Chapter 20 Everly #2
Felix is in there. In a chair, probably, cards in his hands, running the probabilities on tomorrow for the hundredth time and getting the same answer: I don't know. The boy who sees every ending, staring at the one story he can't finish.
I don't think about Felix. I let the chaos settle.
But I don't walk back. Not yet.
Something is pulling me east. Not one magic—all four.
Shadow and storm and blood and chaos, reaching in the same direction for the first time since I absorbed them, aligned toward a point on campus I've never visited.
The pull isn't aggressive. It's not the sharp tug of an absorption or the magnetic drag of a president's proximity.
It's quieter than that. Older. The feeling of a word on the tip of your tongue, a name you've forgotten, a room you walked into and can't remember why.
I follow it.
The eastern edge of campus is different from the rest of Nyxhaven.
The Gothic architecture thins out here—fewer buildings, more open ground, the landscaping gone slightly wild.
The oaks give way to birches, their white trunks ghostly in the moonlight, and the stone paths narrow to a single trail that winds through overgrown hedgerows and ends at—
Nothing.
A clearing. Maybe fifty feet across. Grass, long and unmowed, silver-white in the moon.
A few birches at the edges, leaning inward like they're trying to close a gap.
And in the grass, half-buried, barely visible unless you're standing right on top of them: foundation stones.
Old ones—older than anything else on campus, the granite dark and rough-cut, arranged in lines that trace the outline of a building that isn't here anymore.
Not a square. Not a rectangle.
A pentagon.
My four magics go silent.
All of them. At once. The shadows stop pulling.
The lightning stops humming. The blood magic's pulse drops to nothing and the chaos goes still—perfectly, completely still, no flickering branches, no probability ghosts, just silence.
As if they've found the place they've been looking for and now that they're here they don't know what to do.
I stand in the center of the foundation and I feel it.
Absence. Not emptiness—those are different things.
Empty is a room with nothing in it. Absence is a room where something used to be, and the shape of it is still pressed into the air like a handprint in wet clay.
This ground remembers what stood here. The stones remember.
The magic remembers—I can feel it in the soil, faint and deep, a steady thrum that doesn't belong to any of the four disciplines because it belongs to all of them at once.
Unified. Whole. The way magic was before someone decided it needed to be broken into pieces.
Concordia Hall.
This is where it stood. The Grimoire Girls headquarters—the pentagonal building built from pre-Schism stones, with rooms that adjusted to each occupant's magical needs.
The place where women like me lived and studied and practiced a magic that didn't require choosing.
Before the Schism. Before the dissolution.
Before whatever happened that turned handled into a word that means gone.
Someone tore it down. Not just condemned it—Brittany and I read about condemnation, about boarded windows and locked doors.
This is more than that. Someone razed it to the foundation and carted away the stones and let the grass grow over the bones of it, and they did it so thoroughly that the campus maps don't show it and the students don't talk about it and the only evidence that it ever existed is these rough-cut granite lines in the earth and the ache in my chest where four magics are holding their breath.
I kneel. Press my palm flat against one of the foundation stones.
It's warm. Not body-warm—deeper. The warmth of something that's been holding heat for a very long time, keeping it stored, waiting.
The four magics stir behind my ribs—not reaching, not pulling, just recognizing.
The way you recognize a smell from childhood, a song you haven't heard in years.
Something that was yours before you knew you existed.
There's nothing here to find. No hidden entrance, no secret passage, no boarded-up window that Brittany's flashlight could illuminate.
Just stones in the grass and an absence shaped like a building and the quiet, devastating certainty that I am standing in the place where people like me were erased from history.
I think about Helena Grimoire. Did she stand here? Before the Schism, before the dissolution, before she vanished—did she walk these halls and practice unified magic and believe that the world had a place for what she was?
Did she know they were going to destroy it?
I take my hand off the stone. The warmth fades. The four magics exhale—a slow release, settling back into their separate corners behind my ribs, and the silence breaks into the usual restless hum. Shadow pulling one way. Storm another. Blood a third. Chaos everywhere.
Four magics that used to be one. A building that used to be whole. A lineage that used to exist.
I stand up and brush the dirt from my knees and walk away from the pentagon in the grass, and I don't look back because looking back would mean acknowledging that I just found the place where I belong, and it's a ruin.
Four buildings. Four disciplines. And a fifth that's been torn from the earth so completely that only the bones remain.
The sphere is warm in my pocket. Four colors, pressing against the crack. All of them mine now. All of them restless. All of them reaching, still, toward the clearing I left behind—toward the absence shaped like a home.
I walk back to Bellamy Hall slowly. The campus is still empty, still silver, still holding its breath.
The oak leaves have piled against the stone walls of the main building in drifts, and they crunch under my feet—dry and fragile, the last of autumn giving way to something colder.
The air smells like frost and old stone and the faint, layered scent of four types of magic that have settled into my skin and my clothes and my hair like perfume I can't wash off.
I feel different tonight. Not stronger—that's the wrong word. Fuller. Like a vessel that's been filling slowly for weeks and is now nearly level with the brim. One more thing—one push, one pour, one wrong step—and it all spills over.
Is that what Atlas's mother felt? That fullness?
That terrifying completeness, the sense of carrying more than your body was built to hold?
Did she stand somewhere quiet on the last night and feel the magic pressing outward and know—the way you know a fever is going to break, the way you know a storm is coming—that she was running out of room?
Did she ever find the pentagon in the grass? Did she know there was a place where she would have belonged, if the world hadn't torn it down before she got there?
I push through the door of Bellamy Hall.
The stairwell is dark and silent. My shoes leave wet prints on the stone steps—dew from the grass, cold water marking my path—and the sphere in my pocket pulses with each step.
Shadow. Storm. Blood. Chaos. Shadow. Storm.
Blood. Chaos. A heartbeat made of four colors that don't belong together and won't separate.
Brittany is awake.
She's sitting up in bed with the lamp on, phone in her lap, Herbert on her shoulder. She's wearing an oversized black t-shirt with a band logo I don't recognize—something with a goat skull—and her dark hair is a mess and her eyes are puffy, like she slept for an hour and then couldn't anymore.
She looks at me. Wet shoes. Jacket. Three-in-the-morning face.
"Went for a walk," I say.
"Obviously." She doesn't ask where. She knows. She probably felt me leave—not magically, just the instinct of a roommate who sleeps light and worries more than she'll ever admit.
I take off my jacket. Hang it on the desk chair. The sphere sits in the pocket, four colors visible through the fabric, glowing faintly.
Brittany watches me for a moment. Then:
"Tomorrow's going to be bad, isn't it?"
I sit on my bed. Pull my knees up. Herbert crawls from her shoulder to the space between our beds, bridging the gap, and settles on my knee like he's done this a hundred times.
His small weight is grounding. Real. A spider on my kneecap, alive and present in a world that keeps trying to become something else.
"Probably," I say.
"Do you know what they're going to do?"
"All four of them. Channeling at once. Into me." I stroke Herbert's back with one finger—his legs shift to accommodate, patient, tolerant. "They want to see if I can hold all four disciplines at the same time."
"And if you can't?"
I don't answer. We both know what happens if I can't. We've been reading about it for weeks—the restricted section, the documents, the women who disappeared. The matter has been handled.
Brittany is quiet for a long time. The lamp throws warm light across the room, softening the edges of everything—the textbooks stacked on her desk, the skull-print tissues on the nightstand, the black flashlight with the skull sticker that she bought for our Concordia Hall mission.
We never did break in. Maybe we won't need to.
Maybe after tomorrow, the answers will come to us whether we want them or not.
"Then let's watch something stupid until we pass out," she says.
She pulls her laptop from under the pillow—battered, covered in stickers, the same one she uses for everything—and opens it between us on the bed. Herbert settles on the keyboard for a moment before she gently relocates him to the pillowcase.
"What are we watching?" I ask.
"Something with terrible effects and worse acting. I need to feel intellectually superior to something tonight." She scrolls through options. "Sharknado. Sharknado 2. Sharknado 3. There are six of these."
"There are not six Sharknados."
"There are six Sharknados, and we're watching the fourth one because it's called The 4th Awakens and that's objectively the worst title in cinematic history."
"Sold."
She hits play. The opening credits are terrible. The music is worse. A shark flies through a sandstorm and I think—for no reason at all, for every reason—that I might cry.
I don't cry. I throw popcorn at the screen instead, because Brittany produced a bag of microwave popcorn from a drawer that also contains three flashlights, a Swiss Army knife, and what appears to be a small first aid kit.
The popcorn is stale. The movie is an atrocity.
Brittany provides running commentary in a voice so dry it could start fires, and I laugh—really laugh, the kind that hurts your stomach and makes your eyes water—for the first time in weeks.
Herbert catches a piece of popcorn in a web he strings between the lamp and the bedpost. We both stare at it.
"He's evolving," Brittany says.
"He's always been this advanced. We just weren't paying attention."
"If that spider starts talking, I'm dropping out."
"You'd never drop out. You love it here."
"I tolerate it here. There's a significant difference.
" But she's almost smiling—the closest Brittany gets, which is a very slight loosening of the mouth that you'd miss if you weren't looking—and Herbert is eating his popcorn kernel with the methodical satisfaction of a creature who has figured out the food chain, and for two hours we are just roommates.
Just two girls watching a terrible movie in a dorm room, throwing food at a screen, laughing at things that aren't funny because the alternative is thinking about tomorrow.
The movie ends. Brittany closes the laptop. The room goes dark except for the sphere glowing faintly in my jacket pocket and the small green light of Brittany's phone charger.
"Everly."
"Yeah."
"Whatever happens tomorrow." Her voice is quiet. Stripped of the sarcasm, the deadpan, the protective armor she wears like a second skin. Just Brittany. Just my roommate. "You're not a bomb. You're not a weapon. You're not a problem to be handled."
My throat tightens. "How do you know?"
"Because I've met bombs. And weapons. And problems." A pause. "You brought me cookies on your first day. You wore a yellow cardigan. You named your pillow Frank."
"I did not name my pillow Frank."
"You talk in your sleep. His name is Frank."
I laugh. It comes out watery. Herbert crawls from the bedpost to my pillow and settles beside my head, a small warm weight, eight legs folded, standing guard.
"Get some sleep," Brittany says. "You're going to need it."
I close my eyes.
The dream comes fast.
A woman in a room. Stone walls. Four points of light—silver, blue, red, purple—blazing from the corners. She stands in the center with her arms spread and her head tilted back and the magic is pouring into her from every direction at once.
She looks like me.
Same dark hair. Same build. Same face, or close to it—the jaw slightly different, the cheekbones higher, but the resemblance is close enough that my sleeping brain doesn't question it.
She's wearing something white that's already singed at the edges, and her hands are open and the light is flowing into her palms and she's taking it, holding it, all four at once—
Then it's too much.
I see the moment it tips. Her face changes—not gradually, not in pieces, but all at once, the way a window looks fine until it doesn't and then it's nothing but fragments.
Her mouth opens. The sound that comes out is not a scream.
It's bigger than a scream. It's the sound of a body trying to hold something that bodies were never meant to hold, and failing, and the failure is not quiet.
Light pours from her eyes. From her mouth. From the cracks forming in her skin—yes, cracks, spreading across her arms like the crack in my sphere, running from her fingertips to her shoulders. She's coming apart. She's shining and she's coming apart and she's screaming and the sound is—
Run.
The word. The last word Atlas's mother ever said.
The woman in the dream looks at me. Through me. Her eyes are gold—pure, burning gold, the color my sphere flashed for three seconds and then never again—and in them I see recognition. Not a stranger. Not a ghost.
A warning.
The light reaches her chest and she—
I wake up gasping.
The room is grey with dawn. Brittany is still asleep. Herbert is on my pillow, legs tensed, watching me with all his eyes like he saw it too.
My hands are shaking. The sphere in my jacket pocket is glowing—visible through the fabric, four colors cycling fast, shadow-storm-blood-chaos-shadow-storm-blood-chaos, and the crack is warm to the touch when I reach for it.
Friday.
It's Friday.