Chapter 30: Asphodel (Patreon)

We left the alcove single file, the path too narrow for anything else. Aria fell into step beside me once the stonework widened onto the main terrace, her shoulder bumping mine.

"Okay so." She grabbed my arm with both hands. "In the beginning I thought you were just, like, flopping the whole thing on purpose? Like to prove whatever point you'd already decided to make. But then—" She mimed something with her fingers that I think was meant to represent a pressure point strike. "That. Can you teach me that?"

I turned it over. The honest answer was that I didn't know where it had come from—the angle, the force, the specific spot on Clara's back I'd chosen without choosing it. Something in the body had known and moved, and I'd followed half a beat behind.

"I'm not sure," I said.

"Please." Aria tightened her grip on my arm. "Please, please, please—"

"I'll think about it."

She subsided, which meant she let go of my arm and transferred to bumping my hip instead, but she didn't push further. I was grateful. The taste it had left—not the act itself but the ease of it, how clean and automatic it had been—sat somewhere behind my teeth and wouldn't shift.

I put it aside. "First we need to figure out whether Yrieth was operating alone."

"Does it matter?" Isabella's voice came from just behind my right shoulder. She moved through the terrace crowd without displacing it, students parting in her peripheral vision and closing again, none of them quite registering why they'd moved.

Aria looked back. "What do you mean?"

"Either outcome damages Valentina." Isabella kept her eyes on the path ahead. "If Yrieth spread these rumours independently, it means Valentina cannot maintain discipline among her own people. If she gave the order, then we have something to press her with directly. Both are useful. The origin is secondary."

Aria was quiet for about four seconds, which for her was the equivalent of a long pause.

"She must be genuinely stupid," she said, "thinking that'd actually work. Like—really? That's the plan?"

"For a typical first-year, it might." I stepped around a cluster of students blocking the terrace steps. "Isolate, destabilise, fracture. It's standard enough."

Aria snorted. "We are so far past typical." She hopped down two steps at once, turned to face us walking backward. "I mean come on. After all the fucking and adventuring and nearly dying underground together? You'd need something a lot bigger than whispers to put a dent in this."

"It certainly contributed to our cohesion," Isabella said, and her delivery was so flat that it took me a second.

I shook my head. Aria was already grinning at me, reading my face.

The thing was, she wasn't wrong. I'd watched it happen without being able to stop it—each trip through a summoning circle, each night in London, each moment where one of them had stood between something dangerous and the other, and somehow afterward the distance I'd been trying to maintain had closed another inch. I hadn't wanted it. I'd been careful about not wanting it. And somewhere in the last month they'd ended up on the short list anyway, filed next to Daniel's name in the part of me that noticed when people were gone.

The path curved south, past a row of ember vines running up iron trellises, the metal warm under the vines' ambient heat. Ahead, the lower terrace gardens spread out—private alcoves, stone benches, the places where conversations happened that the upper terraces weren't meant to hear.

"Right." I started down the steps toward it. "Let's go find Yrieth."

*

The lower terrace opened up past a curve in the path, and I found them before we'd looked anywhere.

Valentina occupied a stone bench at the centre of a small clearing like she'd had it placed there. Four students arranged around her—two standing, two seated—and Yrieth close enough to her left

The lower terrace had fewer students than the middle, but not none. I spotted the cluster from twenty metres out—a half-circle of bodies arranged with the particular geometry of people who wanted to be seen associating with someone rather than actually talking to her.

Valentina stood at the centre near a stone bench, platinum hair catching Hell's ambient glow. Yrieth was three steps to her left.

Aria made a small sound beside me, not quite a word.

"Both at once," I said, and kept walking.

Valentina noticed us when we were close enough that turning away would have been a statement. Something moved in her expression—there and gone, replaced by the smile she kept sharpened for occasions like this.

"Well." She tilted her head. "I wasn't expecting company." Her eyes moved across all three of us and settled on me. "Did you finally work out where you belong?"

I didn't stop walking until I was close enough that she'd either have to hold her ground or step back. She held it.

"Skip the preamble," I said. "We both know why we're here."

"Do we?" She touched her collarbone, fingers light. "You'll have to be more specific. I have so many things happening today."

"Yrieth." I didn't look at Yrieth. I kept my eyes on Valentina. "And the rumours she's been circulating about me."

Valentina's expression did something complex and ultimately settled on amusement. "I genuinely don't know what you're referring to. Though—" She paused, as though the thought had just arrived. "If something leaked about your particular... situation, I assumed everyone could see it already. I'm surprised it's news to you."

Isabella stepped up on my left. She didn't raise her voice.

"Either you directed this, or your people act without your knowledge. Choose which version of yourself you'd prefer to present."

Valentina's expression didn't crack, but something shifted behind it. "My people." She let the word sit. "I wasn't aware I had any. We're all equal here, aren't we? Academy policy." Her gaze drifted across her cluster of companions with something approaching fondness. "What my friends choose to do of their own accord—"

"Equal," Aria said, not quite under her breath. "Half of them ran to get her lunch this morning."

"—is entirely their own business." Valentina finished as if Aria hadn't spoken, though the pause before business was a half-beat too long. "I don't govern anyone's private conversations. That would be rather controlling of me."

I cut back in before Aria could. "So what you're telling me is that your—" I gestured at Yrieth with two fingers, "—friend, independently decided to go around telling people I'm exploiting Aria and Isabella. Out of personal concern."

"If Yrieth said something, she witnessed something. I wouldn't presume to—"

"And the part about me being half-feral." The words landed flat between us.

Valentina stopped.

Not a performance pause. The muscles around her eyes changed.

"I'm sorry?"

"Yeah." Aria shifted her weight forward. "Because it's real subtle, isn't it. First you put it around that she's using us, so maybe we pull back from her. And then you put around that she's unstable, so the rest of the school does too. Isolate from one side, then the other." Her voice hadn't lost its brightness, which made it worse somehow. "Does she think we can't see it?"

Valentina's gaze moved to Yrieth—not a glance, a proper turn of the head, slow enough that everyone on the terrace could watch it happen.

Yrieth had gone very still.

*

Valentina kept her eyes on Yrieth for a beat longer than comfortable. "What did you do?"

Yrieth's composure fractured at the edges. "I—I did what you asked. What you told me to—"

"I didn't tell you to do that." Valentina's voice went sharp enough that two of the other students near the bench shifted their weight. "I didn't tell you to—"

She stopped. Her jaw worked once, twice. Then she straightened, and the mask came back, not perfect, but functional.

"We'll discuss this later." Each word placed with precision. She turned back to face us, and something in her posture suggested she'd already dismissed Yrieth from consideration. "As you can see, I have it under control. My friends—" The word carried weight now. "—occasionally take initiative. I can't micromanage everyone's private conversations."

She gestured toward the path behind us, a small flick of the wrist that somehow managed to be both dismissive and formal.

"You're welcome to leave. We'll be having a conversation about appropriate boundaries." Her gaze moved past me to Yrieth for half a breath. "A thorough one."

I waited for the second layer. The veiled threat, the subtle jab, the way she'd twist it back around into something we'd regret hearing.

It didn't come.

Aria made a sound I couldn't quite parse. Isabella said nothing, but her posture had changed. Still formal, but no longer braced for combat.

"Right." I kept my voice level. "We'll leave you to it, then."

I turned before Valentina could add anything, and Aria and Isabella moved with me. None of us spoke until we'd cleared the lower terrace entirely and started up the obsidian path toward the middle level.

"Well." Aria broke the silence first. "That was weird."

"Unexpectedly straightforward," Isabella said.

"Yeah." I glanced back once, but the clearing had disappeared behind a cluster of trees. "I was ready for at least three more rounds of that."

Aria's fingers drummed against her thigh. "You think she'll actually stop? Like, make Yrieth stop?"

I considered it. Valentina's anger had looked genuine. Either she was better at this than I'd thought, or Yrieth had genuinely gone off-script.

"She seemed sincere," I said. "Maybe she really didn't know about the second part."

"Plausible deniability is convenient," Isabella said. "But the reaction was... illuminated. She cares about her reputation more than I anticipated."

We reached the main terrace, and the foot traffic increased. Students moved between benches and fountain, most paying us no attention beyond the usual glances Aria collected just by existing.

"Well," Isabella continued as we aimed toward the main building, "if the rumours persist, we can always reciprocate."

Aria perked up immediately. "Oh, I've already got a few I can think of." Her grin arrived in full force. "Like… Valentina secretly loves eating slugs. But she hides it because it would totally ruin her whole image thing."

"Slugs," I repeated.

"Yeah. The big glowing ones." Aria made a vague gesture with both hands. "You know, the ones near the magma lake."

Isabella's mouth did something that might have been trying not to smile. "That's absurd."

"Exactly!" Aria bounced once. "That's what makes it good. Nobody would make it up, so people think maybe it's true."

"That's not how—" I stopped, because actually, in a certain social environment, it probably was exactly how it worked.

The main building's entrance appeared ahead, dark stone and geometric carvings catching Hell's light. A few students lingered near the doors, but the lunch period had clearly ended—most had already filtered back toward classrooms or dorms.

"We should probably get going as well," I said.

"Yeah." Aria fell into step beside me, her earlier tension gone. "But seriously, if she tries anything else, I'm starting with the slug thing."

*

Aria opened the workshop door, and the familiar smell of ozone and dried herbs hit me before anything else. The bright white mage-lights made me squint after the corridor's dimmer glow. The basalt workstations stood in their usual grid, empty except for the standard brass scales and glass alembics.

We claimed our spots near the middle. Isabella took the center position, I moved to her left, and Aria dropped onto the stool to my right with enough force that it scraped against stone.

"Oh, wait." Aria straightened suddenly. "Weren't we supposed to go on some field trip thing? Like, on Mournday?"

"It was delayed," Isabella said, adjusting her stool's position by exactly two inches. "Professor Auriel had something requiring her attention."

"So are we going now?" Aria glanced toward the door. "Because I thought—"

"Yes." I set my bag on the workstation. "You'd know that if you checked the notice board."

"Life's too short to waste time on that." Aria waved a hand. The gesture took in the entire concept of notice boards, administrative updates, and probably forward planning in general.

Isabella's eyebrow rose a fraction. "You're immortal."

"Still a waste of time." Aria stood abruptly. "Okay, I'll be right back. I need to grab—"

I tapped my spatial ring. "Already got everything we need."

The tension dropped out of Aria's shoulders. She turned to look at me, and something warm crossed her face. "Did I mention that I love you? Because I really, really do."

The words landed differently than they should have. Too casual for the weight, too easy for what they implied. I reached out and gave her shoulder a light push.

"Focus. Auriel's coming."

Aria caught herself on the workstation but didn't protest. Her tail did a lazy curl behind her before settling.

The door opened again, and Professor Auriel entered with three other students trailing behind her. Her golden braid caught the mage-light as she moved to the instructor's dais. The blackboard behind her already held chalk diagrams of root systems and extraction methods.

"Good morning." Auriel's voice carried without being loud. "Today we depart for Asphodel. You'll have four hours to gather the reagents on your list and return to the portal site. Groups of three, self-selected."

She gestured to the blackboard, where the chalk rearranged itself into six columns of ingredients.

"Standard rules apply. Don't consume anything you didn't grow yourself. Don't provoke the local fauna. Don't separate from your group." Her gaze swept the room. "Asphodel is the safest layer you'll visit, but that doesn't make it harmless. The plants there have adapted to souls as fertilizer. They will respond to your presence."

Aria leaned toward me. "That sounds ominous."

"It's Auriel," I murmured back. "She'd make a grocery list sound ominous."

Isabella said nothing, but I caught the slight twitch at the corner of her mouth.

Auriel continued. "You have five minutes to review the list and confirm your groups. Then we proceed to the transport circle in the eastern courtyard." She stepped down from the dais. "Questions?"

Nobody spoke.

"Good." Auriel moved toward the door. "Five minutes."

The workshop dissolved into quiet motion. Students clustered around workstations, comparing notes or pulling supplies from spatial rings. I turned to Isabella and Aria.

"Same group as always?"

"Obviously," Isabella said.

"Yeah." Aria grinned. "We're the best team anyway.

*

The eastern courtyard held the whole class by the time we arrived. Twenty-odd succubi clustered near the transport gate's stone archway, the spatial runes along its inner edge dim and cold. Some of the girls had pressed close enough to touch the frame, running fingers across the inscribed channels with the particular reverence of people who'd only ever read about something.

I hung back with Aria and Isabella, alchemy satchel slung over one shoulder.

The gate itself stood about four meters tall, basalt-dark and carved from a single piece of volcanic rock that the Northern District had probably quarried from somewhere unpleasant. No shimmer yet. No sound. Just old stone and older runes, waiting.

Auriel positioned herself at the activation panel to the left of the arch. The panel was newer than the gate—brass fittings, modern rune arrays, the same basic interface I'd seen at the main district gate. She ran two fingers across the uppermost sequence without looking at it.

"When it opens," she said, loud enough to carry across the courtyard without effort, "you have five minutes to cross. All of you." She let that settle. "Anyone still on this side when the gate closes receives a failing mark for the semester. Plan accordingly."

A hand went up near the front. One of the common girls, dark-haired, nervous posture. "What actually happens if you're in the middle of crossing when it closes?"

Auriel looked at her for a moment. "Nothing pleasant." A pause. "I would recommend not testing it. You would prefer to arrive in Asphodel whole."

She turned back to the panel.

Beside me, Aria made a small sound. A suppressed laugh, the kind she never quite managed to suppress.

I looked at her.

She'd pressed her lips together, shoulders shaking. "I was just—" she started, then gave up on containing it. "I was just imagining Valentina sprinting for the gate and not quite making it. Like, she gets through, but her bottom half doesn't, and she's just standing there in Asphodel screaming while her legs are still here being confused."

The image was specific enough to be genuinely funny. I felt the smirk before I decided to let it show.

"She'd find a way to blame me," I said.

"Absolutely." Aria nodded with great conviction. "You'd be standing right here and it'd still somehow be your fault."

Isabella, two steps to my right, said nothing. But she'd angled very slightly away, which was her version of plausible deniability.

The runes lit.

It happened fast—the sequence ran from the base of the arch upward, each glyph flaring amber then settling into a sustained pale gold. The space inside the frame rippled once, surface tension breaking across an invisible boundary, and then steadied into something that looked almost solid. Almost like a wall, except the light through it came from the wrong direction entirely.

The air tasted different immediately. Something green and warm and faintly wrong, bleeding through from the other side.

"That is your signal," Auriel said. She stepped through without ceremony, and the surface swallowed her cleanly.

The students surged toward the gate immediately. Twenty-one succubi moving as one mass, jostling for position. Someone laughed, sharp and excited. Another swore as an elbow caught her ribs.

I started forward with Isabella and Aria flanking me.

We'd covered maybe three steps when movement registered in my peripheral vision. Wrong movement. Deliberate.

Two students broke from the main flow, angling left. Three more peeled right. Not rushing toward the gate. Positioning themselves.

My hand shot out, catching Aria's wrist.

*

Aria pulled up short against my grip, then followed my sightline.

The five had arranged themselves well. Not a panicked scramble—they'd thought about it beforehand, picked their positions. The two on the left stood at the gate's edge where the frame narrowed the approach naturally. The three on the right spread wider, covering the angle anyone might use to go around. Between them they'd turned a four-meter archway into a choke point.

One of them—tall, auburn hair, a burn scar across her left knuckles from a reagent flash—held up a hand as the first cluster of students reached her.

"Five souls per person," she said. "Fair rate. Passage guaranteed."

I recognised her then. The whole group of them, actually, now that I looked. They sat in the left corner of Auriel's workshop, the cluster whose practicals had a tendency to produce smoke rather than product. Not stupid, but impatient. They wanted results before they understood the process, and it cost them every time.

Apparently they'd learned to wait on something.

Aria leaned close to my ear. "Think Valentina put them up to it?"

"No," Isabella said, before I could answer. Her voice was flat, certain. She hadn't raised it. "This is opportunism, not strategy. Valentina's schemes have her fingerprints on them."

"So what do we do?" Aria asked.

I watched the developing situation at the gate. A few students were already digging through their satchels, calculating whether their souls were worth the argument. Several more stood in a knot, whispering. Three had stopped entirely and looked furious about it.

"We could go through them," I said. "There are enough of us that they can't hold everyone."

"Probably won't need to." Aria's chin tilted toward Isabella. "They'll take one look at her horns and wave us through."

Isabella said nothing, which was its own kind of agreement.

The argument at the gate had sharpened. Someone near the front—I couldn't see who—had apparently reached the same conclusion I had about simple numbers, because the dynamic shifted abruptly. A surge forward, voices rising, bodies pressing against the line.

It lasted about four seconds before the auburn-haired one said something quiet and two of her associates demonstrated, efficiently and without apparent enjoyment, exactly why the toll was collectible. The student who'd pushed sat down hard on the courtyard stones.

"Fifteen," the auburn-haired one announced to the remaining crowd. Her voice hadn't changed register at all. "Per person. Adjusted for difficulty."

The hesitation that moved through the remaining students was physical, a visible ripple.

"Should we stop them?" I asked. I didn't particularly want to, but the question felt obligatory.

Isabella looked at me with the patience she reserved for observations she found slightly beneath both of us. "Why? Auriel walked through first. If she wanted to prevent this she would have gone through last." She adjusted the strap of her satchel. "Let us simply walk through and leave this alone."

"Wait, wait." Aria caught Isabella's sleeve with two fingers. "We've still got a few minutes. Let's see how it plays out."

Hell moved differently. Social structures here had their own internal logic. Interference without stake was rarely free.

"Fine," I said.

The crowd at the gate wasn't going anywhere just yet.

*

Most of the crowd folded within the first minute.

A few students produced soul-vials with the resigned expression of people paying a parking fine. A handful walked through on name recognition alone— Some connections that the five apparently didn't want to test—and the auburn-haired one let them pass without comment, which told me exactly how calculated this exercise was. They knew their limits. They'd priced accordingly.

That left six. They stood in a loose cluster to the left of the gate, arms crossed or hands on hips, committed to not paying on principle rather than poverty. The purple-haired one at their front had a jaw set so tight I could see the muscle working from twenty metres back.

"About two minutes," I said.

"Just a bit more." Aria hadn't moved except to lean forward slightly, weight on her toes. "Something's about to happen."

She wasn't wrong. The purple-haired student had turned to face the five blockers fully, and when she spoke her voice carried across the courtyard without effort.

"You can't win this," she said. "There are six of us."

The auburn-haired one smiled. It was a pleasant smile, patient and completely unmoved. "Probably not," she agreed. "But we don't need to win. We just need to hold you until the gate closes."

The math was simple and brutal and the six clearly did it at the same moment, because the shift in their posture was collective. A few seconds of silence while the gate pulsed behind the five blockers, who stood there looking satisfied with themselves in a way that was going to become deeply irritating very quickly.

Then the purple-haired student turned. Looked at us directly.

"What about your group?" Her voice was even, not quite asking a favour, not quite making an accusation. "Are you going to stand there until it closes?"

Aria straightened up from her lean. "You know—" she said, "they make a fair point." She glanced at me sideways, bright-eyed. "Should we get involved?"

The auburn-haired blocker spoke before I could. She'd angled toward us, unhurried, already recalculating. "We'll split the collection," she said. "Help us hold them back, and you take a third. Clean arrangement."

Isabella's expression didn't change in any way I could measure.

I looked at the gate. The pulse had shortened. Ninety seconds, maybe less.

The six were watching us. The five were watching us. Aria was watching me with barely suppressed delight, the way she watched anything that had tipped past the point of reasonable resolution into something more interesting.

The offer was sitting in the air, waiting.

*

Before I could formulate an answer, Isabella spoke.

"I did not come to the Academy to play toll collector."

Her tone was perfectly level. The kind of calm that made the statement land harder than any threat.

The auburn-haired blocker shifted her weight. Just slightly.

"I appreciate the entrepreneurial spirit," Isabella continued, "but you made a significant error in judgement when you assumed I would participate in this exercise." She paused. "Or that I required your permission to pass."

The five exchanged glances. The auburn-haired one raised both hands in a placating gesture.

"No offense intended," she said quickly. "We'll still pay you the cut. You don't even need to help us—just walk through. We're not stopping you."

Isabella tilted her head as though considering the offer. The silence stretched long enough that I could hear the gate's hum shift to a higher pitch.

"I appreciate the clarification," she said finally. "However, I believe you misunderstand the situation. You've insulted me by implying I would extort my fellow students. That requires compensation beyond simply being allowed passage I was never going to request permission for."

She held out one hand.

"Give me everything you've collected so far."

The five went still. The dark-haired girl on the left actually laughed, short and disbelieving.

"That's unreasonable."

"Unreasonable or not," Isabella said, "this is what you get for your mistake."

The auburn-haired one's jaw tightened. "We did the all the work—"

"Of course," Isabella interrupted smoothly, "if you're dissatisfied with my terms, you're welcome to fight me for it. I wouldn't want you to think I'm using my house name to bully you."

The offer hung there, perfectly polite and absolutely lethal.

The five looked at each other. Three of them glanced toward the gate, calculating whether they could rush it and get through before Isabella intervened. The math apparently didn't work in their favour, because the auburn-haired one's shoulders dropped half an inch.

"Fine."

She pulled a leather pouch from her belt and tossed it to Isabella, who caught it without looking and immediately passed it to Aria.

Aria clutched it to her chest with both hands, grinning. "Yay!"

Isabella turned her attention to the remaining eleven students still waiting near the gate.

"You may go through the portal," she said. "Or you may fight me for the privilege. I genuinely do not care which you choose."

The purple-haired student who'd spoken earlier didn't wait for a second invitation. She moved toward the gate, and the rest of the six followed. The five blockers looked at each other, then at Isabella, then apparently decided cutting their losses was the smart play. They went through without another word.

Aria's shoulders slumped as the last one vanished into the shimmer.

"Aww. I really thought someone would try something."

"You still got the souls," I pointed out.

She clutched the pouch tighter, but her expression remained disappointed. "I know, but I wanted to see some action. Just a little."

The gate pulsed. Only seconds remaining.

I stepped toward it, Aria and Isabella falling in beside me. The surface filled my vision—opaque surface that didn't reflect light so much as absorb it, then give it back wrong.

We crossed the threshold together.

*

One moment the gate's shimmer surrounded us, the next I stood on packed earth beneath a canopy of violet leaves.

The air tasted wrong. Sweet, but not like flowers—like overripe fruit left too long in summer heat. I drew a breath and immediately wished I hadn't. The scent coated my tongue, heavy and cloying.

Around us, the other students clustered in small groups, their voices pitched low. The last few stragglers were still orienting themselves, turning in slow circles to take in the landscape.

Because it looked like paradise.

Golden light filtered through the purple canopy above, dappling the ground in warm patterns. The trees themselves appeared healthy, their bark smooth and unblemished. Flowering vines wound up their trunks, blossoms the size of dinner plates releasing that too-sweet perfume. A stream ran along the clearing's eastern edge, its water clear enough to see the smooth stones beneath.

Nothing about it looked dangerous.

But I'd seen Gehenna's charred plains and rivers of magma. Hell didn't do comforting landscapes without purpose.

My gaze tracked along the tree line. The flowers were beautiful—deep purples and vibrant oranges that seemed to pulse in the filtered light. Something about their symmetry felt calculated rather than natural. The way they angled toward the clearing. The spacing between blooms.

A cottage stood at the clearing's far end, its walls constructed from wood that occasionally shuddered. The movement was subtle, easily missed if you weren't watching for it. Behind it, I could make out more structures arranged in loose formation—thatched roofs, vine-covered walls, the aesthetic of a storybook village.

The forest pressed close on all sides. Not gradually thinning, but stopping at a distinct boundary as though something kept it from advancing.

Professor Auriel emerged from a building near the gate, her golden braid catching the light. She moved with her usual measured grace, golden eyes sweeping across the assembled students.

"Well," she said. "It seems this semester everyone made it to this side."

A few nervous laughs rippled through the group.

"Good." She clasped her hands behind her back. "Welcome to Thornvale, one of Asphodel's primary agricultural settlements. What you see around you is the result of centuries of cultivation and careful management."

I filed that away. Management implied control. Control implied something that needed containing.

"Thornvale exists to supply the Academy with botanical reagents," Auriel continued. "The crops grown here are specialized, often dangerous, and always valuable. The settlement's permanent residents have extensive experience handling them. You do not."

She let that sink in.

"The streams contain hallucinogenic compounds. Do not drink from them. The flowers emit spores that can induce paralysis in mortals. Do not handle them without gloves. The forest beyond the safe zone can be lethal even to demons. Do not enter it."

Aria shifted beside me, her weight rocking from foot to foot. Isabella stood perfectly still, but her gaze tracked Auriel's gestures with absolute focus.

"While succubi possess natural resistances that protect you from many of Asphodel's hazards," Auriel said, "I recommend treating this environment with appropriate caution. The Fifth Circle does not distinguish between carelessness and malice when selecting victims."

The professor's wings manifested—blackened remnants of her angelic past. Just briefly, barely a flicker, but enough to draw every eye.

"Your task today is to gather specific reagents from designated areas. You will work in your assigned groups. You have four hours to complete your lists and return to this clearing. The gate will reopen at that time." Her expression hardened. "Any student who fails to return within that window will remain in Asphodel until alternative arrangements can be made. Given the Academy's schedule, such arrangements typically take three to five days to coordinate."

She pulled a stack of papers from her satchel. "I will now distribute your assignments."