Luna
The clearing stretches between us like a wound.
Orin, Riven, Lucien—all shadowed by the cathedral’s fractured arches, the kind of lightless corner that drinks noise instead of echoing it. They’re far enough that I can’t hear their voices, can’t read their lips. Just the curve of Lucien’s spine as he paces, the raw aggression in Riven’s stance, the eerie stillness of Orin, hands folded like he’s waiting for the world to end.
I’m on the opposite side with Silas and Elias.
We’re close to the edge of the old marble fountain, its bowl cracked and half-devoured by creeping vine. A statue once stood here—gods know of what—but it’s crumbled now, the torso twisted backward like it couldn’t stand to see what became of this place. Even the roots here don’t grow straight. They coil wrong. Like something underground is pulling them toward it.
And yet, all I can think about is him.
Lucien. Pale. Bleeding. Avoiding me like I was the thing that unmade him.
I wrap my arms tighter around myself, trying to ignore the ache spreading through my chest like something foreign. I’m not unfamiliar with rejection, but this wasn’t rejection. This was recoil. Like my presence hurt him. Like my voice triggered something that would’ve pulled him to pieces if he didn’t shut me out first.
I’m gutted.
Like something vital has been stolen from me.
Something I didn’t even know I’d already claimed.
Lucien may hate me. He might see me as a threat. A liability. A flaw in the plan he’s always holding so tightly he forgets to breathe. But when I reached for him—when I tried to touch him—he looked… terrified. Not of me. Of what touching me would do.
And gods help me, I keep wondering if he wishes it was me he’d been bound to first.
Not Branwen.
That thought carves through me with the precision of a blade dipped in poison. Because it shouldn’t matter. Because I didn’t ask for any of this.
But the idea that he might want it now? That maybe in the cracked ruin of whatever is left of him, there’s a version of Lucien that wants to be tethered to me instead of haunted by her?
It’s ruinous.
“I know that look,”
Elias says beside me, tone falsely casual, like he’s trying to dance around the sharp edge of the moment.
“It’s the same one Silas gets when he accidentally walks past a mirror.”
“Hey,”
Silas says without looking up, flipping a dagger through his fingers.
“First of all, my reflection owes me money. Second, rude.”
I don’t smile.
Elias shifts closer, scratching at the back of his neck. He always does that when he’s uncomfortable—when he’s trying to make light of something too heavy for him to hold.
“You, uh…”
he starts, then glances across the clearing.
“Want me to, I don’t know, send him a little bouquet? Maybe a glitter bomb with a handwritten poem? ‘Roses are red, your soul’s unhinged, come back to us before Branwen wins?’”
I turn slowly and look at him.
He goes completely still.
Then clears his throat.
“Right. So… too soon.”
“I don’t want him to come back,”
I say quietly.
“I want him to want to.”
That shuts him up for real.
Silas tosses the dagger into the dirt and flops onto a broken stone bench like it insulted him.
“This is getting way too emotionally authentic. Someone throw a curse or fuck a demon already.”
I ignore them both.
Because across the clearing, Lucien still hasn’t looked back.
And that silence is starting to sound like a scream.
“What do you think she’s doing to Caspian?”
I ask them. My voice doesn’t shake, but it lands hard between us, the kind of question that doesn’t want to be answered. And for a second, neither of them do.
Elias looks away first, rubbing the back of his neck like I just pressed my thumb into a bruise he thought I couldn’t see. His mouth twists, some too-clever quip dying behind his lips. Silas follows slower, tossing a pebble toward the broken fountain but not watching it land.
And it terrifies me. Because they’re not speechless. They’re protecting me. Which means it’s worse than I imagined.
Caspian isn’t just missing. He isn’t just under Branwen’s influence. He’s hers now. Body. Magic. Desire. And Caspian, gods—he is lust. He’s the embodiment of it. The pull, the ache, the way your breath catches before you even understand why. If Branwen is using him… touching him...
The thought hits like a blade to the gut, cold and slow and too deep.
I wrap my arms tighter around myself. Not to shield. To hold the pieces in.
“She could make him want it,”
I whisper, more to myself than to them.
“That’s what she does, right? Not just take—corrupt. Make him crave the hand that cuts him open.”
“,”
Elias says, but softly. No jokes now. No stupid comments. And that scares me more than anything.
“She’d use that bond to twist everything he is,”
I continue, pushing through it even as the images build behind my eyes. Caspian, undone and remade in her hands. Not fighting. Seduced. Gods, he would hate that.
“She’d use him to break the rest of us,” I murmur.
Neither of them speaks.
Because we all know I’m right.
“She’d make him want to be the blade.”
Silas shifts, unease flickering across his expression before he covers it with a low whistle.
“We don’t know for sure that’s what’s happening. Could be she’s got him locked in some creepy mirror maze making him relive all his bad sex jokes in a loop. Eternal punishment and all that.”
“Silas,”
I say, voice tight.
He meets my eyes then—and for once, there’s no chaos in his grin. Just something raw and grieving. And that’s how I know it’s even worse than I imagined.
“She’ll keep him alive,”
Elias says finally.
“That’s what she does. She savors. Doesn’t kill until she’s had every last piece of what she wants.”
“And what does she want from him?”
Elias’s answer is a whisper, bitter and sharp.
“To prove she can still own someone like him.”
My breath catches.
Because that’s it.
That’s the game. Not just power. Not just sex. It’s about rewriting who we are. Taking the parts of us that defy her—and turning them into instruments of her will.
And Caspian? He’s fire wrapped in flirtation, devotion buried beneath play. If she burns that out of him, if she unravels him with her voice, her touch, her magic—
Then she’ll do it to the rest of us next.
Starting with Lucien.
Ending with me.
“Tell me a joke, Silas,” I say.
It’s not really a request. It sounds like one, maybe. But my voice cracks just slightly at the end, too thin, too strained, and he hears it for what it is.
A plea.
I need him to take my mind off this, even if only for a second. Off the image of Caspian in Branwen’s hands. Off the way Lucien looked at me like I was the noose tightening. Off the truth I haven’t said out loud—that I can feel the bond shifting like it’s preparing for a death it won’t warn me about.
Silas turns slowly, and the smirk he gives me is sharp-edged but soft at the corners. He knows. He always fucking knows.
“A joke?”
he echoes, flipping the dagger once more before tucking it into his belt.
“That’s a dangerous thing to ask for, darling. Especially from a man whose best material involves haunted underwear and morally questionable punchlines.”
“Please,”
I say again. Quieter.
His grin falters just a little. Then he straightens, swiping imaginary dust from his shoulders like he's preparing for a performance.
“All right,”
he says, clearing his throat theatrically.
“Why did the demonic courtesan break up with her necromancer boyfriend?”
Elias groans from behind me.
“Gods, no—”
Silas ignores him, eyes locked on mine.
“Because every time they got into bed, he kept resurrecting his exes.”
I blink. Just once. And then I laugh. Short. Sharp. Kind of horrible. But real.
Elias drags a hand down his face.
“I hate you so much.”
“Wait, wait, I’ve got more,”
Silas says, suddenly animated, pacing now like the ruins are a stage and we’re his reluctant, captive audience.
“Why don’t ghosts have orgies?”
“Please don’t—”
“Because they can’t touch each other, Elias. It’s very sad. Extremely tragic. Zero group intimacy in the afterlife.”
I’m laughing again, a sound that’s part cry, part something else. Something ragged and alive.
Elias sighs dramatically.
“Silas, I swear to all the gods, if you don’t stop, I will personally bind your soul to a cursed cock ring and yeet it into the Hollow.”
“That’s a threat and a promise,”
Silas replies, wagging his eyebrows.
“Depending on who’s listening.”
I don’t say thank you. I don’t have to. Because Silas—chaotic, ridiculous, dangerous Silas—just nods once like he knows what it cost me to ask, and how close I came to breaking.
And now I’m laughing in the ruins of the academy, with ghosts in the walls and monsters in the blood, and it’s the first thing that hasn’t hurt in hours.
Elias clears his throat with exaggerated dignity, like he’s about to deliver a lecture on necromantic ethics and not, very obviously, derail whatever fragile emotional stability I’m clinging to.
“Right,”
he says, lifting his chin.
“Enough from the clown prince. Let the real filth begin.”
Silas gasps, wounded.
“I am the filth. You’re just the aftertaste.”
Elias ignores him entirely. His eyes are on me now—silver bright, too sharp—and I know that look. He’s about to say something inappropriate. Crude. Awful. And he’s doing it for me.
“,”
he says with mock solemnity.
“Do you want to hear the worst pick-up line ever uttered in the bowels of Daemon?”
“No,”
I say, deadpan.
He grins. I don’t stop him.
“Are you a cursed relic,”
he begins.
“because I can’t stop touching you even though I know it’ll destroy me from the inside out.”
Silas wheezes.
“Ten out of ten. Horny and doomed. Very on-brand.”
“You’re disgusting,” I say.
But my lips are twitching.
Elias steps closer, dropping his voice, but not the tone.
“Wanna hear what I told a possessed mirror once?”
“Please don’t—”
“I said, ‘if you’re gonna reflect my inner demons, at least give me a show worth stroking to.’”
Silas snorts.
“That explains why the Mirrorwing tried to drown you in piss vapor for three days.”
“It was sexy piss vapor.”
“Elias,”
I choke out, covering my mouth, trying not to laugh. “Stop.”
“I’m on a roll,”
he says, undeterred.
“Next up, the time I got banned from an orgy in the undercatacombs for asking if the ghost watching us could join—”
“No,” I gasp.
“—because he looked lonely! And I’m a giver.”
Silas collapses backwards onto a pile of old stone, cackling.
“He was lonely. I saw him crying after.”
My sides hurt. My eyes sting. The ache doesn’t vanish—but it shifts. Loosens.
Because Elias is standing there with that maddening, cocky tilt to his mouth, hiding something deeper behind every filthy word. He’s the kind of idiot you hate needing. The kind you know would burn down the world just to make you laugh while it turns to ash.
“Thanks,”
I say finally, wiping the corner of my eye.
He shrugs, like it’s nothing.
“We’re all fucked, . Might as well fuck around on the way down.”
Silas raises a hand. “Poetic.”
And for the first time since this nightmare started, I let myself breathe.
Even if it’s just for a minute.
I hate this place.
Even though I’ve never been here before—not really—it coils around me with the intimacy of memory, the kind that isn’t yours but lives in your blood anyway.
Like a dream half-remembered, or a story whispered to you in the womb before your first breath.
The longer I stand here, the more the ruins begin to breathe.
The wind moves through the archways in patterns too deliberate to be weather.
The stones feel warm where they should be cold.
And beneath my boots, the earth hums with something old.
Older than the Academy.
Older than the Sins.
Something that doesn't belong to time at all.
I look around, trying to anchor myself in detail, not feeling.
Because the feeling will swallow me if I let it.
The courtyard is ringed with crumbling pillars, most half-sunk into the moss-veined ground like they tried to sink back into the dirt.
Ivy curls like veins along every surface.
A sunken staircase leads down into what used to be a lecture hall—or maybe a crypt. It’s hard to tell. Everything here seems suspended between purpose and decay.
But it’s not dead.
That’s the part that unnerves me.
This place wants to be something again.
It’s becoming.
Even the air—thick with dust, old magic, and rot—feels like it's waiting to be exhaled. Like if I speak too loudly, it’ll respond. Shape itself around the sound of my voice and listen.
And gods, it feels like it’s listening already.
There’s something cruel about it, too. Something laced in the foundation. A trick of Daemon’s memory—or Branwen’s design. A place rebuilt not for learning, but luring. Every piece of stone, every vine-choked wall, feels like it’s been placed to draw us deeper. Like it remembers what we were. And it’s not done with us yet.
I take another step, trailing my fingers along the edge of a broken pedestal.
It’s warm.
Alive. And then I hear it—soft, nearly swallowed by the wind.
A voice.
Not Branwen.
Not the Sins.
Mine. But not my voice. An echo. A memory. A promise.
“You will come back here.”
I jerk my hand away like it’s burned. No one else reacts. Because no one else hears it.
It happens too fast to make sense of.
One breath I’m fine—heart still racing from the echo that wasn’t mine, skin prickling from the way the stone held my touch like a secret. And then something shifts. Not around me—in me.
The air thickens—or no, not thickens. It disappears.
Like the ruins themselves have turned inward and dragged the breath from my lungs as payment.
Dust. Ash. Something older. It pours into my mouth, my nose, my throat like I’ve inhaled the very bones of the place. My lungs seize. My legs buckle. And the courtyard spins, warping at the edges like oil on water. Color drains from the sky. The ground tilts.
And the black creeps in.
First at the corners of my vision, then closer, spiraling inward like a storm made of hands clawing toward my skull.
I stagger.
My knees hit stone, but I barely feel it. Everything’s slipping—sound, thought, shape. Except for one voice, one name, slicing through the haze.
“?!”
Elias.
Panic doesn’t suit him. Not really. But I hear it now—raw, cracked, urgent. He’s running to me. I see a blur of silver hair, boots skidding across moss-stained tile. I try to reach for him, but my hand moves like it belongs to someone else.
He drops to the ground beside me, arms already under my shoulders, pulling me up like he’s afraid if he lets go, I’ll vanish into the stone. He’s saying something—I can’t catch the words—but his voice is hoarse, frantic, real.
I try to speak. Nothing comes out. Just that godawful dust, curling on my tongue like decay and something older. My lips are numb. My chest is on fire. There’s a weight pressing down on me from every side, like the ruins have turned into a tomb just for me.
Something inside me is answering it.
My body shudders, not from cold—but recognition.
This place knows me.
And it wants me back.