Aria moved through the shadowed stacks of Ashwright Academy's library, the scent of old ink and dust wrapping around her like a shroud. Cold silver lamps flickered overhead, their flames enchanted to burn without heat. Their pale glow illuminated rows of ancient tomes, their cracked spines whispering warnings she could almost hear.
It was quiet here.
Too quiet.
Even time felt hesitant to move.
She pulled out a scroll sealed with brittle wax. The parchment crackled like old bone as she unrolled it across the obsidian reading table. Symbols writhed faintly—ink shifting like something alive beneath the surface.
"This… this is worse than I imagined," she whispered.
A diagram showed a ritual vessel carved from vertebrae, channels bored through bone and filled with sacrificial glyphs. The sigils around it resembled fractured spines, torn souls, and the prison-mark of an Old God.
Her stomach tightened.
Footsteps approached—soft, gliding. The librarian emerged from the dark aisle, an older elf with ink-stained fingers and a gaze heavy with unspoken knowledge.
"Careful, Miss Thorne."
His voice was low, almost reverent.
"Knowledge of the cult is a burden. Many who sought this history walked away changed… or didn't walk away at all."
Aria swallowed hard.
"I have to understand what they're doing. If they're resurfacing again—someone has to stop them."
The librarian's eyes ghosted over the writhing sigils.
"May the academy's light shield you, child. But be warned… some truths cling like tar. Once touched, they never release."
He drifted away, leaving her alone in the cold glow.
Aria leaned closer to the scroll, tracing the outline of a ritual circle. As her finger passed over a segment depicting a shattering spine suspended above an altar, the ink pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
Then—
It latched onto her.
A sudden wave of cold slammed into her skull.
Her vision snapped away.
She stood in a cavern of black stone veined with red, molten fractures. The air reeked of burned marrow and rotting incense. Hooded figures circled an altar, their hands raised in trembling devotion.
A spine—human, cracked, and still dripping—hung above the stone slab, suspended by glowing bone sigils.
A voice rasped from the shadows:
"At mid-cycle… at the turning of the scholar's moon…
the Academy will open its gates.
And we will tear down their chosen saint."
Aria felt something cold wrap around her throat.
A skeletal hand—long, jointed, and wrong—reached from the darkness and brushed her cheek.
"Bring her to me."
The cavern shook. Hooded figures chanted, their voices scraping like knives across stone.
Bone sigils erupted in sickly light—
—fracturing—
—multiplying—
—crawling across the cavern floor toward her.
Aria tried to move.
Tried to breathe.
Tried to scream—
White light cracked through the vision like shattering glass.
Aria gasped, slamming her hands onto the table. The scroll skidded back several inches.
Her breath came fast and weak. Sweat glistened across her brow despite the cold.
She looked down.
The symbols on the scroll had gone still.
Silent.
Lifeless.
But she knew what she saw.
The midterms.
They're planning something during the midterms.
They're coming here.
Her fingers trembled as she rolled the scroll closed.
"I will be ready," she whispered, though her voice shook.
"I have to be."
Because if the cult was coming for her…
…then she wasn't just preparing for exams.
She was preparing for war.