The ground had not stopped shaking.Stone towers groaned as if they were made of bone, their spires bending, their arches cracking. The Crest’s oldest halls, the marble colonnades that had endured for centuries, shuddered and split like cheap plaster. Students screamed as walls rippled with cracks, portraits of grim-faced founders crashing to the floor in frames of splintered oak.In the council chamber, order collapsed faster than the architecture.Councilors shouted over one another, their robes tangling as they lurched to their feet. The chandelier overhead swung wildly, scattering prisms of fractured light across the polished floor. At the center, the High Chair rattled with the weight of an old man clinging to it — Chancellor Veyron — his knuckles white, his lips moving in desperate prayer to laws older than his own flesh.“They’ve broken the Rite!” barked Councilor Kether, his voice thunderous but frayed with fear. “Do you feel it? Do you hear it? The serpent stirs, unbound!”An

The stairwell narrowed as they went down, each step swallowed by a silence that pressed harder the deeper they descended. The walls sweated with moisture, slick under the faint glow of the lantern Callum carried, and the air grew dense with the scent of stone and something faintly metallic — like blood aged and left to rust.Eli trailed his fingers along the wall, not for guidance but because he couldn’t stop himself. The surface was too warm. It wasn’t stone at all, not entirely. It throbbed faintly, as though he were brushing against the underside of something alive. His stomach turned, but he kept his expression hard.Lena’s voice carried softly in the dark. “It feels like… breathing.”Her words echoed his own unspoken thought. Eli clenched his jaw, refusing to answer. To agree would make it real, and right now, he couldn’t afford reality.Callum’s voice was steadier, though beneath it ran the strain of someone carrying knowledge too long hidden. “These passages aren’t part of the

The campus looked like a battlefield at dawn.The night had fractured into a chaos of screams, firelight, and the ringing toll of the chapel bell that refused to stop even though no one had touched its rope. Students poured into the quad in their pajamas and coats, their faces ghost-white as they watched fissures split through the cobblestones and then seal again, like the ground itself was breathing. Lights flickered in the dormitories, sparks spraying from shattered lamps. The air smelled of ash and iron.Eli stood at the edge of it all, swaying as Lena braced him with an arm around his waist. His body still burned from whatever had passed through him in the chamber below. His hands shook violently, skin blistered where the cube had left its mark. The cracked thing lay in the dirt near his boots, pulsing faintly like a dying heart. He couldn’t look at it without wanting to vomit.Everywhere he turned, eyes followed him. Some terrified, some furious, some reverent. Whispers rushed th

The Sixth Toll hit like a hammer blow.It wasn’t just heard—it was felt. The sound rolled through the air and into the stone beneath their feet, deeper than any bell could possibly ring. It traveled through marrow, resonated against nerves, and pressed at the backs of their skulls as if it could pry them open. Eli swore he felt his ribs vibrate, every breath rattling as though the sound itself had lodged inside him.The fissures running across the quad widened with sharp cracks. Jagged lines glowed with molten fire, branching across the ancient flagstones like veins feeding into a heart that had just begun to beat after centuries of silence. The ground lurched, the Crest shifting on foundations no longer steady. Whole slabs tilted, then dropped into the black below. Screams rose as some students disappeared, swallowed whole.Above, the crimson sky bled brighter. The auroras writhed like serpents, twisting into forms that hovered between imagination and nightmare. One moment they looke

The battlefield stilled, but only for a moment.The Eye’s vessel stood at the threshold of the shattered chapel, its molten frame dripping streams of light that hissed when they touched the stone. Its every movement cracked the earth further, as though the ground itself rejected its existence. Behind it, the doors of the chapel hung loose from their hinges, the wood charred black. The Ninth Toll still vibrated in the air, low and endless, as though the sound would never truly end.Eli dragged himself up from the ground. His hands shook, his body trembled, every breath felt like it burned on the way out. The cube was no longer visible, but he could feel it inside him, hot as coal, pulsing against his ribs like a second heart. His shirt clung to him, wet with blood and sweat, his chest seared with glowing lines that refused to dim.Lena staggered to his side, her face pale, hair damp and matted from the storm. “Eli,” she whispered, her voice broken. She tried to take his arm to steady h