"We cannot stay here," Thomson's declaration slices through the grim tableau. His gaze sweeps over the smoldering ruins, the faces of the shell-shocked survivors. "This place is a grave. The scent of blood and spent power will draw them, or worse, it will draw scavengers. Human or otherwise. We must go."
A few of the younger students start to cry softly at that. The finality of it. Not just leaving, but abandoning everything they have ever known.
"To where?" Michael, the quiet scholar, asks. His glasses are cracked, and a smear of blood mars his temple. "There is nowhere else."
"There is," Thomson contradicts, his tone leaving no room for argument. "There is one place. A sanctuary. A place of last resort. The Order was never just this monastery. We are a network, a hidden web that has spanned centuries. This was the heart, but there are other nodes. Safe houses. Hidden away from the world, forgotten even by most of our own."
He looks at the glyph in his palm again, then closes his fist around it. "One such place exists. Not far. We will go there. We will regroup. We will survive."
There's a murmur of uneasy relief among the survivors. A spark of hope, fragile but real.
Flynn is the one to voice the practical concern. "What supplies do we have? What weapons? We have a handful of Exorcist Candles, a few Lanterns..." His voice trails off. The paltry nature of our arsenal is a stark reminder of our vulnerability.
"And you," Thomson says, looking at Flynn, then at Amelia, then at me. "We have you. And we have this."
He holds up the obsidian glyph again. I feel that same faint, disconcerting pull from it, a note of resonance with the very fabric of the Gloom I now command.
"We leave at once," he commands. "Take only what you can carry. Food. Water. Medical supplies. Anything that looks like a weapon. Be quick. We have less than an hour."
The next fifty minutes are a frantic, desperate scramble through the corpse of our home. We move like ghosts, picking through the belongings of the dead. It feels ghoulish, violating, but Thomson's logic is ironclad. There's no room for sentimentality now. Sentiment is a luxury we can no longer afford.
Amelia directs the others with a calm, focused intensity, her grief locked away behind a wall of duty. Flynn becomes a beast of burden, carrying twice what anyone else can, his face a grim mask. I find myself moving with a strange, detached purpose, my hands finding things I know we'll need—a coil of sturdy rope, a skin of water, a half-empty tin of salves.
My fingers brush against a familiar, cool metal cylinder. An Exorcist Lantern. Not the one from the island—that was lost in the chaos—but another one, belonging to some poor soul who no longer needs it. For a moment, I hesitate. I have no power to activate it. To me, it's just a heavy, useless piece of metal.
Then I remember how the humanoid Dweller had hesitated. How it had reacted to the illusion of Amelia's light. And I sling it over my shoulder. A bluff. A tool for a trickster. It's better than nothing.
As we gather our meager supplies, the reality of our situation settles in. We are a dozen survivors from a massacre. Children, mostly, with two instructors who look as haunted as we feel. We're heading to an unknown sanctuary, with only the clothes on our backs and a few scavenged tools.
We are the last dying ember of the Order of Light.
And the Gloom is waiting for us in the darkness. It's waiting, and it's smarter than we ever imagined.
The finality of our departure is a physical blow. We stand at the monastery gates, what's left of them, and look back one last time. The home I'd always resented, the place I'd always wanted to escape. Seeing it now, a smoldering ruin against the bright morning sky, a cold knot of loss tightens in my gut. It wasn't just a prison. It was a shield. And now it's gone.
"Move out," Thomson's command is devoid of emotion. "Stay together. Stay quiet."
We fall into a tight, wary formation, a small column of fear and grief threading into the unfamiliar wilderness beyond the Order's protected lands. The forest is unnaturally silent. No birdsong. No rustle of small animals in the underbrush. The only sounds are our own ragged breaths and the crunch of leaves under our feet.
We walk for hours, each step taking us further away from the world we knew, deeper into an uncertain future. The sun climbs higher, beating down on us, turning the forest into a humid, suffocating green maze. The fear is a constant companion, a cold knot in my stomach. Every shadow seems to hold a threat, every snapped twig a potential alarm.
But it's not the fear of the unknown that haunts me the most. It's the feeling inside me.
I'm sure I'm imagining it.
I must be.
There's nothing different about me.
It's not as if I can just summon the Gloom, even if it seemed to obey me when it was present.
But it's...
Haunting.
It's a ridiculous feeling, perhaps from my own lack of sleep, that tells me this is somehow all because of me.
That this whole mess is because of me. And that the only way out is...
Somehow...
Me.
My grip tightens on the strap of the Exorcist Lantern on my shoulder. It's a dead weight, a lie I carry. A symbol of a power I don't have. A symbol of something I don't deserve to hold.
Of something that's...
The opposite of me. The opposite of what I am.
A beacon of light.
I am anything but.
"Caden."
Amelia's whisper pulls me from my spiral. She's walking beside me, her green eyes scanning the forest around us with a practiced, wary alertness. "You've been quiet."
I almost laugh at the absurdity of that statement. I'm always quiet. That's my whole deal.
"I'm fine," I mumble, the lie feeling cheap and thin even to my own ears.
She doesn't press, but her gaze lingers on me for a moment longer than necessary. There's a knowing in her eyes, a concern that I find both comforting and unnerving. She knows something is wrong. She doesn't know what, but she knows.
"What's that?"
Flynn's voice cuts through the tense silence from up ahead, where he's walking point with Thomson. He stops, holding up a hand, his body tense as a bowstring.
We all freeze, our collective breath held captive in our chests.
Thomson moves forward cautiously, peering through the dense foliage. "What do you see, boy?"
Flynn points. "There. On the ground."
I strain to see, my heart pounding in my ears. And then I see it.
A patch of pale, off-white goo.
It's not just a random smear. It's a line. A deliberate, drawn line of Gloom, stretching across the forest floor, a few feet wide.
A boundary?
Or another trap? The very word is anathema to everything I know about Gloom Dwellers. They're parasites, predators. They take, they consume. They don't create. They don't build. They don't communicate. Except... the one on the island did.
The humanoid.
Thomson kneels, his expression a mask of grim concentration. He doesn't touch it, but he studies it with a hunter's intensity. "It's fresh. Less than an hour old, I'd wager."
"So they're here?" Leah asks, her small, trembling voice barely audible. Her brother Archie clutches her hand, his face pale.
"No," Thomson says, standing up slowly. "If they were here, we'd be fighting them. And besides..." He glances up at the sky. "The day is too bright for them to do anything by now." That's not quite true. It's just harder for them to manifest and move. But it does offer us some small measure of safety. "...But we must stay on guard. The danger isn't gone." He looks at the line of Gloom again, and I see the muscles in his jaw tighten.
"It's a warning," I say, the words forming in my mind before I consciously decide to speak them.
Everyone looks at me.
"...That. Humanoid one." My tongue feels clumsy as I try to explain. "The one from the island. He was intelligent. He spoke. He... he knew things. He must have planned the attack, and if he did then...that's..."
"Maybe." The Classmaster presses his lips together as he stares down at the Gloom. "...But even if there is one...more intelligent now. There are still mindless beasts. Most of them." He sounds...like he's trying to convince himself of that, more than me. "Be on guard and pick up the pace. It is a long journey, and I don't wish to be caught by Gloom Dwellers on the way."