Voidbound

Forbidden theory

Sera wanted to tell someone. Elara wouldn't let her.

They slipped out of the restricted section, resealed the ward, and walked back through the library with the stiff, careful steps of people pretending they hadn't just seen something impossible. Sera kept whispering—we should tell a professor, we should tell Thorn, we should at least tell someone—and Elara kept saying no.

Because the writing had been wet. Because the ink had been fresh. Because it wasn't a map anymore, it was a message, and messages were for one person only.

Come find me.

If she reported it, the Headmistress would know. And Caelan had warned her exactly what happened to students who became interesting.

So instead, she went to Thorn.

---

His office was at the end of a corridor nobody used, behind a door that had no handle. Sera refused to come. "He gives me the creeps," she said, and vanished toward the dormitories.

Elara knocked on the wood. The door opened on its own.

Professor Thorn sat behind a desk buried in books. Candles burned without wax. The room smelled of iron and cold stone. He didn't look up.

"You're late," he said.

"I didn't tell you I was coming."

"No. But you were going to." He turned a page. "Sit."

Elara sat. The chair was hard and unwelcoming, which she suspected was the point.

"I want to ask you about my brother."

"Everyone wants to ask me about your brother." Thorn finally looked up, and his sharp blue eyes caught the candlelight. "I taught him. I liked him. He was arrogant, reckless, and about twice as talented as he had any right to be. And then he did something stupid and he died. There's your answer."

"He didn't die."

Thorn's expression didn't change. "What makes you say that?"

She almost told him. The words were right there—the map, the ink, the voice, the thinness in the dark that said my name. But something held her back. Some instinct, low and animal, warning her that Thorn was not a man you handed your secrets to for free.

"I just know," she said.

Thorn set down his pen. For a long moment he simply studied her, and Elara got the distinct impression that he was reading something written on the inside of her skull.

"Stand up," he said.

"Why?"

"Because I'm going to give you a test, and I'd rather you didn't bleed on my desk."

Elara stood.

Thorn reached into a drawer and drew out a small stone tablet. It was covered in runes—tight, spiraling, layered over each other like scales. He placed it on the desk between them.

"This is a binding rune," he said. "Eighth-century Unseelie work. It is currently holding the door of my office shut, the candles lit, and a rather unpleasant creature trapped in my filing cabinet." He tapped the tablet. "Break it."

Elara stared. "I don't know how."

"Then learn. Touch it."

She hesitated. Then she pressed her fingertips to the stone.

The runes flared—and her magic surged up to meet them, cold and starving, the way it always did. She tried to push it down. She tried to feel the runes the way a normal mage would, tracing the lines of power, working out the pattern.

She couldn't. The Void didn't trace patterns. The Void ate them.

The tablet cracked.

Not gently. It split down the middle with a sound like snapping bone, and the runes unwound—unraveled, thread by thread, spooling out of the stone and dissolving into the air. The candles guttered. The filing cabinet rattled violently and then went still.

Elara yanked her hand back. The tablet was a dead gray husk.

"I'm sorry," she said immediately. "I didn't mean to—it just does that, it always does that, I can't control—"

"Sit down."

She sat.

Thorn was not angry. That was the worst part. Thorn was pleased. He picked up the ruined tablet and turned it over in his gloved hands, and there was something in his face that looked almost like hunger.

"Nine years," he said. "Nine years I've been trying to break that rune. I've tried fire. I've tried counter-runes. I've tried bleeding on it, which was undignified." He set the tablet down. "You did it in four seconds."

"I destroyed it."

"You unbound it. There's a difference, and it's the difference between a vandal and a locksmith." He leaned back. "Void magic doesn't create and doesn't destroy. It removes. It takes away the rules that hold things together. Which is why it's forbidden, which is why the Council would burn you at the stake if they knew, and which is why you're going to tell me exactly how long you've had it."

Elara's mouth went dry. "I don't—"

"Don't lie to me. I've been lied to by professionals." He gestured at the gray husk on his desk. "That was Void work. Yours. And I saw what you did to the Awakening Stone yesterday, no matter how prettily the Headmistress dressed it up as an accident. So. How long?"

She looked at her hands. "Four years."

"Since you were twelve."

"Yes."

"And your brother?"

Elara looked up.

Thorn's face had gone carefully blank, which she was beginning to understand was what his face did when he was saying something true.

"Kaelen had it too," he said. "Void magic. Rare as a honest politician and twice as dangerous. He came to me in his third year because he couldn't hide it anymore and he needed someone who wouldn't turn him in." He paused. "I didn't turn him in."

Elara's heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat. "Then you know what happened to him."

"I know what he did." Thorn's voice tightened. "There's a rift beneath this academy. It's been there since before the school was built, and it's been leaking for a century. The wards hold it—barely—and they need feeding. Kaelen found out what they feed it with." He stopped.

"With what?"

"That's not my secret to tell you."

"He's my brother."

"He was my student." Thorn's jaw flexed. "And I sent him into that rift to seal a breach, because he was the only person alive who could, and because he volunteered, and because I told him it would be survivable." He looked at her, and for the first time, Elara saw the grief underneath the sarcasm—old and deep and badly healed. "It wasn't. I've been trying to get him out for five years."

The candles flickered.

Elara stood up so fast the chair tipped backward. "He's alive?"

"I don't know." Thorn's voice was flat. "The Void doesn't tell me anything. It only tells you."

The room went very quiet.

"What does that mean?"

"It means," Thorn said, "that the voice you heard in the library last night wasn't your imagination. I felt it too. Every ward in this building felt it." He stood as well, and for a moment he looked less like a professor and more like a man standing on the edge of a cliff. "Void magic recognizes Void magic. If Kaelen is alive in there, he'd be reaching for the nearest thing that matches him."

"Me."

"You."

Elara pressed her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were burning. She'd spent five years being told to accept it—the funeral with no body, the empty room, the letters that stopped coming. Five years of he's gone, Ellie, he's gone.

He wasn't gone. He was trapped. Right underneath her feet, this entire time.

"I want to go in," she said.

"No."

"I want to go in—"

"No." Thorn's voice cracked like a whip. The candles snuffed out. In the darkness, he was a silhouette and a pair of gleaming eyes. "You are sixteen years old and you can't control your own magic for four consecutive seconds. If you walk into that rift, it will keep you, and then there will be two Veyras in the dark and no one left to pull either of you out."

The candles relit themselves.

Thorn sat back down and pulled a fresh page toward him.

"However," he said, "I have been trying to build a key for five years. And I could use an assistant."

Elara stared at him. "You're offering me a job."

"I'm offering you a way to be useful instead of dead." He dipped his pen. "You'll come here three nights a week. You'll tell no one. Not the half-fae, not the prince, not anyone. You will learn rune theory, ward structure, and every forbidden thing I know about the Void. And in return, when you're ready—and you will know when you're ready—I'll help you go get your brother."

Elara's hands were shaking. "Why? Why would you help me?"

Thorn didn't look up from his page.

"Because I owe him," he said. "And because the alternative is that the Headmistress finds out what you are, and then you'll be the one feeding the wards."

He began to write.

"Now go. And if you see the thinness again—the place in the air where the world doesn't heal right—don't run. Say my name. I'll find you."

Elara walked to the door. She put her hand on the frame. Then she stopped.

"You said Kaelen did something stupid," she said. "What did he do?"

Thorn's pen paused.

"Nothing you need to know yet," he said. "But when you find out, you'll understand why Dorian Blackwood wants you dead."

The door closed behind her.