Ten Minutes to Midnight - The Flame-Swept Window
The heat roaring out of the librar
The heat roaring out of the library’s second-floor window felt like an open furnace door.Shards of charred cedar and shattered glass littered the flagstones below, where students and instructors had clustered in a chaotic, coughing mob.
The thick, bluish-grey smoke curled upward into the grey mountain air, smelling violently of burning alchemical tallow and scorched parchment.”Back!
Get back from the perimeter!” Vice-Professor
Ann’s voice cracked over the roar of the fire.Her dark grey
Apothecary coat was scorched at the hem, her hair half-unpinned from her bun, framing a face blackened with soot.
She had just hauled two coughing
Chancery freshmen out through a smoking ground-floor embrasure, shoving them into the arms of a pair of passing
Artifact seniors.Felix stood near the edge of the stone terrace, his wet cloth mask pressed tight against his nose and mouth.
His ribs throbbed a dull, angry rhythm from
Xu’s earlier beatdown, but the physical pain was completely drowned out by the rising panic in his chest.”Five out,” Vice-Professor
Ann panted, coughing violently as she spat out a glob of black phlegm.
She wiped her sleeve across her eyes, staring up at the raging inferno of the upper west wing. “The catalog room… where are the others from the registry desk?”A pale, trembling
Chancery freshman—his uniform half-charred—stumbled forward, grabbing onto
Ann’s sleeve. “Halian!
Halian stayed behind to grab the regional tax ledgers from the iron safe!
The structural beam… it came down right across the back corridor!”Ann’s face went dead white.
She didn’t hesitate.
Aether flared across her skin in a shimmering silver film, and she threw herself back through the smoking window frame without a rope or a safety harness.Seconds stretched like hours.
The roar of the interior flames grew louder, accompanied by the terrifying, rhythmic pop-pop-pop of ancient timbers snapping under extreme heat.Around the courtyard, instructors were converging from the main quad—Instructor
Torin had already arrived, his single eye cold and calculating as he checked the load-bearing beams of the exterior walls, while two
Apothecary professors unreeled a heavy, magic-infused water hose from a stone well.
But water wouldn’t put out a chemical-ether fire fast enough.
Not before a human being ran out of oxygen.Felix’s pulse hammered against his ribs.Three minutes, a cold, clinical voice in his head whispered. If he’s trapped under an oak beam in that blue smoke, he’ll suffocate in three minutes.He looked around.
No one was watching him.
Everyone’s eyes were glued to the flaming window frame where
Ann had disappeared.Felix dropped his canvas bag onto the flagstones, took a deep, steadying breath through his wet cloth mask, and reached deep into his mind.He grabbed the green, gear-toothed wheel of the
Knot and twisted.Tock.The world didn’t shatter; it simply lurched backward like a heavy wagon rolling down an incline in reverse.
The smoke sucked back into the burning window; the shattered glass flew upward, reassembling itself in mid-air before clicking back into the cedar frames; the shouting voices reversed into a high-pitched, unintelligible chatter.Felix blinked, his vision stabilizing.The time was ten minutes earlier—just as the second explosion rocked the library annex, and long before
Vice-Professor
Ann had pulled out the first five survivors.He didn’t wait for the panic to spread.
He didn’t wait for
Vice-Professor
Ann to issue orders.While the rest of the students and instructors were still frozen in shock by the initial blast,
Felix tore across the courtyard, his boots pounding against the stone.
Aether core flooded his muscles with a sudden, desperate surge of raw energy, entirely ignoring the bruised ribs in his chest.He didn’t head for the main entrance where the fire was thickest.
He sprinted toward the narrow, stone-framed coal chute on the western flank of the library—a maintenance drop used to feed the basement furnaces.With a sharp heave, he wrenched the iron cover off its hinges, dropped it onto the dirt, and squeezed head-first down into the dark, smoke-choked crawlspace before anyone in the courtyard even realized he was gone.