“Slut, you got a nice ass!” Stavros yells across the giant cavernous open tower as he’s coming down the massive, wide spiral staircase that winds down through all the floors of the citadel.

It's currently packed full of students going from one class to the next, all of it lit up brightly through stained glass windows. The crowded atrium hushes for a moment and looks around until they realise it’s just Stavros and ignore him.

On the other hand, Rafael on the second floor straightens up from fixing his shoe and already has his middle finger locked and loaded.

“Don’t scream across the fucking halls!” Flick roars from further up the staircase, picking up the pace as she goes down.

Stavros jumps the last few sets of stairs and jogs to catch up with Nicholas who is already retreating. Rafael lifts his bulging bookbag because he’s an absolute nerd -and like always, Stavros brought Rafael as many books as he could fit into his luggage since the Lambros library is well stocked with rare tomes- and hustles after them.

They take a hidden passage behind a false wall and abruptly run into Luca when they pop back out. They’ve gotten used to Luca hunting them down but the jump scare still makes them startle. So the four of them head down to lunch, ignoring the way people walk quickly past, side-eyeing Nicholas.

The Ayads are a powerful family but Haochen Xia is a whole other level and people are whispering behind his back as he passes them.

Nicholas doesn’t mind it so much. He’s friendly with everyone because when he's in the mood for it he just drags people into his orbit, bright and intense, but he's never close. After this many years, people notice that kind of thing; when Nicholas' cursory focus fades and that becomes an uncrossable distance where he doesn't even bother to look at other people in the halls.

He barely even interacts with the other InCore boys in his year - far too tangled up in his best friends to spare a glance for the boring ones who can't keep his attention. So the stares wash over him without passing through.

Things are tangled though, with people saying Haochen has known the Ayads for years, that the person who kidnapped Nicholas did it to use him as a hostage against Haochen. The best rumour is that Luca isn’t a branch cousin but Nicholas’ bodyguard, hired after he won the duelling tournament.

Some of the rumours are sympathetic, most are starting to get mean, but none of it matters. Nicholas knows everyone adores him, they can't stop themselves. All it takes is a smile and joke and they're tripping over their own feet to get closer because isn't Nicholas so funny and clever and isn't everything just so much more exciting around him.

If he put some effort in, they'd be back to loving him by the end of the day instead of all this staring but Nicholas doesn't care enough, not when he’s already drowning in affection from his friends and Luca.

Christos and Haochen have solidified the thought, as unfortunate as that is. Nicholas is so loved, Stavros came back for him. Nicholas is so admired, even the high mage chose him.

People don't say no to Nicholas. Not really, not when he doesn't want them to.

So he doesn’t even bother with these people, and coxes Luca out for a hike instead.

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Nicholas puts his hands on Rafael’s ass and shoves him up the steep incline, Rafael grabbing at roots poking out of the dirt or clawing at the steep steps of boulders as they hike their way up the squat cliff for a good view to enjoy the edge of the island and the vast scenery of the earth far below.

Rafael gets up and then lowers a hand, dragging Nicholas bodily up the large step but then shakes him over the drop. Hearth is scampering around ahead, too short to take the larger climbs but agile enough he can loop around for different paths.

Luca is keeping up well – probably because he isn’t wasting so much time grabbing Rafael’s ass or swinging Nicholas threateningly over a drop because he keeps getting his ass grabbed.

Luca gets up onto the large boulder with Nicholas and Rafael and pauses, looking around. "In my time there's a dead magic zone around here, we should be careful."

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Rafael turns to him in shock. "It doesn't fix itself?"

Luca only sighs.

"We didn't start it," Nicholas begins immediately, kicking at some fallen leaves to clear the way for the next climb. "Look, some fairy shitstick steps out of a portal and sees us while we're camping, then does the whole fairy thing like; ohohoho little boys to eat. And we're like; you just got off the endangered list, are you sure you're ready for this?"

"They are endangered," Luca realises. "Is that - wait, we learned about you in school!"

Hearth bursts back into Stavros further up ahead and leans out over a precarious drop, laughing. "Us? Literally by name?"

"No, no, just that something happened and the population of summer fey went through a sudden drop in..." Luca trails off. "Two years ago from now?"

Nicholas is cracking up so hard he has to sit on the ground before he loses balance and falls down the drop.

Rafael awkwardly pats the dirt off his hands. "We didn't mean to. They started coming through the portal and we tricked them back in with a word game challenge, and then...figured if we put up another portal, facing their portal..."

"It imploded," Stavros says with a sharp grin.

Nicholas wheezes.

"They're not dead," Rafael reassures. "Just stuck in their own pocket dimension because the portal is shut. I'm sure they're fine, they probably have more portals - you know how the fey realm works. The dead magic zone isn't even that big either."

Luca looks off in the distance towards where he knows the zone to be. He opens his mouth to say something but then shuts it with a click of teeth, eyes widening in realisation. "Where is the nearest portal to the surface here?"

"I think it's the one between those two branched tree trunks, from Mongolia," Nicholas offers, panting a bit from his laughter. "You can get Canada if you don't mind climbing a bit further up, it's just around that bend."

"Huh," is all Luca says.

Luca doesn’t follow this up with an explanation so Nicholas shrugs and keeps climbing.

“I’ve been thinking about what kind of animal you could be,” Nicholas muses, grabbing a handhold and boosting up. “Hopefully something small, Thoth can already barely stand up on his hind legs without hitting his head on the ceiling. Oh, you know about the kennel, right?”

“I do,” Luca admits, waiting for Rafael to go up next. “It did seem really small.”

Stavros sighs theatrically, squatting up above and waiting for them to catch up. “It was fine when we were younger, but Thoth got his growth spurt recently and it's so cramped. Like you’ve seen how tall Rafael is now and Thoth is worse. It'll be a nightmare when Rito actually manages to grow."

"I'm getting there," Nicholas snaps, defensive because his mum is so short, there's no way he'll beat Stavros and reaching Rafael is a pipe dream, just look at how short Luca is at nineteen – barely average. "Either way, we try to stay outside most of the time but we can't do it all night every month.”

Luca hesitates. “I...know a place.”

“The old warehouse?” Rafael asks. “Because we tried that, but the housemaker fairies still use it. There’s so many of them infesting the place I think they’re developing a government.”

“Communism?” Stavros jokes.

“If it’s stratocracy we’re fucked,” Nicholas laughs.

Luca shakes his head. “I meant the beacon tower.”

“The three-legged crow is still swooping me every time we see each other,” Nicholas rejects immediately. “I don’t go near that place.”

Rafael furrows his brow. “It needs to be a room we can seal off properly, and silencing charms don't last the whole night so people will hear Thoth if it's too close to hallways.”

“Not the crow Luya, I meant…” Luca opens his mouth, closes it. “Do you know the third, lost guardian of the island?”

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Stavros stares as Luca self-consciously drips a bit of blood on a shallow and small indent in the wall where the third beacon tower is just on the other side.

The citadel has three particularly tall spires called beacon towers, two of which hold a guardian - like the three-legged crow at the top of a tower (that’s still pissed off at Nicholas) or the sleeping leviathan at the bottom of a tower that’s partially sunken into the lake.

No one knows what the third guardian is because it hasn’t appeared for thousands of years but they do know the third beacon tower has been sealed off and there’s no entrance inside.

There's a scraping of stone and Rafael peers through the hole that appears, into darkness. "So there's a cockatrice down there and we're still going to explore? Despite it being able to kill with its eyes. Or its breath. Or really just anything at all because it’s a millennia old?"

"Thoth could take on a cockatrice," Nicholas says encouragingly.

"No. No, I really could not."

“I’m pretty sure it’s sleeping in the staircase so just don’t chip too hard at the stone or you’ll find feathers,” Luca offers.

“Are you high right now?” Stavros asks genuinely.

Luca waves him off. “You’ll understand when we get in there.”

“So we are going in?” Rafael clarifies. “Where there is a cockatrice?”

Nicholas kicks Stavros through the door and tries to push Rafael but gets grabbed and dragged down too. The three of them end up in a pile only a metre in on more stone and it’s fine – until Stavros pats around and his hand goes through a hole and touches something warm and with scales.

Stavros makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat.

“Yeah, I mean don’t kick anything, but it should be fine,” Luca says calmly.

“This sucks,” Stavros declares.

“It’s a fixer-upper,” Nicholas corrects, disentangling himself from the other two and throwing out rapid fire cleaning charms.

“We’re going to die,” Rafael sighs in resignation.