Sarafina is in the teeth of the night.
The sky above the southern headland of Atlas is a bruise of low cloud and ash. Fires gutter along the tents like bright, angry flowers; smoke strips visibility down to veils of gray. The academy's lights have been snuffed in places, and the moon, when it shows, is a cold white cut through the smoke. Sound is raw and layered — the crack of timber, the sharp staccato of wards colliding, the endless thin keening of students calling names. Into that maelstrom Sarafina moves like the point of a spear.
She is not a student of half-measures. Her hair, silver and long, flicks behind her like a stream of powdered metal; her eyes are the clear blue of glacial lakes, cutting through smoke. The world around her is chaos; she makes order from violence. Tonight it is only her and the fight in front of her — a giant demon that towers, a silhouette of too many knuckles and a crown of horns twisted back like broken sea spires. Its black horns spiral like iron and it bellows a sound that feels like the earth remembering its own pain.
Sarafina has the spear. She runs, the chilled edge of her magic already knitting around the staff in her hands. Her boots dig in the black sand; the air tastes of salt and burnt fabric. She drives forward, a single arrow of motion, and thrusts an ice spear so sharp it sounds like glass on stone. The weapon disappears into the demon's belly with a terrible hissing — not flesh ripping, but a terrible, answering groan — and for a moment the behemoth trembles and collapses like a tree felled by lightning. Those nearby whooped and stumbled back. Students that had been pinned down by smaller creatures find the gap and push for safer ground.
She stands a second, chest heaving, the spear vibrating in her grip. Flames flare on the ridge behind her: other fights. Shouts and the metallic snap of splintering wood. Sarafina turns her face up to the sky the way a soldier scans for lines of attack. The horizon is a knife-edge of movement: more demons sliding through the air, more gates yawning open. Screams are the background: one boy's frightened call, a teacher's warning, a single small choking sob from someone pulled free of a tent.
"Why would they throw trash at us?" she says aloud, a private, savage humor in the question that tastes like bile. "Why send the weak first?"
She sees the pattern: numbers overwhelm stamina. Wear you down with many, then take you with a few strong ones — the true strategy. The field is littered with bodies of small, fast things — nimble and biting — and Sarafina feels the economy of their design. Their claws leave angry welts. They're not meant to be the spearhead; they are the hammer that chips away the edge.
A student screams as a shadow strikes down, and Sarafina doesn't hesitate. She raises a hand and forms her ice with a flick and a hum. The first of her signatures is the shard volley.
— Shard Volley: She manipulates the air into hundreds of hairline icicles between her palms. They are translucent and glitter with a pale, inner light. With a breath she releases them; they fly like a swarm of frozen wasps, humming through the smoke. Each shard hunts the smallest gap in a demon's hide. On the weaker targets they rattle like hail; on the stronger, they bite into scaled joints and make the creature stagger. The shards' edges sing as they fly — a thin, wind-borne note that helps Sarafina locate where her magic lands. On impact the shards melt off without scalding anything nearby; their purpose is kinetic, not incendiary. She uses them to thin groups, to create breathing room.
A flame demon — glinting embers inside its mouth, wings that whip together sparks — rears and spits a ball of molten fire toward a cluster of students. The heat and light are a bright, cruel blot on the night. Sarafina pivots, draws a frozen disc into being between two fingertips, and throws.
— Crystal Disk: It is a circular blade of packed water, struck into perfect, millimeter-thin hardness. She hurls it; the disk arcs in slow, deliberate geometry. It meets the fireball and shatters it into hissing steam, not by heat absorption but by violent exchange — the disk fractures the coherent energy, forcing it to disintegrate into rain. Sparks and smoke explode outward; a student saved grasps at the air and sobs, alive. The disk drops and shatters into harmless slivers that glow for a heartbeat and evaporate. Sarafina uses the disk to intercept, to weave a shield-web — offensive when it must, merciful when it can be.
There is no romantic choreography to this. Her hands are precise because they must be: crafting a mangled shard pattern becomes a meditation where a flaw is a student's end. She studies the night with a cool, forensic calm. Every incantation has its cost — each piece of ice is fed by a pulse in her chest — and she is measuring, counting breaths.
A monstrous shape unfolds overhead now, vast and terrible; the Flame Demon glides and prepares another blast, but before its maw opens a voice rends the smoke — an effect like an explosion mapped into sound. A different thing is on her flank: a Sound Demon, a creature whose whole body vibrates as though built from tightened wire and drumheads. It throws its voice like a spear; the effect is physical. A concussive chord cracks out and sweeps across the ground. Students fall — heads hitting sand, hands clutching ears.
Sarafina's right ear pops. Pain blooms like a red flower behind her skull. She feels her equilibrium tilt.
She reacts without thinking: feet moving by habit. She throws up an ice dome — a hemispherical shell that shivers and chews the noise into harmless echoes. The dome is a living thing under pressure: it ripples when the Sound Demon screams, but it holds enough of the shock to keep the students inside from drowning in raw blast. Inside the dome, Sarafina reaches toward the erupting sound with another craft.
— Harmonic Fork: She molds two thin, tuned tines of crystalic ice and pushes the fork against the dome's inner surface. The fork resonates with the sound and changes its harmonic pattern. Sound, in her control, can be bent. For a terrifying moment the Sound Demon's shriek for a target is reflected back on itself; it wrenches and halts, disoriented. The alien voice shrieks again, a vandalized note, and the creature convulses. Sarafina uses that pause to strike, to throw a hundred shards into its sinews. It reels and howls, a long, raw ultraviolet scream. Students cough and blink in the dome's filtered silence. One of them — a slender boy with a bandage around his head — tries to stand and almost collapses but is steadied by another student. The sight steels her resolve.
Fate takes an immediate turn. From behind a charred pavilion a Stonewinger leaps and drops at Sarafina with talons like hooks. She does not see it at first: the smoke hides it. It lands on the sand and the talons flash. She is quick — she slams a spear of compressed frost into its chest. The creature sobs and dies as ice takes hold of the joint. Sarafina uses it again: she thrusts upward and the corpse slides into the darkness between gates as if the world itself is swallowing clutter.
She is second-guessing style with survival skills. Her body is already a map of bruises and cuts. The cut across her palm comes from a demon's talon — a thin weeping line that glistens in the torchlight. It is bleeding; the wound is not deep, but it stings and the salt of sweat and smoke stings it more. She presses it into glove and keeps moving. She cannot afford to stop.
She sees a student pinned against a flailing arm. The opponent is a Flame Demon, one of the stronger breed — a living furnace; it roars and sweeps a club of live flame over heads. Sarafina plants her feet and draws breath. She channels.
— Avalanche Lance: This is the student of shape that asks for everything. She splits the very air; the conjured lance is a column of ice packed so dense it hums with oppressing weight. She charges it with a crystalline rune that turns the tip to a razor of cold pressure. The lance hits the throat of flame with a sound like a bell submerged too fast into black water. The flame shrieks and dissipates; the club smolders into steam. The demon staggers, and in the gap Sarafina pulls the child free — small and quivering, yet alive.
She tilts her head; the sky is a net of flight and dots of darkness. She sees one of the Ten — a tall dark figure directing the swarm — and knows at once that the night will bring worse. The Ten send now a pattern: the weaker swarm is withdrawal and distraction. The strong ones converge. Sarafina realizes that the strategy is temporal: this is the fatigue phase. Keep breathing; do not waste your big spells now.
But the Sound Demon's last, desperate attempt changes everything. It emits a chord with such force that the air itself becomes a blade. The dome quivers like boiled glass; Sarafina's teeth chatter and her vision ripples. Her ears bleed salt; the blood is small, shining in the torchlight on her collar. She staggers backward. For a heartbeat her limbs go out of sync. The pain is a white flare that could disable the best of magicians.
And then the Sound Demon changes frequency, tuning to something lower and more insidious: a throat song designed to collapse minds. The chord is a pressure on the chest, not unlike drowning on dry land. Students slump and fingers go slack; a teacher curses and claws her face like a drowning animal.
Sarafina holds the line with fists clenched. The ice spells she throws begin to fracture under the sonic hammer. Her shard volley melts into snapped slivers. The Crystal Disk fractures into glittering dust. The Sound Demon's next bellow is a demolition — it reverses and swallows the texture of sound itself, making it hard to remember the syllables that could summon a ward. The dome cracks open like a broken egg. She falls to one knee. The smoke tastes thicker.
She staggers; a demon takes the advantage and claws her shoulder. She feels a burning scratch — not red gore but a stinging pain that draws scarlet along the seam of her armor. Blood beads on her sleeve. She does not look at it. She needs to stay upright.
"Keep the students moving!" she roars, grounding herself with language instead of spell. Her voice is a rough blade. She digs into another technique she reserves for when things go sideways.
— Glacial Net: It is a lattice of ice that drives into the sand and anchors like an icy web. She throws it in between the demons, and this time the net is tuned not for damage but for damping. The Sound Demon's cry collapses into the net and is squeezed into harmless, bassless moans. Students inside the web breathe as if surfacing. A teacher bulldogs through the last of the smoke and grabs a child; two more students run and slide under shelter. The net anchors an arc of safety.
But anchoring safety costs. Each spell she makes is a tax on her stamina. Her limbs tremble. The wound on her palm pulses and the salt of blood tastes metallic when sweat beads and touches her lips. The night tightens.
From the ridge: an even stronger voice — the Flame Demon returns, backed by a cluster of smaller ones. They make a charging wedge; the leader rolls forward like a living furnace and slams a wave of flame that incinerates a thin row of tents. The heat of that wave knocks Sarafina off her feet and sends a wash of embers across a cluster of students. She scrabbles, feeling something hot against her cheek; a tear of blood streaks, but she snatches at a fallen tarp and beats at the flames until the only thing left is smoke and the sickly sweet smell of char.
She hears a child's small sound — a little boy's whimper behind a collapsed crate, eyes huge. Without thinking she dives again, a coil of ice tightened into a rope — Frost Line — that slides between the demons' boots, tripping and tangling them. The Flame Demon stumbles, and the students use the gap to scramble along a trench and find cover. A small, victorious cheer is swallowed by the noise again.
Then the Sound Demon roars. Its notes are now a weapon to crumble structure: they hit and glass above the infirmary shivers and falls in powder. Adalia's shout is a single, cutting thing. Sarafina tastes copper on her tongue. She takes the moment to reach down and press her palm to the wound on her side. The band of blood under her fingers is warm. She presses a thin shard into the cut — a crude, immediate healing — and chants under her breath. Her voice is small and raw, knitting the skin with the quick stitch of cold. It hurts like winter sun, but the bleeding slows. She cannot make miracles — only slow the loss.
The two great demons — Flame and Sound — now mirror each other. Where one scorches, the other shatters. Their cooperation is horrific: the Sound Demon's frequencies make the Flame Demon's fire magnify into glass shards and ricochet; the Flame Demon's heat bakes the air into pressure waves that sound becomes a knife through. Their synergy is an escalator of danger.
Sarafina realizes the night will hinge on a single decision. She can stand and be a shelter for a few — which she has done, buying breaths and lives — or she can make a sacrifice to force the Ten to recalibrate. She feels the old trade that fighters like her keep: burn everything to save the many. The glacial thoughts ascend: how to break a chord? How to freeze a flame so it loses the ability to burn?
She chooses calculation over sacrifice. She is a Frostborn strategist in a furious body. She leans into a long, complex weave she has read in the older books — an expulsive pattern that bends both sound and flame into an inverse of themselves.
— Winter's Resonance: First she constructs a tower of tuned ice crystals — each one a resonating column calibrated to the Sound Demon's harmonic. They ring in a sequence that eats at the tone instead of amplifying it, a kind of negative echo. Those crystals she then coat in a membrane of vapor-chilled glass: when the Flame Demon's blaze sweeps across them it is not consumed but captured, forced to condense into a hail of steam that cools quickly into a fog of shards that cannot burn. The ritual is delicate and rapid; she calls on a depth of mana that makes the world swim. Her chest burns; she tastes iron. She remembers her training as if under anesthesia — breath, chant, motion, the small phrases that set ice to behave as unburning.
She releases the resonance. The crystals sing a sound that is not music but an architecture of silence. The Sound Demon gets thrown off — its scream warps and folds, like being read by a mirror of time. The Flame Demon's fury collapses into a rush of steam and glass that clatters like a hail of bells. For an instant the two beasts are both unmade by their own strength: their weapons turn against them and tear at the seams of their coordination. They stagger, give one last keening, and then break — not into gore but into retreat: they are forced back through a portal that cracks open like a black eye closing.
The ground resettles with a shudder. The tide of demons recedes where her resonance took hold. Students emerge from under crates and behind the handful of standing tents, breathing ragged and raw.
Sarafina drops to her knees, palms on the sand. Her chest is an ocean of pain. Her wounds throb; blood stains the cuff of her sleeve. She has pushed something large out of alignment, and the cost is sharp. A young girl comes to kneel beside her, palms small and earnest, and presses a makeshift bandage to the seam on Sarafina's arm. "You saved us," she says in a voice like old glass, and for a moment Sarafina can only laugh, a tiny cracked sound that is all at once ridiculous and holy.
Around her, the academy breathes in. Teachers make lists, count the missing, call for search parties. The fires are tending into embers. The night is not safe; the Ten are still out there with their ship on the horizon. But the immediate field — the place where students huddled and feared — holds. Sarafina has bought time.
She rises slowly, a figure cut and bruised, blood crusting at her lip, hair sticky with sweat and ash. A teacher offers her water. She takes it and drinks, the cold water tasting like victory and like the beginning of more work.
Even as she steadies, she thinks in that long, careful way the night demands: the pattern of attack, the use of weak waves to fatigue and then strong waves to harvest. She counts what she has spent: her heaviest spells, her reserve, the wound and the necessity of rest. She sends a glacial signal into the dark — the code she and others use — a single sharp pulse that marks her location and calls for aid. Her thought is already folding toward strategy: rescue teams, warding reinforcement, the need to find the Ten's anchors and cut them, and, beyond that, a harder plan — to strike the command points so these raids cannot be simply repeated.
For now, Sarafina stands amid the smoke and scattered ash. The students are alive. The night does not promise gentleness, but for the first time since the sea dissolved into gates, there is something like hope pressing the edges of the dark. She tastes iron on her teeth and grit on her tongue and lets the cold of success sink into her bones.
She will mend. She must. The island is far from safe. The battles will come again. But tonight, in this torn field of tents and smoke and cries, Sarafina — blood, ice, and nerve — has kept the line.
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Heat: Thank you so much for reading.