Something I...can't identify.
Something that looks like I feel.
"...No." The word comes out of my mouth before I even realize I'm speaking. It's a reflex. A rejection of the despair he's offering. A rejection of the very thing I've spent my entire life chasing.
Thomson's lips twist into something that might be a smile, if smiles could be carved from granite. "Good. Because there's no room for the dead among the living." He turns to face the three of us, and the authority that has been absent since the island returns, tempered with a newfound, terrifying urgency. "The Order is fallen."
The words are like ice, even if I've thought them - said them - myself.
Amelia shivers.
"...But from the ashes..." He's stating...
An old saying...
A motto we've not used since it was the Order of Light.
But from the ashes, the Light will rise again.
Thomson isn't saying that, though. He's looking at me as if...
"...From the ashes," he says, hands in fists. "The Light. Will. Rise." Each word is a stone dropped into a still pond.
I don't think he believes it. Not really.
But he wants to.
I think... he needs to.
And the most alarming part is...
I think...
I want to, too.