**Chapter 59 – The First Real Day of Classes**
**September 12, 2029 – Aerie Academy, 7:02 a.m.**
The campus wakes up differently.
The sky is the same impossible bruised-twilight color, but now every cloud has a faint violet edge, like it's embarrassed it ever belonged to anyone else.
Our dorm has added a new wall:
A living mural of last night's battle, painted in lightning and foxfire, looping forever.
The broken throne dissolves into blackbirds every thirty seconds.
The Sky King kneels, stands, kneels again.
We watch it while eating breakfast on the porch swing that still smells like Remy's grandmother.
Seras is in Lucian's hoodie again, armor dismissed, hair in messy space buns, stealing bacon off my plate.
Kayo is teaching Rowan how to make mochi that explodes into tiny foxes when you bite it.
Remy's braids are loose, feet bare on the warm red-dirt floor, arm around my waist like it's the most natural thing in the universe.
No one mentions the war.
We don't need to.
The sky already told the story.
At 7:15 the schedule appears in mid-air above the firepit, written in our own oath-mark glow:
**Monday – First Official Day**
- 08:00 – Advanced Sky Rebellion 501 (Kael Stormrider)
- 10:00 – Mythic Combat Tactics (Professor Thunderstrike)
- 13:00 – Void Physics & Trickster Math (Professors Kayo & Rowan – guest lecturers)
- 15:00 – Free skate / open war council
We all read it.
Then we look at each other.
**Seras (grinning):**
"So… normal college now?"
**Lucian (deadpan):**
"If your definition of normal includes 'guest lecturing your own class on the first day.'"
Rowan actually blushes.
Remy stands, stretches, and cracks his neck.
**Remy:**
"Coyote Club rule number twelve:
First day of real school, you show up early and remind everyone who rewrote the sky yesterday."
I grab *Sânge Furtună* and Hellebore Mist.
**Celeste:**
"Let's go be legends before the second period."
We step out the door.
The entire campus is waiting.
Students part like water when we walk.
Some bow.
Some fist-bump.
A dragon the size of a pickup truck lands in front of us, lowers its head, and offers rides to class.
We take it.
Six kids on a dragon's back, boards under arms, laughing into the wind as the new constellation above us burns brighter than the sun.
The first bell hasn't even rung yet.
And the year we were supposed to scatter?
We just turned it into the year the sky learned our names by heart.
Welcome to college.
Our version.
Game on.
**Advanced Sky Rebellion 501**
**September 12, 2029 – 7:58 a.m., The Tempest Arena**
The classroom doesn't have walls.
It has horizons.
We step off the dragon's back onto a floating disk of black glass suspended in the middle of an endless storm.
Lightning forks in slow motion all around us.
The air tastes like ozone and adrenaline.
Fifty students are already here (upperclassmen who look like they've fought wars, first-years who look like they're about to start them).
Kael Stormrider stands dead center on a hovering longboard, barefoot, hair white as lightning, wearing the same beat-up Aerie hoodie now splattered with yesterday's Sky Court blood.
A massive holographic scoreboard floats above him:
**ADVANCED SKY REBELLION 501**
**Professor: Kael Stormrider**
**Office hours: whenever the sky is bored**
**Grading: You bleed, you learn. You win, you eat.**
He doesn't wait for silence.
He kicks his board, spins it once, and the entire arena tilts ninety degrees.
Gravity forgets its job.
**Kael (voice carrying over the thunder):**
"Rule one: the sky is a liar.
It will tell you up is up, down is down, and kings deserve thrones.
Your first job is to prove it wrong."
He snaps his fingers.
The disk fractures into fifty separate platforms that shoot away from each other like shrapnel.
Every student suddenly has their own floating island, a hundred yards apart, storm raging between.
Kael's voice appears inside our skulls.
**Kael:**
"Objective: take my flag.
Location: wherever I feel like putting it.
Tools: anything you brought, anything you are, anything you can steal from the sky itself.
Time limit: until someone succeeds or the storm eats the rest of you.
Begin."
He vanishes.
A crimson flag on a spear of solid wind appears a mile straight up, dancing in the heart of a hurricane that wasn't there a second ago.
Chaos.
Students rocket in every direction (some on wings, some on boards, some riding literal tornados they just invented).
Seras is already a blazing comet streaking upward.
Lucian follows as living thunder.
Kayo opens nine golden portals and steps out of the one closest to the flag, tails spinning like helicopter blades.
Rowan just sighs, flips a page in his grimoire, and the hurricane politely pauses, confused.
Remy looks at me, golden eyes wild with joy.
**Remy:**
"Race you, storm queen."
We drop in together.
I hit a rail made of frozen lightning that appears the second I need it.
Remy runs beside me on nothing but air and coyote will.
We weave through students fighting mid-air (some with swords, some with raw elements, one guy literally arm-wrestling a thundercloud).
Kael reappears directly in our path, riding the flag itself like a surfboard, laughing.
**Kael:**
"Took you thirty seconds to find me.
I'm disappointed."
He flicks his wrist.
The hurricane wakes up and tries to eat us whole.
I answer by speaking the forty-fourth line again.
The storm stops.
Listens.
Then folds itself into a perfect half-pipe that leads straight to him.
We ride it.
Side by side.
Remy on claw and wind, me on titanium and thunder.
We hit the top together, ollie in perfect sync, and snatch the flag out of Kael's hand mid-air.
He lets us.
The hurricane dissolves into applause made of thunder.
Every platform snaps back together.
We land in the center, flag raised between us.
Kael claps once, slow.
**Kael (grinning):**
"Class record: thirty-four seconds.
Previous record was four minutes, twelve seconds.
Held by me."
He looks at the rest of the class (panting, bleeding, staring at us like we're myths that just walked in late).
**Kael:**
"Lesson one complete.
The sky is a liar.
These six just proved it."
He turns to us.
**Kael:**
"Welcome to the top of the leaderboard, freshmen.
Try not to get comfortable.
Tomorrow we do it again.
With live ammunition."
The bell (somewhere a dragon roars three times) signals the end of first period.
We walk out with the flag still in our hands.
Students part for us like we're royalty.
Because today, in the only class that matters, we just reminded the sky who actually owns it.
First period down.
Five more to go.
College is going to be fun.**STEAM & SHADOW**
**Mythic Combat Tactics**
September 12, 2029 – 10:00 a.m., The Crucible Ring**
The Crucible Ring is a perfect circle of obsidian floating in a pocket dimension that smells like blood, ozone, and old glory.
No ceiling.
No walls.
Just an endless red sky bleeding slow-motion sunsets and a floor that remembers every fight it's ever hosted (scars, burns, claw marks, and frozen lightning veins glow under the surface).
The professor is already waiting.
Professor Thunderstrike (real name unpronounceable in mortal tongues) is eight feet tall, built like a war forge, skin the color of stormclouds at midnight, four arms, each holding a different legendary weapon:
- a flaming trident
- a katana made of dawn
- a shield that shows you your own death
- and a coffee mug that says "World's Okayest Mentor."
He doesn't speak.
He just points to the center of the ring, where six obsidian pedestals rise from the floor.
One for each of us.
The rest of the class (maybe thirty students) forms a ring around the edge, silent.
We step onto our pedestals.
The floor locks our feet in place with living shadow.
Thunderstrike finally opens his mouth and the sky itself rumbles.
**Thunderstrike:**
"Mythic Combat Tactics.
One rule:
Survive the story long enough to rewrite the ending."
He slams the trident into the ground.
Reality fractures.
Suddenly we're not six students in a ring.
We're six archetypes in six different legendary battles at once:
- Seras is the Sun Goddess besieged by ten thousand shadow dragons.
- Lucian is the Last Dragon defending a dying world from falling stars.
- Kayo is the Trickster Fox trying to steal the moon from a jealous god.
- Rowan is the Mortal Scholar who must out-argue Death itself.
- And I… I am the Storm That Ends Empires, standing alone on a battlefield where both sides have already lost.
But Remy…
Remy is standing in the exact spot his grandmother's porch used to be.
Except the porch is burning.
The entire Caddo Nation sky is on fire, red dirt turned to glass, stomp-dance grounds cracked open, ancestors screaming in languages that are dying.
And in the center stands a version of Remy (older, hollow-eyed, wearing a crown of coyote bones and human teeth).
Future-King Remy.
He has become the thing every elder ever warned him about:
the Coyote who finally took too much trickster power and lost his pack.
He looks at present-Remy with dead gold eyes.
Future-Remy (voice like dry graves):
"You were always going to leave them.
You were always going to choose the throne over the storm queen.
Look—
they're already gone."
The illusion tries to show me dead at his feet.
My body broken.
My rings melted.
My board snapped in half.
Present-Remy freezes.
For one heartbeat the entire Crucible Ring feels his fear (cold, sharp, ancient).
Then he snarls (so loud the red sky cracks).
Remy:
"No."
He shifts (not into dire-coyote, but into something new).
A coyote made of starlight and desert wind, eyes still golden, still his.
He charges his future self.
I rip free of my own battlefield and dive straight into his.
I land between the two Remys, Hellebore Mist raised.
Celeste:
"Not happening.
Not ever."
Future-Remy laughs, raises a hand of bone and fire.
Present-Remy and I move together like we've rehearsed this our whole lives.
He becomes wind.
I become lightning.
We strike at the same exact moment (one heartbeat, one promise).
The illusion of the burning nation shatters like glass.
Future-Remy screams as the starlight coyote tears the bone crown off his head and crushes it to dust.
I drive Hellebore Mist through the illusion's heart and speak the only line that matters:
Celeste:
"He already chose.
Every day since we were fourteen.
He chose us."
The fake Remy dissolves into red dirt and gentle rain.
The real Remy lands human beside me, breathing hard, eyes wet but fierce.
Remy (quiet, only for me):
"Never doubted it.
Not for a second."
Thunderstrike's timer hits 00:04.
Across the dimensions I see Seras punch a shadow dragon so hard it turns into sunrise.
Lucian catches a falling star and hurls it back into the sky as a new constellation.
Kayo convinces the moon god that stealing the moon is actually his idea.
Rowan quotes a footnote so obscure Death forgets why it came.
We keep crossing, keep rewriting, keep breaking every legend that was written before we were born.
At 00:03 left on the timer, all six stories collapse into one.
We stand in the center of the Crucible Ring again, surrounded by the smoking remains of six dead myths.
The pedestals are gone.
Thunderstrike takes a slow sip of coffee.
**Thunderstrike:**
"New class record: nine minutes, fifty-seven seconds.
Previous record was twenty-three minutes by a pantheon of war gods who no longer exist."
He salutes us with the coffee mug.
**Thunderstrike:**
"Lesson one:
Myths are just stories that forgot they can be edited.
You six just red-penciled the entire library."
The obsidian floor beneath us etches six new names in glowing violet:
BLACKBIRD · COYOTE · SUN · THUNDER · FOX · SCHOLAR
Permanent.
The class erupts into cheers (some students are literally on fire with excitement).
Thunderstrike just nods once and walks away, trident dragging behind him like he's already bored.Thunderstrike lowers his coffee mug in a slow salute.
Thunderstrike:
"Some legends try to write your ending for you.
You just burned the page and wrote a better one."
He turns and walks away without another word.
Class dismissed.
We leave the ring shoulder to shoulder.
Remy's hand finds mine, fingers laced tight.
Some battles aren't about winning.
They're about refusing to lose who you are.
Second period is over.
And the Crucible just learned a new definition of unbreakable.
Second period is over.
We walk out dripping legend-blood and victory.
Two classes down.
And the Crucible Ring just gained six new scars it will never forget.
College is officially ridiculous. And the Students here are all special some are still mortals some are somewhere between and some border on god level strength and power. This isn't a typical college and some are creatures of mythology.
I love it.