2025-08-06 02:37:44The matchbook sat on the desk, the flame long extinguished, but its message still burning in Eli’s mind.
The Chapel Below. Midnight. Come Alone. The words weren’t a request. They were a summons. He knew it was a trap. Knew they were waiting. And yet, when midnight came, he was already walking the path back to Crest Hall. The campus was silent. Not the kind of silence that comes with sleep — but the kind that feels like the air is holding its breath. Windows were dark. Doors locked. Even the ever-present hum of the bell tower was gone. Eli passed the old quad, hands in his coat pockets, Lena’s flash drive buried deep inside. He walked the narrow stone path to the chapel entrance, beneath the stained-glass saints with eyes like knives. The doors groaned open. Inside, the pews were empty. The altar glowed faintly in moonlight that filtered through shattered panes overhead. And at the far end, the pulpit had been pushed aside, revealing a descending staircase Eli had never seen before. No turning back now. --- The steps spiraled into pitch darkness. Eli descended slowly, his breath echoing louder than his footsteps. Each turn seemed to stretch time — longer, deeper, older. Until at last, he reached it. The Chapel Below. A subterranean cathedral carved into the earth, lit only by candelabras suspended on rusted chains. The walls were covered in ancient Latin inscriptions. And in the center, a circle of stone where the floor dipped into a carved basin — an altar. He stepped closer. Etched around the basin were names — Kingston, Holloway, Greaves, Avery — the founding legacies. His bloodline carved into ritual. Then the lights shifted. He turned. The Watchers had arrived. Seven figures, each in a grey coat, faces shadowed, stepped silently into the outer ring of the room. No words. No movement. Until one of them stepped forward. Eli’s heart nearly stopped. It was his father. Not in memory. Not in photograph. In the flesh. Older, colder, but undeniably real. “Eli,” Daniel Kingston said, voice echoing in the stone. “You lied to me,” Eli breathed. “I protected you.” “You buried the truth.” “I buried the dead,” Daniel said sharply. “I silenced the past so you could have a future.” Eli stepped forward, fury shaking his voice. “Then why am I here?” “Because you’ve seen too much,” Daniel said. “And once seen, the Wheel must turn.” Eli’s voice dropped. “What wheel?” His father raised his hand. One of the Watchers stepped forward, placing an object at the center of the altar. A small wooden box, engraved with the Kingston crest. Daniel spoke: “Crestmore University was never just a school. It was a sanctuary — for knowledge, for blood, for sacrifice. Every generation must give something. And every heir must choose.” “Choose what?” “To inherit… or to vanish.” The box clicked open. Inside was a knife. Not ceremonial. Not symbolic. Real. Ancient. The blade dark with age and something far more recent. “You want me to kill someone?” Eli said. “No,” Daniel said. “We want you to remember.” He stepped closer. And in his hand now — a vial. Inside it: dark red liquid. Blood. Eli stared at it. “What is that?” “A memory,” Daniel said. “Drink it, and you’ll see what I saw. You’ll understand.” The air in the room thickened. “You said you tried to summon something,” Eli said. “Thirty years ago. What did you bring here?” Daniel’s smile was empty. “Not what. Who.” Eli took a step back. “No.” “You were chosen before you were born.” “I didn’t choose any of this.” “Exactly,” his father said. “That’s why it works.” --- The other Watchers began to chant. Low. Rhythmic. A language Eli didn’t recognize, but his bones did. The walls trembled. And the blood in the vial began to glow. Eli’s head pounded. Flashes of memories not his own—candles, screams, firelight on stone. A boy with silver eyes. A woman bound in shadow. He clutched his chest. His father stepped forward, placing the vial into Eli’s hand. “Drink. Or die.” The room spun. His vision blurred. And then— A crack. Loud. Gunshot? No. A scream. --- The chamber doors flew open. A figure in red stormed in, torchlight behind her. Lena. Bleeding from the shoulder. Hair wild. Eyes burning. She raised a flare and hurled it into the circle. Boom. Fire erupted across the basin. The Watchers fell back, screaming. Eli stumbled away from the altar, grabbing the knife from the box. Lena reached him, pulled him toward the exit. “We have sixty seconds,” she shouted. “Move!” “But—” “No time!” --- They ran through a second tunnel behind the chapel — narrow, curved, collapsing in places. Smoke choked the air. Voices screamed behind them. They didn’t stop until they burst out into the cemetery on the edge of campus. Graves glowed in moonlight. Eli collapsed near a tombstone, coughing, shaking. Lena dropped beside him. “You said you wouldn’t come back,” he rasped. “I lied.” He looked at her. “Why help me?” She hesitated. Then: “Because I saw what they did to Marcus. Because I watched my brother vanish. Because no one stopped them.” “And because of me?” Lena’s eyes didn’t leave his. “And because of you.” --- Eli lay on the grass, staring at the sky. The stars above Crest looked different now — colder, sharper. He reached into his coat and pulled out the vial. Still glowing faintly. “What is this?” he whispered. Lena looked at it. “That’s not blood,” she said. “That’s memory. Distilled from ritual. Drinking it doesn’t kill you. It turns you into one of them.” Eli stared at it. His inheritance. His damnation. He gripped the vial tight — and without warning — smashed it against the tombstone. Shards scattered in the dirt. The red liquid hissed. Fizzled. Vanished. He turned to Lena. “This ends with me.”
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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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