In the island atlas
Screams lace the night. Smoke stings the throat. Black lightning knifes the sky and hammers the treeline in relentless, obscene rhythm. Everything smells of iron and singed leaf.
Nox stands at the center like a new god made of shadow and teeth. His hair is black velvet now, the white gone like a memory. His eyes are long golden slits. Fangs peel out between wet lips. Black arcs of lightning crawl along his arms and shoulders, stitching light and ruin into flesh.
He looks at Leona and the world narrows to a single focus — the white-haired girl who cradled him moments before, the sister he once knew.
"Hello," he says, voice layered with something old and enormous. "Heir of the white lion, Kai."
His right foot slams the earth.
The forest answers with a crack as if a giant fist has struck the planet.
The ground fractures in a radial web; roots snap like brittle ropes. A wave of force explodes outward — KRA-THOOM — and dirt and stone launch like shrapnel. Nox launches himself forward with impossible speed, claws flexing, a black arc of lightning trailing at his heels.
Leona sees him move and reaches for her sword, but the world blurs in the instant between thought and impact.
His blow finds her side first: a strike meant to stall, to punish, to throw. The force hits the ribs and the breath leaves her body like a bell being struck. She tumbles, sails, and then slams through saplings and underbrush, a small human missile ejected from a much larger horror.
"LEONAAAA!" Ethan screams — a word torn out of him raw and thin. He charges, blade a sliver of reflected flame, but the time between his decision and motion is a sliver too long.
Nox is a whirlwind of violence. He slaps Ethan with a hand that is more talon than human, and the impact spins the taller boy into the ground. Boots skid on mud. Ethan's vision blooms white at the edges; a ringing percussion pounds between his ears.
Nox's boot comes down onto Ethan's skull.
Everything tightens into a narrow sound: the dull crunch, the hitch of breath. Ethan howls — a keening that tears at the air — and the world expands again to include Lilia screaming, arrows snapping, and the earth itself pulsing like a drum.
Three mana-infused arrows strike Nox's palms and his chest — a sudden chorus of light and steel. The bolts blow with a violent bloom; dust roars upward. Nox reels back, staggered, the lightning in his veins flaring and recoiling like a dog insulted.
For a sliver, his head tilts and something like the old boy blinks behind the new predator. But the blink is small, swallowed quick.
Lilia scrambles, heart wild. She dives across mud and roots and yanks Ethan from under Nox's heel, pulls him behind a broken trunk. Her breath is a ragged machine as she clutches him to her chest, prayers stitched in panic.
"Ethan!" her voice is a raw, pleading edge. "Stay with me. Stay with me!"
Ethan tries to answer. He tries to move. His body yawns under him like a broken marionette. He cannot believe the shape of Nox's face — the smile that leans like a predator, the flash of white fangs — and he does not have time to understand and must understand because Leona is bleeding under the foliage and because the island is a chorus of dying things and because someone is calling ancient tides.
Nox's gaze slides away from them like a blade finding a new mark. Now it seeks the place where Leona landed — the place where her body smokes with the breath knocked out of it.
He strides toward her and the land yields with a sound like folding metal. Rocks split, roots explode outward in nails of splintered wood. Trees that stood for a century are flayed as he passes; bark peels, trunks smoke, leaves vaporize in the black lightning's wake.
Shouts rise from students and teachers alike. The demons scream — not with malice now but in a recognition of hierarchy — and many break and flee, pulled by fear to run from the storm that wears human shape.
The sky continues to rain black fire.
Leona's world is a broken film reel. Pain detonates over and over: the ribadel crushing, the whiplash of dirt in her mouth, the taste of salt and iron. Images flicker — a laugh on a riverbank, a crumpled note at home, Nox as a kid smiling with mud-smeared cheeks. The sequence speed-wobbles between memory and the present trauma until she is dizzy with the weight of both.
She tastes leaf and smoke. Her breaths are short rasping things. A welted pain climbs the spine of each inhale.
No. Not like this, she thinks with a clarity that is almost cruel. I will not let the island have this. Not yet. Not like this.
Her hands, stubborn things, curl toward the earth. The thought of Rena — a name like a small bell in her chest — comes and thunks harder than it should, and she clutches air and tries to pull herself, to rise.
The light inside the clearing flickers uncertainly. Every living thing feels the pressure of a presence that is older than the map of stars. The black lightning that moves around Nox is not just electricity; it's language, ancient and proprietary. It tastes like memory and punishment.
"Leona!" Ethan croaks, voice swallowed in the smoke.
She tries to speak. A wet sound, a broken vowel, escapes. She can't find the words. She thinks of the academy lessons about warding, about seals that hold and chains that bind. She thinks of the rules and the warnings and of Rena red eyes and of the weight of the house names, of being between families and histories like a person wedged between two sharp stones.
And beneath all that, a small, naked fear blooms: the thought that maybe she is not strong enough. Maybe she will not protect them. Maybe Nox — or whatever sits inside him — will make a feast of everything they are.
The thought is a hot coal.
She feels for a seam inside herself where stubbornness lives, a lineage of fighters who refuse. Her fingers press into loam. The smell — that primal animal scent of wet earth and decay — grounds her. It gives her a momentary anchor.
Then footsteps: massive, deliberate. Nox's shadow eclipses the broken canopy. His claws rake the ground. Sparks spit and hop from the tips like stars popping.
He lifts a hand as if to finalize the killing blow.
Time stretches. The hush before the storm becomes its own instrument — high, thin, tuned to a frequency that sets dust trembling.
From somewhere in the chaos, a voice calls — not a human voice exactly, but a fracture of mana that Lilia forms with her teeth clenched, a desperate number of arrows still stuck to her bow.
"Now!" Lilia screams, not to anyone but to the thinnest sliver of plan that flirts with being possible.
Ethan finds some broken, stubborn steel and leverages it, a motion as primal as birth: raise, test, strike. He belatedly moves, blade a frantic comet.
Leona's eyes find him, and for a heartbeat they are two flares of human will across a field of devouring shadow.
The strike lands — not enough to fell, but enough to divert. Nox jerks, a sound like a canyon's creak echoing through his chest. Temporarily unbalanced, he misses the perfect strike.
But he recovers fast. Faster than any of them. He is not held by ordinary timing.
The hand that was raised becomes a comet of power and slams down near Leona — not intended to kill but to rend, to ensure she can neither rise nor strike. She takes the hit and the breath seeps out of her. A shudder ripples through her body.
"I'm sorry," she thinks, an embarrassed childishness amid the maelstrom. There is no time for words. There is only fight.
Somewhere behind the roar of destruction, Lilia fires a string of arrows into Nox's flank. Each one detonates with a crystalline sound. Sparks and shards of dark light burst outward.
"Now!" Lilia screams again. "Ethan, strike! Leona, hold on!"
Ethan lunges — not with finesse now, but with a raw earnestness honed by love and fear. He drives through the soil that had cracked under Nox's step and slams his sword into the nearest vulnerable seam, aiming to anchor rather than to pierce.
There's an answer from the ground itself — a deep low moan like the earth exhaling in pain. Rocks shift and slide; the island reminds them it is ancient and will not be trifled with.
For a breath, for a sliver of a heartbeat, the circle holds.
However, the victory is brittle. The thing in Nox is not a simple presence you can charm away. It is furnace and bone, cunning and age. It watches with golden slits and smiles the way winter smiles before the snap of bone.
"Do you feel it?" a teacher yells somewhere else in the field, voice carried over the din. "Those who can, hold the line! Form the ring!"
Orders scatter like leaves. Students howl. Someone screams for medics that cannot reach them. The academy's monitors flash like dying fireflies.
Leona's breaths are shallow now. She closes her eyes, not because she intends to sleep but because she needs to move the world inside her head into a single alleyway of focus. Memory flows — a montage of faces and moments, of small hands held, of a kitchen where laughter was fierce and stupid. Her life insists on being worth more than an ending.
She has a final thought as the world hammers around her, a private vow: If I must fall, I will fall driving the thing back, even if I can only buy seconds. If Rena, if Jin, if any of you — if they live because of me, then the pain will be honored.
The open sky above them collapses with a new thunder. Something splinters in the air — a sound like glass and iron and stars being unstrung. The black lightning recoils, gathers, and descends again.
Lilia's cheeks are streaked with grime and sweat. Her hands tremble. "We can't keep him like this," she says fiercely to Ethan, who tastes copper and grit and finds his jaw working.
"No," Ethan breathes. "We need to pull him away from Nox — from whatever that thing is. If we can sever the bond, maybe his core will fight back. Maybe the boy inside will claw out."
"Maybe," Lilia says, but there's no faith in it. Just a slender, stubborn hope — and hope is something like a weapon. It is not enough without action.
The island groans. The demons that remain are unsettled; their shrieks ricochet as if the night itself is a drum. A scattering of them surge forward with manic hunger, as if to eat any morsel of chaos they can find — perhaps hoping to claim part of the power that walked in human skin.
Nox steps forward, every motion a sentence of threat. He walks past the smashed trunks and the dead, and the world seems to slide toward him like water. The smell of burning flesh and pine clings to his furred cuffs.
Leona hears a sound like funeral bells. Her vision narrows to a tunnel punctuated by gold, white, and the crossed silver of Ethan's sword. A shadow unrolls across her field of sight. She thinks the world has become soft and rounded.
She tries once more to summon something like a ward, a tiny seam of defense she has in her chest like a pocket knife. She reaches with her will. The muscles in her hand shake. Her fingers find the earth.
There is pressure from behind her ribs. The world tilts. The spell stutters — a sputter and a hiss — and collapses like embers starved of oxygen.
Her vision fades as if someone pulls a blanket over the sun.
Her last thought, very small and bright, is of Rena.
Rena — hold on. If I die here, know I tried.
Leona's eyes close. The last sound she hears is the crackling of black lightning as it climbs the sky.
Footsteps approach the fallen form. Somewhere a child is still crying. Somewhere far off a bell tolls the hour of trouble.
The clearing spins, the island groaning, and Nox — or the thing that speaks through his jaws — bends to look down at the prone figure.
A low, soft chuckle, like a wind through teeth, threads the air.
"You play with fire," it says, voice liquid and cruel. "How beautifully… human."
Leona's chest tightens once, starved for breath. She tastes ash and salt and the memory of a river bank.
Then darkness swallows her completely.
At the edge of the clearing, shadows gather and hesitate. Someone, unseen, watches and leans forward with intent. A new presence, older than the island and patient as slow decay, turns its attention toward the broken field where a sister sobs and a brother walks in the shape of a god.
The island holds its breath.
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Heat: Thank you so much for reading. 🌹🌹🌹