Voidbound

Dead files

Sera took some convincing.

"You want to break into the Headmistress's private archive," she said flatly. "The one place in this school I've been explicitly told never to go near. The one with the living wards."

"Thorn says the drainings are recorded somewhere. Every student who's been fed to the rift. If Kaelen's name is in there—"

"It won't just be his name." Sera chewed her lip. "There'll be yours too, once Vaeloria gets around to it."

They went anyway.

The archive was in the basement of the administration wing, three floors below the Headmistress's tower and one above the cells where students were held for disciplinary hearings. The corridor was cold enough that Elara could see her breath.

The door was iron, banded, and warded with runes that crawled when she looked at them too long.

"Can you break it?" Sera whispered.

"I don't want to break it. Breaking things makes noise." Elara pressed her palm to the iron and closed her eyes.

Thorn's voice echoed in her head. It's a river. Stop trying to hold it back.

She didn't pull. She listened. The wards were a lattice—layered, interlocking, each thread of power tied to the next. And underneath all of it, a single anchor rune, humming low and steady.

She found the thread that held the anchor. And she didn't unravel it. She loosened it. Just enough.

The runes dimmed. The door clicked.

Sera stared at her. "You didn't even break a sweat."

"I've been practicing."

The archive was worse than the library. No floating orbs. No windows. Just shelf after shelf of black ledgers, each one labeled with a year. Elara found the current one and pulled it down.

Enrollment Records: Aetheria Academy.

She flipped past the first years. Past her own name—Veyra, Elara. Scholarship. Affinity: Undetermined. Past Caelan's, Dorian's, Sera's.

Then she found the section marked WARD FEEDING — AUTHORIZED DISBURSEMENTS.

It wasn't a ledger of money. It was a ledger of people.

Two names per year. Always second-years or below. Always scholarship students, orphans, or the unconnected—the ones nobody would ask about. Next to each name, a date and a single word: Discharged.

"Discharged," Sera whispered. "That's what they call it. Like they're letting them go home."

Elara flipped back. Year after year. Name after name. Seventeen students over four decades, all of them quietly removed from the enrollment rolls, all of them labeled discharged.

"Elara." Sera's voice had changed.

She was holding a different book. A thin one, bound in cracked black leather, unlabeled.

Elara took it. Opened it.

K. VEYRA — INCIDENT REPORT. WEST TOWER, SUBLEVEL THREE. FINAL ENTRY.

Her hands started shaking.

She read.

Third-year student Kaelen Veyra discovered the feeding protocol and attempted to intervene during the scheduled disbursement of L. Blackwood. Subject was restrained. Blackwood was discharged as planned. Veyra subsequently accessed the sublevel three rift gate without authorization and entered the rift. Purpose unknown. Recovery deemed unfeasible. Case closed.

Elara read it twice. Three times. The words didn't change.

Blackwood was discharged as planned.

Liora Blackwood. Dorian's sister. She wasn't killed by Kaelen. She was fed to the rift, and Kaelen had tried to stop it.

"There's more," Sera said quietly. She was pointing at the bottom of the page. A second handwriting—not the neat academy script, but cramped and hurried, written sideways in the margin.

I'm sorry. I couldn't save her. But I can save the rest. Don't follow me, Ellie. — K

Sera put a hand over her mouth. Elara didn't cry. She felt like she'd used up all her tears in Caelan's corridor, and now there was just a cold, flat thing sitting in her chest where her heart should be.

Don't follow me.

She'd spent five years planning to do exactly that.

"He wrote this for you," Sera said. "He knew you'd come looking."

"He knew he wasn't coming back."

The lamp above them flickered.

Both of them froze.

The door at the end of the archive was still closed. The wards were still dimmed. But the air had changed—gone thin and cold, the way it had gone in the restricted section. The way it had gone in Elara's dormitory on the night she heard her brother's voice.

Sera grabbed her sleeve. "Elara."

"I feel it."

The shelves at the far end of the room began to whisper.

Not words. Just sound. Pages turning without hands, ledgers sliding against each other, a low dry rustle that grew louder and louder until it was almost a voice.

Then it stopped.

And one ledger—one single black book from a shelf Elara hadn't touched—slid out of place and dropped to the floor, open.

She walked toward it. Sera hissed at her to stop. She didn't.

The book was a ledger of enrollments. Open to a page near the beginning, so old the ink had browned. And there, in handwriting that was not academy script and not her brother's, a single entry had been circled in red.

Enrolled: Malakar Veyra. Affinity: Void. Status: FOUNDER.

Elara's blood went cold.

"Veyra," she said.

Sera's face was white. "That's... that's your—"

"Get the door."

They ran.

---

The corridor outside the archive was empty. The wards had gone back up behind them, humming innocently. They made it up two flights of stairs before a voice stopped them.

"You know," Professor Thorn said, leaning against the wall at the top of the landing like he'd been waiting there all night, "when I said 'tell no one,' I assumed you understood that included the half-fae."

Sera made a small, terrified noise.

Thorn's gaze moved to Elara, and his eyes were not amused.

"Give me the book."

"The book fell off a shelf on its own—"

"Give me the book."

She gave him the book. He didn't open it. He didn't need to. He tucked it under his arm like it weighed nothing and started walking.

"Follow," he said. "Both of you. And if either of you speaks a word of this to anyone, I will personally ensure you spend the remainder of your academic careers scrubbing the sublevel three floors. Which, as you now know, are the floors where students go to die."

They followed.

He led them back to his office. The candles lit themselves as he entered. He set the black ledger on his desk, next to the husk of the rune tablet Elara had destroyed in her first lesson.

"Malakar Veyra," he said, "was one of the four founders of this academy. He discovered the rift. He wrote the first ward. He also, over the following two centuries, attempted to open the rift six times, each attempt costing the lives of a dozen students before he was finally stopped."

Elara's mouth was dry. "And his name is Veyra."

"Yes."

"Which means—"

"It means," Thorn said, "that the Void magic in your blood is not a mutation, and it is not a curse. It's an inheritance. You are the last living descendant of the man who built the rift, the man who was imprisoned inside it, and the man who is currently reaching out of it to speak to you every night."

Elara couldn't breathe.

"He wants me," she said.

"He wants you," Thorn agreed. "But here is the part you don't know." He opened the ledger and turned it toward her, to a page past the circled entry—a page covered in the same cramped, hurried handwriting she'd seen in Kaelen's margin, except this was fresh. Days old, at most.

She's here. She's walking into it. Everything is going according to plan.

Elara stared at it.

"That isn't Kaelen's handwriting," she said.

"No," Thorn said quietly. "It's Malakar's."

The candles went out.

And from beneath the floor—deep, deep beneath the floor—something laughed.