Draven Ashmore was going to die in a grey rift.
The simplest of them all. The kind professors described as "a safe excursion." The kind that only covered the first through fifth floors of the Underworld, and whose monsters, according to the Academy's official manual, "posed no real danger."
His three groupmates — his friends — were dead.
Finn lay face-up four meters away, split in half, eyes open toward the stone ceiling with an expression Draven couldn't put into words — not one of pain, but something worse. Horror. As if death had caught him completely off guard.
Ahead of him, what remained of Cole. His body had been reduced to scattered remains across the stone floor, entirely unrecognizable.
And right behind him was Darius.
His best friend.
No head. No legs.
Draven couldn't stop staring. His eyes moved on their own — from Finn to what was left of Cole, from Cole to what remained of Darius — as if his mind still refused to accept that what he was seeing was real, still searching for some angle from which it might make sense.
There was none.
Before him, the wyrm waited.
Enormous. Coiled around itself at the center of the room as if it had all the time in the world. Several rows of teeth, barely parted. Eyes fixed on Draven with a calm that was worse than any aggression.
"Well, well!" said a voice behind him. "Who would have thought! It seems you're Mor'khad's favorite. All signs point to you being the one worthy of being devoured."
The man was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and a smile that had no business being there. Ordinary in every way except his eyes — too still, too fixed, like those of someone who has been doing things like this for so long that they no longer feel anything.
"What...?" Draven said.
"Think about it." The man gestured toward the bodies with a vague, almost bored wave. "Your friends were merely killed. Mor'khad showed no interest in devouring them. To him, they were nothing but garbage. But you... you are special to him."
Draven stared at him.
"What did you just say...?"
Something in his voice had changed. It was no longer confusion.
It was something else.
"Come on." The man laughed lightly. "How can you be too stupid to understand? You're worth more than they were —"
"Go to hell."
The man blinked.
"Excuse me?"
"You didn't know them." Draven's voice came out low, tight, controlled in a way that was costing him to maintain. "You know nothing about them!"
"Hey... if I were you —"
"Shut your mouth!" The control was gone. "Or I swear I'll kill you!"
The man looked at him for a moment.
Then he extended one finger.
A streak of blood cut through the air and grazed Draven's cheek with enough precision to make it perfectly clear that if he had wanted to go through his skull, he could have.
Draven went rigid.
'This guy...'
His teeth clenched on their own.
'He uses a very strange kind of magic... I've never seen anything like it. And I don't see a ring on any of his fingers.'
Son of Cedric Ashmore — the only Sentinel ever ranked S+ in all of Eryndal's history, the most powerful living man — and yet unable to connect with his ring. No magic. No rank. In a world where those two things were everything, Draven was nothing. He knew what magic looked like. He had studied it, memorized it, spent years trying to understand why it refused to answer him. And whatever this man was using, it wasn't anything the Academy had ever taught.
"If I were you," the man said, now cold, the smile gone, "I would show some respect. Because you know perfectly well that I could kill you without any trouble." He pointed toward the corpses. "Like I did with your friend back there, a little while ago."
Draven didn't respond. He clenched his jaw and said nothing, because he knew that if he opened his mouth he was going to say something that would cost him his life before he was ready.
"Now then..." the man continued, recovering his smile, "let me make something very clear. You are garbage. Just like all your friends — nothing but a bunch of pathetic F-ranks, and you even worse, an Unranked. But even garbage has something special for someone. And Mor'khad found something special in you."
F-ranks. Unranked.
The words landed the same way they always did — like something confirmed rather than said for the first time. The Academy had made sure of that. The whispers in the hallways. The sideways glances. The nickname someone had started using in the first week, and that had spread like a stain until it became the only thing anyone called him without hesitation.
"Black sheep."
His father had been cleaner about it. On camera, in that calm voice he reserved for things that admitted no reply.
"My son is no longer part of this family. From this point forward, a rankless has no place among the Ashmores."
Without so much as a tremor.
And Magnus Holloway had delivered the final word less than two weeks ago, wearing the expression of someone enduring something they find deeply offensive.
"You are an embarrassment to this academy and to my class, Ashmore. You and that group of F-ranks you've been running with will enter the first retention exam together. The academy is raising its standards — if they can't keep up, they pack their things and leave."
One exam. A grey rift. Four students no one would defend if something went wrong.
'How did I not see it from the start.'
He had sensed it. But sensing something and accepting it were different things. He never thought they would go this far — that sending four students to their deaths was even an option anyone inside the Academy would consider.
He had underestimated how disposable they thought they were.