7. Ashley
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ashley
The abandoned classroom on the fourth floor has become the closest thing I have to freedom inside these walls.
It’s dusty and forgotten — desks shoved against one wall under drop cloths that haven’t been lifted in years, cobwebs connecting the ceiling beams like architectural lace.
The windows face the forest rather than the main courtyard, which means no patrol sightlines, and the room sits at the end of a corridor that the cleaning staff apparently decided wasn’t worth the walk sometime around the previous century.
The monitoring crystals up here stopped working ages ago and nobody’s bothered to replace them. Whether that’s neglect or something else, I’m not in a position to question the gift.
Tonight marks three weeks of solo sessions in this room, and my shadows greet the space like a dog let off its leash — expanding immediately, filling the corners, testing the dimensions with the eager restlessness of something that’s been held still all day and has opinions about it.
“Alright,” I whisper to the dark. “Shadow sword. Let’s break a minute this time.”
They respond with enthusiasm that borders on showing off.
Darkness pools together at my right hand and solidifies into a blade that gleams with its own internal light — not reflection but generation, a cold luminescence that comes from somewhere inside the construct itself.
Unlike the basic formations we practice in class — temporary shapes that dissolve the instant concentration wavers — this weapon holds its edge even when I shift my attention to monitoring the corridor outside.
Forty-five seconds. Fifty. The edges begin wavering at sixty-two seconds before I lose cohesion and the sword dissolves back into ambient shadow.
Progress. Not enough progress, but progress.
“Now the hard one,” I murmur.
Creating shadow constructs is one thing — they’re essentially animated darkness given temporary shape, sophisticated but fundamentally simple.
Creating a shadow double that moves independently requires something entirely different: splitting consciousness while maintaining control of both my physical body and the construct.
Every time I’ve tried it, the dual awareness makes me feel like someone’s taken my brain and tried to tune two different radio stations on it simultaneously.
I close my eyes. Extend awareness through my shadows. Feel them begin shaping themselves into a duplicate of my physical form — pulling details from my own body’s dimensions the way a sculptor works from a model.
The process is nauseating in its wrongness, consciousness dividing like a cell splitting, each half suddenly too small for the thoughts it’s trying to contain.
The double takes shape.
Darkness coalesces into recognizable human form — my height, my build, my hair, rendered in shadow so dense it’s nearly opaque.
When I open my eyes, I’m looking at myself standing three feet away.
The double mirrors my movements with a slight delay, like an echo made visible, like watching my reflection in water that’s half a second behind.
“Holy shit,” I breathe. Three weeks of practice and the sight still makes the hair on my arms stand up.
Independent movement. That’s the real test.
I focus on directing the double while keeping my own body stationary by the window.
The dissociation is brutal for the first few seconds — two sets of spatial awareness fighting for dominance in a brain built for one.
But gradually, like learning to read two books at once, the double begins moving on its own.
It walks across the room while I stand still, its footsteps silent on the dusty floor, shadow feet not quite touching the stone.
Through the connection, I perceive what the double perceives. The room from a second angle. The dust motes floating in moonlight from a different perspective. My own body standing by the window, still and watchful, seen from the outside for the first time.
The dual vision is dizzying until my brain stops trying to reconcile the two feeds and simply accepts both.
“Let’s see how far this holds,” I whisper, directing the double toward the door.
It moves into the corridor and the connection stretches but doesn’t break.
Through the double’s awareness, I see moonlit hallway, empty and silent in the late-night hours.
Stone walls. Dead torches. The dust patterns on the floor undisturbed except by whatever mice have made the fourth floor their territory.
My double turns a corner toward the main staircase, and the sensory feed remains clear despite the increasing distance — I can feel the temperature drop near the exterior wall, smell the old stone and the faintest trace of cleaning solution from the floor below.
Then I see him.
A Hunter patrol guard ascending the stairs.
Silver badge catching enchanted torchlight from the third-floor landing, boots heavy on each step, hand resting casually on the alarm crystal at his belt.
He’s heading directly for the fourth floor.
Directly toward the corridor where my shadow double stands in the open like a confession written in darkness.
Panic hits like ice water.
The guard will reach the top of the stairs in seconds. The hallway offers nowhere to hide — no alcoves, no open doors, nothing but bare stone and my very visible, very unexplainable shadow construct.
His boot hits the top step. They’re face to face — a Hunter patrol and a shadow double that shouldn’t exist outside theoretical texts that most practitioners consider fiction.
His eyes widen. His hand moves toward the alarm crystal. “What in the — “
The command erupts from me before conscious thought can intervene.
“Walk away and forget you saw anything here.”
The words carry something that bypasses language entirely — power flowing through my shadow double and slamming into the guard’s mind with a force that feels like slamming a door. His hand freezes halfway to the crystal. His expression empties.
Not confusion. Not compliance. Absence.
Like someone reached inside his head and turned off the part responsible for the last five seconds.
“Nothing here,” he mutters to himself, voice flat and mechanical. “Routine patrol. Nothing unusual.”
He turns and walks back down the stairs with the stiff gait of someone whose muscles are following instructions their brain didn’t issue. Within moments, the staircase is empty. Silent. As if the encounter never happened.
I recall the double immediately. It dissolves on the return trip, shadow essence flowing back to me across the distance and reintegrating with a sensation like cold water poured into my chest.
My hands are shaking. My whole body is shaking.
I just controlled someone’s mind.
Reached into a man’s consciousness and rewrote his last thirty seconds like editing a rough draft. Made him forget, made him leave, made him compliant with a few words that didn’t feel like they came from my vocabulary at all.
“What the fuck was that?” I whisper to the empty room, staring at my hands like they belong to a stranger.
Bael’s attention focuses on me instantly — his consciousness drawn by the emotional earthquake. His presence arrives through our bond like a steadying hand on my shoulder, warm and immediate.
Command. Ancient ability. Certain bloodlines carry it. You’re developing faster than I anticipated.
The word carries approval I’m not ready for.
“I controlled his mind, Bael. I took his will and replaced it with mine. That’s not shadow manipulation — that’s something else entirely.”
It’s survival. You protected yourself and your secret using available resources.
“Did you hear his voice?” My throat feels tight. “He sounded like a puppet. Like I’d hollowed him out and put my words inside the space where his should have been.”
The guard remembers nothing. He’s unharmed. Your location is secure. A pause, and then gentler: The first time is always frightening. The ability itself is neutral — what matters is why you used it.
He’s right about the immediate situation. The guard is fine. My cover holds. But the memory of that blank expression — the way his face emptied of everything that made him a person thinking his own thoughts — sits in my stomach like something I swallowed that won’t go down.
Three quick knocks at the classroom door. A pause. Two more.
Constantine’s signal.
“Enter,” I manage, straightening my spine and locking the trembling behind my teeth.
He slips inside and activates privacy wards with the efficiency of someone who’s done it hundreds of times, though his appearance suggests urgency that’s anything but routine.
Hair slightly disheveled, robes fastened wrong — the top clasp skipped entirely, leaving the collar asymmetric in a way that would normally drive him insane.
“Are you alright?” The question comes before the wards finish settling, his amber eyes scanning me with an intensity that abandoned professional distance three sentences ago.
“I felt something through the fire-shadow connection. Strong emotional disturbance — fear, then something I couldn’t identify.
Power signature I haven’t encountered before. ”
He came.
Felt my panic from wherever he was — his quarters, the archives, wherever professors go at midnight — and came to check on me personally.
Not through official channels. Not by sending a message.
By walking through monitored corridors after hours to an unauthorized location because something in the connection between us told him I was in trouble.
“I had an encounter with a patrol guard,” I say. “My shadow double was detected during practice.”
His expression sharpens. “Were you identified? Do we need emergency extraction protocols?”
We. Not “do you need.” We.
“No identification. The situation was... handled.”
Something in my voice makes him look harder. “How was it handled, Ashley?”
My first name. Not Miss Dawn. The shift is small and enormous and I feel it in my chest.