Soren had always believed you could measure any disaster by the number of times the bells rang before breakfast.
Today, the peal was on its seventh sweep, and the echo still chased itself along the high vaults of the dormitory corridor as he laced his boots and joined the column of half-woken students filing out to the parade ground. Seven was a new record. Even Jannek, who’d once slept through an electrical fire, looked up from his cot and muttered, "They’re not going to stop, are they?"
Soren gave him a flat look, then fell in at the end of the line, shoulder to shoulder with a cluster of second-years who made a show of yawning with every step. The air on the landing was cold and full of old polish; his breath smoked in a thin ribbon, immediately erased by the crowd’s collective exhale.
The ground was cordoned in rigid, razor-straight lines, each marked with a rune-etched tile that hummed faintly against the soles of his boots. The formation assembled in silence, save for the cough of the chronic asthmatic three rows ahead and the compulsive throat-clearing of one of the instructors.
Soren’s hands found each other behind his back, habit, or maybe a safeguard against what he felt brewing in his chest. He’d never been so aware of the way his pulse tracked with the bells: an arrhythmic, nervous clatter, impossible to ignore.
The Division’s command staff stood opposite the massed bodies, their coats all shades of midnight blue, faces scrubbed raw by the hour. At the far end, Cassian Velrane looked freshly pressed and already bored. Two notches down, the twins’ hair was violently blue, sullen after a night spent explaining the difference between "order" and "obedience." Soren didn’t check for Kale, knowing he’d be last and, by tradition, least.
The day’s agenda was rolled out by the senior instructor, Mira, her voice a cold slap against the shock of morning. "You are on modified lockdown. No one leaves the property. No drills outside perimeter. Any questions?" A pause, then: "Good."
The crowd broke into their assigned clusters. Soren’s group drifted toward the east wall, where the shadow of the archives fell sharpest. He looked up, counted the windows. The lights burned in every office today, no one was pretending at normalcy.
He’d heard the rumors even before the bells started: the breach in the lower archive, the "incident" in the antechamber, the aftershock that rattled half the wards on the north axis. No one mentioned the soul-vessel, or the way the sigils had all pulsed red at the same moment. But then, nobody ever named the thing that might have teeth.
Drill cycles ran on a reduced loop. The instructors kept their voices low, movements clipped, as if the air itself might carry dissent. Soren cycled through the forms, blade heavy and awkward in gloves that had yet to remember his grip.
On the third repetition, the girl opposite him, Aria, her face still blotchy from the cold, let her blade bounce off his, a maneuever so out of rhythm that for a second he thought she might be signaling. She wasn’t. She just blinked at him, shrugged, and reset.
The morning went that way: nothing smooth, nothing resolved. Even the instructors seemed to want it over, marking time until the next directive from above.
Lunch came, a tasteless mash of grain and rehydrated something, and the cohort inhaled it with the lagging energy of people who knew the rest of the day held more questions than calories. Soren found a spot at the edge of the refectory, back to the glass, and watched as the rest sorted themselves into the usual factions.
He waited for the internal click, the shift from "survive" to "plan" that usually came with the first full meal of the cycle. It didn’t arrive, only a dull awareness that even his own thoughts sounded like they were being filtered through a crack in the wall.
The rumors found him anyway. Aria sat down next to him, uninvited, and began portioning out her protein brick with surgical precision.
"They say whoever was down there last night broke the archive lock," she said, not looking at him. "Not supposed to be possible. Unless it was the new warden."
Soren kept his focus on the window. "If the warden did it, we’d all be dead already."
She snorted, then grinned. "That’s not what Lira said. Lira says the warden’s just a scarecrow. No one’s scared of him except the twins." Her tone made it clear she found this hilarious. Thɪs chapter is updatᴇd by novel⸺fire.net
He shrugged. "Lira talks too much."
Aria’s smile faded. "They say Jannek’s name was in the blue book. That he’s not really gone. Not if someone opens the right page."
Soren’s hands went cold on the tray. "No one’s opening anything today."
She shrugged, then swept the last of her lunch into her palm and left, leaving the seat warm.
He ate in silence, the food turning into paste in his mouth. He tried not to think about the ledger, or the way the rune in the vial had pulsed like a trapped animal. He tried not to remember how it had felt, in the moment, to want to open it anyway.
Afternoon drills were no better. The sky had gone leaden, a color that made every face in the yard look sepulchral. Soren went through the motions, marking time, until the bell sounded again, short, angry, surgical, and the squads fell in for a surprise inspection.
It was not Cirel or Lethren awaiting them at the rostrum, but a new face: tall, thin, with a mouth permanently set in a line that suggested she’d rather be anywhere but here. The uniform was the same midnight blue, but the insignia at the lapel was edged in silver—the mark of a Spire Inspector, and the implied authority to make the rest of the faculty wet themselves.
She let the silence ride, scanning each face as if she were already plotting the order of disciplinary action.
"Your campus has been compromised," she said, voice as dry as the history texts. "There will be no further discussion of last night’s events.Your job is to maintain order and remember your place in the system. Anyone found outside their prescribed area will be subject to immediate reassignment." The word "reassignment" carried the weight of a threat leveled often, never retracted.