Home / Mystery/Thriller / Inside the Crest: The Fall of Eli Kingston / Chapter 118

Chapter 118

Author: Lucy

2025-09-05 02:18:18

By morning, the Crest was no longer itself.

The fog had settled across the lawns like a living thing, clinging to stone paths, sliding in through windows, curling beneath doors. Students whispered that they could hear voices in it—snatches of Latin, prayers half-remembered, or their own names called in tones so familiar they almost obeyed.

In the dining hall, food turned to ash in their mouths. In the library, books bled ink across the pages, as if the words themselves were fleeing. Lamps guttered even when the air was still, shadows moving independently of their casters.

No one spoke of the chapel. No one admitted remembering the ritual. But those who had been there were marked. Their eyes caught the light strangely, their reflections wavered, and some twitched at invisible strings when the wind shifted.

The Crest was breaking. And everyone felt it.

Eli, Lena, and Callum sat in silence at the far corner of the library’s upper floor, the cube hidden under Eli’s jacket. Sleep had been

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Chapter 134
The silence after the twelfth toll was unbearable.Dust hung in the air, glowing faintly in the light pouring from the jagged wound in the sky. The serpent’s shadow writhed against the fractured wall, its coils withdrawing with a sound like grinding stone, its scream still echoing in Eli’s bones.The students who hadn’t fled were huddled at the edges of the hall, pale and wide-eyed. Some clutched each other, others pressed themselves flat against the pillars as if hoping to melt into the stone. Professors crouched with their sigils half-formed, their power spent or broken. The council’s robes littered the floor like discarded skins where they’d scrambled into hidden exits.Only Eli stood in the center, chest heaving, the mark on his arm blazing like a brand of fire. His throat was raw, his body shaking, but the light still burned in him, defiant, alive.Lena was at his side, her hand gripping his sleeve so tightly her knuckles were white. Callum lingered a step behind, his face carved
Chapter 133
The ninth toll still rang in Eli’s bones when the last fragments of glass struck the marble floor. The great stained window was gone, shattered into a kaleidoscope of ruin. In its place, yawning open like a wound in the air itself, was a void rimmed in light—black, endless, and pulsing with a gaze that wasn’t sight but presence.The Eye.It wasn’t looking at the hall. It wasn’t looking at the students or the professors or even the council. It was looking at him. Eli felt it as heat crawling beneath his skin, as whispers like wind scraping bone, as an unrelenting pull dragging at his very marrow.Lena’s cry pierced the suffocating silence. “Eli don’t look at it!”Too late. His vision was already splitting again, reality sliding sideways. The hall, the crowd, the council—superimposed over it all was the Eye’s endless surface, rippling like an ocean of black glass. And beneath that surface, shapes moved—vast, serpentine, coiling around each other in silence.A shove jarred him back. Call
Chapter 132
The great hall’s doors loomed like the jaws of a predator, each slab of carved oak etched with curling serpents and blazing suns. Eli stood at the base of the marble steps, staring up at them, unable to ignore the weight of the chanting crowd pressing at his back.“Inside,” the headmaster ordered again. His voice carried no rise, no fury. It was colder than that—like frost crawling across glass.For one trembling moment Eli almost refused. Every muscle in his body screamed at him to turn, to melt back into the crowd, to let them sweep him away in their chants and their defiance. He felt Lena’s hand clutch his own, the strength in her grip belied by how pale her knuckles were. Callum hovered at his shoulder, silent as always, a shadow bound to him now more than ever.Refuse, and the Crest might erupt tonight. Accept, and he was walking straight into their cage.Lena leaned closer, her breath feathering against his ear. “Whatever you choose—make it yours.”He glanced at her, saw the stu
Chapter 131
By morning, the Crest was no longer quiet.Eli woke to the sound of voices rising through the dorm windows, layered and insistent, a chorus that refused to be silenced. At first, he thought it was some kind of assembly. Then he caught the rhythm. A chant.He pushed the curtain back.In the quad below, students were gathered in clusters, spilling from the stone steps, the pathways, even the fountain at the center. Dozens of them, maybe more. Their uniforms looked disheveled, damp from the misty air, but their eyes burned with the same restless energy.At the center of one crowd, someone had dragged a lectern from a lecture hall and propped it against the fountain. A girl in a torn blazer stood atop it, her fist raised, her voice cutting through the morning air:“They think they can keep deciding for us! They think they can bury the truth under their secrets! No more!”The response came in a wave of shouts.Eli shut the curtain. He already knew what they were talking about.Word of the
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

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