Kael choked on a breath.
Vashen's shadow swayed from the bone-tree, not limp—but twitching. Like it was struggling to remember how to be a person.
"No—" she stepped forward.
Something cracked overhead.
A sound like splitting bark—but wet, too soft for wood. The tree above was growing. Thickening. Veins along its trunk bulged and twisted, pulsing in time with the twin heartbeats—the one she'd heard from the Book, and the other… far older, far deeper, now pulsing beneath the earth itself.
Then came the screams.
Not all the students had fled when the dome collapsed. Some had stayed too long out of shock. Others had arrived late, drawn by the tremors and crimson sky. And a few—just a few—had watched Spandrex's rise and could not look away, fascinated or horrified beyond reason.
They were the first to fall.
Kael turned toward the courtyard.
Students—some younger than her—arched backward, as if yanked by invisible wires. Their mouths opened, eyes wide, and shadows ripped out from under them, tearing away like molted skin. Their physical forms dropped—unmoving, unconscious, or dead.
But what rose… were echoes.
Half-shaped silhouettes, born of glyphs and memory, wrapped in dripping ink. Hollow figures that mimicked their hosts. And then twisted.
One had too many joints in its limbs. Another was shaped like a girl, but crawled on broken elbows, her head twisting full circle to sniff for prey. A boy Kael recognized—Teren, a quiet warding student—now hovered inches off the ground, humming tunelessly, as glyphs circled his body like broken teeth.
And still they came.
From every shadowed surface—arms shot out. Grasping limbs of darkness wrapped around students too slow to run. Some tried to fight—lighting runes, warding sigils—but their glyphs failed mid-cast. Screams rose, turned to gurgles, then fell into silence as they were dragged into the walls, devoured by something vast and hungry.
Only a few escaped.
Kael saw them as flickers in the chaos—children ducking under collapsing beams, leaping over shattered pillars, fleeing toward the deep halls. One girl ran barefoot, blood on her hands from dragging her unconscious twin. An older student screamed a ward chant loud enough to shatter the air—and bought a second of safety for those behind her.
She fell.
The shadows swallowed her whole.
Kael sprinted into the chaos.
Smoke filled her lungs. Heat licked at her shoulders. Veins of glowing red cracked through the walls like a dying heartbeat bleeding through stone.
To her left, a boy barely thirteen clung to a broken column, eyes wide and feral. He trembled as he tried to sketch a rune into the air—but his hand was shaking too hard. Kael dropped beside him.
"What's your name?" she demanded.
He just stared.
She grabbed his wrist. "Look at me. What's your name?!"
"J-Jern," he choked.
"Jern. You're going to run. South archives. The vault door. Glyph-sealed. Do you know it?"
He nodded, barely.
"There are others hiding there. Go. Now."
"But—" he glanced back, toward the main plaza. "Nerel… she was…"
"She's not Nerel anymore," Kael said, voice hard. "Go."
He ran.
Kael turned back—and froze.
The bone-tree had grown again.
More bodies now hung from it. Not just Vashen.
Some were teachers.
Others were students she knew.
Some still twitched.
And beneath it, something stepped forward. Not a shadow. Not a student.
A memory, shaped like a boy. But it wasn't him. It wore Vashen's face, but the way it moved—jerky, too fluid, like smoke trying to remember how bones should bend—betrayed what it truly was.
The voice it spoke with wasn't his, either.
"Kael."
She stepped back.
Its head tilted—eyes empty voids—but its mouth curled in a mockery of a smile.
"The Book remembers."
Then it charged.
She tried to raise a shield glyph—her hand moved on instinct—but the air cracked, shimmered… and shattered.
Too late.
The creature struck.
Darkness slammed into her chest. Cold flooded her lungs. She flew backward, crashing through a rune-wall of brittle blue stone. Glyph shards spun through the air like dying fireflies.
Her body hit the ground—and everything went black.
…Kael awoke.
No screams.
No blood.
Just silence. Cold. Thick and still as old breath.
She lay on stone. Not the courtyard. Not the school. This place was too… wrong.
It pulsed.
The ground beneath her had veins—real ones—slowly throbbing, like it was alive. And above her, the sky was not a sky at all. Just a dome of darkness, filled with shifting lines of ancient glyphs that crawled in and out of sight like insects.
She sat up, dizzy.
There were no torches. No lanterns. Just a single flame hovering above an altar, flickering blue-black like it couldn't decide what it was made of.
And standing beside it—
"Spandrex?" she whispered.
But it wasn't him.
Not fully.
Not anymore.