Ten Minutes to Midnight - The Ashes of the Alchemical Fire
The morning sun over the
Ashes of the
The morning sun over the
Citadel broke through the mountain mist, casting a harsh, flat glare across the smoking, blackened skeleton of what had been the upper library annex.The air still tasted of burnt sulfur, wet ash, and the bitter, chemical undertone of scorched paper.Felix
Lin stood near the shattered stone foundation, his
Vanguard cadet boots crunching over calcified mortar and charred splinters of cedar.
His ribs throbbed with a deep, dull ache—a lingering souvenir from
Xu’s willow branch and yesterday’s mad dash through the burning coal chute—but he barely noticed.A few paces away,
Vice-Professor
Ann stood in silence, her dark grey coat smelling faintly of smoke, her eyes fixed on a scorched iron floor-grate that led down into the building’s dry cellar.Beside her,
Torin crossed his thick, scarred arms over his chest, his single flint-grey eye unblinking as he poked at a pile of dark, glassy slag with the toe of his iron-shod boot.”It wasn’t an accident,” Torin rasped, his gravelly voice cutting cleanly through the quiet morning air.
He knelt, scooping up a handful of the blackened residue, and rubbed it between his thick fingers. “An ordinary alchemical furnace rupture leaves a wide splatter pattern.
The glass flasks fragment outward.
This… this slag is concentrated in a tight, concentric circle right beneath the primary historical archive racks.”Vice-Professor
Ann crouched beside him, her pale fingers tracing the edge of the iron grate.”Someone used a dual-phase thermal compound,” Ann said, her voice tight and devoid of its usual academic composure. “A small, stable charge of black-powder derivative mixed with volatile mahrish phosphorus.
It doesn’t flare up immediately—it burns cold and silent for twenty minutes until the timber reaches ignition point, then vaporizes completely, leaving no physical evidence of the detonator.”Felix kept his mouth shut, standing a respectful distance back, but his mind was racing.*Sabotage.*A deliberate, calculated fire designed to wipe out specific historical records.
Not a careless freshman dropping a flask of solvent during a medical elective.He remembered the stele in the
Frank’s warnings about the fragility of the empire’s borders, the secret ciphers, and the deep, invisible fissures running through the
Citadel’s history.Torin straightened up, his single eye sweeping over the smoking ruins before locking onto
Felix, who was standing quietly by the broken wall.”You,” Torin said, his voice dropping into a flat, dangerous register. “You were the first freshman to break the police perimeter yesterday afternoon.
Ann even pulled out the survivors, you were down in the coal chute.
How did you know where to look,
Lin?”Felix felt a momentary, cold prickle run down the back of his neck, but his face remained completely smooth, masking his thoughts behind that familiar, unbothered merchant-son expression.”I didn’t know where to look,
Instructor,” Felix replied mildly, keeping his hands tucked inside his wide sleeves. “I just saw the blue smoke rolling across the courtyard, remembered the freshman registry said there were students cataloging the south wing, and panicked like everyone else.
I just got lucky with the coal chute.”Torin stared at him for three long, agonizing seconds.
The veteran’s gaze felt heavy, as if he were trying to strip away
Felix’s skin and check the double-chambered
Aether core ticking beneath his ribs.Then, with a short, rough grunt,
Torin turned away, kicking a piece of charred timber out of his path.”Luck doesn’t keep a boy alive in a burning cellar,
Lin,” Torin muttered, his back to him. “Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut.
Someone in this academy is trying to burn our history to the ground—and next time, they might not leave an empty room for you to run into.”