Voidbound

Restricted

Professor Thorn didn't lecture. He prowled.

"You believe magic is a tool," he said, pacing the front of the amphitheater with his gloved hands clasped behind his back. "A hammer. A sword. Something you pick up when convenient and set down when you're finished. This is the thinking of children and farmers. Magic is not a tool. Magic is a creditor. It lends. It always collects."

He stopped in front of the first row. A girl flinched.

"Take fire," Thorn continued. "You summon a flame. Charming. Where does the heat come from? Your body? The air? The realm itself? And when you're old and your bones ache and your hands shake, who paid for that flame?"

Nobody answered.

"Correct. Nobody knows. That is the first lesson of Elemental Theory." He turned, and his sharp blue eyes found Elara in the third row. "Which brings me to today's demonstration. Miss Veyra. Stand."

Elara's stomach dropped. Caelan, seated two rows over, didn't look at her. But his shoulders had gone rigid.

She stood.

"Come here."

She walked down the stone steps. The other students watched with the particular hunger of people who are about to see someone humiliated.

Thorn placed a small iron cube on the lectern between them. Runes crawled across its surface like living things.

"This is a containment vessel," he said. "Inside it is a shard of unstable elemental energy. It is not dangerous. It is merely rude." A few students laughed. Thorn didn't. "Your task is simple. Reach into the vessel and identify the element. Fire, water, earth, or air. Speak the answer and you may sit down."

Elara looked at the cube. "That's all?"

"That's all."

She reached for it. And she felt it immediately—the way her Void magic rose in her chest, hungry and cold, like water pressing against a dam. It wanted out. It always wanted out.

Don't use it, Caelan had said. Fail.

She touched the iron. The runes flickered. She closed her eyes and tried to feel with her skin alone—heat, dampness, grit, movement—

Nothing. The Void was drowning everything out. She couldn't sense anything through it.

"I don't know," she said.

Thorn tilted his head. "You don't know."

"No."

"Interesting." He leaned closer. "Because a trained mage can identify an element through three inches of iron. And you, Miss Veyra, have more raw power in your left hand than half this room combined."

Whispers rippled through the class. Elara's face burned.

"I don't know," she repeated.

Thorn studied her for a long moment. Then he smiled—that same thin, knowing smile from before. "Very well. Sit down."

She fled back to her seat. Sera squeezed her arm under the desk. You okay? Elara nodded without meaning it.

Thorn resumed his lecture, but Elara barely heard a word. Because as he turned away, he'd said one more thing. Quietly. Just for her.

"You're a better liar than your brother was. But not by much."

---

Sera found her after class in the corridor, weaving through the crowd like a fish swimming upstream.

"That was brutal," she announced. "Thorn never does the vessel test on the first day. He's testing you."

"I noticed."

"No, I mean he's testing you. Like, watching. Did you see the way he looked at you? Like you were a puzzle he already solved and he was just checking the answer."

Elara rubbed her temples. "What do you know about him?"

"Nobody knows anything about Thorn. He was expelled like twenty years ago, then came back and now he teaches Forbidden Magic Theory, which isn't even a real subject. The school just lets him do whatever he wants because he's the only person alive who can read the old runes." Sera lowered her voice. "He's also the last person who saw your brother before he disappeared."

Elara stopped walking. "What?"

"Rumor. But the good kind of rumor—the kind nobody will confirm because it's true." Sera glanced around, then grabbed Elara's wrist and pulled her through a side door. "Come on. There's something I want to show you."

"Where are we going?"

"The library."

---

The academy library was not a room. It was a kingdom. Shelves rose five stories high, connected by spiraling iron staircases, lit by floating orbs that drifted like lazy fireflies. Thousands of books. Millions of pages. The smell of old paper and dust and something faintly like rain.

Elara had never seen so many books in her life.

"This is the public section," Sera said, dragging her past rows of studying students. "Boring. Histories. Biographies. Genealogies of noble houses nobody cares about."

"Then why are we here?"

"Because the public section has a back door."

Sera led her to a narrow archway behind the reference desk, sealed with a shimmering ward. The air around it hummed with warning.

"That's restricted," Elara said.

"Extremely. It's where they keep the dangerous stuff. Cursed texts. Banned grimoires. Maps of places that don't officially exist." Sera grinned. "I come here twice a week."

"You'll get expelled."

"Only if I get caught." Sera pressed her palm to the ward and closed her eyes. Her skin shimmered faintly—pink and gold, like sunlight through rose quartz. The ward flickered. And then, silently, it parted.

Elara stared. "How did you—"

"Fae blood. Wards don't see us the same way." Sera slipped through the archway. "You coming?"

Elara hesitated for exactly one second. Then she followed.

The restricted section was darker. Colder. The orbs here burned a sickly green, and the shelves leaned inward like they were trying to whisper to each other. Sera moved confidently, trailing her fingers along the spines.

"Here," she said, pulling out a large leather-bound volume wrapped in chains. "This is what I wanted to show you."

She set it on a reading table and undid the clasp. Inside was a map—not of the academy, but of something beneath it. Layers of tunnels and chambers, spiraling down into blackness. At the center, a jagged tear in the parchment had been inked over in red.

"The Void rift," Sera said quietly. "It's under the academy. Has been for centuries."

Elara's hands went cold. She touched the red mark. "Why is there a hole in the map?"

"Because the cartographer went in. And didn't come out." Sera flipped the page.

The next spread was covered in notes—hasty, cramped handwriting in at least a dozen different languages. Dates. Names. And there, in the margin, circled in faded ink:

Kaelen Veyra — West Tower, sublevel three. Last confirmed sighting. Terminated.

Elara's breath stopped.

"Terminated," she whispered. "That's what Dorian meant. That's what the file said."

Sera was watching her carefully. "Elara... 'terminated' doesn't always mean dead. In academy records, it usually means—"

"Removed." Elara's voice cracked. "It means removed."

She traced her brother's name with her fingertip. Underneath it, in the same faded ink, someone had written a single additional line. It was so small she had to lean in to read it.

The Void remembers him.

The same words. The same words she'd heard in her room last night.

The green orbs above them flickered. Then all at once, they went out.

Darkness.

Sera grabbed her arm. "Elara."

"What?"

"Someone's here."

Elara turned. In the blackness at the end of the aisle, something moved. Not a shape. Not exactly. A thinness in the air, like the world had been cut and hadn't healed properly.

It was watching them.

And then, from the darkness, a voice. Dry as old paper. Familiar as a heartbeat.

"Ellie."

Elara couldn't breathe.

The lights snapped back on. The aisle was empty. The figure was gone.

But the map on the table had changed. The faded ink was wet again, glistening like it had just been written. And beneath Kaelen's name, three new words had appeared.

Come find me.