The night did not end.The rain thinned, but the clouds clung to the Crest like a funeral shroud, refusing to let dawn cut through. Eli, Lena, and Callum holed themselves in the third floor of the library again, the one place where the walls seemed reluctant to whisper.The cube sat on the table between them, its shifting spirals twisting whenever light touched it. None of them had dared to touch it since Eli shoved it into his jacket. Yet the thing pulsed faintly, as though aware it was being ignored.The silence stretched until Lena finally snapped.“Alright, Vale,” she said, leaning across the table, her eyes sharp. “No more riddles. You said there’s a way to share the burden. Tell us how.”Callum glanced at Eli first, as if asking permission. Eli’s stare offered none.So Callum opened his father’s journal, not Eli’s this time, but one bound in navy leather with his family crest on the inside. He flipped through pages of cramped handwriting, diagrams, and stains so dark they looked

Morning came too quickly.Eli expected the campus to look the same — the same ivy-choked spires, the same sharp angles of gothic stone. But something was off. It wasn’t the weather. It wasn’t the broken clock face still pointing at midnight.It was the silence.Crest University was rarely quiet. Even at dawn, there were usually students laughing, the clatter of bikes on the cobblestones, coffee carts humming on the quad. Today, the air was heavy, muffled, like the campus itself was holding its breath.And everyone who passed wore the same look: pale, unsettled, whispering. Some clutched their heads as if they hadn’t slept. Others had bandages around their wrists, their necks, their temples.Lena walked at Eli’s side, her hood up, her voice low. “They felt it.”Eli’s jaw tightened. He knew what she meant. The Sixth Toll hadn’t just been theirs to bear. Every strike had reached outward. The campus had absorbed it. The students had absorbed it.Now the cracks were showing.At breakfast,

The next morning, Crest University was too quiet.No laughter spilled from the dining hall. No arguments rose from the quad. Even the crows that normally perched on the Chapel spire were gone, leaving the stone bare against the pale sky.It wasn’t silence exactly. It was something worse — a hush that carried weight, as though the whole campus was holding its breath.Eli noticed it first in the way people walked. Students moved in pairs, shoulders hunched, heads tilted low. They avoided eye contact, even with friends. When they spoke, their voices carried a strange, hollow cadence — as though they were repeating lines fed to them.Lena caught his sleeve as they crossed the quad. “They’re not right.”Eli looked around. She was right. Everyone seemed… blurred. Faces drained of warmth. Smiles that stretched too wide or didn’t reach their eyes.He whispered, “It’s the tolls. They’re getting inside.”She didn’t argue.They pushed into the library to meet Callum, who’d sent a message through

The world didn’t sound the same anymore.Eli lay on the floor of his dorm, his chest heaving like he’d just run through fire. Every heartbeat throbbed with a phantom toll, deep and echoing, vibrating the marrow of his bones. His vision fractured like spirals of gold and black crawling across the ceiling like living veins.Lena crouched beside him, gripping his shoulders hard enough to bruise. “Eli. Look at me. Stay with me.”Her voice broke through the ringing in his head, but only barely. He forced his eyes open.Lena’s face was pale, her eyes wide with a fear she tried to mask. Behind her, Callum stood like a statue, one hand pressed against the cracked glass of the window, the other gripping the hilt of a blade Eli hadn’t seen him draw.“Say something,” Lena begged. “Tell me you’re still in there.”Eli swallowed against the taste of iron in his mouth. “I… am.”But even as he said it, a second voice whispered under his words — his own voice, doubled and warped.Lena flinched.Callum

The Chapel swallowed them whole.The heavy stone door slammed behind Eli, Lena, and Callum with a sound like a coffin sealing. The air was damp and heavy, charged with something older than dust. Torch brackets lined the walls, their flames guttering to life one by one as though the Chapel itself had been expecting them.“Not creepy at all,” Lena muttered, but her voice carried sharp edges.Eli said nothing. His wrist sigil pulsed in time with the torches, each beat like a drum in his veins. The cube inside his jacket vibrated as though it recognized the place, like a tuning fork struck against ancient stone.Callum drew his blade. “Stay sharp. The Watchers guard this place even when you can’t see them.”The stairs spiraled downward into blackness. Every step echoed like a toll, the sound reverberating in Eli’s chest until he could no longer tell whether the bells were outside or inside him.The staircase ended in a vaulted chamber.Dozens of sarcophagi lined the walls, carved with ser