Chapter 20 Everly
I can't sleep.
The four magics won't settle. They've been restless since I absorbed the chaos—shifting inside me like animals in a too-small cage, each one jostling for space.
The shadows curl and uncurl behind my ribs.
The lightning hums at a frequency that makes my teeth ache.
The blood magic pulses in time with my heartbeat, and the chaos flickers at the edges of everything, showing me ghost-images of probability branches that shimmer and dissolve before I can focus on them.
I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. Brittany's breathing is slow and even across the room.
Herbert is a small dark shape on her pillow, legs tucked, motionless.
Outside, the campus is quiet—no storms, no screaming books, no shadows moving where they shouldn't.
Just the wind in the old oaks and the distant chime of the clock tower marking one in the morning. Then two.
At two-thirty, I give up.
I sit up slowly, careful not to wake Brittany, and reach for my bag on the floor beside my bed. My fingers find the sphere by feel—smooth glass, cool to the touch, the crack running under my thumb like a scar.
I haven't taken it out in days. Haven't wanted to look at it. But tonight, with the demonstration hours away and four magics churning inside me and the ceiling offering nothing but shadows and silence, I pull it into my lap and hold it in both hands.
The crack is worse than I remember.
It runs from pole to pole in a jagged line, wider now than when Warrick reassembled it on the first day, and the glass on either side has gone thin—translucent at the edges, like ice that's been melting from the inside.
I can see the colors through it. Shadow-dark.
Storm-blue. Blood-red. Chaos-purple. All four, swirling together in the sphere's center, pressing against the crack like something trying to get out.
This is yours now, Miss Grey. Your responsibility. Figure out how to fix it.
Warrick's voice, weeks ago, in a classroom that smelled like chalk and old wood.
She'd reassembled it with her Stylus Mortis after it shattered during the demonstration, and she'd handed it back to me with an expression that I now realize wasn't concern.
It was something closer to grief. Like she was giving me a puzzle she already knew the answer to and wished she didn't.
I try channeling into it. Gently—barely a whisper of intention, the way Parker taught us in Elemental Studies. Awareness precedes control. I reach for the shadow magic first, guide it toward my palms, let it flow toward the glass.
The sphere responds.
The dark color inside brightens, deepens, swirling faster.
The crack glows faintly—a thin line of light where the magic presses against the damaged glass, looking for a way through.
I add the storm—just a thread, the smallest current I can manage—and the blue joins the black in a spiral that makes the sphere vibrate in my hands.
The glass groans.
Not a metaphor. An actual sound—a low, stressed creak, like a beam taking too much weight. The crack flexes. Widens by a hair. The colors inside surge brighter, pressing outward, and I feel the sphere's structure bowing under the strain, the glass thinning, the whole thing a breath away from—
I stop. Pull the magic back. The colors dim. The groaning fades. The crack settles, no wider than before, but no narrower either.
I sit in the dark holding a broken sphere and breathing hard.
Maybe that's what I am. Something that can't be fixed. Something cracked down the middle with too much inside, always pressing outward, always threatening to shatter. You can hold me together if you're careful. You can keep the magic flowing gently, keep the pressure low, keep everything balanced.
But you can't fix the crack. And sooner or later, something's going to push too hard.
I wrap the sphere in a sock—because I don't have a case and because the mundanity of it makes me feel slightly less like a ticking bomb—and put it in the pocket of my jacket.
Then I get dressed in the dark, lace my shoes, and slip out the door.
Campus at three in the morning is a different country.
The paths are empty. The buildings are dark except for the occasional window where some insomniac is burning through a paper or a crisis, and the only sounds are the wind and the oak leaves scraping across stone and the soft, persistent hum of magic that lives in everything at Nyxhaven—in the walls, in the ground, in the air itself, a vibration so constant that you stop noticing it until you're alone and the world goes quiet enough to hear.
The moon is nearly full. It turns the Gothic architecture silver—every spire and buttress and carved stone face lit up like a cathedral in a painting, the kind of beauty that's too old and too heavy to be comfortable.
The ivy on the buildings is black in the moonlight, and the shadows it throws are long and intricate, reaching across the paths like fingers.
My shadows reach back. I feel them stir inside me, responding to the darkness the way lungs respond to air, and for a moment—just a moment—the campus feels like it belongs to me.
Like I'm the only person in the world, standing in the center of a place that was built for secrets, and the secrets are finally ready to be heard.
I walk northeast first. Toward Ossium Hall.
The Mors building rises out of its valley like something that crawled up from underground and decided to stay.
Seven stories of Victorian Gothic, the flying buttresses sharp against the sky, the gargoyles crouching on their corners with expressions that look intimidating and half-feral at this hour.
The graveyard in the inner courtyard is visible through the iron gate—headstones catching moonlight, some of them cracked, some of them fresh, the old names worn to nothing and the new names waiting.
I stop at the gate and close my eyes. The shadow magic unfurls inside me—reaching outward, stretching toward the building like a vine toward sunlight.
I feel the death magic that saturates this place.
Old. Deep. Patient. It's in the stones and the soil and the bones underneath, a cold current that flows through everything Mors touches, and my shadows drink it in like water.
Callum is in there somewhere. Third floor, probably. Sitting at his desk in the dark with his cuffs straight and his drawer locked and the diagrams he copied from his mother's office spreading their poison quietly through his thoughts.
I don't think about Callum. I let the shadows settle and I walk on.
Northwest. Uphill. Toward Fulmen Hall.
The Tempest building is the opposite of Ossium—sleek where Mors is ornate, metal and glass and lightning rods piercing the sky like needles.
The towers catch the moonlight differently here, turning it blue, and the air changes as I climb the hill.
Thinner. Charged. The fine hairs on my arms lift and the storm magic in my chest wakes up, humming, reaching for the rods that crown the building like fingers reaching for a hand.
I can feel the residual energy from Atlas's breakdown—a ghost-charge in the earth, scorched spots in the grass that haven't grown back.
Three days ago he stood here and poured his grief into the sky and I pulled it out of him and I can still feel it inside me, heavy and electric, tasting like metal and loss.
Atlas is in there. Somewhere high up, probably. Close to the sky. Close to the storms that speak his language, that translate his grief into a force that can crack the earth open. Sleeping or not sleeping, I don't know which is worse for him.
I don't think about Atlas. I let the lightning settle and I walk on.
Southeast. Downhill, through the gardens. Toward Vitae Hall.
The Sanguis building smells different from the rest of campus.
I catch it before I see it—roses, heavy and sweet, the year-round thornbushes blooming in defiance of the season, their petals so dark in the moonlight they look like clots of blood against the black leaves.
The building itself is red marble and obsidian, elegant and strange, and the fountains that line the approach are still running—water catching moonlight, the sound of it soft and rhythmic, like a pulse.
The blood magic surges. Warm, insistent, reaching for the building the way the shadows reached for Ossium, and underneath the general pull—underneath the hum of a hundred Sanguis students sleeping behind those walls—I feel something specific.
A single heartbeat, quiet and steady, slower than the others. Ren.
He's awake. I know it the way I know my own breathing—through the blood magic, through the connection that's been open since his thumb pressed against my pulse in the library.
He's awake and I can feel him and I am almost certain, standing in the rose garden with wet grass soaking through my shoes, that he can feel me too.
I don't think about Ren. I let the blood magic settle and I walk on.
Southwest. The longest walk. Across campus to the place that doesn't follow the rules.
Long Shot Mansion sits in its patch of shimmering air, the exterior Gothic and wrong, the interior unknowable. The probability clouds above it are visible even from outside—faint purple smudges against the dark sky, shifting, churning, the mathematical dreams of a building that runs on chaos.
I stop at the edge of the shimmer. The chaos magic inside me reaches—not toward the building but in every direction at once, outward, upward, branching.
I catch fragments of probability at the edges of my vision—flickering ghost-paths, translucent as gauze.
The version where I walk away. The version where I go inside again.
The version where tomorrow goes well. The version where it doesn't.
I blink and the branches dissolve.