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Blue coughed as they crossed the broad dorm hall, their footfalls softened by a soot-stained rug. The air was choked with the acrid afterburn of dark magic, but that isn't what now was working its way into their lungs. As they hacked, they noticed a fine dust permeating the room, and quickly ducked down to avoid it.
"It's fine, it'll all be fine," they thought. "I just have to see them."
Trepidation was rising in their chest, but their will overpowered it, forcing them to carry on, first stooped, then crawling. They passed door after door in varying states of disuse and destruction, guided forward by a sputtering and soft glow from the wand they held aloft, their only light in a thick smog.
Finally, they reached the end of the hall; the rooms on the east side of the building, whose windows had once provided a view over the Junk Heap and, on the horizon, the gathering sheet of shadows. Blue hadn't truly considered the world outside those glass walls until they crashed through them, had never thought anything like the little glimpses of what they'd seen would descend on the academy itself.
But this was no time to get lost in recollection. They had to make sure they were okay.
They had to be okay.
Their arm, shaking, stretched up towards the door's handle. It wasn't exactly as they'd imagined coming back, but they couldn't bear another breath of that vile dust. They fumbled over the handle, finally resting on it and steeling themself before tugging the door open.
A curtain of dust collapsed on them from the room. With what little dexterity afforded them by their position, they sprang back, and glimpsed something silhouetted against the back window. They couldn't look at it. They wouldn't look at it. Their eyes slammed shut, hoping to blot out not the dust but that horrible thing they had seen. Stars swam in their vision as they gasped down stale air in shallow and erratic breaths that tasted like static.
The thing that used to be V stood, wand outstretched in perfect mock of dueling form. Blue hadn't expected them to be fine, but needed to see them, needed to try to undo this curse. But it was folly. It was all folly.
The statue's head was gone. Hat and shoulders precariously balanced together as each of them slowly sloughed away, the rock of the statue little more coherent than wet sand as a gentle breeze from the broken window slowly eroded it, grain by grain. Blue suddenly heard the sound of stone cracking and pushed down the pain to spring into the room, only to see it crumbling apart.
They grasped at the pieces in trembling hands, holding them tight. Cool tears dragged across their face. Each shuddering sob was more dust, just more and more pieces of them that could never be recovered, the gradual end of both -
"-isgrace! Heartbreak! Misfortune!" The wandering voice hummed, each prediction a different note to some cruel melody. "Piteous, truly-"
"Stop... please..."
Blue found their body crumpled on lush grass, lightly graced with dew.
"- hoo? Hmm?"
Blue recognized the figure in front of them. They had just crossed paths this morning, but it seemed like so long ago. Wasn't it? Hadn't it been..?
"What trouble is it that now descends on your heart, hoo? Has prophecy proven painful, as is its prerogative?"
Blue stared up at the masked onlooker with confusion, tears betraying freshly-shed grief.
"Ohh, hum, believe you me, it is never my intention to make that which is destined to become worse grow worse yet by being before it is." The figure spread out their arms, and at once the winds ceased to carry them aloft, odd grey shoes seeing very rare footfall. "If, hoo, there indeed is something, something which has at once transpired, it is not my weaving that makes it so!"
Blue climbed to their feet, staring warily at eye level with that inscrutable, unmoving mask.
"You've a long, long way back home yet, might I wager. Why, hoo, one might imagine you spending months mapping out the paths through the crossroad from here. Yes, even years spent quiescent, should you misjudge the wrong road through. But do not allow a little premonition to dissuade you, hoo hoo. All manner of those shadows will come to pass, in their hour. But it is no good tragedy without the intermission, and perhaps in the afterward-quiet there lies a path to a favorable outcome."
The wizard finally pulled their resolve back together, their defiant sensibilities creeping through like an old treasure unearthed. "Stop. I have to get home."
"Very well, very well, hoo, to you for who this road lies crossed, do not let me impede you! I await your next steps with interest, lie as they may."
The creature kicked back off the ground, and in a flash of gold departed, the mocking mask burned in brief afterimage as Blue turned and marched away down one of the trampled footpaths.