The Villain Professor's Second Chance

Night laid a film of pewter over the cliffs, muting even the restless hiss of the distant breakers. Draven and Korin stood together at the very edge, boots scuffing grit that wanted to slide into black infinity. Frost-starred clouds drifted low enough to snag on jagged promontories, turning every breath into a faint plume that vanished before it could warm the air.

Between them, the Lantern hung on Korin's chest like a captive sun. Its surface—usually a steady topaz—throbbed with anxious light, each pulse brighter than the one before. The pattern reminded Draven of a heart forced to sprint beneath too-thin ribs. He counted the beats, noting the erratic skips.

Then, without warning, the glow collapsed inward. Glass went clear, metal borders dulled. The Lantern looked hollow, as if someone had unstitched the light from inside.

Korin sucked in a breath sharp enough to sting. "I see him," he said, eyes gone wide and faraway.

Draven's attention sharpened the way a blade narrows on a whetstone. "Orvath?"

Korin nodded, though the motion seemed borrowed. "He's walking the seafloor—stride for stride—like the water barely notices him." His voice drifted, a man describing dreams he feared might be prophetic. "Memory-wraiths trail him. They're shaped like… shadows that forgot their owners. I can hear them whisper names—names I almost recognize but can't place."

Draven angled his body, placing one silent step closer to Korin, ready to steady him if the vision stole his balance. "What else?"

Korin's pupils tightened. "He wants Sylvanna."

Wind curled around them, carrying a briny chill that tasted of old bones. Draven's knuckles pales around the cliff-face ledge. "Why?"

"He says her storm-essence is the key," Korin murmured, eyelids fluttering. "If he catches her alive…"

"Then the Gate opens from within," Draven finished, voice flint-dry. He felt the words click into the larger mechanism of his thoughts—another gear turning, another deadline tightening.

The Lantern flared once, blinding white. Korin staggered. Draven caught his elbow, grounding him until color crept back into the young man's cheeks. When the glow settled, the Lantern returned to its usual amber, as if nothing had happened. Yet Korin trembled, shoulders hitching with silent aftershocks.

Draven did not offer hollow comfort. Instead he turned his gaze seaward, mapping the unseen path Orvath would have taken beneath the waves, calculating velocity, distance, intent. Storm-essence—Sylvanna's lightning-tuned core—had just become more valuable than any siege engine.

He filed the fact like a blade.

At the stroke of midnight, the camp gathered to surrender Captain Marrin Bright-Helm to flame. Torrches studded the perimeter, but most of the light came from the pyre itself—a tripod of driftwood logs whitewashed by salt, stacked so tall the top licked at the stars. Marrin lay upon it as though carved for such a bier: helm resting above her breastplate, sword across mailed hands still locked in final duty.

Vaelira stood vigil beside the fire-pit. In her grasp fluttered a fist-length tassel—deep crimson, fraying at the edges—from Marrin's personal banner. Wind dragged at her officer's coat, snapping the braid of her hair against steel spaulders, but she did not flinch.

"Water forgets blood," she declared, voice rough but resolute.

Across the circle soldiers repeated the line, each echo lower than the last, as though grief itself knelt with them.

"Water forgets blood—"

"—cloth keeps story," they finished together.

Draven held to the shadows, arms folded, expression carved from moonstone. He watched fire chew through salt-soaked wood, watched the helm glow cherry-red until details of gilding blurred. Sparks whirled up like tiny souls trying to find constellations willing to shelter them.

He inclined his head barely a breath. "Ash to wind, memory to steel. Let no cry be unheard," he whispered in a tongue older than any kingdom present—a prayer from the mountain Cradle where swords were named at birth.

Sylvanna stood two paces away, silver-white hair flickering blue in the flamewash. "That's… from the Cradle," she murmured, surprise softening the subtle severity of her features.

Draven offered no reply. Words were currency; he spent none needlessly.

Beyond the funeral glow, Azra and Helyra set up their temporary forge beneath a ragged awning. Seismic choristers—polished quartz rods as tall as a grown wolfhound—lay on a canvas tarp. Helyra adjusted brass clamps around each crystal, checking etched runes aligned with compass markings. When she tightened a bolt, the rod rang a faint, eerie F-sharp that vibrated in the chest.

Azra rolled her shoulders, sleeves soot-smudged to the elbows. "Like singing over a scream," she muttered, and sparks leapt from her rune-hammer as she struck the next binding ring home.

Draven arrived silent as afterthought. He set a small casket on the trestle. Inside lay eight manacles, each forged of silver threaded with black electrum, filigree runes bright as frost. Cool lantern-light traced latticework designed to short any parasitic memory-leech that tried to piggyback onto a wearer's nervous system.

He gestured. "These bind lightning, mock specters, and ground possessed skin. Wear them or regret the omission."

Sylvanna approached, curiosity a glimmer behind her storm-pale eyes. "Including you?" She nodded toward the spare manacle nested apart from the others.

Draven snapped it around his own wrist without ceremony. The clasp locked with a sure, satisfying click. "Insurance," he said.

The flicker of amusement that played at Sylvanna's mouth almost qualified as a smile. "Paranoid or prepared?"

"Yes," he answered, letting the single syllable settle like iron dust.

She turned to her workstation—a long plank rested across two stone blocks, strewn with arrow shafts of pale ashwood. Each shaft bore engraved sigils that spiraled toward the arrowhead, meeting barbs fashioned from rare storm-glass. She selected a blunt practice tip first, fitting nock to string. As she drew, the markings glowed cyan and a low musical hum—a perfect E-flat minor triad—vibrated into the night.

Soldiers on nearby watchposts paused, mid-yawn, gazes tilting skyward as though expecting thunderheads.

Sylvanna centered her breath, eyes reflecting torchflame and something wilder. A heartbeat held. Then she released.

The arrow streaked outward, trailing a filament of faint silver haze. It struck the cliff face a hundred yards away with a crack like sheet ice splitting. Dust cascaded, and the ground underfoot shivered, rattling buckets and helmets across the camp.

She fired one.

The cliff shook.

They marched at dusk, just as the last streaks of ochre slipped off the sky and the cold lavender of approaching night bled in. A magnesium-bright sliver of moon clung to the horizon, its reflection quivering in the puddles left by the outgoing tide. Draven led the vanguard with Vaelira half a pace to his right, the pair flanked by two rows of scouts who carried long sticks of chalk and walked as delicately as glassblowers in the cooling room.

The seabed was bared—an immense, silent plain where the ocean had peeled itself back. Ribs of ancient coral jutted out like shattered cathedral arches; fossilized trilobites pressed together in carpets so dense that every step crunched softly. Some of the spiraled shells exhaled faint hiss-words in forgotten dialects, tones too brittle to translate. The wind pressed sand across those relics in thin veils, and the air itself felt wrong—dry to the point of tasting dusty, as though the seabed were a gargantuan tomb whose lid had just been lifted.

Every twenty paces a scout dropped to one knee and chalked a crisp line across the ground—bright swaths on the ghostly surface that warned of hollows. Draven's eyes flicked from mark to mark, mapping them to the pulse of distant tremors. Beneath the thin crust he sensed chambers of powdery silt, pockets waiting to become sudden graves. He said nothing aloud; the speed of his assessment lived behind his pupils, tightening and relaxing like a fencer's grip.

A child soldier—no more than sixteen summers—shuffled too far left of a chalk strip. She wore a satchel heavier than her frame and kept ducking her head as though expecting reprimand. Draven spoke her name once, gently but without softness, and jerked his chin toward the safe lane. She corrected course, cheeks burning even in the dimming light. He noted her timid gait and revised his mental risk ledger accordingly.

They pressed on. Torches remained shuttered to preserve night sight; the army moved by the thin blue sheen radiating from the huge amplifier mirrors on the far ridge. That glow, pulsing every few heartbeats, cast moving shadows of skeleton fish across the sand. In the hush, armor buckles clicked like distant metronomes, and somewhere a loose canteen cap rattled with every step until its owner silenced it, face red with shame.

Then, without warning, the earth sang.

The note started low—subaudible—but Draven felt it in his feet, a thrum like a heartbeat amplified tenfold. Quartz fins half-buried in sand began to hum, resonating in sympathy. Scouts froze. Vaelira's eyes widened, pupils shrinking. Helyra, ten strides behind, whipped out her tuning fork and frowned at the perfect C-sharp that vibrated through the prongs.

A squad on the leftmost flank drifted past their chalk boundary, lured by what they took for firmer footing. Draven opened his mouth to call them back, but the ground answered first. It buckled inward with a muffled roar, collapsing into a maw of gray dust. Three soldiers vanished—one swallowed whole, two dropping half-in, grappling at the rim. A fourth lurched sideways, knees folding.

Draven moved, all calculation stripped to pure velocity. He snatched a coil of rope from a mule's rig, hacked the end free with a single flick of his left blade, and ran. The sand slid under him, but his balance held. He drove his heels into a ridge, braced, and hurled the line toward the nearest trapped soldier—a youth with a scalp braid bright against the gloom. The rope slapped the boy's armored chest; frantic hands latched on.

"Hold!" Draven barked. The command cracked like iron striking flint, louder than drums. Two nearby warriors dashed to his side and anchored the rope around a jag of fossil coral. They hauled in concert—one two three—sinews visible under leather. The boy came free, choking. Sand sloughed from his greaves in waterfalls.

A second soldier's gauntlet emerged. Draven leaned back, wrists burning, pulled her clear as the rim peeled wider. The void exhaled a sulfur stink and a sound reminiscent of distant weeping. The girl stumbled forward onto her knees, retching.

But the third? Only a hand remained above the churn, fingers scrabbling. Then even that slipped away with a soft hiss, like a candle drowned in its own wax. The younger rescued soldier screamed for his sister until his throat rasped. Draven said nothing; his jaw flexed once, the smallest betrayal of tension, and then he pulled the rope tighter, coiling it for reuse.

The column reorganized with bruised efficiency. Vaelira strode among the ranks, voice low but forceful, reminding them why chalk lines existed. Scouts doubled their vigilance, chalk dust turning their gloves ghost-white. No one uttered complaints; grief and discipline wrestled to a stalemate inside each breast.

They advanced up the gradual incline toward the plateau. There the earth hardened underfoot—compressed shale interleaved with rust-red iron seams. Yet unease followed, dogging every boot. When they crested the rise, the plateau spread out under twilight like a weathered shield—flat, open, too easy.

That was where Vostyr's advance detachment waited.