The Academic God

The Second Test

The fear from the West Wing door faded slowly, worn down by the daily grind of classes. It became a bad dream they didn’t talk about, a secret shard of ice buried deep in their chests. But it changed them. Their study sessions became more serious, more focused. Felix complained less. Cassia’s facts were now weapons she was sharpening. Lira’s calm felt less like a natural trait and more like a fortress she was building, stone by careful stone. Elian listened harder, to the teachers, to the hum, to the spaces between words.

A month passed. The trees in the valley below turned to fire—red and gold and orange. The air grew colder, and the first morning frosts silvered the courtyard grass. The academy felt older, starker against the dying year.

And then, the second test arrived. Not from a teacher, but from the academy itself.

It started with a headache.

Elian woke with a dull pressure behind his eyes, as if the deep hum had gotten stuck in his skull. At breakfast, he saw others rubbing their temples. Felix was uncharacteristically quiet, pushing his porridge around.

“My head feels like there’s a bell ringing inside it,” Felix muttered. “A small, mean bell.”

Lira, sitting with perfect posture, simply nodded. “The confluence is active. The veil is… thin today. Can’t you feel it?”

Elian could. It wasn’t just the hum. The air felt charged, thick. Colors seemed too bright, sounds too sharp. The ozone tang was so strong it stung the back of his throat.

Their first class was Principles of Mana Theory with Professor Lin. She entered the classroom looking flustered, her spectacles slightly askew. The copper orbs and crystal tuning forks on her desk were not still. They quivered, emitting faint, discordant chimes.

“Good morning, class,” she said, her voice tight. “You will note the… atmospheric disturbance. Do not be alarmed. It is a natural flux in the local thaumic field. We will proceed, but we will be focusing on grounding techniques today. A very practical lesson.”

She taught them a simple exercise, visualizing roots growing from their feet, down through the floor, into the bedrock, to stabilize their own personal mana flow against the external chaos. It was hard. Elian’s “roots” felt like they hit a hard, humming plate of energy twenty feet down and bounced back.

Halfway through the class, the door to the lecture hall flew open with a bang.

A second-year student stood there, his face pale, his robes smudged with soot. “Professor! It’s the Scriptorium! The inks—they’ve gone reactive!”

Professor Lin’s face went from flustered to alarmed. “All of you, stay here! Practice the grounding! Do not leave!” She rushed out, following the student.

The moment the door shut, the class erupted into nervous chatter.

“Reactive inks? What does that mean?”

“I heard a story about a moonwater spill once—it made everyone in the room forget their own name for a week!”

“My head is killing me.”

Elian looked at Lira. She was still doing the breathing exercise, but her knuckles were white where she gripped the edge of her desk. Cassia was looking toward the door with fierce curiosity. Felix just had his head down on his desk.

Then, the lights went out.

Not just the magical orbs lighting the room. The daylight from the high windows seemed to dim, as if a thick cloud had covered the sun. A deep, purple twilight filled the room.

And the noise started.

It wasn’t the hum. It was a voice. Or a thousand voices, whispered all at once, layered over each other, speaking in no language Elian knew. It came from the walls, the floor, the air itself. It was sorrow and hunger and a vast, empty curiosity. It pressed against his ears, his mind.

Students cried out, clapping hands over their ears. Some slumped in their seats, eyes wide with terror.

Elian fought the panic. Ground. Root yourself. He pictured the cliffs of Hearthaven, the solid, unmoving rock against the pounding sea. He imagined his roots not bouncing, but spearing down, through the humming plate, into the quiet dark below.

The whisper-voices grew quieter, a distant buzz. He could still hear them, but they weren’t inside him.

He looked around. Felix was shaking, tears of fear and pain in his eyes. Cassia was muttering facts to herself like a prayer—“It’s just a psychic echo, a bleed-through, it’s not real, it’s not real…” but she was trembling.

Lira was the only other one still upright and focused. She met Elian’s gaze across the aisle. Her eyes were wide, but clear. She gave a tiny, sharp nod. Hold on.

A scream echoed from the hallway. It was cut off abruptly.

That broke the last of the class’s order. Several students bolted for the door, yanking it open and fleeing into the purple-dark corridor, into the chorus of whispering voices.

“Don’t!” Elian shouted, but it was too late.

He, Lira, and Cassia helped a sobbing Felix to his feet. “We have to get out of here,” Cassia said, her voice shaking. “But not into the halls. There’s a service stair behind the demonstration table. For bringing up the equipment. It goes down to the storage cellars. It should be shielded.”

They stumbled forward, half-dragging Felix. The whispering voices seemed to press in, offering terrible secrets, promising forgotten dreams. Elian kept his mind on the cliff, on the rock.

They found the small, plain door behind Professor Lin’s desk. Cassia fumbled with the latch. It opened onto a narrow, dark stairwell that smelled of dust and cool stone. The whispering was muffled here, dampened by thick walls.

They hurried down, the darkness swallowing them. At the bottom was a small, low-ceilinged storage room filled with crates and old, covered apparatus. It was silent. The only light was a faint, greenish glow from a fungus growing in a damp corner.

They slumped against the crates, breathing hard. Felix was crying quietly. Cassia was hugging herself, rocking back and forth. Lira leaned her head against the wall, eyes closed.

Elian listened. The whispers were gone. The deep hum was there, but it was a comfort now—the normal, background noise of the world. The test was over. Or they had passed it.

“What… was that?” Felix choked out.

“A breach,” Cassia said, her voice hollow. “A tiny one. The veil thinned, and something… leaked through. Not a thing. A sound. An idea. Raw psychic resonance from the other side.”

“It wanted to tell me things,” Felix whispered. “Awful, wonderful things. I almost listened.”

“We all did,” Elian said quietly.

Lira opened her eyes. “The grounding worked. For us. The ones who ran… they weren’t grounded. They let it in.”

They sat in the dark for what felt like an hour, waiting for the world to right itself. Eventually, the green fungus-light seemed to brighten as the normal, golden magical lights in the ceiling flickered back on. The oppressive feeling lifted.

Cautiously, they climbed the stairs. The lecture hall was empty, but the lights were back. The windows showed a normal, grey autumn day. It was as if nothing had happened, except for the abandoned books and bags scattered around the room.

They found Professor Lin in the hallway, looking exhausted but relieved. She was shepherding a group of dazed, crying students back toward the dormitories.

“Ah, you four,” she said, spotting them. Her kind face was strained. “You are unharmed? You stayed put?”

“We went to the storage cellar, Professor,” Cassia admitted.

Professor Lin nodded, a flicker of approval in her tired eyes. “Smart. Practical. That is good.” She looked at the weeping students around her. “Not everyone was so… grounded. Go back to your tower. All non-essential classes are canceled for the rest of the day. Rest. You have been through a resonance event. It is… taxing.”

As they walked back across the quiet courtyards, the academy seemed bruised. Teachers spoke in hushed tones. Some windows were cracked. They passed a patch of grass that had turned a vivid, impossible blue.

Back in the Novice Tower common room, rumors were flying.

“The Scriptorium inks boiled over and wrote curses on the walls!”

“A third-year in Evocation tried to cast a shield and summoned a cloud of screaming faces!”

“The Headmaster sealed himself in the Chronos Spire!”

Amid the panic, their little group sat together on a worn sofa. The shared terror in the dark cellar had bound them tighter than any study session.

“We passed,” Lira said softly, looking at her hands. “The academy tested us. Not with quizzes. With… that. And we passed.”

“Because we stuck together,” Elian said. “And because we listened.” He didn’t just mean to the teachers. He meant to the silence under the whispers, to the solid rock under the chaos.

Felix, his color returning, managed a weak smile. “So… does this mean we’re not getting expelled for the West Wing? Because I feel like we just got community service for saving our own skins.”

For the first time since that terrible door, they all laughed. It was a shaky, relieved sound.

That evening, as Elian lay in bed, the deep chime sounded. Boom. It didn’t feel like a heartbeat now. It felt like a sigh. A release of pressure.

He thought of the whispering voices. The hunger in them. The vast curiosity. It was different from the patient listening of the deep hum. This was active. This was trying to get in.

Proctor Brom’s warning had been about the deep listener. But the thing behind the West Wing door, and the voices in the walls today… they weren’t just listening.

They were knocking.

And today, for a little while, the door had cracked open. Elian and his friends had just learned what happened when the watched things didn’t just know they were seen.

They tried to speak.