Chapter 62: Time and Space
The sky above Astaria Academy had forgotten the color of dawn.
Where once the rising sun had painted the towers gold, now there was only the bruised pallor of twilight — a false, stagnant light cast by the crimson haze that hung heavy over the land. The world beyond our walls was dying. The rivers were blackened veins. The forests had withered into skeletal husks. And where cities once stood, only ashen craters now marked the dominion of the Hollowborn.
Magus Mundo was no longer a world. It was a wound.
Astaria had become its final bandage.
The academy’s once-beautiful spires, carved with silver runes and crowned with gardens of lightbloom, were now reinforced with layers of wardsteel and mana conduits. Siege runes lined its perimeter, ballistae jutted from
