The three days following the sounding of the Clarion Bell were the quietest in the recorded history of Valmere Academy. It was a heavy, suffocating silence—the kind of stillness that settles over a forest just before the snow begins to bury it for good.
The Ministry guards remained at their posts, but the air had gone out of them. They were no longer an occupation force; they were statues in red and black, standing at attention but refusing to meet the eyes of the students they had spent a week starving. Lord Blackwood had been confined to the very administrative office he had used as his command center, his mana-repeater confiscated and his authority suspended by the ringing of the Bell.
