Chapter Seven: The First Flight
"There's another one," Headmaster Ashvane said, staring at the map spread across his desk, his voice unsteady in a way Talia had never once heard from him. "Whatever woke beneath Ashcinder Mountain, it isn't alone. The old records were wrong. There were always two."
Talia gripped the edge of the desk, feeling the floor tilt beneath a truth she hadn't braced herself for at all.
That was an hour after the emergency assembly. First, there was the assembly itself, and the careful, watered-down explanation the academy offered four hundred frightened students.
Headmaster Ashvane had stood before the assembled school that morning with a composure Talia now recognized, having seen him unguarded the night before, as a performance considerably more effortful than it looked. He had explained, in the same careful, clipped tones the history masters used for the Catastrophe itself, that a minor geological disturbance had been detected in the Ashcinder range, that proctors were investigating, that classes would proceed as scheduled, and that panic served no one.
The hall had not fully believed him. Talia had watched the murmurs ripple outward from the front rows toward the back, students trading half-remembered fragments of history lessons about sealed places and forbidden bloodlines, none of them quite bold enough to voice the theories aloud in front of proctors but all of them clearly thinking the same uneasy thoughts. Even Isolde, seated stiffly among the Elite rows with an expression carefully arranged into polite attention, had caught Talia's eye once across the crowded hall, a single raised eyebrow asking a question neither of them could answer yet.
He's lying by omission, Talia had thought, watching him from her place near the back of the hall, Simon tense beside her, Isolde and Alexander both conspicuously present among the Elite rows despite the previous night's exhaustion written plainly on all their faces. He knows more than he's saying. I'd bet the pendant on it.
She had been right. A summons had found her within the hour, delivered by the same clipped-voiced messenger from two nights before, and this time she hadn't bothered rehearsing excuses on the walk up the tower stairs. Ashvane had been waiting with a map already unrolled across his desk, old and hand-annotated, marking the Ashcinder range in a detail no official academy record would have preserved.
"Sit," he'd said, without his usual weary courtesy this time, urgency replacing it entirely. "I need to know exactly what you're protecting, Talia, and I need to know now, because I no longer have the luxury of letting you choose your own timeline for trusting me. The smoke changes everything, and I would rather learn what we're dealing with from you directly than piece it together too late from a proctor's frightened report."
She had told him. All of it, this time, the egg and the loft and the bell tower and the small, trembling creature currently hidden in a groundskeeper's shelter half a mile into the forest. She had expected, even now, some flicker of the fear she'd braced for since the very first night, some flash of the charter's cold language about immediate expulsion. It never came. Ashvane had listened without interrupting, his expression cycling through something that looked almost like relief buried beneath the mounting dread of the morning's other news.
"A hatchling," he murmured, when she finished. "Bonded, properly, through choice rather than force. That is precisely the variable the old records never accounted for." He rose from his desk, moving to the map with the sudden, restless energy of a man who had spent decades waiting for a piece of information that had just, finally, been handed to him. "Forty years I have wondered whether the old accounts my father left behind were accurate, or simply the fevered imaginings of a man who never fully recovered from what he witnessed. I confess I had begun to hope they were the latter."
"What did his notes say."
Ashvane did not answer immediately. He traced one weathered finger along the mountain's ridgeline instead, and that was when his voice had changed entirely.
"There's another one," he said, staring at the map, his voice unsteady in a way Talia had never once heard from him. "Whatever woke beneath Ashcinder Mountain, it isn't alone. The old records were wrong. There were always two."
Talia gripped the edge of the desk, feeling the floor tilt beneath a truth she hadn't braced herself for at all.
"Two Tyrants," she said slowly. "Zeus, and."
"And the one responsible for the Catastrophe itself, if my father's private notes are accurate, which I have spent forty years hoping they weren't." Ashvane's finger stopped over a small, hand-inked symbol near the mountain's northern face, a mark Talia didn't recognize from any official cartography she'd ever studied. "The creature that razed those villages a century ago was never destroyed, whatever the official record claims. It was sealed. Grief-maddened and uncontrollable after its bond-master's murder, too dangerous to approach and too significant to kill outright, so the survivors buried it instead, deep beneath the mountain, and built an entire education system on top of the lie that it was simply gone."
Talia thought of Zeus, small and trusting and barely a week old, and tried to imagine what a century of grief might do to something built along the same lines, given enough time and enough darkness to fester in.
A century of grief, sealed alive under a mountain, Talia thought, feeling something cold settle into her chest. And now something has disturbed that seal.
"How does a seal like that fail after a hundred years," she asked. "Did something disturb it, or did it simply wear thin on its own."
"I don't know yet. My father's notes describe the sealing ritual in detail, but nothing about its expected duration, as though the men who built it either believed it eternal or simply didn't dare imagine it wouldn't be." Ashvane's expression darkened. "Either possibility troubles me. If it wore thin naturally, we have no way of knowing how long we have before it fails completely. If something disturbed it deliberately, then we have a considerably more immediate problem than geology."
"What does that mean for Zeus," she asked, the only question that actually mattered to her in that moment.
"It means the timeline I hoped we had just collapsed considerably." Ashvane straightened, some of his usual composure reasserting itself now that the worst of the confession was finally spoken aloud. "A newly bonded pair, however unprecedented, is not yet strong enough to face what's stirring beneath that mountain. But you are, I suspect, the only bond in a hundred years capable of eventually reaching it at all. Which means we no longer have the luxury of a slow, careful introduction to what you are. Zeus needs to fly, Talia. Properly, not accidentally up a bell tower in a panic. And you need to learn what your own Resonance can actually do, before whatever's under that mountain finishes waking up entirely."
"You make it sound like I'm supposed to fight it eventually."
"I make it sound like exactly what I fear, which is that no one else currently can." Ashvane's expression softened, just slightly, the closest thing to an apology she'd seen from him yet. "I take no pleasure in saying that to a sixteen year old I only just finished handing her mother's pendant to. But I would be doing you a far greater disservice by pretending otherwise."
She found Alexander waiting outside the tower when she finally emerged, his expression already braced for whatever she was about to tell him, and it took less time than she expected to relay the headmaster's revelations, the two of them cutting across the training yards toward the forest path at a pace just short of running.
"A second Tyrant," Alexander repeated, processing it as they walked. "The actual one from the Catastrophe. Still alive."
"Sealed, not destroyed. And apparently no longer entirely sealed, if that smoke is any indication." Talia pushed a low branch aside as they entered the tree line, the Hollow's familiar clearing coming into view ahead. "Ashvane thinks Zeus and I need to learn what we're actually capable of. Starting today."
"And Isolde and Simon?"
"Meeting us there. I sent Isolde a note through a first-year she apparently bribes for exactly this purpose. Efficient, in a slightly alarming way." Talia allowed herself a small, tired smile despite everything. "Simon's bringing food. He said panic makes him hungry, and I didn't have the heart to argue."
They found Zeus exactly where they'd left him, curled in the groundskeeper's shelter's shadowed doorway, and the moment he caught sight of Talia he was up and moving, considerably steadier on his feet than he'd been even yesterday, some rapid, unnatural growth already visible in the length of his limbs and the new, sharper definition along his jaw. Even the shelter itself looked smaller around him than it had the night before, as though the old stone walls had quietly begun losing an argument they hadn't realized they were having.
Simon and Isolde arrived only minutes later, Simon breathless from jogging the last stretch of forest path with a sack of stolen kitchen bread slung over one shoulder, Isolde considerably more composed but no less quick to take in the scene, her eyes widening slightly at the visible growth in Zeus's frame since she'd last seen him only hours before.
"He's bigger," Isolde said flatly. "Considerably bigger. Is that normal."
"Nothing about any of this has been normal since the moment he hatched," Talia said. "I don't see why growth spurts should be the exception."
He's growing faster than any bestiary described, Talia thought, watching him bound across the clearing toward her. Whatever's happening under that mountain, it's speeding up more than just its own timeline.
"Show me what you've got, then," she said aloud, crouching to meet him at eye level, feeling something settle and steady in her chest the moment his amber gaze found hers. "Whatever instinct made you climb that tower last night, I think it's time we actually understood it, instead of just panicking about it."
Zeus chuffed, low and eager, and backed up several paces across the clearing's open ground, his stunted wings, no longer quite so stunted, spreading wide on either side of him with a confidence that hadn't existed even a few hours earlier. Talia felt something answer inside her own chest at the sight, an odd, tugging pull she hadn't noticed before, as though some invisible thread connecting them had simply grown taut enough, finally, to feel.
Alexander caught her arm before she could follow him further into the open. "Talia. Whatever happens in the next few minutes, remember that you're the one who taught him trust, not fear. That matters more right now than getting this technically correct."
She nodded, throat tight, and turned back to find Zeus already crouched low, muscles coiled, amber eyes fixed on hers with an intensity that felt, for the first time since the egg first cracked, less like a frightened hatchling and more like something ancient finally beginning to remember exactly what it was built for.
Simon had gone very quiet beside Isolde at the tree line, the sack of bread forgotten in his hands, and even Isolde's usual composed detachment had slipped into something wide-eyed and unguarded, both of them watching with the specific, breathless stillness of people witnessing something they instinctively understood they'd remember for the rest of their lives.
He launched himself skyward, and the wind of his first true wingbeat knocked Talia flat onto the clearing grass, laughing and terrified in equal, overwhelming measure, watching the small, bronze-black shape climb higher above the treeline than either of them had ever imagined possible after only five days of life. Somewhere above her, distant now but unmistakable, she heard him call out once, wild and triumphant, and felt the sound land somewhere deep in her own chest as though it had always belonged there, waiting only for him to finally learn how to say it.