Nova

Chapter 31

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

SANORA

I walked into the library with my head bent to my phone, scrolling through the photos my mother had just sent me. The images were of our neighbour’s house, Van Elliott’s, blackened and gutted, the skeleton of wood and metal jutting out against the sky like broken bones.

Van Elliott was in his early thirties, a widower and quiet man.

My mother said he’d been lucky not to be home when the fire swallowed everything he owned in the middle of the night.

She had smelled the smoke drifting in through her own window in her sleep, and was the one who’d called the fire emergency.

I lifted my gaze just long enough to wave at Amelia behind the desk before dipping back into the screen, asking if they’d identified the cause of the fire. Her response was no, and she was just heading back home after giving her statement to the police.

As I read that, another notification blinked onto the top of my screen.

Thrax

No, I didn’t delete it.

I froze between two shelves, my eyes widening as I fixed them on the message. All these while, I thought he’d snuck into my room and deleted that photo of him craning his neck up my window. He hadn’t deleted it. The one I had snapped of him from my room the first night I arrived in Nimorran.

Me

Then what? It just…vanished

on its own?

I hit send, pulling a book similar to the last one I read.

I didn’t know if I should give up on using the Soulless Man as my thesis.

There was no record of him anywhere, and the only new thing I could write down was what he’d tell me himself.

Which was a no because I told him I wasn’t trying to get any fuck-ass information out of him or turn his life into an academic scavenger hunt.

Doing that would be going against my words.

But what could I even write? I met him in Nimorran and lived with him for a month?

Anyone would laugh me out of the room. It still didn’t feel real even to me.

Everything I put on paper would read like a fever dream because no one—no one—had been able to track him down.

Not historians, not desperate truth-seekers who made their living out of chasing ghosts and chucking people who went missing for years back into their homes. No one knew a thing.

They didn’t even know that he cast no shadow.

My phone vibrated against my palm.

Thrax

There are a lot of things that come

with having a soul.

My lips pressed together, brows furrowing.

Me

So you can’t be caught on camera…

because you don’t have one?

Same reason why he cast no shadow—he didn’t have a soul. I’d mentioned it before, but he was actually a dead man. A ghost.

Me

But I saw the photo right after I

took it. It only disappeared later,

when I checked again.

Thrax

Proof that I exist and don’t exist

at the same time.

A sigh escaped me, half frustration, half awe. My thumbs hovered above the keyboard, words rushing to the edge of my thought but never making it through. The more I learned about him, the harder it became to look at him without wanting to dismantle every secret he carried.

But what good would knowing do? He’d lived over a thousand years. What fraction of his story could I possibly learn before I, too, disappeared from this place?

Shoving the phone into my back pocket, I pulled the book free and walked to the desk. Just something to keep me out of my thoughts, or keep Thrax from spiralling through twenty-four-seven.

He’d been in the house since yesterday afternoon, after the orgasm he’d given me, dragging me into a climax so devastating I could still feel it echo in my bones.

He didn’t leave throughout the day. And yes, I’d slept in his room when darkness fell, then woke up in the middle of the night to find him gone.

Because of that, I’d stayed in the living room to wait for him after sending him a ‘where are you’ text that he purposefully ignored.

But I’d only lasted two hours before I slept off.

Then I woke up on his bed this morning, realising he’d put me there.

I’d rushed downstairs to find him, the question spilling out of me.

“Where did you go?”

“Unfinished business,” he said.

I was starting to despise those words. “You ignored my text. What if I was in danger?”

“I’d know.” His voice had held such conviction it almost sounded like truth. “If you were in danger, sweetheart, I’d feel it. And I didn’t ignore your text. My phone died.”

“And how would you have known?”

His eyes dropped to my chest. “Your fear.”

I blinked, realisation dawning. “Are you saying you can sense people’s emotions? You weren’t kidding that day in the library?”

“I cannot sense people’s emotions.”

Then he went on denying it no matter how hard I argued and tried to piece things together.

Like that day in the rain when he said that he felt my heart breaking, the time I was having a panic attack in my room, the time the messenger had attacked me and the countless times he’d found me.

It was because he could feel what I was feeling.

There was no other way to describe how he magically showed up everytime.

I surfaced from my thoughts as I set the book on Amelia’s desk, only to find she wasn’t alone. A man stood beside her—a male version of her. He looked slightly older, taller, his brown hair falling across his forehead, with a pair of bright brown eyes.

The siblings stopped talking when I showed up, Amelia’s smile lightning up while her brother just stared at me.

“Hey, Evening. Nice to see you again,” Amelia said, jotting my details in her record book.

“You too.” I mirrored her smile.

She slid the book towards me. “Sorry about the other day. I didn’t realise you had…company.”

I waved her off. “It’s fine.”

“See you again,” she said as I took the book, waving with a small smile.

I stepped back out into the cool of evening, the book tucked to my chest. The sky had deepened into that dusky blue where lamplight began to glow faint against the encroaching dark.

When I checked my watch, it was nearly seven.

The hours had bled away too fast, maybe because I had slept half of them thanks to those night’s creatures I'd fought.

Footsteps fell into place beside mine. I turned to find Amelia’s brother, hood up with his hands tucked into his grey shorts.

His smile was identical to hers. “Good evening,” he greeted.

“Good evening,” I replied, my gaze flicking back ahead.

“You don’t look like you’re from here,” he said. “I’d have noticed you if you were.”

“Yes. Because I’m not.”

“Let me guess. Researcher?”

A faint smile tugged at my lips. “Yes.”

He nodded once, falling into silence for half a minute. “Solo?”

“Yes,” I clipped.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Merton.”

“Sanora.”

“That’s a beautiful name,” he said, chuckling when I muttered thanks.

He tilted his head. “I’m guessing you’ll be heading back when the train arrives in four days?”

I nodded, thankful for the remainder that dragged me under. I had four days left in Nimorran. Four days to let go of the strangeness, the fear, the questions, and the pull I still couldn’t explain. And to call it bittersweet was putting it lightly.

Merton’s gaze wandered, his head tilting slightly as though he was searching for a thread of conversation to tug on. His eyes drifted downward and caught on the book in my hand. The realisation lit across his face as he spoke.

“You must be the girl Amelia talked about.”

I cut him a brief glance, my brow arched, waiting.

“She mentioned lending my grandfather’s book to a girl with green hair.” His eyes flicked to my hair, the corner of his mouth quirking. “Green and brown, I see.”

A smile tugged faintly at me, softened by the warmth of genuine appreciation. “Yeah, she did. It actually helped me a lot.” I tilted my head. “Do you stay here?”

“Oh, no. Just Amelia. She was closest to my grandfather, and when he passed, she wanted to preserve the library herself instead of giving it over to someone else to manage.” He gestured between us with a shrug.

“We came together. Definitely must have missed each other on the train. Maybe we’ll see each other when we’re leaving? ”

I gave him a small nod in reply.

He let out a breath. “The only other time I’d ever come here was for a school project,” he went on, almost as though to fill the silence between us. “I came with my group.”

That pulled at me. My curiosity gnawed, and I turned my head fully to face him. “School project? What did you study?”

“I majored in Historical Geology,” he said, watching the flicker of interest in my expression. Encouraged, he continued. “There were six of us, and we thought Nimorran might hold some unique stones, since…you know.”

“So, did you find any before you left?”

He nodded, his expression brightening. “Yes. Quite a lot. But during our search, we stumbled across something else. It was a cave. It was…different. It was nothing like we’d ever seen before.

I can’t remember exactly where it was, but it felt creepy.

” He visibly shivered. “Cannot also recall all the details. But we hammered out a fragment of the stone and brought it back to experiment on. At first, it seemed like ordinary igneous rock. But it gave off residual warmth long after we’d removed it from the cave, and whenever the sun hit it, it shined, like tiny pieces of diamonds were caught in it.

Even in storage, it felt…alive. Sometimes, under darkness, it glowed faintly with air hissing out of it. ”

I gave him a questioning look.

“There was a private research,” he explained.

“Conducted, I think, about nine hundred years ago. Actually, it was a private record our school kept locked away because the people who started that research weren’t able to complete it—died the next year.

After a lot of back-and-forth with professors, we discovered that the cave wasn’t just any cave, and every anomaly we found was there in the old research. ”

I frowned. “In what way? What did you find?”

He took a long look at the eagerness on my face, then continued, counting on his fingers as though he was listing them out in the order he remembered.

“There were organic traces where none should even exist, it was unnaturally warm for stone that had been existing for over a millennium. They speculated that something powerful slept inside due to the strange glow. The old records noted inaudible whispers heard by those who entered the cave.” He pointed to himself.

“We also heard some twisted sounds even from outside, and it was eventually linked to the Soulless Man’s lore of corrupting minds. They believed it was his home.”

My shoulders dropped as I rolled my eyes, letting out a short scoff. “How would they know he slept there? Always spreading false lore about him.”

“And how would you know he didn't?” He smiled and pressed on. “They were just speculations though, nothing solid, no real evidence to actually back it up. It was named The Cave of the Undead before they died.”

My brows pinched. “What?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “We didn’t go inside.

Fear kept us out. None of us wanted to risk not making it back.

But the old researchers did. Could the Soulless Man have lived there, really?

Do you think they all died the next year because of it?

Our professors banned us from going back there to continue the research, in fear we might end up like them. ”

The Cave of the Undead.

The name alone unsettled me, familiar like a half-remembered dream, pressing cold into my skin.

Could it be one of those histories still alive, a magical element that survived the wrath?

It had to be very special if the wrath didn’t destroy it.

And if so, why there? Why would Thrax live in such a place nine hundred years ago?

Only one person could give me the truth.

“Thanks, Merton. I gotta go.”

He looked caught off guard, scrambling for something to hold me there, words tripping over his tongue. “Uh—uhm, maybe we’ll see each other when we leave? At the station, perhaps?”

I gave him an appreciative smile. “Sure.”

Then I quickened my pace, my steps carrying me fast towards the house, the air cooling against my cheeks as the shadows deepened. By the time I reached the door, the clock had just hit seven.