The storm battered the Crest until the old stones seemed to groan under its weight. By morning, the quad was a wreck of broken branches, ankle-deep water, and scattered papers that the rain hadn’t yet dissolved. Students rushed from dorm to hall with their heads down, collars pulled tight, whispering not about exams or professors, but about the tolls, about the Eye, about Eli Kingston.He could feel it when he walked into the library. The change wasn’t subtle anymore—it was in every glance, every pause in conversation, every face that turned his way. Some carried hope, desperate and hungry. Others dripped with anger, fear, and resentment. But none were indifferent. The silence followed him to the third floor, where Lena sat at their usual table with her hood up, hair plastered to her cheeks, dark circles beneath her eyes.“They’re fracturing faster than we can count,” she said before he even sat down. “Three dorms have already declared themselves for you. Two more for the Council. The

The tower didn’t fall so much as it bled.Cracks ripped through the stone in slow, sickening groans, golden fire leaking from each fracture like veins torn open. The bell above shrieked, the sound no longer a toll but a scream, and every student in the Crest must have heard it. Eli stumbled down the spiral stairs, the cube clutched so tightly in his hand his knuckles had gone white. The dagger was still burning in the other, the serpent’s-eye hilt fused against the mark in his palm.Behind him the Watchers reeled. Some clung to the walls as their masks cracked, others crawled on the floor with voices warped into static, chanting broken prayers. Their leader staggered after him, cloak torn, mask hanging in pieces. A single pale eye glared through the fragments.“You cannot unmake what was spoken,” the doubled voice rasped. “The Eye waits. It always waits.”Eli didn’t answer. The only thing that mattered was getting down. Getting out. Getting to Lena.The stairs twisted beneath his feet

The wind on the rooftop cut like knives, sharp and wild, tugging at coats and hair, carrying with it the distant toll of bells that no one should have been able to hear. The Crest’s towers loomed in every direction, jagged silhouettes against a bruised sky. Lightning pulsed far above, but no thunder followed, only silence broken by the scrape of boots on stone.Eli stood at the center of the roof with the cube in his hands. It pulsed faintly, each beat in time with his own heart, a dull throb that threatened to break through bone. He could feel the Watchers before he saw them. They emerged from the shadows at the roof’s edges, one by one, cloaked and masked, forming a ring that seemed to close tighter with every breath. Their movements were slow, inevitable, like the circling of predators that already believed the kill was theirs.Lena was just behind him, her face pale in the stormlight, hands clenched at her sides as though she could hold back her fear by sheer force. Callum stood a

The Crest had never known silence.Even at night, its towers hummed with late lamps, with the shuffle of pages in libraries and the midnight footsteps of students sneaking across quads. But after the rooftop burst, silence spread like smoke. The air itself seemed stunned, waiting.Then came the chaos.Eli and Lena barely made it down from the shattered dormitory before the flood of bodies surged through the courtyard. Students poured from every hall, their voices breaking the hush in shrieks and confused shouts. “Fire!” someone cried. “The west wing collapsed!” Another voice screamed, “The bell tower’s falling—run!” Panic cascaded through the crowd until it was no longer words but noise, raw and ragged.The earth beneath them was not steady. Each step seemed to groan. Cracks split across the cobblestones, narrow fissures glowing faintly from within. It looked like the Crest’s bones were showing through, veins of pale light winding across the ground.Lena clutched Eli’s sleeve, pulling

The quad looked like a graveyard of light. Fires had been stamped into embers, smoke hanging in damp curtains that clung to the air. Someone had managed to douse the worst of the dormitory blaze with the emergency lines, but the stone was cracked, glass shattered, and the courtyard was littered with shards and rubble. It was after midnight, but no one had gone to sleep.Students huddled in corners, wrapped in blankets pulled from wreckage or coats ripped from closets. Some whispered prayers, others cursed, others simply stared, numb and unseeing. The professors moved between them with clipped orders and tight expressions, but their authority had lost weight. Too much had been seen, too much could not be explained away.Eli stood apart, marked hand shoved into his jacket pocket, jaw tight. Every time he caught someone’s eye, they looked away. Not out of rudeness—out of fear. He was the boy who had burned the Watchers, the boy whose skin glowed with the same mark carved into the Crest’s