2025-08-04 22:58:03Eli stared at the third note until the letters began to blur.
You’re walking a path built by the dead. Step carefully, Kingston. This time, it’s your name on the stone. It was more than a threat. It was a message in code or maybe in blood. He sat at his desk, the glow of his laptop casting shadows across the room. Zayn was out for the night, probably flirting his way through one of the upperclassman parties. Eli didn’t care. He needed quiet. He needed focus. He pulled the previous notes from his drawer and laid them side by side. The paper was the same: matte, heavy stock, expensive. The ink didn’t smudge. The font was too clean to be handwritten — printed from a high-end laser printer. Professional. Deliberate. Whoever was sending them had resources. Patience. A twisted sense of poetry. And access to Eli’s schedule. The notes weren’t random. They had been left in precise places: his mailbox, the statue near the chapel, now his dorm room. No cameras had caught the drop-offs. No witnesses. No signatures. Someone was watching him from the shadows. He reread the last line again: This time, it’s your name on the stone. Was it metaphorical? Or was there an actual stone? That question wouldn’t leave him alone. By morning, he had a plan. — At noon, he found Lena Moore in the archives wing of the library. She was reading a massive book titled Crest Obituaries: 1871–Present, her legs curled under her on a cushioned bench. Her fingers danced lightly over the pages, tracing names like she was searching for ghosts. Eli walked up and dropped the latest note on the table. She didn’t look surprised. “What do you want?” she asked, not lifting her eyes. “I think you already know.” She closed the book slowly, marked the page with a ribbon. “They’re escalating.” “You’ve seen this before?” “Not exactly. But similar patterns. The notes, the timing, the tone — all of it fits.” “Fits what?” She hesitated, then stood up. “Come with me.” They walked in silence through the west quad, past the bell tower and under a canopy of gold-turning trees. Lena led him off the main path, around the back of the old library annex, to a part of campus most students didn’t bother with. Here, tucked between two crumbling garden walls, stood a stone memorial. A circle of engraved names. Dozens of them. It looked like a war monument — weathered, mossy, forgotten. “What is this?” Eli asked. Lena crossed her arms. “The university calls it the Legacy Circle. It’s supposed to honor Crest students who died while enrolled. Accidents. Suicides. Illness.” “But…?” She turned to face him. “Most of them weren’t accidents. And a lot of them have no official death records. Some of these names don’t even show up in the university database anymore. It’s like they were wiped.” Eli crouched, reading the names. There was something eerie about them — elegant fonts etched into fading stone, most from wealthy families, many from decades ago… and a few recent. Too recent. He stopped at one: Marcus Holloway — 2021 He looked up. “Two years ago?” Lena nodded. “He was a sophomore. Legacy kid. Smart. Quiet. Started asking questions about the Watchers.” “The Watchers?” “That’s what the old threads called them. They’re not a club. Not a secret society like everyone thinks. They’re something else. Older. Institutional. Embedded into Crest itself. They don’t recruit. They choose.” Eli stood slowly. “You think they killed him?” “I think they erased him. His dorm was cleared out within twenty-four hours. No memorial. No emails. Just… gone.” Eli looked back at the names. There was a space at the end of the ring — a blank slab waiting to be carved. The silence between them thickened. He could feel it now — the pull of something ancient, stitched into the bricks of this place. “This isn’t about me, is it?” Eli asked. Lena gave him a long look. “It is now.” — That evening, Eli sat alone in the common room of Lancaster Hall, watching the fire crackle in the stone hearth. The flames cast gold light across the old floorboards and framed photos of smiling alumni. All dead-eyed. All legendary. His mind was racing. He pulled out his phone and opened the Subnet forum again. The thread titled "The Watchers Are Still Here" had been updated. A new post had appeared twenty minutes ago. No name. No profile picture. Just text: > He’s found the stones. He knows what comes next. Eli’s blood ran cold. Another message. Another watcher. He typed quickly. Who are you? No reply. Then, after a full minute: > Ask your father what he did in 1996. That’s where it starts. Eli stared at the screen, breath caught in his throat. 1996. He was barely a year old. His fingers hovered over the keys. What did he do? No answer. He refreshed the thread. Nothing. Then he checked the post again. It had been deleted. Like it had never existed. Zayn found him in the room later, sitting at his desk with the screen still glowing. “Jesus,” Zayn muttered. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” “Close,” Eli said without looking up. “More notes?” “No. Worse. I think… I think this has something to do with my family.” Zayn’s expression shifted from amused to serious. “What do you mean?” “Someone mentioned a year. Nineteen ninety-six. Said to ask my father what he did.” Zayn whistled low. “That’s creepy and weirdly specific.” “I don’t even know where to start.” Zayn scratched the back of his neck. “Can I ask something? Do you think maybe… they’re not just watching you because of your name, but because of something your family covered up?” Eli didn’t answer. But the thought had already rooted itself in his mind. He stood abruptly. “I need to make a call.” The phone rang three times before his father picked up. “What is it, Eli?” “I need to ask you something.” “You sound like your mother. Get to the point.” “What happened in 1996?” Silence. Then: “Where did you hear that?” “Answer the question.” His father exhaled slowly. “That’s none of your concern.” “It is now.” There was a pause longer this time. When his father spoke again, his voice was lower. “Don’t dig where you’re not invited. Ivory Crest is full of graves, and some of them don’t stay buried. If you want to make it through the year, Eli, forget what you heard.” “I can’t.” “Then you better learn how to bury your own secrets.” The line went dead. Eli stared at the screen. The silence on the other end said more than words ever could. And suddenly, the final line of that third note made perfect sense: This time, it’s your name on the stone.
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Chapter 161
The light tore through the chamber like a living thing, spilling upward in great coils that twisted into the shape of the Eye. Eli’s skin burned where the fragments of the cubes still clung to him, glowing faintly as if they refused to let go. The air was no longer air—it was heat and vibration, a storm of sound and pressure that made his bones feel hollow. Lena clutched him tighter, her arms anchoring him even as the ground beneath them split wider, stones shearing off into the abyss below.The Watchers writhed where they knelt, their masks cracking and shattering. From beneath the porcelain shards came not faces but shadow, their forms unraveling into streams of black smoke that the Eye drank hungrily. Their chanting devolved into screams that echoed into the fissure. The broken mask, the last one standing, staggered toward Eli with movements that were almost human and yet all wrong—his limbs jerking too fast, his spine arched unnaturally. His voice came distorted, layered with a hu
Chapter 160
The hall groaned under the weight of centuries, every stone shuddering as if the very foundation of Crest was remembering its own buried sins. Dust fell like ash from the vaulted ceiling. Eli stood in the center, the two cubes heavy in his hands, their carved spirals twisting in ways his eyes couldn’t quite follow. Every breath he took came ragged, uneven, like he was pulling not air but something darker, heavier, into his lungs. The whispers were relentless now, no longer murmurs at the edge of hearing but a tide of voices clamoring inside his skull, pressing against his thoughts until his own mind felt like it might splinter.“Eli,” Lena hissed. Her face was pale, her eyes bright with fear, her hands trembling though she fought to keep them steady on his arm. “Don’t listen to it. Put them down. We’ll find another way.”Her voice cut through, thin but real, a thread in the storm. Eli wanted to answer her, wanted to ground himself in her presence the way he always had, but the cubes p
Chapter 159
The Crest had gone quiet after the Watcher’s defeat, but it was not a silence of peace. It was the kind of hush that settles before a storm breaks, when the air grows heavy and every breath feels borrowed. Eli could not shake the weight of what had happened in the refectory. The look on the students’ faces haunted him, their awe cut through with fear. They hadn’t just seen him resist a monster—they had seen him command it, even if only for a moment. That truth was spreading faster than fire through dry grass.He tried to convince himself that it didn’t matter, that the whispers were just noise, but he could feel the shift everywhere he went. Doors stayed open for him a second longer. Conversations cut off as he walked by. Students who had once mocked him with sneers and behind-the-back laughter now stepped aside, eyes lowered, as though unsure if he was a savior or the next curse. And somewhere inside, that attention stirred something dangerous, something old and cold, like a crown lo
Chapter 158
The Crest no longer pretended to be a school. By the next evening, the façade of classrooms and lecture halls was a hollow mask over something older and rawer. Eli felt it in the air as soon as he stepped from his dormitory—every breath was heavy, tinged with smoke though no fire burned. The corridors stretched further than they should have, ceilings groaned, and portraits whispered behind their gilt frames. Students huddled in corners with wide, restless eyes, whispering rumors about the tolling bell and the ground that had shifted beneath their feet. Professors, once so composed, moved like hollow men, clutching books to their chests, their voices cracking when they tried to enforce order. The Crest was unraveling, and everyone inside could feel it.Eli walked with Lena and Callum, the three of them moving like a unit though every step was shadowed with unspoken tension. The cube weighed in his pocket like a stone, inert since the Eye’s hall collapsed, but it wasn’t dead. He felt it
Chapter 157
The Crest had always loomed like a monument—timeless, impervious, a citadel that stood outside the rules of ordinary decay. But on that night, as the bell’s unnatural tolling faded into silence, Eli felt it breathe. The stone itself shifted, walls groaning as if the foundations were no longer sure of themselves. The corridors no longer obeyed their maps. Arches sagged, staircases bent where they had once stood straight, and new shadows moved where there should have been none. The Crest was alive, and its pulse matched the rhythm hammering in Eli’s chest. He ran down the corridor, Lena at his side, Callum a step behind. Their footsteps echoed too loudly, as though the stone was eager to swallow their sounds. Every hallway they turned down bent into shapes Eli swore hadn’t existed yesterday. Murals bled onto the walls—figures painted centuries ago now moving as if freed from their confinement. Eyes followed them, whole frescoes leaning forward as if hungry for the trespassers running be
Chapter 156
The night stretched on like it would never end. Eli didn’t know how long they had been walking through the shifting halls of the Crest, but time had slipped away from him in the way it did inside dreams, measured not by minutes but by how heavy the silence grew, by how tightly his chest clenched. Every corridor looked the same now, and yet different—walls bending in angles that defied logic, arches that curved downward like jaws ready to snap shut.They had left the library behind, but the weight of that great Eye on the wall still lingered. Eli could feel its stare in the back of his skull, like a nail pressed into bone. Each time he blinked, he half expected to see the spiral when he opened his eyes again.“We can’t keep wandering like this,” Lena whispered, breaking the silence. Her voice echoed in strange ways, bouncing down the hall ahead of them before coming back warped, like someone else was speaking with her mouth. “The Crest isn’t letting us go. It’s folding us back inside i
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