The sixth toll came at dawn.It didn’t sound like a bell.It sounded like metal screaming underwater, a low groan that tore across the Crest in waves. Every window shuddered. Books slipped from shelves. Lights flickered and died, leaving the campus smothered in half-light.Eli woke to it like a punch to the chest. The spirals along his arms seared as though they had been branded fresh. He bit back a shout, fingers digging into the sheets, but the sound pressed inside his skull, vibrating bone.Across the room, Lena bolted upright. “No.”Callum was already on his feet, sword in hand. “It’s begun.”The sixth toll didn’t fade. It lingered, a resonance that made the air feel wet, heavy. And underneath, Eli heard whispers. Not words this time—just breath, thousands of voices breathing in unison.The cube pulsed against his ribs like it was answering.By the time they stumbled outside, the Crest was chaos.Students flooded into the quad, some clutching their ears, others screaming. Professo

Silence followed the blast.Not the comforting kind, but the kind that made the air feel hollow, as though sound itself had been erased.Eli lay flat on the roof, chest heaving, his vision nothing but white fire. For a long moment, he wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead. The cube’s afterimage burned behind his eyelids, spirals folding in on themselves until his brain felt like it was bleeding.A groan pulled him back. Lena, sprawled only feet away, rolled onto her side, clutching her stomach. Her face was pale, her lips streaked with blood. Yet when her eyes found his, she gave the smallest, weakest smile.“You… stubborn bastard,” she whispered.Eli tried to answer, but his throat was raw, torn from screaming. Only a rasp came out.Movement snapped his head around. Callum staggered upright, his sword still clutched in one hand. The blade glowed faintly, humming like it had drunk some of the light from the cube. His face was a mask of disbelief, not triumph.He didn’t look like a man w

The tower loomed above them like a black tooth gnawing at the clouds. The glow from the cracked bell pulsed across its face, painting the stone in sickly reds and golds. Every flash revealed fractures spidering through the walls, mortar crumbling as though the tower were rotting from the inside out.Eli’s hand ached where the sigil burned. It pulsed in time with the bell now, every strike rattling his bones. He kept moving anyway, boots splashing through puddles as the rain slicked the path to the base.Lena stayed close to his side, her face pale, eyes hollow from sleeplessness but sharper than ever. She carried the journal tight against her chest as though it alone could shield her. Callum trailed a step behind, silent, his jaw tight, his eyes always scanning the shadows.The quad they crossed looked nothing like the one they’d known. Glassy black spirals etched into the ground stretched farther, eating into the lawns. Every few feet a student stood in the center of one, eyes wide a

The first crack split the floor in two, running straight through the spiral pool. The Eye’s golden iris widened, its gaze searing through stone, through flesh, through thought itself.Eli staggered as the ground lurched. Lena’s scream was swallowed by the thunder of stone giving way. Callum grabbed her wrist, hauling her toward the stairwell, but the stairs themselves shuddered, steps splintering, dust raining down in choking clouds.The cracked bell above snapped free of one chain. It swung violently, the sound tearing the chamber in half, a toll that rattled ribs and spines.Eli couldn’t move. The Eye pinned him in place, its gaze stripping him bare. His knife shook in his hand, and for a moment he saw not stone walls around him, but endless black. Floating in the dark, he saw his father — hollow-eyed, whispering with bloodied lips.You cannot fight it. You are what it made you.Eli gritted his teeth, but the words slid into him like hooks. He saw more — his mother’s face blurred by

The Crest tried to pretend nothing had happened.By morning the rubble was cordoned off with velvet ropes, the kind usually reserved for art exhibitions and graduation ceremonies. Custodians worked in silence, sweeping up shards of glass and scattering chalky dust into neat little piles, as though tidiness could erase what hundreds of students had seen.The tower was gone—there was no denying that—but the university spun a narrative before the debris had even cooled. An “accidental structural failure,” whispered through official channels, repeated in the emails that flooded students’ inboxes. There had been no lightning, no storm, no shrieking of wind that carried voices through the night. Only old stone giving way. A tragedy, yes, but explainable. Rational.Eli sat in the dining hall, listening to the story circle like vultures around the carcass of truth. Students gathered in clusters, their voices hushed but urgent. Some claimed they’d seen sparks, not lightning but fire, licking t