“Sorry, but I don’t think we really work out as a couple. Can we go back to being friends?”
Elle Kuang swallows and nods, trying to hide her shock. She exchanges a few mumbled courtesies with her now ex-girlfriend, not wanting to burden her with the hurt welling up in her heart. As the blonde woman turns away, the short university freshman picks a random direction and walks away from her.
Don’t lose your head over a breakup, she thinks to herself.
Ten minutes later, her head is nearly bitten off.
***
Fuck off already! A half-nymph watches a corrupted gryphon perching on a stone pillar, its wings twitching every few moments.
For leagues upon leagues, sunken structures litter the sand dunes, dropped by the Great Calamity. She doesn’t know which wave they came from and doesn’t care either.
Impatient on her own pillar, the young woman concentrates on the ground below where numerous monsters roamed, spaced apart from one another. With a single thought, she projects the image of the sand moving, as if someone carelessly limped through it while invisible.
The gryphon leaps off its perch, and the tall half-nymph takes the pillar in a single bound.
With wind blowing through her short, grimy hair, Serena smirks at her own ingenuity.
***
Thank god, it’s done. Oliver Idowu slings his bag over his shoulder as he exits his evening polisci class on the formation of states in the developing world. He actually likes the class, but he’s far more happy to spend the night celebrating his last day with his girlfriend Willow.
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One more month before graduation, and then he’s off to law school.
The dark-skinned man smiles at the thought, adjusting the strap of his laptop bag to a more comfortable position. Heading over to the library where Willow waits, he admires the gentle glow of street lamps against the old, brown buildings.
It feels kind of romantic.
Or rather, it does until his phone starts blaring. Heart pounding from the sudden sound, Oliver curses as he retrieves his phone from his pocket.
Its screen reads, EMERGENCY ALERT.
***
Thermal Harovel is an academic not a combatant. He repeats this in his head even as snarling beasts chase him through the library ruins.
“...Frozen winds beget frozen blood. No life can escape winter. No winter can escape the passage of time.”
Table. Bookshelf. Window. That’s his path.
Wood and glass smash behind him.
The blond man jumps onto the table. His foot catches on the edge of a fallen bookshelf. He tumbles to the floor with a thud.
“Your ice will not thaw with the seasons,” Thermal continues with a steady voice despite his throbbing ankle and bottom. He cannot afford the backlash from a broken incantation.
Three snarling Fenn wolves approach. Black veins pulse on their faces bare of fur.
“It will shatter as a hammer does to glass.”
His spellbook floating next to him glows. Warm flesh turns to ice. Those jaws filled with teeth—those muscles strong enough to rend a man in half—those hateful eyes all crumble like a child kicking through a snowman. All in an instant.
Thermal sighs as energy leaves his already exhausted body. As soon as the spell completes, his spellbook’s currently opened pages burn to ashes, revealing more written pages. Cold seeps into his body, knitting his wounded flesh back together.
As a scholar, the pale array arcanist prides himself in prioritising safety over efficiency. Who cares if a spell takes longer so long as there’s a lower chance of burning his voice box to cinders? That being said…
Note to self, rework arrays so they take less than three minutes to cast.
***
Somewhere else, a beast with an alligator-like face closes its jaws.
Hungry. So hungry.
Nothing can satiate it for long. The warm aura and bloody meat hold its attention for only a moment.
It wants. It wants power; it wants love; it wants satisfaction; it wants peace; it wants revenge.
Anything to fill its stomach and keep its mind off the void.
The human between its jaws howls once more. Then he doesn’t speak again.