Читать онлайн The Crimson Citadel

Chapter 1: The Fracture

The world had always been a study in shades of grey for Elara Vayne, but tonight, the grey felt particularly suffocating. It was the grey of the rain-slicked asphalt eleven stories below her apartment window, the grey of the endless, unremarkable skyline of a city whose name she’d long stopped caring about, the grey of the silence that pressed in on her from all sides. It was the grey of a life that felt like a waiting room for something that was never going to happen.

She traced a finger through the condensation on the cool glass, her reflection a ghostly imprint over the neon sign of the all-night laundromat across the street. High cheekbones, a mouth that naturally settled into a disapproving line, eyes the color of dark smoke that missed nothing and found little to appreciate. She was beautiful, in a sharp, unforgiving way, like a shard of obsidian. People told her that, sometimes, with a tone that hovered between admiration and a warning. It had never done her any good. Beauty like hers was a fortress, not an invitation. It kept people at a distance, and after twenty-two years, Elara had decided that was precisely its purpose.

With a sigh that was more of a controlled release of breath, she turned from the window. The apartment was a monument to minimalist indifference. A sofa, a bookshelf crammed with dense, philosophical texts and dog-eared fantasy novels—her only true escape—and a single, struggling succulent on the windowsill she kept forgetting to water. It was a place to exist, not to live. The silence was a physical presence, broken only by the low hum of the refrigerator and the distant, rhythmic swish of a car through a puddle.

She picked up a book from the coffee table, its cover depicting a knight battling a creature of shadow and flame. It was comfort food for the soul, a predictable narrative of good and evil, of chosen ones and destiny. It was so much simpler than the ambiguous, disappointing reality of rent payments and grocery runs and the hollow ache of a Friday night spent utterly alone.

This is it, she thought, the familiar, cynical voice in her head chiming in. The thrilling culmination of another week. Should I make tea? Scroll through mindless feeds filled with people living lives more vibrant than mine? Perhaps I should just stand here until I fossilize. At least then I’d be interesting.

Her pride, a constant, simmering flame in her chest, bristled at the self-pity. She was Elara Vayne. She was smarter than this, sharper than this city, more deserving than this… nothingness. But deserving of what? That was the question that had haunted her since she could form coherent thoughts. There was a restlessness in her bones, a feeling of profound misplacement, as if she’d been born on the wrong planet, into the wrong story.

A flicker of light caught her eye. She turned back to the window. The sky, perpetually bleached by light pollution, was doing something strange. The ambient orange glow was deepening, shifting to a bruised, unnatural purple. The stars, normally invisible, weren't appearing. Instead, the darkness seemed to be thickening, congealing.

A low thrum, a frequency felt more in the teeth than heard by the ears, began to vibrate through the floorboards. The succulent on the windowsill trembled. Elara’s heart gave a single, hard knock against her ribs. This wasn’t right. This wasn't a thunderstorm.

She watched, frozen, as the moon—a pale, insignificant sliver—was slowly devoured. This wasn't a gradual astronomical eclipse. It was violent. A blot of absolute blackness slithered across its face, consuming it in seconds, leaving a hole in the sky. A perfect circle of void.

The thrumming intensified. The glass in the windowpane began to vibrate in its frame, emitting a high-pitched whine. The light from the streetlamps below didn’t just go out; it was extinguished, the darkness swallowing it whole as it rushed upwards, enveloping the building.

Panic, cold and sharp, finally pierced through her numb astonishment. She stumbled back from the window, her breath catching in her throat. The air grew frigid, her exhales forming plumes of mist in the suddenly arctic room. Shadows, once static and mundane, began to writhe. The shadow of the bookshelf elongated, stretching across the floor like a grasping hand. The shadow of the struggling succulent twisted into something thorny and malicious.

This isn’t happening. This is stress. A hallucination. You’ve finally cracked, the logical part of her brain screamed, but her primal instincts knew better. They were screaming, too, a raw, animalistic signal to run.

The center of the room, where her worn Persian rug lay, began to darken. Not with shadow, but with something deeper. A stain of nothingness seeped into the fabric, unraveling the threads without fire or decay. It just ceased to exist. And from that point of nullity, the air itself began to fracture.

It was like watching glass shatter in slow motion. A spiderweb of black lightning split the reality of her living room. Through the cracks, she saw not the wall behind, but a swirling, chaotic vortex of indigo and charcoal. A wind howled from it, carrying a scent she had no reference for—ozone, ash, and the cold, metallic tang of ancient stone.

Elara backed away until her back hit the cold wall, trapped. Her mind raced, a frantic, disjointed montage of every fantasy novel she’d ever read. Portals. Rifts. summonings. It was all impossible. It was all terrifyingly, awfully real.

A sound emerged from the fracture, a dry, scraping rustle, like bones dragging across stone. Her blood turned to ice. This was no benevolent doorway to a magical world. This was a wound. And something was coming through from the other side.

The fracture widened with a sound like a mountain groaning. The darkness within coalesced, forming a shape. It was tall, impossibly so, and unnaturally thin. A limb, long and jointed in too many places, clad in what looked like tattered, fossilized leather, reached out from the void. Its hand was not a hand. It was skeletal, the bones blackened and sharp, ending in talons that seemed to drink the little light left in the room.

It reached for her.

Elara’s paralysis broke. A raw scream tore from her throat, swallowed by the howling wind from the rift. She scrambled along the wall, toward the apartment door, her hands slipping on the now-frosted plaster. The taloned hand swept through the space where her head had been, slicing through the wall with effortless, silent precision.

She fumbled for the doorknob, her fingers numb with cold and terror. It was locked. She always locked it. A habit born of city life, now a death sentence. She twisted the deadbolt, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.

The creature took a step fully into her world. It didn’t walk; it unfolded itself, its height making it stoop under the ceiling. It had no face, just a smooth, bone-white plate where features should be, and from it, she felt a cold, immense attention fix upon her. It was hunger. It was purpose.

The doorknob turned. She yanked the door open, stumbling out into the dimly lit hallway. “Help! Somebody, help me!” Her voice was a ragged, desperate thing.

The hallway was empty, silent. The emergency lights were out. The only illumination came from the violent, pulsating glow spilling from her apartment doorway. The thing was coming. She could hear its dry, scraping gait on the hardwood floor.

She ran. She didn’t look back. The sound of her own frantic footsteps and ragged breaths were the only things in her world, apart from the terrifying presence gaining on her. She hit the door to the stairwell, bursting through it and starting down the concrete steps, taking them two at a time.

A wave of freezing air washed over her. The lights in the stairwell flickered and died. She was plunged into utter blackness, so complete it was a physical weight. She stopped, blind, her hands flailing out to find the railing.

The scraping sound was right behind her. It wasn’t on the stairs. It was just there.

She felt an impossible coldness wrap around her ankle. The talons. They were like rings of ice, burning with a cold that seared into her bone marrow. She screamed again, kicking out wildly, her heel connecting with something hard and unyielding.

It was useless. The grip tightened, and she was dragged. Not back up the stairs, but through them. The concrete beneath her dissolved into the same swirling vortex she’d seen in her apartment. The world tore open around her.

There was a sensation of falling, of being pulled apart and crumpled together all at once. Colors that didn’t have names flashed behind her eyes. Sounds that were the screams of dying stars and the birth of black holes filled her ears. She was a speck, a nothing, caught in a cosmic current she could not possibly comprehend.

Just as suddenly as it began, it stopped.

The sensory assault ceased. The falling sensation was replaced by a jarring impact on something hard and damp.

Silence.

A deep, ringing, absolute silence.

Elara lay on her back, every nerve ending screaming, her lungs burning for air she couldn’t seem to draw. The cold around her ankle was gone. She was just… cold. A damp, pervasive cold that seeped up from the ground beneath her.

She opened her eyes.

There was no ceiling. No fluorescent lights. No stairwell.

Above her stretched a vast, empty sky the color of a day-old bruise, a sickly tapestry of twilight purple and muted green. No stars. No moon. No familiar constellations. Just a void, immense and utterly alien.

She pushed herself up onto her elbows, her body protesting with a chorus of aches. She was lying in a field of coarse, grey grass that felt like wire wool. It stretched out to a horizon dominated by jagged, black mountains that clawed at the weird sky. The air was thin and carried that same strange scent—ash, ozone, and cold stone.

She was alone. Completely, terrifyingly alone.

Her apartment was gone. Her city was gone. Her world was gone.

The pride that had always been her armor lay in shattered pieces around her. The cynicism, the wit, the intellectual superiority—all of it was stripped away, leaving only a raw, primal terror. A single, coherent thought managed to form in the wreckage of her mind.

It was a line from one of her books, a foolish, romantic notion she’d once scoffed at. It now felt like the only truth left in this terrifying, new reality.

The story has found you.

And it was nothing like the books. It was darker.

Chapter 2: The Citadel Gates

The silence was the second most terrifying thing. The first was the sky.

It wasn't the silence of an empty room or a quiet night. It was a profound, suffocating absence of sound, as if the very air had been vacuumed clean of noise. No insects chirped in the coarse grey grass. No wind whispered through the stark, leafless trees that stood like skeletal sentinels in the distance. There was only the frantic, hammering rhythm of her own heart, a drumbeat of pure panic against her ribs, and the ragged, too-loud sawing of her own breath. Every inhale was a shuddering effort, the thin, cold air scraping her throat raw.

Elara pushed herself up fully, her muscles screaming in protest. She was shivering uncontrollably, the damp cold of the ground seeping through her clothes—a simple pair of black jeans and a thin sweater, utterly inadequate for this… wherever this was. She wrapped her arms around herself, her fingers digging into her own arms, seeking some anchor in a reality that had become utterly unmoored.

Breathe, she commanded herself, the voice in her head sounding small and pathetic against the immense, alien emptiness. Just breathe. Assess.

Her eyes, wide with a fear so potent it tasted metallic, scanned the horizon. The field of grey grass stretched out to those impossible mountains, their peaks sharp and cruel against the bruised canopy of the sky. The light had no source. It wasn't sunlight or moonlight. It was just a flat, sickly illumination that seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere at once, casting long, distorted shadows that didn't seem to obey any logical rules of physics.

This was not Earth. The thought was not a gradual dawning but a cold, hard fact, dropped into her mind like a stone into a still pond. The portal. The creature. The fall. It was all real. The part of her that clung to logic, to the mundane explanations of anxiety attacks or psychotic breaks, finally, utterly surrendered. This was beyond any pathology she’d ever read about. This was… other.

A sound.

Elara froze, her breath catching in her throat. It was faint, distant, but it cut through the absolute silence like a scalpel. A rhythmic, metallic clicking. And something else. A low, guttural snuffling.

She dropped flat to the ground, the coarse grass scratching her face, her heart now trying to batter its way out of her chest. She willed herself to be small, to be invisible. Slowly, ever so slowly, she raised her head just enough to peer through the grey stalks.

Movement. A hundred yards away, a creature was loping across the field on all fours. It was the size of a large dog but built like a malnourished wolf, its hide a mottled patchwork of grey and black that blended perfectly with the landscape. Its head was too large for its body, all jaw and teeth, with milky white eyes that saw nothing and everything. It paused, its head swinging side to side, sniffing the air. The clicking sound came from its claws, long and chitinous, tapping against a exposed piece of dark rock.

It was hunting.

And she was lying in the middle of its hunting grounds.

A primal terror, colder and sharper than any she had ever known, locked her in place. This was not the fear of a bad grade or social humiliation. This was the fear of being torn apart, of being meat. Her mind, usually so quick with a sarcastic retort or a cynical observation, offered nothing. It was blank, wiped clean by a survival instinct so ancient it predated language.

The creature’s head snapped in her direction. Its nostrils flared, sucking in great drafts of air. It had caught her scent. The human scent. The out-of-place scent.

It let out a sound that was half-hiss, half-growl, and began to move toward her, its gait a fluid, terrifyingly efficient trot.

Run. The command exploded in her brain, breaking the paralysis.

Elara scrambled to her feet, her legs feeling like water. She didn't look back. She just ran, plunging through the grasping grass, her only thought to put distance between herself and those clicking claws. The ground was uneven, riddled with hidden holes and tangled roots, and she stumbled, her ankle twisting painfully, but she forced herself onward, driven by a adrenaline-fueled frenzy.

She could hear it behind her, the snuffling growing louder, the clicking accelerating into a rapid, eager tattoo. It was gaining. It was faster than her. She was prey.

Tears of frustration and terror blurred her vision. This was how it ended? Dragged through a portal to be devoured in some godforsaken field under a stupid, ugly sky? The proud, cynical part of her that had always felt superior to everyone else was now just a screaming animal, desperate to live.

A shadow fell over her.

Not a cloud. The sky didn't have clouds. This was a different kind of shadow—deeper, more solid. It swept over the grass, and with it came a new sound. A sound that vibrated through the soles of her feet. A deep, rhythmic thumping, like the beating of a colossal heart. Or… wings.

The creature behind her let out a startled yelp, its predatory trot faltering. The clicking claws skittered to a halt.

Elara risked a glance over her shoulder, her own flight forgotten for a split second.

The wolf-thing was cowering, its head lowered, its milky eyes wide with a fear that mirrored her own. It was staring up at the sky behind her.

Elara followed its gaze.

Her blood ran cold.

Sweeping down from the bruised expanse of the sky were three… riders. They were mounted on creatures that defied any earthly biology. They looked like horses if horses had been flayed of their skin and then fossilized, their bodies a framework of bleached, articulated bone and taut, grey sinew. Their eyes were pits of empty blackness, and smoke, not breath, plumed from their nostrils. They moved with an eerie, silent grace, their hooves not touching the ground, their skeletal wings beating the air with that same deep, resonant thump… thump… thump that felt like it was cracking her ribs.

The riders were swathed in heavy, hooded robes of a charcoal-grey material that seemed to drink the light. Their faces were completely hidden in shadow. They held no visible reins, their postures utterly still, as if they and their monstrous steeds were a single, unified entity.

They were the most terrifying things she had ever seen. The wolf-creature was a feral predator. These were something else entirely. They were order. They were purpose. They were death, institutionalized.

One of the riders broke formation, its bone-steed descending toward the cowering wolf-thing. The rider didn't draw a weapon. It simply extended a hand from within its voluminous sleeve. The hand was gloved in the same dark material, but the fingers were long, too long, and ended in sharp, metallic tips.

The wolf-creature whimpered, a pathetic sound, and tried to back away. The gloved hand made a slight, almost dismissive gesture.

The creature didn't scream. It didn't have time. It simply… unraveled. Its form dissolved into a cloud of grey ash that hung in the air for a moment before scattering on the non-existent wind. It was erased with less ceremony than swatting a fly.

Elara stood frozen, her mind refusing to process what she had just witnessed. The casual, absolute power of it. There was no struggle, no drama. Just an end.

The lead rider turned its hooded head. She couldn't see its eyes, but she felt its attention settle on her. It was a physical pressure, a weight that pushed down on her shoulders, demanding submission. It was the same feeling she’d gotten from the faceless creature in her apartment, but magnified a thousand times—an ancient, cold, and utterly dispassionate scrutiny.

There was no point in running. There was no point in fighting. Whatever these things were, they were so far beyond her understanding that resistance was a laughable concept. The pride that had been her defining characteristic for her entire life crumbled to dust in that moment, leaving behind only a hollow, terrified shell.

The lead rider gestured with one of those gloved, terrible hands.

The other two bone-steeds descended, landing silently on the grey grass a few feet from her. The riders dismounted with a fluid, unnatural grace. They were tall, impossibly so, and moved without a sound.

They approached her. Elara wanted to back away, to scream, to do something, but her body was no longer her own. It was locked in a state of petrified awe.

One of the figures stopped before her. It didn't speak. It simply reached out and grabbed her arm. The grip was like iron, cold and unyielding through the fabric of her sweater. There was no malice in the touch, no cruelty. There was nothing at all. It was the impersonal grip of a machine executing a function.

The other figure produced a length of rough, dark cord from within its robes and bound her wrists together in front of her with efficient, practiced motions. The cord bit into her skin, but the pain was a distant thing, secondary to the overwhelming terror.

Without a word, they led her to one of the bone-steeds. The creature stood perfectly still, its empty eye sockets staring into nothing. One of the riders made a gesture, and the steed knelt, its bony legs folding awkwardly beneath it.

She was lifted onto its back as if she weighed nothing. The bone was cold and hard against her thighs. The rider mounted behind her, one arm wrapping around her waist to hold her in place. The grip was just as impersonal and firm as before.

The lead rider gave another silent signal, and the steeds beat their powerful wings, lifting off from the grey field with that same unsettling, silent grace. The ground fell away beneath them, and Elara’s stomach lurched.

She was too terrified to even close her eyes. She watched as the field, the mountains, the entire nightmarish landscape shrunk below her, becoming a vast, desolate painting. They flew toward the largest of the black mountains, and as they drew closer, a shape began to resolve itself from the jagged peak.

It was a building. A city carved from the mountain itself. It wasn't constructed; it was hewn, as if some gargantuan force had clawed the rock into a semblance of architecture. Towers of obsidian-black stone clawed at the sky, twisted and sharp, like thorns on a monstrous rose. Windows, few and far between, were slits of dull orange light, like embers in a dead fire. Bridges of impossibly slender stone arched between towers, defying gravity and reason. It was a place of terrifying, brutal beauty. It spoke of immense age, immense power, and a profound, chilling indifference.

This was no school of magic from her storybooks. This was a fortress. A prison. A razor-edged crown upon a mountain of despair.

The Obsidian Citadel.

The name surfaced in her mind from some deep, instinctual place, as if the very stones were whispering it into her soul.

The riders flew toward the highest peak, where the central tower stood, a needle of pure blackness that seemed to pierce the fabric of the weird sky. They approached a vast opening in the side of the tower—a gateway that looked like a wound, flanked by two colossal, weathered statues. The statues depicted robed figures, their features eroded by time, but their hands were outstretched, not in welcome, but in a gesture of weighing, of judgment.

They passed through the gateway, and the temperature dropped even further. The light died, replaced by the flickering glow of torches set in iron sconces along walls of rough-hewn rock. The air smelled of damp stone, cold metal, and something else… something old and bitter, like forgotten dust and dried blood.

The bone-steed landed in a vast, cavernous space that echoed with the drip of water and the distant, muffled sounds of… something. Something that might have been screams, or might have been the wind whistling through countless fissures.

The rider dismounted and pulled her down after him. Her legs buckled, but his grip on her arm kept her upright. The other two riders had already vanished into the shadows.

Ahead, a set of steep, narrow steps led down into darkness. A heavy iron door, studded with black rivets, stood open, revealing a corridor lined with identical doors, each bearing a single, runic symbol that pulsed with a faint, malevolent light.

Her captor led her toward the nearest open door and pushed her inside, not with force, but with finality. The door swung shut behind her with a deafening, final clang that echoed the closing of a tomb.

The lock turned with a sound of heavy, grinding iron.

Elara stood alone in the pitch blackness, the silence pressing in on her once more, broken only by the sound of her own ragged, terrified breathing and the frantic beating of her heart. She was in a cell. She was a prisoner.

And as her eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom, she saw she was not alone.

Huddled in the corners of the small, stone room were other shapes. Other figures. She could make out the pale glint of wide, frightened eyes in the dark. The quick, panicked breaths of others. A sob, quickly stifled.

She had been gathered. Processed. Delivered.

The first lesson of the Obsidian Citadel was over. It had been a simple, brutal one: You are nothing. Your will is irrelevant. Your world is gone.

And the only thing that mattered now was survival.

Chapter 3: The Sorting of Sorrows

Time became a meaningless, stretched-out thing in the absolute dark. It could have been minutes or hours. Elara’s world had shrunk to the four cold, rough-hewn walls of the cell, the scent of damp stone and fear-sweat, and the sounds of the others.

There were five of them. She’d counted by their breathing. A boy who couldn’t stop shivering, the chattering of his teeth a constant, grating rhythm. A girl who wept in soft, hopeless hiccups. Two others who were so still and silent they might have been statues. And herself, standing ramrod straight in the center of the small space, her bound wrists held before her like an offering to gods she didn’t believe in.

Her initial, animal terror had receded, burned away by a cold, simmering anger. This was an indignity. This was chaos. Her mind, starved of visual stimuli, began to rebel, constructing order from the nothingness. She analyzed the sounds, the smells. The weeping girl was to her left, near what Elara guessed was the door based on the slight draft. The shivering boy was in the far corner. The silent ones were a mystery. Potential threats or potential allies? The thought was automatic, a chess piece moved on a board only she could see, a pathetic attempt to assert control in a situation where she had none.

They gathered us, she thought, her internal voice laced with a venom that was better than despair. They culled us. Like livestock. Why? For what? The i of the wolf-creature dissolving into ash flashed behind her eyes. Was that their fate? To be judged and found wanting, erased with a gesture?

The pride that had been shattered in the field was beginning to reform, not as a shield, but as a weapon. It was brittle and sharp, and it cut her from the inside, but it was better than the alternative—dissolving into a sobbing heap in the corner.

A new sound pierced the oppressive silence. Not from within the cell, but from without. A slow, rhythmic, metallic scraping. Like a giant blade being dragged along stone. It was getting closer.

The weeping girl’s cries cut off abruptly, replaced by a terrified whimper. The boy’s shivering intensified. Elara’s heart, which had settled into a frantic but steady rhythm, began to hammer again. She turned toward the door, her body tensing.

A slit of light appeared at the base of the door—a dull, orange glow. Then, with a groan of protesting iron, the door swung inward.

A figure stood silhouetted in the doorway, holding a torch that burned with a sullen, smoky flame. It was not one of the silent riders. This creature was shorter, stockier, encased in crude, black iron armor that was pitted and scarred. Its face was hidden behind a featureless helm, but two pinpricks of red light glowed from within the eye slits. In its other hand, it held a massive, cleaver-like sword, the source of the scraping sound—the tip dragged along the floor as it walked.

It was a jailer. A brute. Something meant for intimidation and violence.

It didn’t speak. It simply gestured with its torch-bearing hand, a jerky, impatient motion for them to come out.

Nobody moved. Frozen by fear.

The jailer took a heavy step into the cell, the cleaver scraping loudly. It reached out a gauntleted hand and grabbed the weeping girl by the arm, yanking her to her feet. She let out a shrill cry.

Something in Elara snapped. The action was so brutish, so unnecessary. It offended her on a fundamental level. Before she could stop herself, the words were out of her mouth, her voice hoarse from disuse but sharp as a whip crack.

“She understands ‘come out’. We all do. You don’t need to manhandle her.”

The pinpricks of red light swung toward her. The pressure of its gaze was physical, a weight of pure menace. The girl stared at Elara with wide, terrified eyes, as if she’d just signed both their death warrants. Perhaps she had.

The jailer took a step toward her, its bulk blocking the light from the doorway. It leaned in, and she could smell the rust on its armor and something older, like grave dirt. It raised the cleaver slowly, the filthy edge hovering near her face.

Elara didn’t flinch. She met the red lights, her chin lifted, every ounce of her defiance burning in her gaze. She would not cower. It was the only thing she had left.

A long, tense moment stretched out. Then, with a grunt that sounded like grinding stones, the jailer lowered the cleaver. It made that same impatient gesture toward the door. This time, the message was clear: Move. Now.

One by one, they filed out of the cell. The jailer fell in behind them, its heavy, scraping footsteps herding them down the torch-lit corridor. They passed other doors, all identical, all shut. The air grew colder, and a new sound reached them—a low, rhythmic chanting, coming from somewhere deep below.

The corridor ended at a vast, circular chamber. It was the source of the chanting. Dozens of other youths were already there, standing in ragged, terrified groups, all bound at the wrists like them. They were a disparate lot—some pale and fine-boned with hair the color of moonlight, others with skin of deep umber or mossy green, some with extra joints in their fingers, others with eyes that glowed faintly in the dim light. All stolen. All from worlds not their own. The sight was somehow more crushing than being alone. This was an industry. A system. They were a crop.

In the center of the chamber stood a massive, rough-hewn block of dark stone, as tall as a man. Its surface was covered in intricate, spiraling channels that converged into five deeper grooves at its base, each leading to a large, black iron bowl. The stone pulsed with a faint, internal light, a slow, sickly heartbeat of pale green.

Standing around the stone were five figures, different from the jailer and the riders. They wore dark, elegant robes, their faces sharp and severe, their eyes missing nothing. These were the faculty. The masters of this place. Their expressions ranged from bored curiosity to cold assessment. They were butchers inspecting the herd.

At the head of the stone stood a man who could only be the Headmaster. He was tall and gaunt, his face a mask of severe, ageless lines. His hair was silver, pulled back tightly from a high forehead. His eyes were the color of a winter sky, and just as warm. He held a long, black dagger with a serrated edge that seemed to drink the torchlight.

“Welcome,” his voice cut through the chanting, calm and resonant, filling the vast space without effort. It was a terrible voice, full of a quiet, absolute authority that demanded obedience. “To the Obsidian Citadel. You have been reaped. You have been brought. Your past lives are cinders. Your futures are unwritten. Here, you will be tested. Here, you will be sorted. Your potential will be measured not by your desire, but by your essence. By your blood.”

He raised the black dagger. “The Sanguine Tithe will determine your House. Your path. Your worth. Resistance is pointless. Fear is inevitable. Embrace the cut. Let the Citadel see what you are.”

The ritual began. One by one, the jailers dragged the terrified students forward. The Headmaster would take their bound wrists, make a quick, deep slash across their palm, and force their bleeding hand onto the top of the stone.

The reactions were immediate and violent.

A boy with bark-like skin pressed his hand down. The stone flared a dull, earthy brown. The blood flowed down the channels and into the second bowl. The Headmaster announced, “House Ossis.” A jailer roughly pulled him away toward a group under a banner bearing a symbol of a skeletal hand.

A girl with gossamer wings trembled as her blood was spilt. The stone glowed with a soft, pinkish light. Her blood trickled into the fourth bowl. “House Corde.” She was led away, sobbing with relief.

A hulking brute with tusks jutting from his jaw snarled and fought, but his blood, when it touched the stone, ignited it in a brief, violent burst of orange-red flame, flowing into the fifth bowl. “House Ignis.” He was clubbed into submission and dragged off.

Elara watched, her stomach churning, her mind racing. Five houses. Bone, Heart, Inferno. That left two. The blood flowing into the first bowl was accompanied by a deep, shadowy ripple in the stone, a darkness so profound it hurt to look at. “House Umbra,” the Headmaster would say, his voice dipping into a tone of grim respect. Those students, few in number, were met with a wide berth and fearful glances.

The third bowl collected blood that made the stone hiss and emit a faint, acrid green vapor. “House Venenum.” These students had a cruel, sharp look to them, even in their fear.

It was efficient. It was brutal. It was a production line of damnation.

Finally, it was their cell’s turn. The weeping girl went first. Her blood produced a faint, flickering pink light. House Corde. She almost collapsed with relief as she was led away. The shivering boy was next. His blood sparked and sizzled—House Ignis. He looked stunned. The two silent ones were a surprise; one went to Venenum, the other, with a blood that sank into the stone without a trace, to Ossis.

Then it was Elara’s turn.

The jailer shoved her forward. The Headmaster’s wintery eyes appraised her. She saw no interest there, only the clinical gaze of a scientist about to dissect a specimen. He took her bound wrists. His grip was like ice. He didn’t look at her as he positioned the black, serrated dagger.

The pain was sharp and clean as he drew the blade across her palm. She didn’t cry out. She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood, her eyes fixed on the stone.

He forced her bleeding hand down onto the cold, rough surface.

For a second, nothing happened. The stone remained inert, her blood a simple, dark red smear against the grey rock. A faint, almost imperceptible frown touched the Headmaster’s lips. Had it failed? Was she nothing? The thought was somehow more terrifying than any of the other outcomes.

Then, it began.

A deep, thrumming vibration started in the core of the stone, shaking the very floor. The channels began to darken, then blacken, as if a corruption was spreading from her hand. The pale green heartbeat within the stone flickered, choked, and then was snuffed out entirely.

A sound began to emanate from it—a low, rising hum that quickly escalated into a piercing, psychic shriek that felt like needles being driven into her temples. The torch flames in the room guttered and bent toward the stone, as if being sucked into a void.

The blackness from the channels erupted. It wasn’t a light. It was the opposite of light. A perfect, absolute blackness that shot up from the stone in a column, so dark it seemed to tear a wound in the very air of the chamber. It didn’t illuminate; it devoured the light around it. The temperature plummeted. The air grew still and heavy.

Within the column of blackness, tiny points of cold white light appeared, like distant, dead stars. It was a shard of the void itself, a piece of the nothingness between worlds, made manifest in the heart of the Citadel.

The shriek faded, replaced by a silence more profound than any that had come before. The entire chamber was frozen, every eye fixed on the terrifying phenomenon.

Elara’s blood was not flowing into any of the bowls. It was being sucked into the stone, and the void was pouring out.

The Headmaster’s cold composure finally cracked. His eyes were wide, not with fear, but with a blazing, avaricious hunger. He stared at the void, then at her, his gaze stripping her bare, seeing not a girl, but a tool. A weapon. A key.

His voice, when he spoke, was a whisper that carried to every corner of the dead-silent room. It was filled with a reverence usually reserved for gods or monsters.

“House Umbra.”

The words hung in the air. The jailer who had dragged her there took a step back. The other faculty members exchanged sharp, unreadable glances.

The jailer assigned to the Umbra group, a larger, more silent brute than the others, approached her. He didn’t shove her. He simply gestured for her to follow, his body language cautious, almost… wary.

As she was led away from the stone, her hand throbbing, the Headmaster’s hungry eyes followed her every step. She had wanted to be special. She had wanted to be more than the grey nothingness of her old life.

She had gotten her wish.

She was special. She was a void. And the look in his eyes promised that her new life would be infinitely more terrifying.

Chapter 4: The Prince of Nothing

The walk to the Umbra common room was a silent, chilling procession through the bowels of the Citadel. The brute leading her didn't speak, his heavy armor clanking a monotonous rhythm against the stone floors. The corridors here were different from the rough-hewn prison level. They were smoother, older, the walls carved from a single, continuous vein of obsidian that reflected the torchlight in distorted, funhouse mirror shards. The air grew colder with every step, a dry, ancient cold that seeped into the bones. It was the cold of deep space, of forgotten tombs.

Elara cradled her injured hand against her chest. The cut had stopped bleeding, but it throbbed with a deep, persistent ache. The memory of the stone, of that column of devouring blackness, played on a loop behind her eyes. The Headmaster’s hungry stare was burned into her soul. House Umbra. The words were a sentence. The wary caution of the jailer was a clearer indicator of her new status than any banner could be. She was not safe here. She was… other, even among the others.

They arrived at a doorway that was not a door. It was a sheer, polished wall of obsidian, seamless and flawless, reflecting their approaching forms like a dark mirror. The jailer didn’t break stride. He simply walked directly into the reflection. The surface rippled like black water, swallowing him without a sound.

Elara hesitated, staring at her own wide, smoke-quartz eyes in the impossible doorway. She looked pale, her dark hair a chaotic storm around her face, her expression a carefully constructed mask of defiance over raw terror. Taking a shuddering breath, she stepped forward.

The sensation was like being plunged into ice water and emerging instantly, dry. There was a moment of absolute sensory deprivation, a silence and darkness so complete it was a physical blow, and then she was through.

The common room of House Umbra stole the breath from her lungs.

It was not a room. It was a geode the size of a cathedral. They stood on a narrow walkway of polished jet that ringed a vast, yawning chasm. The walls were not stone but a continuous crust of immense, perfectly formed black crystals, each one the size of a tree trunk, jutting inward at violent, beautiful angles. They glimmered with an internal, captured light, a faint violet-and-silver luminescence that provided the only illumination, casting long, dramatic shadows that danced and twisted. The air hummed with a low, resonant frequency, the sound of ancient, dormant power. Far below, in the depths of the chasm, a faint, silver mist swirled, hinting at impossible depths.

The walkway led to a series of natural landings and alcoves carved into the crystal walls, each furnished with low, dark divans and tables of polished bone. There were perhaps twenty other students scattered throughout the cavernous space, but they were mere whispers of movement in the overwhelming grandeur. They spoke in hushed tones, their voices swallowed by the immense acoustics. All of them were pale, their clothing dark, their eyes sharp and watchful. They turned as one as she entered, their gazes not hostile, but intensely, unnervingly assessing. She was a new piece on their board.

The jailer gave her a final, almost imperceptible shove forward onto the main walkway and then turned and vanished back through the liquid obsidian doorway, leaving her alone.

Elara stood frozen, feeling smaller and more exposed than she ever had in her life. The pride she’d mustered in the cell and before the Tithe Stone felt like a childish costume here. This place demanded a different kind of strength, a stillness, a comfort with the void that she did not possess.

She forced her feet to move, walking slowly along the jet path, her senses on high alert. The other students watched her pass, their expressions unreadable. She felt their attention like a physical touch, cold and probing. She kept her chin high, her face a mask of cold indifference, mimicking their demeanor. It was the only defense she had.

She found an empty alcove slightly apart from the others and sank onto a divan that was harder than it looked. She focused on her breathing, on the throb in her hand, on anything to keep the rising tide of panic at bay. Observe. Adapt. The mantra repeated in her head. This was just another hostile environment. She had survived high school, university, the soul-crushing emptiness of her old life. She could survive this.

A shift in the room’s energy made her look up.

The air near the center of the main walkway thickened, the shadows coalescing, drawing in on themselves like a reverse explosion. From the pool of concentrated darkness, a figure resolved itself, stepping forth as if he’d simply been a part of the gloom that had decided to take shape.

Kaelan.

He was taller than she remembered from the fleeting, chaotic glimpse in the field. His shoulders were broad under a simple, black tunic of a fine, unfamiliar material. His pants were tucked into knee-high boots scuffed from use. His pale skin was a stark canvas for the intricate, silvery scars that traveled up his forearms and, she could now see, curled up the side of his neck like vines of frozen lightning. They pulsed with a faint, rhythmic light, a heartbeat of contained power.

But it was his face that held her captive. It was all sharp angles and severe lines, brutally handsome and utterly devoid of warmth. And his eyes… His eyes were pools of absolute obsidian. No white, no iris, just endless, depthless blackness. They were windows into the void she herself had somehow summoned.

He didn’t look around. He didn’t need to. His presence commanded the entire geode. The hushed conversations died completely. The other students stilled, their postures shifting into something between respect and fear. He was the unspoken king of this dark court.

His head turned slowly, those black eyes scanning the room, passing over the other students as if they were furniture. They moved over her alcove, paused for a fraction of a second, and then continued on. There was no recognition, no curiosity. Nothing.

He began to walk toward a larger landing that seemed to be a focal point of the room, a place with a larger divan and a table holding a carafe of something dark and a single, black crystal goblet. As he passed her alcove, he was close enough that she could smell him—a clean, cold scent like ozone after a storm and freshly turned earth.

One of the other students, a boy with hair the color of white ash and a cunning glint in his eye, stepped forward, bowing his head slightly. “Prince Kaelan. The new tithe from the lower realms…” he began, his voice ingratiating. “The one who… the Stone…”

Kaelan didn’t break his stride. He didn’t even look at the boy. His voice, when it came, was low, flat, and devoid of any inflection. It was the sound of stone grinding on stone, felt in the bones more than heard.

“I am aware.”

He reached his divan and sat, pouring a measure of the dark liquid into the goblet. The silence in the room was absolute. The white-haired boy flushed a dull red, his hands clenching at his sides before he retreated back into the shadows, humiliated.

Elara watched, her heart thudding against her ribs. This was it. This was the hierarchy. This was the power she had to navigate.

Kaelan took a slow drink from his goblet, then finally, he turned his head. Those fathomless black eyes found her again. This time, they did not move on. They fixed on her, pinning her to the spot like a specimen. The pressure of his gaze was immense, a weight that pushed the air from her lungs. It was the same dispassionate scrutiny the riders had possessed, but distilled, more personal.

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. In the utter silence, every syllable was perfectly, chillingly clear.

“A spark from a dead world.”

He paused, letting the words hang in the humming air. The other students were statues, watching the exchange with rapt, silent attention.

“The Stone screamed for you. It always screams for the ones who think their emptiness makes them special.”

His lip curled, the barest hint of a sneer. It wasn’t cruel. It was worse. It was bored. Profoundly, utterly bored.

“They will pour power into you. They will try to forge you into a key. They will break you on the wheel of their ambition.”

He took another sip, his black eyes never leaving hers. They saw everything—her fear, her defiance, her pathetic attempt to appear calm. They saw the girl from a grey apartment clinging to her pride like a lifeline.

“You will splinter. You will shatter. You will be nothing but a warning to the next one who shines a little too brightly in the dark.”

He finally looked away, dismissing her from his world as one might swat away a gnat. He turned his attention back to his drink, the conversation clearly over. The finality in the gesture was absolute.

“Enjoy the silence,” he said, the words a flat, cold dismissal. “It is the only peace you will find here. A spark like you will be snuffed out within a week.”

The pronouncement echoed in the crystalline silence. A few of the other students allowed faint, cold smiles to touch their lips. Her fate had been declared by the only authority that mattered here. She was already dead.

The pressure of his gaze lifted, but the coldness it left behind was deeper than the geode’s chill. Elara sat perfectly still, her hands clenched in her lap, her nails digging into her uninjured palm. The heat of a furious, humiliated blush wanted to rise to her cheeks, but she forced it down, channeling it into the core of her being, where it solidified into something hard and sharp and cold.

He thought she was a spark? A weak little thing to be extinguished?

He had seen her fear, yes. But he had completely missed her pride. And her pride, when cornered, when threatened, when dismissed so utterly, did not flicker and die.

It turned to ice. It turned to stone. It turned to razor-edged obsidian.

She didn’t look away from him. She let her own gaze, pale quartz against his endless black, sweep over him with a calculated, icy disdain she did not fully feel but would learn to embody. He was not her prince. This was not his court. He was just another obstacle. Another monster in a mountain full of them.

You’re wrong, she thought, the words a silent vow etched in the newfound coldness of her soul. You look at me and see a spark to be snuffed out.

But you’re not paying attention.

You should be worried about what happens when the spark falls into the tinderbox.

Chapter 5: First Lesson: Pain

Sleep, in the Obsidian Citadel, was not a surrender. It was a temporary retreat, fraught with terrors of its own. Elara’s assigned cell was a small, hexagonal niche carved into the living crystal of the geode wall, furnished with a thin pallet and a rough blanket. There was no door, only a heavy curtain of what felt like woven shadow. The constant, low hum of the place vibrated through the stone floor into her bones, a perpetual reminder of where she was. She’d spent the night curled into a tight ball, not sleeping, but listening. Listening to the silence, which was somehow full of sounds—the distant drip of water, the faint scuttle of something that might have been claws on crystal, the occasional, muffled cry from another cell as a nightmare broke through.

When a sharp, discordant chime echoed through the geode, it was almost a relief. The day had begun. Whatever it would bring, it was preferable to the helpless anticipation.

The other students moved with a grim purpose, flowing from their cells and onto the main walkway. No one spoke. Their faces were masks of cold focus. Elara fell in with them, her body aching with exhaustion, her mind running through a thousand scenarios, each worse than the last. Kaelan’s prophecy of her swift extinction rang in her ears, a taunt she was determined to prove wrong.

They were led not by a jailer, but by one of their own—the white-haired boy who had tried to speak to Kaelan. His name, she overheard in a hissed whisper, was Lysander. He moved with a predatory grace, his eyes constantly scanning, assessing. He didn’t look at her.

Their destination was a lecture hall deep within the Citadel’s roots. The air here was thick with the smell of dust, decay, and a cloying, sweet scent that made her want to gag. The room was circular, with tiers of black stone benches descending to a central dais. On the dais stood a tall, gaunt man who made the Headmaster look jovial.

Professor Morvan was a collection of sharp angles draped in robes of funereal black. His skin was pulled taut over his skull, the color of old parchment. His eyes were sunken deep into their sockets, two points of cold, hungry light. His hands, which rested on the lectern, were long-fingered and skeletal, the nails yellowed and sharp. He didn’t move as they filed in and took their seats. He simply watched them, his gaze like a physical weight.

Elara found a seat near the back, as inconspicuous as possible. The bench was ice-cold.

“Necromancy,” Morvan’s voice rasped through the hall, dry as bones grinding together. It required no effort to fill the space. It simply was, a sound that slithered into their ears. “Is not a parlor trick for summoning departed relatives for a chat. It is not a means to build a workforce of compliant skeletons. Such notions are for children and fools.”

He pushed away from the lectern and began to pace slowly before them, his robes whispering against the stone.

“Necromancy is the art of imposing will upon that which has been relinquished. It is the ultimate expression of power over entropy, over the final, pathetic surrender of death. To command the dead is to spit in the eye of fate itself. It is violence. It is domination. It is pain.”

He stopped and swept his ghastly gaze over them. “Your first lesson. A simple test of will. Of ruthlessness. Of your capacity to inflict your desire upon the unwilling.”

He clapped his skeletal hands once. A door at the side of the dais swung open, and a hulking jailer entered, dragging a large wicker basket. With a grunt, the jailer upended it onto the dais.

Dozens of small, brown-furred bodies tumbled out. Rats. Dozens of them. They were limp, their fur matted, their eyes glazed and empty. They were very, very dead.

A wave of revulsion passed through the students. A girl in the front row gagged.

“Silence,” Morvan hissed, and the sound was like a lash. The girl stifled her retch instantly, her face pale.

“Your task is simple,” Morvan continued, his lips stretching into a rictus that might have been a smile. “You will come down here, one by one. You will place your hand upon a subject. And you will command it to live. You will pour your will into its vacant shell and force it to serve you once more.”

He let the impossibility of the task hang in the air for a moment, savoring their dread.

“The method is irrelevant. The result is all. Success earns my… attention.” His hungry eyes gleamed. “Failure earns a demonstration of what true mastery looks like. And you do not want to be my demonstration.”

He pointed a long, bony finger at a hulking boy with thick tusks from House Ignis who had been smirking. “You. Begin.”

The boy swaggered down to the dais. He grabbed a dead rat, held it in his meaty fist, and closed his eyes, his face contorting with effort. He grunted, he strained, his face turning purple. Nothing happened. He shook the rat, then threw it against the wall in frustration. It landed with a soft, pathetic thud.

Morvan sighed, a sound of profound disappointment. “Pathetic. You seek to bully it. To intimidate a soul that has already fled. You have the subtlety of a hammer.” He gestured to the jailer. “Hold him.”

The jailer grabbed the boy’s arms, pinning them behind his back. Morvan approached, his movements fluid and menacing. He placed his hand on the boy’s forehead.

The boy screamed. It was a short, sharp sound that was cut off abruptly. His body went rigid, his eyes rolling back in his head. Then, the dead rat on the floor twitched. Its legs kicked spasmodically. It flopped onto its feet, took two jerky, uncoordinated steps, and collapsed again, truly still.

Morvan removed his hand. The boy sagged in the jailer’s grip, unconscious, a trickle of blood seeping from his nose.

“I forced his life force into the rodent,” Morvan explained conversationally to the horrified class. “A crude transfer. Wasteful. But illustrative. The body is a vessel. The will is the wine. You do not ask the empty cup to fill itself. You pour.” He nodded to the jailer, who dragged the unconscious boy away. “Next.”

One by one, students were called down. The results were variations on a theme of failure. A girl from House Corde wept over her rat, begging it to come back, to no avail. A Venenum student pricked his finger and smeared his blood on the rat’s muzzle, whispering poisonous words; the rat’s fur blackened and shriveled, but it did not move. An Ossis boy chanted in a low voice, trying to rearrange its bones from the inside; a leg snapped with a sickening crunch, but that was all.

Lysander was called. He strode down confidently. He picked up a rat, held it by the tail, and stared into its dead eyes. His own eyes glowed with a faint, grey light. The rat shuddered. For a moment, it hung limply, then its back arched violently. It began to swing itself back and forth on its tail, a grotesque pendulum. It wasn’t alive. It was a puppet on a string of stolen will. After a few seconds, the motion stopped, and the rat went still. Lysander dropped it, a sheen of sweat on his brow.

Morvan gave a slow, approving nod. “A clumsy puppetry. But a glimmer of understanding. You pulled the strings of the flesh, not the spirit. Passable.”

Lysander returned to his seat, a smug look on his face, which he directed pointedly at Elara.

Her turn was coming. Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs. She had no idea what to do. She had no magic. She had nothing but a void inside her that had made a stone scream.

“The new tithe,” Morvan’s voice cut through her panic. His cold eyes were fixed on her. “The one from the Stone. Let us see if the void has a voice. Come.”

Every eye in the room was on her as she walked down the steps, her legs feeling like lead. The dais seemed miles away. She could smell the cloying sweetness of death now, mixed with the musky scent of the rats. She stopped before the pile of small, lifeless bodies.

“Choose your instrument,” Morvan purred.

Her mouth was dry. Her mind was blank. Command it to live. How? She had no life to give. She had no will that could overpower death. Kaelan’s words echoed in her head. A spark… snuffed out…

No.

She would not be his demonstration. She would not end up like the Ignis boy, used as a battery and discarded.

She looked at the dead rat. She saw its emptiness. Its stillness. And something in her recognized it. It was a reflection of what she had felt her whole life. A hollow vessel.

She couldn’t fill it. She had nothing to pour.

But perhaps… she didn’t need to.

She remembered the Tithe Stone. It hadn’t responded to her blood. It had responded to the void in her blood. It had devoured the light.

She wasn’t a vessel to be filled. She was a drain. A negation.

She didn’t reach for the rat. She didn’t touch it. She simply knelt down on the cold stone, ignoring the filth, and placed her injured hand, palm down, on the dais beside the creature. She closed her eyes, shutting out Morvan’s expectant gaze, shutting out the other students.

She didn’t try to push anything out. She did the opposite. She reached for that cold, empty place inside her, the one that had always made her feel separate, wrong, alone. She embraced it. She focused on the dead rat, not as something to be filled with life, but as a symbol of stillness. Of an ending.

And she invited it in.

She imagined the emptiness within her stretching out, not as a force, but as a space. A silence. A perfect, peaceful nullity. She offered the rat’s corpse an escape from the indignity of decay, from being a lesson, from being a puppet. She offered it the void.

You are still, she thought, the words a cold ripple in the stillness of her mind. You are empty. You are at peace. Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing move you. Be as you are. Forever.

She poured her will not into animating it, but into enforcing its absolute, perpetual death.

For a long moment, nothing happened. She heard a derisive snort from somewhere in the tiers. Morvan let out a disappointed sigh.

Then, the shadows around the rat… deepened.

They pooled around its small form, not cast by any light, but born from it. They thickened, becoming a shroud of tangible darkness. The faint, sickly light in the lecture hall seemed to bend away from the creature, repelled.

The rat itself began to change. Its fur lost what little luster it had, becoming a flat, matted black that seemed to absorb light. Its body didn’t move, but it seemed to… settle, as if its weight had tripled, fusing it to the stone dais. It didn’t look dead. It looked like it had never been alive. It became a sculpture of void. A perfect, eternal monument to cessation.

The sneers and whispers in the room cut off abruptly.

Morvan was silent. He took a step closer, his skeletal hands clasped behind his back. He leaned down, his hungry eyes wide, examining the rat-not-rat. He reached out a finger to touch it, then pulled back as if shocked by the absolute cold radiating from it.

He straightened up and looked at Elara. His expression was unreadable, but the cold light in his eyes was blazing now. It wasn’t approval. It was the look a miner gives a vein of unprecedented, dangerous ore.

“Fascinating,” he whispered, the word a dry rustle. “You did not command it to live. You commanded it to… cease. Absolutely. You did not pour wine into the cup. You shattered the cup so it could never be filled again.”

He circled her, a vulture assessing carrion. “You enforced a state of being through sheer negation. You didn’t animate the corpse. You made the concept of animation itself impossible for it.”

He stopped in front of her. “You didn’t give it life. You gave it the opposite.”

Elara rose to her feet, her knees trembling. She met his gaze, her own eyes wide with a shock that mirrored his, though for different reasons. She had done… something. Something she didn’t understand.

“A perversion of the art,” Morvan said, his voice rising to address the class, though his eyes never left her. “A heresy. An abomination.”

A slow, terrifying smile stretched his parchment skin.

“Well done.”

Chapter 6: The Library of Whispers

The aftermath of Morvan’s class was a study in shifting social tectonics. The dismissive glances Elara had received from her Housemates were gone, replaced by a wary, calculating distance. They didn’t look at her with the casual cruelty they might show a weaker peer, nor with the deference they showed Lysander. They looked at her as one might look at an unstable vial of high explosive—something to be given a wide berth, its potential both terrifying and useful. She had done something they couldn’t comprehend, and in a place where power was the only currency, incomprehensibility was a form of strength.

It was a shield, but a fragile one. It wouldn’t protect her from the next test, the next arbitrary lesson designed to break them. Morvan’s hungry gaze had promised more, worse, to come. Kaelan’s prediction of her swift demise felt less like a taunt and more like a timeline. A week. She had perhaps days to stop being a fascinating anomaly and start becoming something that could survive.

She needed information. Not the sanctioned lies and half-truths fed to them in lectures. She needed the truth about this place, about the Eleventh Cycle the Headmaster had mentioned, about the void inside her that made stones scream and dead things… cease.

There was only one place to find answers that weren’t given willingly.

The Library of Whispers.

It wasn’t hard to find. Every new student, upon receiving their thin schedule etched on a slate of shale, was given a cursory map of the Citadel’s common areas. The library was a cavern marked in the heart of the mountain, separate from the House territories. Getting there was the first test.

The Citadel was a labyrinth of intentional disorientation. Corridors branched off into dead ends that hadn’t been dead ends the day before. Staircases spiraled down into blackness only to deposit you on a higher floor than you started. Shadows moved with a life of their own, sometimes obscuring passages, sometimes revealing them. It was a living entity, and it seemed to enjoy getting lost.

Elara moved with a purpose she didn’t feel, her senses stretched to their limit. She memorized the feel of the air—a sudden draft might indicate a hidden archway; a change in the hum of the stone might signal a shifting wall. She was using the only skills she had: observation and a stubborn refusal to be beaten by inanimate objects. After what felt like an hour of wrong turns and backtracking, the corridor she was in opened up, and the air changed.

The smell of dust and decay was gone, replaced by something dry, ancient, and complex. It was the scent of old paper, of leather bindings, of ink made from things she didn’t want to imagine, and underlying it all, the same ozone-and-stone smell that permeated everything, but here it was… sharper, more alert.