2026-09-16 22:29:54Every step Lexi took was a testament to the horror she had witnessed. The students gathered around whispering and staring so much Lexi felt like even the walls were watching her.
She trembled, her knees threatening to give up when finally she reached her room and practically threw herself inside, slamming the door shut before leaning her weight against it.
She closed her eyes, her breathing shallow, with no tears left to cry, her chest felt hollow as if the horror had burned out her ability to cry.
From across the room, her roommate turned sharply towards Lexi's arrival, “Lexi?” Belle rushed over, her robes swirling around her ankles as she reached out to grab Lexi’s trembling shoulders.
“Lexi, oh gods, I heard. The whole campus is talking about it. Are you alright?”
Lexi couldn't even speak, as her teeth clicked together rhythmically from the residual shock.
Belle guided her slowly toward the edge of the unmade bed, “Do you want to talk about it?”
It took several long seconds for Lexi to find her voice, “It was horrific Belle.”
The dam broke again, the memory rushing forward as she stared blankly at the wall, her voice dropping to a whisper. “I can't even find the words…”
She breathed as fresh, hot tears flooded her eyes, blurring her vision as she looked up at her roommate, her expression completely fractured by a child's confusion at the dark. “How could a human being be so cruel?”
Belle didn't answer. She just sat down slowly beside her, wrapping her arms around Lexi and pulling her tight against her shoulder as Lexi struggled to suppress another wave of tears against Belle's cloak.
After a few minutes, Lexi pulled back, wiping her cheeks. Her eyes were wide and fixed on the closed door as if the threat were already standing outside it.
“They said the Mage of Ruin dwells within our very walls. I believe it. I think disaster is coming for all of us.”
Belle reached out, gently squeezing Lexi’s hands. “Whatever it is, the Academy won't let an outside army just slaughter us…we'll be safe.”
Lexi gave an uncertain nod, wanting desperately to believe what wasn't convincing at all. Belle then leaned forward, pressing a kiss against Lexi's forehead before she rose to smoothen her skirt.
“I have to get to the advanced alchemy lecture,” Belle said, gathering her books from the desk. “The Magisters haven't canceled the afternoon block yet. I'll be back in a few hours, okay? Just lock the door behind me and try to rest.”
×××
Days bled into one another, and the facade of the Academy began to crack. It was becoming obvious to every student that the High Magisters had grown utterly distressed.
The grand courtyard where the boys were killed remained locked down, the afternoon advanced blocks were constantly cancelled without explanation, and the senior faculty members were perpetually missing, locked behind the doors of the council chamber where emergency meetings were held.
For Lexi, the waking world was bad enough, but the dark was even worse because every time she closed her eyes, the nightmares found her but this time, she didn't see the soldiers anymore; she saw the Mage of Ruin.
Unable to sit idly in her room while the clock ticked toward a possible doom, she decided she was going to find out if the Mage Of Ruin actually lived.
On one of those late nights, where Lexi sat huddled over a pile of loose textures and faded historical scripts she had smuggled from the common rooms, behind her, Belle stepped out of the washroom, a damp towel wrapped around her shoulders.
She looked over Lexi's shoulder and sighed. “Are you seriously still onto this thing?”
Not looking up from the pages, Lexi answered, “Why wouldn't I be? Everyone's life is at stake, Belle.”
“You worry too much,” Belle said, walking over to her own bed and shaking out her damp hair. “There's no danger coming. If we were actually in real trouble, the entire academy would have been evacuated by now.”
Lexi turned sharply in her chair with her quill between her fingers, “Whether or not tragedy befalls us, Belle, they are not evacuating this school. They would make us stand and fight because that is exactly what they've trained us for. We are the elite bloodlines.”
Belle rolled her eyes, unimpressed by the lecture as she continued drying her hair with the towel, her voice dripping with boredom. “Fine. If you're so worried about a myth, you should just go to the library. God knows anyone barely visits that place anyway. You might actually find something useful instead of staring at those useless common-room pamphlets.”
Lexi froze, the central library! Of course.
In all her panic, in all her searching through the dormitory records, she hadn't even thought of that.
The next morning, the moment her introductory theory class let out, Lexi didn't even bother returning to her dorm to drop off her satchel as she walked frantically straight across the central grounds and toward the library.
But when she reached the grand entrance, she found the doors shut. She grabbed the iron ring handle and pulled, but it didn't budge.
“Locked?” Lexi muttered out loud, looking around the empty, shaded colonnade before knocking but no one came to answer.
Then she thought to herself that maybe the old librarian had probably overslept, or perhaps the tension on campus had disrupted his morning schedule entirely.
Unwilling to walk away when she was this close, she decided to skirt around the side of the foundation and try the back door.
To her surprise, the door was slightly ajar.
As she pushed the door open and stepped into the cool, dust-scented shadow of the history stacks, two voices drifted from the aisle directly ahead.
One was a younger male voice, and the other was a low, dry, older rasp. Lexi slowed her footsteps, creeping closer behind the massive partitions before she could even reveal her presence.
Through the gap in the shelves, she spotted the transfer kid she’d noticed around assembly a few times standing right in front of the old librarian and clearly they were in the middle of a heated argument.
“It was very stupid of you to go charging like that.” Clovis growled.
Chadwick glared back.
“What was I supposed to do?”
“More importantly, how were you able to sense his presence?”
Chadwick shrugged. “I couldn't see him, but I felt his mental energy. Whispers of his thoughts.”
Clovis stared at the boy in contemplation.
“What?”
Clovis sighed.
“I don't trust you.”
Chadwick threw his hands up in frustration and yelled, “Yeah, like I'm going to tell the whole world Mr. Dupond is the infamous Mage of Ruin!”
Lexi’s heart stopped dead in her chest as her satchel slipped from her fingers and hit the floor.
“What?” she breathed out, drawing both men's immediate attention.
Chadwick's eyes went wide with panic as he locked eyes with her, his face turning pale as ash. “Oh, no.”
“T-that’s impossible,” she said despite herself, instinctively taking a step back, her eyes and fingers twitching as the reality of the nightmare slammed into her.
The boogeyman is the old librarian?
But she didn't have time to dwell on the revelation that she confirmed from their reactions.
She immediately spun on her heel, sprinting back towards the exit with one thing in mind: to reach the Grand Magister, to tell the council, to save the school from its impending doom.
But she didn't even make it three paces when a hand clamped violently around her mouth, pushing her scream back down her throat.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE: Lexi’s Resolve.
She worked the plate at her own hour, came up the back passage, and went along the reading floor with a book held up against her, and her hands started somewhere around the second range end.She let them. She did not look down at them and she did not put them away in her sleeves, and by the time the study room door was shut behind her they had quit on their own.One window, and nothing in it at that hour but the sky going out over the eastern spires.There was a chalk line across the boards near the door, standing at sixteen feet and stopping dead. She stepped over it, the way you step over a thing somebody else is in the middle of, and sat down past the end of the table with the repair bench between her and the wall.On the far side of that bench, face in, was the board with the pins in it and the red thread run between them. She could have said every item on it without turning round. S
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT: Clovis Prepares For The Hunt.
The north door had been unbarred since the last bell, and the boy came in at it at the hour he comes in at, and there was nothing in that to read.What there was to read was that he did not go to the trolley.He came up the floor, took the register off the end of the desk, opened it, and turned it round to face the chair.Clovis did not put a hand on it.The hand in it is the boy’s. He backfilled the whole term in one sitting, in ink, and nobody asked him for the hours. They were his own, because he does not leave a column short.A boy does not carry a man a book he has been keeping all term unless somebody else has read it first.It lay open at a night in the second week, with his thumb down the fore edge in three more places. He took the thumb away, left the three proud of the block, and stepped back.Four lines with
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN: The Prominent Magister’s Move.
The chit had four words on it in a clerk’s hand and a crest pressed into the corner, and going up the slope he worked out what they had on him, and the answer was that he had written it himself.The register. Dates put in from the start of term forward, in ink, because the old man had let it stand and said he should not have.He had offered it on the way down the floor, the two of them a yard apart and both looking straight ahead.The old man was turning a cloth over on his own wrist and folding the clean side out while he said what wanted doing, and it was out of Chadwick’s mouth before he had decided to say it.There was the smallest pause after. Then he was told he would do it in ink, and he said he would do it in ink, and he did.Nobody made him put the hours in. The hours were his own idea, and he put them in because he is a boy who counts and a colu
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX: Clovis Doesn’t Tell Her.
He had the velvet book out on the desk before she came in, because a thing you mean to give back should be the first thing in the room.It has been shut in the drawer with the rest of what he keeps since the night he took it, and getting it out he could not put it anywhere on that wood that did not look arranged.So he stopped moving it and put his hands either side of it and waited.She came up the north aisle at her hour and stopped two feet short of the desk, further out than she used to stand.She looked at the book. Then at his hands either side of it. Then at the shut drawer that has her notebook in it, and she said nothing about that.“Take it,” Clovis said.She did not reach for it.“You’re going to answer them,” she said.“I am.”&ldq
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE: The Secondary Anchor.
She gave him the length of time a person gives, and when it had gone by she put the pencil in the satchel and got up.He had her notebook under his own hand. He had stood up and gone round the corner of his desk for it an hour ago, in front of her, and she had not asked for it.So he got up as well, and took the lamp, and walked her down to the north door.He set the lamp down and got the bar up out of its brackets, four feet of iron that wants both his arms now.She waited while he did it, and did not offer.“You can keep the notebook,” she said. “I’ll ask you for the other one again. I’m not in a hurry about it.”He had nothing ready for either half. A man can refuse a thing asked of him and cannot refuse a thing handed over, and she had done both in a breath.“Go to your wing,” he said.“Yes, sir.”Then she went out past him into the colonnade, and the cold came off the grass for as long as the door stood open.Clovis got the bar back across its brackets and kept a hand on it a whi
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR: The Second Reading.
The notebook lay at the length of the desk from his hands, and to get it he was going to have to stand up out of that chair in front of her.He had already looked at it, so the price had been set by somebody else.A chair taking a girl’s weight back is a small sound. That one had arrived like a thing presented for signature.Nothing since. No page turned up at the cold table, no foot on the boards, no shifting about by a girl who wanted it heard.The chair was still round on its legs where he had turned it an hour ago, so he was facing up his own floor, and he could not undo that without the undoing being counted.The lamp had burned past the hour it had in it.The sub-vault volume sat squared to the edge with its seal unbroken, and beside it the ruled sheet, still one row.The notebook lay past the pair of them.
You may also like
XianXia : Sovereign of the Gods
kalki_gsk21.1K viewsInto The Unknown World
Einvee16.9K viewsReincarnation Of The Bullied
Udoka Okoh118.3K viewsImmortal Universe
Shin Novel 21.0K viewsThe Almighty Cultivator
HushedVoiced187 viewsThe King Who Broke Heaven’s Tithe
Efrylrez143 viewsThe Demon King who wanted peace
ANIMETALE177 viewsZero System: World's Only Classless Hunter
A knight in skirt 332 views