2025-08-27 05:04:22
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Chapter 102
The first Watcher rose fully out of the spiral, porcelain mask gleaming in the broken light. Its robes dripped with liquid fire, hissing where drops struck the stone. It didn’t walk. It glided, its long feet dragging just above the ground, its gaze locked on Eli.Behind it, more emerged. Six. Seven. Ten. Their whispers braided into one roar, a chorus of teeth grinding inside bone. Students broke at last, sprinting in every direction. Some bolted toward the dorms, others tried to force the chapel doors open, others simply screamed and stumbled through the rain.The professors fought to hold them back, but even Harrow’s bellow couldn’t match the terror. “Stay together! Don’t scatter—stay—” His words snapped into a grunt as one of the Watchers twisted its hand. Harrow clutched his chest, choking. His knees buckled before another professor dragged him aside, chanting frantic incantations Eli didn’t recognize.The air crackled with heat.Lena yanked Eli harder. “We can’t stay here—”But Ca
Chapter 101
The crater steamed in the center of the quad, fissures glowing like molten veins, the spiral burned so deep it seemed to coil forever into the earth. The fragments of the bell still smoldered, their bronze edges slick with some liquid light that hissed against the rain.No one moved at first. The entire campus seemed to hold its breath.Then the screaming started again.Students scrambled across the rubble, tripping over fallen stone, pulling one another to their feet. Some ran for the dormitories, though their windows glowed with cracks and their doors sagged half-off hinges. Others clustered together like flocks of birds scattered mid-flight, uncertain where safety lay.The professors shouted orders, but the words dissolved in panic. Harrow’s voice was the loudest, sharp and furious: “Stay back! Get away from the crater! Form lines—move!” He waved his arms as though he could bend the chaos back into order, but his white hair clung to his skull with sweat, and his eyes were wild.Eli
Chapter 100
The quad looked like a graveyard of light. Fires had been stamped into embers, smoke hanging in damp curtains that clung to the air. Someone had managed to douse the worst of the dormitory blaze with the emergency lines, but the stone was cracked, glass shattered, and the courtyard was littered with shards and rubble. It was after midnight, but no one had gone to sleep.Students huddled in corners, wrapped in blankets pulled from wreckage or coats ripped from closets. Some whispered prayers, others cursed, others simply stared, numb and unseeing. The professors moved between them with clipped orders and tight expressions, but their authority had lost weight. Too much had been seen, too much could not be explained away.Eli stood apart, marked hand shoved into his jacket pocket, jaw tight. Every time he caught someone’s eye, they looked away. Not out of rudeness—out of fear. He was the boy who had burned the Watchers, the boy whose skin glowed with the same mark carved into the Crest’s
Chapter 99
Smoke clung to the air long after the last of the shadows had dissolved. It wasn’t the clean drift of a dying fire, but something denser, heavier—like ash mixed with breath. The quad looked like a battlefield. Benches overturned, windows shattered, the dormitory wing still belching embers into the sky. Students sat huddled in small clusters, some sobbing, some silent, some staring into nothing.The silence was worse than the screaming had been.Eli stood at the center of it all, the mark on his hand still glowing faintly, casting a sick light across his skin. No one came near him. Not even Lena, though she lingered close, watching him with a kind of fierce worry that was almost anger. He could feel their stares, the students and even the professors—like he wasn’t a boy anymore but something dangerous, a torch that might burn them all.Dean Harrow finally broke the silence. His voice was low but sharp, meant to carry across the ruined courtyard. “You saw it with your own eyes,” he said
Chapter 98
The Crest had never known silence.Even at night, its towers hummed with late lamps, with the shuffle of pages in libraries and the midnight footsteps of students sneaking across quads. But after the rooftop burst, silence spread like smoke. The air itself seemed stunned, waiting.Then came the chaos.Eli and Lena barely made it down from the shattered dormitory before the flood of bodies surged through the courtyard. Students poured from every hall, their voices breaking the hush in shrieks and confused shouts. “Fire!” someone cried. “The west wing collapsed!” Another voice screamed, “The bell tower’s falling—run!” Panic cascaded through the crowd until it was no longer words but noise, raw and ragged.The earth beneath them was not steady. Each step seemed to groan. Cracks split across the cobblestones, narrow fissures glowing faintly from within. It looked like the Crest’s bones were showing through, veins of pale light winding across the ground.Lena clutched Eli’s sleeve, pulling
Chapter 97
At first there was nothing but white. Not silence, not noise, not darkness, not light. Just a blank, crushing nothingness that pressed in from every side, swallowing thought and breath alike. Eli tried to move but had no body to move, tried to shout but had no voice. Only the cube’s final roar lingered, echoing through the void like the fading toll of a bell.Then, slowly, sensation returned. The cold came first. A wind, sharp and relentless, cutting through skin that felt raw and fragile. Then the smell of charred stone, metallic like iron, heavy like smoke after a fire. Eli opened his eyes.He was lying on the rooftop still—or what was left of it. The roof was split down the center, a gaping wound of rubble and flame that reached into the dormitory floors below. Pieces of stone jutted upward at unnatural angles, glowing faintly with heat. The skyline of the Crest beyond was wrong. Some towers stood, but others had collapsed, toppled as though struck by some invisible fist. Sparks ra
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