Chapter 10 Everly
The letter arrives on a Monday morning, slipped under our door sometime between midnight and dawn like a coward's love note.
I almost step on it on my way to the bathroom.
White envelope, cream paper inside, the Nyxhaven crest embossed in gold at the top.
Very official. Very polite. The kind of letter that uses phrases like "we regret to inform you" and "failure to meet expectations" while meaning something else entirely.
Dear Miss Grey,
Following a review of your academic performance and conduct during your first semester at Nyxhaven University, the Office of Student Affairs has determined that you will be placed on Academic Probation effective immediately...
The rest is bureaucratic filler. Weekly meetings with a faculty advisor. Satisfactory grades. No "unsanctioned magical activity," whatever that means. Failure to comply may result in expulsion.
I read it three times. Brittany reads it once, says "That's bullshit, your grades are fine," and goes back to sleep.
She's not wrong. But we both know this isn't about grades.
The squeeze starts slowly.
Professor Robertson cold-calls me with questions that weren't in the reading. A Mors TA loses my essay and I have to rewrite it overnight. My meal card stops working for four days—"technical error," they say, like the system just happened to forget I exist.
Group projects become exercises in invisibility.
I approach three different clusters of students for Parker's sensory mapping assignment.
They scatter like I'm carrying plague. Eventually Parker assigns me to a group herself, and my partners spend the entire project talking around me, through me, like I'm a ghost they've collectively decided not to see.
Someone salts my laundry. Literally—dumps actual salt into the machine, which apparently interferes with magical residue and ruins anything that's been near active spellwork.
Brittany's band tees come out stiff and faded.
She doesn't yell at me. Just looks at the ruined fabric for a long moment and says, "I'll add it to the list."
And the storms keep following me. Small ones—localized drizzle when I'm crossing the quad, static shocks every time I touch metal.
Once, lightning strikes a tree I'm walking past, close enough that I smell my own hair singeing.
I never catch Atlas doing it. But I feel his magic now, that electric hum before a strike, and I know.
They're all still watching. Callum from windows. Felix from corners. Atlas from storm clouds.
And Ren. Ren is the strangest of all.
It takes me a week to notice him.
Not because he's subtle—he's terrible at subtle, too tall and too still, standing in doorways like a well-dressed statue. It's more that I've trained myself not to look for him. After combat training, after watching him step over my bleeding body, I decided Ren Ashford didn't exist to me anymore.
But he's hard to ignore when he keeps showing up.
He's in the dining hall on Tuesday, warm brown eyes tracking me across the room. Outside my Elemental Studies classroom on Wednesday. In the library on Thursday, two floors below my usual table, and when I glance down through the atrium I catch him looking up before he turns away.
It's not like Callum's cold observation or Felix's sharp curiosity. Ren watches me the way you watch a fire—wary, uncertain, drawn in despite yourself.
I don't know what it means. I'm not sure I want to.
On Friday night, leaving the library at midnight, he's waiting in the shadows near the entrance.
"Everly."
I stop. Turn. He's half-hidden by darkness, and for a moment neither of us speaks.
"What do you want, Ren?"
His hands are shaking—a fine tremor he's trying to hide by pressing them flat against his thighs. The healer's hands. The hands that fix everyone except me.
"Be careful," he says finally. "What you're looking for—the answers you want. They're not safe."
"What does that mean?"
Silence. The shadows lean toward me the way they always do now, and I see his eyes drop to my hands, like he can sense the darkness gathering there.
"Some doors stay closed for a reason."
Then he's gone, slipping into the night before I can ask anything else.
I can't sleep.
The magic inside me is restless—shadow pressing against my ribs, lightning humming beneath my skin. Every time I close my eyes I see Ren's face, that warning I don't understand. Some doors stay closed for a reason.
At 2 AM I give up. Pull on Brittany's least-ruined hoodie, stuff my feet into my pink tennis shoes, and slip out to the library.
The fourth floor is where the dangerous books live. The ones that scream if you open them wrong. The ones with territorial tendencies. Most students avoid this section entirely, which makes it perfect for research you don't want anyone to know about.
I've been through these shelves a dozen times already, following threads that lead nowhere. But tonight something feels different. The shadows are thicker here, pooling in corners, and I find myself moving deeper into the stacks than I've gone before.
Past the screaming books. Past the ones that hiss warnings. Into a section so dusty it's clear no one's touched it in years.
The books here are old. Really old—cracked spines, faded titles, pages that crumble if you're not careful. I pull volumes at random, scanning for anything useful.
A History of Magical Education in North America. Nothing about people who absorb multiple disciplines.
Fraternity Origins and the Formalization of Magical Practice. Dry academic prose about why the four disciplines needed separate institutions. Something about "maintaining balance" and "preventing dangerous hybridization."
Dangerous hybridization. That's a new phrase. I make a note.
The next book is different. Smaller, older, the title barely legible: Campus Architecture and Memorial Sites.
I almost put it back. Then I see a chapter heading halfway through the table of contents: Concordia Hall: A Cautionary History.
Concordia Hall was built in 1847.
According to the book, it sat at the center of campus—a pentagonal building made from stones that predated the university itself.
For almost eighty years, it housed a sorority called the Grimoire Girls.
Students who could channel all four magical disciplines.
Students who could absorb spells, blend magic, do things that single-discipline casters couldn't.
Students like me.
I read faster, my heart pounding.
The Grimoire Girls were powerful. Respected.
They had their own leadership structure, their own traditions, their own place in the university hierarchy.
The book includes a photograph from 1920—a group of young women standing on the steps of a beautiful Gothic building, arms around each other, smiling.
Then came the Schism.
In 1926, the four fraternities formally separated. The book talks about it in careful, neutral language—"restructuring of magical education," "clarification of disciplinary boundaries," "necessary reforms for student safety." But between the lines, I can read what actually happened.
They didn't just separate the fraternities. They dissolved the Grimoire Girls entirely.
Concordia Hall was condemned. The sorority was disbanded. The students were supposed to be "integrated into appropriate single-discipline programs."
Supposed to be.
I flip to the next page, looking for more. What happened to them? Where did they go?
But that's where the chapter ends. Just a brief note at the bottom: For more information on the post-Schism transition period, see Administrative records (RESTRICTED).
I spend the next three hours pulling every book I can find about the Schism, about unified magic, about the Grimoire Girls.
The information is scattered. Fragmentary. Like someone went through decades ago and removed anything too detailed, leaving only scraps.
But scraps are enough.
I learn that the leader of the Grimoire Girls in 1926 was a woman named Helena Grimoire. She argued publicly for unified casters' rights. She published papers about magical equality. She had a partner named Cordelia.
I learn that Cordelia "disappeared" in 1930. No explanation. No death certificate. Just—gone.
I learn that Helena vanished around the same time. The records call it a "voluntary departure." They don't say where she went.
I learn that unified casters—grimoires, the old books call them—were classified as "unstable" and "dangerous" after the Schism. That anyone showing signs of multi-discipline absorption was supposed to be reported to the Administration immediately.
And I learn that every single grimoire identified after 1926 has simply... stopped existing.
No expulsion records. No transfers. No graves.
They just vanish. One by one, year after year, for almost a hundred years. Here one semester, gone the next, and no one ever asks where they went.
I sit back in my chair, surrounded by dusty books and scattered notes, and I feel the cold weight of shadow magic pressing against my ribs. The electric hum of lightning under my skin. Two disciplines already inside me, and two more out there somewhere, waiting.
Grimoire. That's the word. That's what I am.
And if the pattern holds—if I'm like Helena and Cordelia and all the others whose names have been scrubbed from the records —
Then I already know how this ends.
Dawn light is creeping through the library windows when I finally stop reading.
My eyes burn. My hands are shaking. The notes I've taken cover three pages, fragments of a history no one wants remembered:
Grimoire Girls sorority—dissolved 1926 Concordia Hall—condemned Helena Grimoire—vanished Cordelia—"disappeared" 1930 Every grimoire since—gone without explanation
I don't know what happened to them. The books won't tell me. Maybe no one knows anymore, or maybe the people who know aren't talking.
But I know what I am now. I know why the four presidents have been watching me, testing me, pushing me to absorb more and more. I know why Catalina smiled when my sphere cracked, why Callum texts his mother after every incident, why the Administration put me on probation instead of expelling me.
They're not trying to squeeze me out.
They're waiting for something.
I gather my notes, my books, my cracked sphere that's been pulsing faster all night. The shadows follow me as I walk down the stairs, through the empty lobby, out into the grey morning light.
Somewhere on this campus, there's a condemned building that used to house girls like me. Somewhere in the Administration archives, there are records that explain what "disappeared" really means.
I'm going to find them.
And I'm going to make sure I don't end up like all the others—a name in a file, a gap in the records, a girl who was here one day and gone the next while everyone pretended not to notice.
I'm not going to disappear.
Not without a fight.