16. Leith
Leith
“We are wasting time,” I say quietly. “SilverGate wants Asha gone.”
“So she said,” Hale responds.
“She is one anomaly that SilverGate doesn’t want to keep.”
“And why would it? She is a goddess from another realm, for fuck’s sake.”
“You don’t need to convince me. I’m just telling you the facts. We have less time than Blackridge accounted for.”
Tobin lies unconscious on the bed. His silver magic flickers under his skin, then disappears. His breathing stays even, but the room keeps reacting to him in small ways. The lamp by the desk dims whenever his fingers twitch.
“He needs several hours,” Hale says.
“We may not have several hours.”
“Then we make them.”
I look at him. “You intend to argue with a realm?”
“I intend to burn whatever gets near her.”
“That won’t slow SilverGate if it decides to eject her through the nearest ward seam.”
His eyes sharpen. “Can it do that?”
“No idea.”
“Then why say it?”
“Because if I were an academy designed to contain dangerous entities, and one of those entities became an unacceptable risk, I’d remove her from the closest possible point.”
Hale goes very still.
Good. He understands the problem now.
Asha doesn’t have five days. Not if SilverGate is getting impatient.
“I’m going back to the library to see if I can find anything about this Shadow Well place. You stay here and monitor this situation.”
Hale nods grimly and drags the chair over to the window before sitting down. “Try to find something useful this time instead of disappearing books.”
“Try not to set anything on fire before I return.”
“No promises.”
I leave before Asha comes out of the bathroom and decides to come with me.
Normally I wouldn’t resist her presence.
But now I need to focus, and she is distracting in every way imaginable.
The corridor outside her room feels too quiet.
SilverGate’s usual hum sits beneath the stone, but impatience scrapes through it now.
I head down the stairs, irritated at losing the journal. I had the thing. It let me read enough to make everything worse, then vanished into a wall because apparently even books in this academy have dramatic timing.
Death magic runs beneath SilverGate in thin black veins. Some of it has existed here longer than the academy wants anyone to know. I noticed traces before, but I dismissed them as residue from centuries of supernatural students dying in creative ways. Now I know better.
Sovereign death preserves the path.
The words repeat in my head, unwanted and persistent.
I reach the library before the next lecture bell. Verne isn’t behind her desk.
Again.
That is starting to feel deliberate.
The front hall stands empty except for the shelves, the rain ticking against high windows, and the quiet pressure of a place pretending it isn’t alive. I stop just inside the door and let death magic spread across the floor.
Nothing recent.
No corpse. No trace of violence. No Verne.
The wall behind her desk remains blank, but the black trail from the journal still sits there, faint and stubborn, sunk into the stone where ordinary magic can’t follow. I cross the entrance hall, place one hand against the wall, but this time I don’t push.
I listen.
Death isn’t always force. Sometimes it’s absence. A pause or a door left open after the body has gone cold.
The wall answers with silence too complete to be natural.
I press my palm flatter against the stone. Death magic slips from me in a narrow line, a patient tendril of shadow seeking rather than seizing. It enters the place where the journal vanished and disappears again.
But this time, something returns.
A pulse of recognition. Dead and certain.
“Finally,” I murmur.
The stone under my hand cools until pain bites through my palm. Black script rises beneath my skin, visible through the flesh. I read it before it fades.
Only the claimed may descend.
“Claimed by what? And descend to where?” I ask the empty library.
The wall remains blank.
I withdraw my hand and flex my fingers. The marks fade, leaving a deep ache behind. The library’s silence presses closer. It wants me to accept the answer as complete, which means it isn’t.
Asha is claimed by StormGate, by SilverGate, by the bond, by whatever death decided to preserve inside her.
Tobin has been labelled an Unbound Source by a system that panicked the moment it saw him.
Hale is an infernal heir whose fire can burn classification magic without touching flesh.
And I’m the first death. The hollow sovereign.
The reaper who apparently looks like a god Asha killed before she knew her own name.
I dislike patterns when they include me.
I move away from the wall and head to the indexing system. I’m here to find out about the Shadow Well.
The indexing system sits in the centre of the first floor, smug and antique.
“Shadow Well,” I say to it.
It refuses to acknowledge the term.
I stand before the brass catalogue, watching the little drawers rearrange themselves.
“Shadow Well,” I say again.
The drawer nearest my hand snaps shut, then a book drops from a shelf behind me.
I turn slowly.
It lies open on the floor in the centre aisle, pages blank, cover plain grey. I approach it cautiously.
The pages remain blank until my shadow falls across them.
Ink rises.
The Shadow Well is the absence between claims. It opens where identity fails, and authority remains.
“Yes, we know that. Blackridge already told us.”
It is the absence beneath places. The pause between gates. The dark that remembers every shape it has held.
I crouch beside the book without touching it.
Do not enter with a borrowed name.
“That will be a problem.”
Anyone who enters will be tested.
“Figured.” It won’t care that we’re escorting her. It won’t care about intention, loyalty, strategy, or urgency.
It will find the fracture in each of us and push.
I touch the edge of the book. Magic slips from my fingertip into the paper, careful and controlled. The book doesn’t resist. It opens wider, pages fanning with a dry whisper until they stop on an illustration.
A map.
SilverGate’s foundations appear in black lines, layered beneath the academy in descending circles. The upper levels are obvious. Drainage tunnels, old ward chambers, the river path under the library. Below that, the map becomes less architectural and more hostile.
The lines bend away from themselves. Corridors end in circles. Chambers sit inside other chambers. One level has no doors at all, only marks indicating pressure, memory and descent.
Then I see a black point at the centre of the lowest circle.
The paper around it has been scraped clean.
I study the route leading towards it. There are three possible approaches. One through the old river under the library, one beneath the combat halls, one from the sealed designation chamber under Blackridge’s office.
The river path has been crossed out.
The combat path carries a warning symbol I don’t recognise.
The designation chamber route remains intact.
“Convenient,” I mutter.
Ink rises beside the black point.
The Well rejects those who arrive whole.
I stare at the sentence.
“That’s not fucking helping.”
The book slams shut.
I jerk my hand back before it takes my fingers with it.
A drawer in the brass catalogue opens behind me.
I look at it.
The drawer waits, half-open, offering nothing but darkness. It slides out another inch.
I go to it with my magic coiled around my fingers before I reach inside. My fingertips brush card.
Bone.
I pull the index card free.
One word is carved into it.
Hollow.
The brass catalogue snaps shut behind the empty drawer, and every lamp in the library goes out.
Darkness closes over the library.
It’s an active darkness.
It fills the aisles, eats the shapes of shelves, swallows the brass catalogue and leaves me standing with a bone card in my hand and death magic stirring under my skin in answer.
“Hollow,” I say.
The word travels too far. It moves down aisles I can’t see, returns softer, then softer again, until the library whispers it back from every wall.
I tighten my grip on the card. The carved letters warm beneath my fingers, which is irritating.
“Verne?” I call.
No answer.
Death magic pulls me down the stairs and spreads across the floor in a low sweep. The darkness reacts. It doesn’t retreat. It parts in narrow paths, revealing strips of carpet, shelf legs, the edge of Verne’s empty desk.
The wall behind it no longer appears blank.
A door has appeared.
Its outline exists in black against black, visible only because my magic recognises the absence around it. The card pulses once in my hand.
“You weren’t seriously going to go through there without us, were you?” Tobin asks from behind me.
I don’t look back. I know they’re all there. “I was contemplating it.”
“Rude,” Asha says and barges past me. “If we’re doing this, let’s be quick about it.”
I breathe out and nod once. “Let’s do it.”