The school received more than a handful of complaints from the permanent residents of Brakket. Most of those complaints were directed at the Elysium Order. The injury of Susie worried the town more than the parents of other students, for the most part.
If the school shut down over all the parents pulling their students, the town would dry up soon after. It was already a parched town. Most people left living in Brakket wouldn’t be able to afford to leave.
Prospects like that scared a lot of people.
All the more reason to keep the ring close at hand. As an instructor, it was Zoe’s first and foremost job to protect her students. Teaching them was a good second. By protecting the students, she’d also be protecting the town.
As the last student filed out, wishing Zoe a good weekend as she went, Zoe headed back to her office. There she sat upon her couch–the same one Nel sat on a mere month before.
Nel looked… alright. In truth, most of Zoe’s focus had been on the demon. From what little she saw, there were no tear streaks nor any harm that Zoe could see. She even smiled once or twice and sported a very happy looking open-mouthed grin when Juliana asked to stay for a few moments.
If Juliana was to be believed, the former nun was very lonely but otherwise doing fine in her service to Ylva. They apparently had a long talk before her questions with Ylva. She didn’t speak of what questions she wanted to ask. The only real information Zoe had about their meeting was about Nel.
Zoe wasn’t opposed to meeting with Nel every so often. It seemed entirely too cruel to leave her with nothing for company but a demon. The demon herself was the biggest holdup in agreeing to let Juliana meet Nel.
Fondling the ring in her pocket, Zoe thought,
Mentally, Zoe worried about possible corruption. Tempting and encouraging her students towards darker paths was simply unthinkable.
Of course, Eva herself probably counted as a worse corrupting influence than Ylva.
Zoe sighed, resting her head in her hands with her elbows on her desk. Things were getting so out of control. First it had just been Devon, or so she thought. Then it turned out that Eva had her own pet demon.
Now Juliana and Zoe were getting wrapped up in this mess. Juliana had taken to all the aberrations far better than Zoe had. Every little thing that happened grated on Zoe’s conscience.
Coils bound tighter and tighter with every passing day. There was no one to turn to. Wayne had been exceedingly terse since their rather heated discussion the other day. For a long while, Zoe thought he would simply report everyone who had been to Eva’s prison.
He never did.
Instead, Zoe had been given one hard slap against her cheek. Not even for being involved in all the diablery but for not telling Wayne in the first place.
Zoe had half a mind to just get up and go talk to him. She told Wayne the goings on, but she had neglected to mention all her fears and worries. She had put on the strong Zoe Baxter and kept her calm throughout their discussion.
But she couldn’t. Not for a while at least. Zoe maintained office hours for one hour after the final class of the day. Students rarely showed up, but there was always the possibility that today would be different.
Lightly slapping her own cheeks, Zoe straightened up and prepared to work on her lesson plan for the next week.
—
Zoe scratched down a stream of notes in her notebook. Like all of her research projects, Zoe started with a blank tablet. It never stayed blank but this project became ridiculous somewhere along the line. It was getting to the point where she almost needed a new one and not even a week had passed.
At first, Zoe had been extremely hesitant with her experimentation. She only had the one ring and, while she never wanted to meet Ylva again, she didn’t want to risk destroying the ring and offending the demon. Slowly she ramped up her experiment’s intensity.
No matter what she tried, nothing even made the tiniest scratch on the surface of the ring.
Placing it in a pit of the hottest magical fire she could produce did nothing. The parts of the flame that touched the ring simply vanished. It wasn’t so much extinguished as the flame just disappeared.
Ambient heat still forced Zoe to keep a short distance. When the temperature ramped up as hot as Zoe could make it, it reached around two-thousand kelvin. Hot enough to melt steel with heat to spare. Not as hot as Wayne could do, but he was class one, not a lowly class three.
Zoe watched as the ring sat in her kiln. It remained black. Not a hint of the glow expected from molten metal.
