Ilyra had fallen asleep in the medical wing healing Cael.
Her consciousness snapped into place.
Not because of pain.
Because the room fell away.
For a single suspended moment, the medical wing ceased to exist.
The white stone.
The muted glow of ward lights.
The careful murmurs of healers working in practiced rhythm.
All of it peeled back as if it had never been real to begin with.
The ward lights flickered.
Not enough for anyone else to notice.
Just a fractional hesitation in the steady glow, the kind that only registered if you had spent years watching for signs of failure.
The hum beneath the room shifted pitch, like a note held just slightly too long.
Her hands tingled where they rested near Cael's chest.
Not with magic, but with expectation.
And then the room let go of her.
Sound vanished first.
Then weight.
Then time.
She stood somewhere else.
The sky was wrong.
Not dark, but empty.
Devoid of any color.
As if someone had reached up and scraped the color out of it, leaving behind a thin hollow shell stretched too wide.
Just a pale nothing pressing down from every direction at once.
The ground beneath her feet was ash covered stone, fractured and fused together in uneven layers that spoke of heat beyond flame.
Melted.
Reformed.
Broken again.
The surface still carried the memory of violence.
The air did not move.
No wind.
No warmth.
No cold.
Nothing breathed here.
Cael lay in front of her.
Alive.
Burned, yes.
Scarred and broken in ways she could not recognize.
But breathing.
His chest rose and fell shallowly, unevenly, each breath a quiet fight.
His face was drawn tight with pain, lashes fluttering as if caught between waking and sleep.
But unmistakably present.
Relief hit her so fast it nearly knocked her off balance.
"I can fix this," she said.
Patterns formed instinctively in her mind.
Pressure.
Flow.
Continuity.
She shaped the spell the way she always did, careful and deliberate, weaving stability where pain had torn things apart.
Nothing happened.
The magic did not resist.
It simply had nowhere to go.
The ground beneath her hands did not respond.
The air did not carry intent.
Even the light around her refused to bend.
It was like trying to treat a wound on something that did not recognize itself as alive.
Her breath stuttered.
"That is not possible," she whispered.
The words left her mouth without thought, without doubt.
Instinct, not decision.
She dropped to her knees beside him, robes brushing against scorched stone.
Her hands lifted, already glowing faintly.
Not with a shaped spell.
Not with the careful latticework she had been taught to construct.
But with intent.
The pull was there immediately.
Stronger than before.
Her magic leaned toward him like it had been waiting.
Like something inside her had recognized him long before she had.
The sensation settled deep in her chest, steady and insistent.
A wordless yes.
She reached.
And something made her look up.
The horizon was wrong.
What she had taken for distant stone was not still.
It leaned.
Shifted.
Bent.
Towers, or what had once been towers, slanted at impossible angles, their foundations swallowed by the land itself.
Streets had collapsed inward.
Folded, as though the world had grown tired of holding its own shape.
There was nothing.
A silence so complete it felt deliberate.
Intentional.
As though something had erased sound along with life.
Her heart stuttered.
A tight panicked beat lodged in her throat.
"He is out," someone said quietly from her periphery.
The world snapped back.
The medical wing returned in layers.
Stone.
Light.
Breath.
Ilyra blinked hard.
"Sorry… I must have dozed off," she said, looking at Cael, her heart beating too fast.
The burns were gone.
But where they had been, thick dark scars cut across his skin.
Jagged.
Uneven.
Like the damage had been sealed rather than erased.
The blanket hid most of it.
The lighting was low.
No one lingered long enough to study.
Healing wards hummed, steady and satisfied.
Healing did not leave reminders.
This was one of the most fundamental truths of her discipline.
Ilyra stared anyway, her pulse roaring in her ears.
The echo of the vision rang through her bones like a bell struck too hard.
Cael stirred.
His lashes fluttered.
He swallowed, throat working as awareness seeped back in unevenly.
A faint hiss slipped from him as sensation returned.
"Feels like even healing magic took one look at me and backed off," he muttered hoarsely.
Ilyra was at his side instantly.
"No," she said, too fast, too sharp.
"No, that is not. This is not your fault."
He turned his head slightly toward her, eyes squinting as if the effort alone cost him.
"When I tried to heal you," she said carefully, choosing each word as if it mattered, "it was not just your injuries I felt.
Our auras brushed.
And something pulled."
His brow furrowed faintly.
"Pulled how?"
"Like gravity," she said.
"Like your magic and mine caught on each other.
Not resistance."
"To fix me," he said quietly.
"Yes," she replied.
"And something else.
Something that should not have been there."
He let that sit, eyes drifting shut again as exhaustion took its due.
"So," he murmured after a moment, a crooked hint of a smile tugging at his mouth, "either I broke healing magic, or we tripped over something bigger."
Ilyra did not return the smile.
"I do not think healing failed," she said softly.
"I think it answered something that was not my spell."
Cael did not respond.
Sleep claimed him gently this time.
Ilyra did not move.
She told herself it was to monitor him.
To make sure his breathing stayed even.
To catch any sign of relapse before it could turn.
That was only partly true.
The other part was fear.
Because some small traitorous part of her wondered what would have happened if she had pushed harder.
If she had ignored the resistance and forced the spell through anyway.
Ilyra remained seated beside the bed, hands folded tightly in her lap.
Her gaze stayed fixed on the rise and fall of his chest.
On scars that should not exist, hidden now beneath cloth and hushed voices.
Somewhere else in the academy, three others were returning to their breath, their footing, their thoughts.
Each unsettled in ways they could not yet name.
None of them knew why.
Only that, for a fraction of a second, the world had reached out.
And something had answered back.