The morning came with a brittle sort of sunlight, pale and too thin to warm the damp campus. Students shuffled to classes bundled in scarves and heavy coats, their chatter hushed, as if the whole school had agreed to speak in whispers. Eli moved among them like a ghost—there, but apart. His clothes were still marked with the grime of the tunnels despite his quick shower, his hair damp, his eyes shadowed from another sleepless night.He couldn’t shake the word that had followed him out of the tunnels: Closer. It had taken root somewhere behind his ribs, repeating itself whenever he tried to think of anything else. Closer. Closer. Sometimes it came as a whisper barely audible over the scrape of chairs in the lecture hall, other times like a pulse pressing against the back of his skull. But always the same word, patient and insistent.He hadn’t told Lena. Not yet. She was already wary, and he wasn’t ready to admit that the thing beneath Crestmoor had found its way inside his mind.By mid

Rain lingered in the air long after the storm had passed, hanging over Crestmoor like a ghost that refused to leave. The sky was pale and bruised, the kind of morning that made the stone walls of the university sweat. Students moved through the courtyards with downturned eyes, their conversations clipped. It wasn’t just the missing freshman anymore—rumors were spreading faster than any official notice.Eli heard fragments as he passed:“Disappeared after the library…”“They said his phone was still on the lawn…”“The headmaster’s covering it up.”He walked among them, silent, his expression unreadable. Inside, though, the pressure in his chest had settled into something heavy—like a truth he wasn’t ready to name.By the time he reached the east library, Lena was already waiting, her laptop open beside a stack of old ledgers and yellowing photographs. The circles beneath her eyes told him she hadn’t slept.“Good,” she said when she saw him. “I think I found something.”Eli took the sea

The forest beyond Crestmoor was different at night. It didn’t whisper; it listened. Every sound—the crack of a branch, the echo of their boots against damp earth—hung in the air too long, as if the trees themselves were waiting to see what Eli would do next.Lena kept close behind him, her flashlight beam catching on shards of broken glass embedded in the soil. “Remind me again,” she said softly, “why we’re doing this at two in the morning?”Eli didn’t slow. “Because whatever woke up in the Sanctum doesn’t sleep. And neither can we.”The path curved uphill, winding between trees that grew thicker the closer they came to the crest of the hill. In the distance, the observatory dome rose like a dead planet—a massive silver husk half-swallowed by ivy and time. Its single, glass eye was cracked open toward the stars.Lena shivered. “It looks like it’s watching us.”“Maybe it is.”When they reached the iron gate, Eli paused. The chain that once held it closed had been snapped clean through—

The final bell didn’t fade. It expanded.Each toll rippled through the campus like a heartbeat, bending the air, making the very ground breathe. The spiral of red above the clock tower churned, tightening until it looked like a vortex pulling dawn itself into its center.Eli barely heard Lena shouting his name over the ringing. His body moved on its own, drawn toward the tower’s entrance. The massive oak doors—sealed for decades—swung open before he touched them. Dust burst outward in a breath of age and ash.“Eli, wait!” Lena’s voice cracked as she sprinted after him.He didn’t look back. The pull was magnetic, primal. Each step inside the tower felt like stepping through layers of memory—his own and someone else’s. The air smelled of iron and rain. Faint whispers coiled around the stairwell, words bleeding from the walls:Return what was taken.The stairwell wound upward, tighter than he remembered. The steps trembled beneath his boots. Shadows twitched against the bricks like livin

By afternoon, Crestmoor looked almost normal again.The courtyard was clean, the power restored, and the faculty were already rehearsing the official story: an atmospheric anomaly caused by faulty equipment in the observatory. It sounded almost convincing. Almost.But Lena knew better.There was a pulse beneath the calm — something in the air that hadn’t left since dawn.She crossed the quad with her hood up, keeping her head down as she passed clusters of whispering students. The envelope with Eli’s note burned like a secret in her jacket pocket. Every word replayed in her mind: Find the ledger beneath the library’s foundation.It sounded impossible. But so had everything else.The library loomed ahead — Crestmoor’s oldest building, older even than the chapel or the tower. Its windows were tall and arched, the stone darkened by centuries of weather. Inside, the air smelled of paper and dust, of knowledge that had outlived everyone who tried to hide it.She pushed through the doors an