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Chapter 130
The council met behind closed doors, though Eli didn’t need to be there to feel it happening.Every student on campus knew when the board assembled. The air shifted. The faculty grew quiet, their clipped conversations turning into murmurs laced with tension. Classes were “rescheduled.” Corridors emptied. Even the bravest upperclassmen kept their distance from the inner wing, where oak-paneled doors shut the rest of the Crest out.It wasn’t a council for the students. It was a council about them.Inside, twelve figures sat around the circular table, their robes dark, their expressions grim. At the head, the headmaster leaned forward, his fingers steepled, the faint tremor of last night’s collapse still etched into the lines of his face.“Eli Kingston,” he began, as though speaking the name aloud might summon it. “We can no longer pretend he is merely another pupil. What occurred on the West Tower was witnessed by too many. Containment has failed.”Professor Maer, sharp-nosed and brittl
Chapter 129
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
Chapter 128
The dust hung over the Crest like a second storm. It blotted out the moon, turned the lamplight to sickly halos, choked the air with grit that tasted of stone and iron. Students stumbled through the quad, coughing, clutching each other, their voices a rising chorus of panic.Eli sat slumped against a broken column, his hands trembling, the knife still clutched in his grip. His lungs burned with dust. Lena knelt beside him, her fingers pressed against his wrist, checking for a pulse even as he glared at her.“I’m not dead,” he rasped, voice rough from smoke.“Could’ve fooled me,” she shot back, but her relief bled through the sarcasm. Her eyes glistened. “Don’t ever do that again.”Callum stood a few paces away, watching the crowd instead of them. His uniform was torn, streaked with soot, but his posture was unbroken, like he’d stepped out of the rubble untouched. His eyes, though—storm-gray, sharp as glass—never left the faces of the panicking students. He was calculating, Eli realize
Chapter 127
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
Chapter 126
The First Watcher did not move at first. His skeletal hand hovered in the air, the glow of the cracked bell washing his mask in molten light. The silence that followed Eli’s defiance felt wrong, like a breath held too long, like the whole tower was waiting to see if he would break.Then the laughter began.It was not human laughter. It came from the Watchers surrounding the spiral, masks rattling as if hollow skulls clattered inside them. The sound pressed against Eli’s ears, scraping his bones. Lena covered her head, wincing, while Callum’s face hardened into grim determination.“You resist,” the First Watcher said at last, voice deeper than the tolling bell. “You think you can carve out defiance from blood already written? Foolish heir. The Eye does not grant choices. It consumes.”The chains holding the cracked bell shuddered. Dust rained from the ceiling. The spiral pool beneath it rippled as if something beneath stirred.Eli forced his shaking legs to hold. His grip tightened on
Chapter 125
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
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