2025-08-04 23:27:14There was no rest after the call.
Eli lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling as his father's final words repeated over and over in his head. “If you want to make it through the year… forget what you heard", as if it were that easy. The warning wasn’t just cold it was calculated. A threat disguised as advice. Eli knew that tone. He had grown up with it. His father didn’t bluff. Whatever happened in 1996, it was real. And it was dangerous. And now Eli was part of it. By morning, he had a plan. The university archives were housed in the Old Founder’s Wing — a stone labyrinth beneath Crest Hall that most students avoided. It was where they stored old admission records, disciplinary logs, and historical ledgers, dusty files. Forgotten truths, exactly where Eli needed to be. The wing was technically off-limits without faculty clearance, but Eli had learned long ago that rules meant nothing if you looked like you belonged. He wore a pressed blazer, carried a black folder, and walked like he had a meeting. No one questioned him. He slipped through a rusted side door and into the dim hallway, the air cold and thick with the scent of parchment and mold. The silence was eerie. At the end of the corridor, he found a room marked Records: 1980–2000. Perfect. Eli flipped through the drawers methodically, scanning for any mention of Kingston, 1996, Watchers—anything that felt off. Then he saw it. A slim manila folder with a name printed in faded type: > KINGSTON, D. E. — Incident Report, April 1996 His breath caught. D. E. Kingston. His father. He opened the folder. Inside was a single sheet. It read: > Confidential. Disciplinary Committee Hearing — Daniel Edward Kingston Charges: Unauthorized access to Founder’s Crypt | Defacement of school property | Witnessed unauthorized ritual Outcome: Cleared. Records sealed. Recommendation: Full immunity granted under Legacy Clause 12. At the bottom was a red stamp: SEALED BY ORDER OF THE CREST COUNCIL. The rest of the folder was empty. No evidence. No statements. Just a record of something that no longer officially existed. Eli’s stomach turned. A ritual? A sealed crypt? His father had lied. Not just about the past but about everything. Footsteps echoed in the hall behind him. He froze. The door creaked open. “Kingston.” Eli turned sharply. A tall figure stood in the doorway, dressed in a grey uniform with no university logo. His face was calm, but his eyes were sharp. Cold. “You’re not supposed to be down here,” the man said, voice low. “I’m researching family records,” Eli replied evenly, tucking the folder behind his back. “Archives close at noon. It’s two-thirty.” Eli straightened. “I’ll be out in a minute.” The man didn’t move. “You’re being watched.” Eli’s fingers clenched around the folder. “You think you’re asking questions,” the man continued, stepping into the room. “But you’re really just following breadcrumbs we left for you.” “We?” “The Watchers don’t send threats. They send invitations.” And then, without another word, he turned and walked away, footsteps fading into silence. Eli stood frozen for several minutes. Then he left the room — quickly, folder tucked into his coat — heart pounding. He didn’t go back to Lancaster Hall. Instead, he took a winding route toward the Alumni Rotunda, the oldest part of campus, where oil portraits of Crest’s most powerful legacies lined the curved walls like guardians of a forgotten kingdom. He wandered slowly, eyes scanning the faces. Then he saw it. The portrait of Daniel Edward Kingston, class of 1998. His father. Painted in elegant brushstrokes, standing proud in a navy suit with a golden Crest pin at his collar. But behind his eyes, something unreadable. A shadow that didn’t belong. Eli stepped closer. The plaque beneath the painting was cracked. He bent to read it—and noticed the tiniest indentation in the wall beneath the frame. A seam. A hidden panel? He glanced around. No one else in sight. He pressed the plaque inward. It clicked. A portion of the wall slid back silently, revealing a narrow staircase spiraling downward into darkness. Eli hesitated. Every rational instinct told him to stop. But instinct had lied before. He pulled out his phone, turned on the flashlight, and descended. --- The staircase wound down farther than it should have. At least four stories deep. At the bottom, he found a heavy iron door with a brass plate engraved with one word: MEMORIAM. He pushed it open. The room beyond was circular — a chamber lined with black marble, the air heavy with dust and something older. And on the walls… More names. Dozens. Carved in perfect script. Some he recognized from the Legacy Circle aboveground. Others he didn’t. In the center of the room stood a pedestal. And on that pedestal, a leather-bound book. He stepped forward. Opened it. Inside, each page held a name and a fate. > JULIA GREY, 1985 — Witnessed too much. Removed. HENRY LOCKE, 1972 — Rebelled. Silenced. MARCUS HOLLOWAY, 2021 — Infiltrated Subnet. Neutralized. Eli’s blood ran cold. They weren’t just memorializing. They were documenting executions. Then he turned to the final page. Blank. Except for a single sentence in red ink: > Next: Eli Daniel Kingston. He stumbled back. The chamber began to spin. The walls closed in. They weren’t just watching him. They had already decided his fate. He turned and fled, the echo of his footsteps chasing him up the stairwell. --- Outside, the sky was darkening. The world felt different now. Quieter. Hungrier. He needed air. He needed answers. And he needed to find Lena. But as he turned to go back to the dorms, he stopped dead. Because standing beneath the bell tower was a figure in grey watching him. Then slowly, the figure lifted a hand. And pointed directly at him.
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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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