2025-08-06 02:14:26The figure pointed at Eli with a gesture not of greeting, but of warning, of marking.
Eli didn’t move. The air around them was cold, the figure stood still under the shadow of the bell tower, the same place where the second note had been left. Now he or she was back. Wearing grey. Watching. Then, without a word, the figure turned and walked into the ivy-covered passage beside the chapel. Eli hesitated. His pulse thundered in his ears. But he followed. The path led through the chapel’s rear garden, past hedges carved like mazes and benches that hadn’t been touched in decades. At the far end stood an old maintenance shed. The door was open. Inside, the air was thick with mildew and age. Gardening tools lined the wall. Buckets and boxes cluttered the corners, and in the center, a hatch on the floor. Open. A faint red glow pulsed from below. Eli took a breath and dropped into the darkness. He landed in a tunnel — narrow, damp, lined with red bricks that looked ancient. The glow came from lanterns spaced evenly along the walls, casting shifting light on graffiti-scrawled bricks and faded carvings. He walked forward. The corridor twisted left, then right, until it opened into a room — small, circular, with a low ceiling and a single crimson bulb swinging overhead. And she was waiting. Leaning against the far wall. Lena. But this wasn’t the same Lena he knew from the library. She wasn’t in jeans and boots. She wore a long coat, deep maroon, almost black and her hair was pulled back tight. She looked older here,sharper. Like a different version of herself had been waiting all along. Eli froze. “You?” he said. “You led me here?” Lena didn’t answer right away. She studied him. As if she wasn’t sure what kind of person had arrived. Then, finally: “You weren’t supposed to come this far.” “You’ve been feeding me clues. Playing both sides.” “No,” she said, calmly. “I’ve been trying to protect you. But now… now it’s too late.” Eli’s fists clenched. “You were at the archive. You knew about the notes. The Legacy Circle. You even knew my father was involved” “I know a lot of things, Eli,” she said, cutting him off. “That’s the problem.” The silence between them thickened. Then Eli stepped forward. “Who are the Watchers?” Lena looked at him like the question was a bomb. “They’re not a group,” she said. “They’re not even an organization anymore. They’re a belief. A doctrine passed down through the oldest families at Crest. They call themselves custodians of memory. But that’s just a prettier word for erasure.” “They killed Marcus.” She nodded. “And dozens of others.” “Why?” “Because some things aren’t meant to be remembered.” She stepped toward him now, eyes hard. “You think this is about legacy. About your father. But it’s not. The Watchers aren’t watching you because you’re a Kingston, they’re watching you because you’re the last piece of something they tried to bury thirty years ago.” “What happened in 1996?” he asked. “What really happened?” Lena paused. Then whispered: “They tried to summon something.” Eli blinked. “Summon… what?” “A presence. A force that predates Crest. It was a ritual. Your father was part of it. He saw too much or not enough. No one really knows. But the others… they disappeared. Some were removed. Some just lost their minds.” “Why would they even try that?” “Because Crest was built on lies. Power. Blood. And power always wants more.” Eli’s voice dropped. “Why are you telling me this now?” Lena’s eyes glistened in the red light. “Because they’re coming for you.” Something shifted in the air. The light flickered. And from deeper within the tunnel, a sound — quiet at first, then growing louder. Footsteps. Dozens of them. Boots on stone. Eli turned to run. Lena grabbed his wrist. “You can’t go back the way you came. There’s another exit — but you have to promise me something.” “What?” “If you make it out, you burn everything.” “What are you talking about?” She shoved a flash drive into his hand. “Names. Locations. Ritual records. Everything they tried to erase. It’s all there.” “Then why not leak it yourself?” Her lips trembled slightly. “Because I’m not getting out.” A sudden explosion of light burst through the tunnel behind them. The red glow was washed away in cold white beams — flashlights. Voices barked orders. Eli turned, heart thundering. “Run!” Lena shouted. He ran. The escape tunnel was barely wide enough for his shoulders, winding upward in a dizzying spiral. The air thinned. The walls pressed in. But the sounds behind him never faded — boots, static, voices calling his name like a curse. He didn’t stop. The drive clutched tight in his fist. At the top of the shaft, he found another hatch. Pushed it open. And emerged into the Crest greenhouse. The contrast was jarring, he staggered to the edge of the path and collapsed onto the warm stone, gasping. Safe. For now. That night, Eli didn’t return to his dorm. He booked a room at an off-campus hotel under a fake name and locked the door behind him. Then he opened the flash drive. It was worse than he imagined. Hundreds of files. Scans of old letters from Crest founders referencing "rites of transference." Photos of a sealed door beneath the chapel with Latin engravings — “Ex Umbra, Lux”. Transcripts of interviews with former students — all vanished. And at the very end, a video file. Untitled. Dated April 14, 1996. He clicked it. The screen showed five figures in robes, standing around a stone altar deep underground. The camera was shaky. One of the figures turned slightly — and even through the pixelated footage, Eli recognized the face. His father. Younger, but unmistakable. He was holding something. A knife. And on the stone… A student, unconscious or dead lay with arms crossed, mouth sealed with black wax. A voice from off camera whispered: “This is how we inherit. This is how we remember.” The footage cut to black. Eli sat frozen. Then something strange happened. The screen flickered — and a single line of text appeared, though the video had ended: > You watched. Now we see. The laptop shut down on its own. Outside the window, across the street, a man in a grey coat stood beneath a flickering streetlamp. He was holding something. A matchbook. He struck it. Lit a flame. And in its glow, Eli saw what was printed on the match cover. The Chapel Below. Midnight. Come Alone.
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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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