By morning, Crestmoor felt wrong.The rain had stopped, but the clouds hung so low they almost scraped the rooftops, and the courtyard was eerily empty. No laughter. No movement. Just that sense — heavy and unshakable — that something vast and unseen had shifted during the night.Lena hadn’t slept. She sat in the library’s side room, the ledger open on the table before her. The words The Keeper’s Return still glowed faintly on the cover, the light pulsing like a heartbeat. She’d tried to close it. She’d even tried to hide it. But every time she turned away, she could feel it watching her.Julian arrived just after dawn, soaked and pale. “The chapel bells rang again at four a.m.,” he said quietly, shutting the door behind him. “No one pulled the rope. I checked.”Lena rubbed her temples. “They’re not just bells anymore. They’re signals. Warnings.”“Of what?”She looked up at him, exhaustion shadowing her eyes. “Of the Eye waking.”Julian exhaled, pacing. “Lena, you sound like—” He stop

By evening, the air around Crestmoor had changed.The fog that usually hugged the campus had thickened into something else — not mist, but memory. You could see the echoes in it: flickers of the past caught between breaths. Students rushing through the courtyard who weren’t really there. Bells ringing from towers that hadn’t sounded in years.And over it all, the ticking.Steady. Ruthless.Eight hours left.Julian sprinted through the quad, clutching the brittle Watchers’ journal against his chest. The wind tore at the pages, whispering in a dozen voices at once. Every light in the observatory had gone out the moment he’d found the final entry. Now, even the sky looked wrong — too dark for dusk, like night had arrived early to watch.He needed to find Lena.He burst through the chapel doors, breath ragged. The sight stopped him cold.Lena stood at the altar, surrounded by floating specks of gold — dust suspended in the air, each one pulsing faintly with light. The mural behind her had

Crestmoor was still again.No thunder, no whispers, no tremor in the stone. Just the gentle hum of morning rain easing across the roofs, washing the night from the world. The storm had passed — and with it, the ghosts.Julian stood at the edge of the courtyard, watching the water pool around the cobblestones. The clock tower loomed above, its hands restored, ticking steadily for the first time in years. He hadn’t heard a sound more comforting — or more cruel.The dawn light broke through the thinning fog, spilling over the cracked spire where everything had ended. They’d found Lena there, unconscious beside the shattered pedestal, the ledger closed beneath her hand. No sign of Eli. No trace of the Eye.The university called it a lightning strike — freak weather, a miracle that no one else had died. The old professors whispered about renovation funds and electrical malfunctions, while the students swapped half-true stories of what they saw that night: golden light, the bells tolling, a