Alex landed hard, his right knee crashing into him right underneath his ribcage, knocking the wind out of him. A lesser student would have collapsed, but he willed himself to his feet, while also bypassing his muscles to make his lungs expand and contract via magic while his diaphragm recovered. Still, he must have looked like he was struggling, because the girl was staring at him. Thanks to the darkness of the night, he couldn't see her expression, but he was pretty sure he'd feel ashamed if he could.
The girl slunk to the corner of the dormitory, poking her head around the corner, checking for anyone who might see them. After a second, she waved Alex on, and the two sprinted across the main boulevard that divided campus, vaulting over the pair of train tracks at its center. With every step, Alex feared that someone, somewhere, could hear his boots coming down on the bricks, but the girl either knew better, or just didn't care.
This continued several times, dashing out of and into cover, checking sight-lines, and occasionally waiting for a security officer to patrol past their intended path. Alex hadn't the slightest idea of where they were going, and he doubted the girl would answer if he asked. But eventually, they reached the eastern edge of campus, and they walked out to the beach.
Arcadia was situated in the dead center of a massive crater lake, formed sometime in the Midnight Age, as far as anyone could tell. Snow-tipped mountains ringed their domain, thrown up in evidence of the ancient upheaval that transformed this place from a city back into nature, hundreds of years ago. The lake was almost always still – sure, when storms rolled in, you'd have waves, but most of the year, it'd make nothing more than gentle lapping at the shores as the Earth rotated. Here, on the familiar side, there was just grass softly dropping into a sandy beach well beyond the furthest buildings on campus, and on the other side, more familiar to Alex and Max than most, was a vast forest, stretching up to the mountains. The only variation in this circular geography was, of course, the umbilical cord of the School of Arcadia – The bridge leading due east, across the lake and into the City of Arcadia, a metropolis of a hundred thousand running along the course of a river, a highway, and a rail line, which would make a fine site for a city even if there wasn't the most important magical facility in all of Christendom relying on it.
Alex had never seen the city, not up close, but from afar, the twinkling lights, unordered and chaotic, had a certain appeal, laced with a strange anxiety that he, once upon a time, had had a hard time shaking. After focusing on that, he'd begun noticing how the stars themselves would fall in and out of favor, and, well, that was a rough month.
The girl stepped out onto the frozen lake. In the winter months, it froze solid, enough to walk over. Sometimes, professors held classes out on it, just to entertain their students a little more than usual, but surely, without access to some kind of boat, the girl wouldn't try to-
She reached down to her shoes, uttered a few inaudible words, and pressed them into the ice, sliding slightly when she did.
“You know how to make a heat knife?” she asked. Alex followed her lead, commanding a thin layer of air to compress into a solid rail underneath his right boot, which dug into the snowy beach. Then, he channeled the concept of heat onto its edge, drawing from the warmth of his body to form a heat knife. “Yeah,” he said, not quite understanding her purpose, but reasoning that whatever she was up to, it was better for a level-headed student to be shadowing her.
“You know how to skate?” She was staring Alex down. He could lie. It was wrong, but maybe it would turn her back at this junction – a little rebuff, at the right moment, could do a lot.
He nodded. Lying was wrong. Or at least, it felt wrong.
With that, the girl enchanted her other shoe, and on a razor-sharp edge of heat, she skated across the ice, spinning around to face him just before he passed out of range of her concealment spell.
She was lucky he was good at this.
He made a heat knife on his left boot, and stepped out onto the ice. For good measure, Alex infused a little bit of extra strength into his legs, and the two of them skated off into the night.