The way Damien just gave me everything he had left.
The way I just gave him a chance to become something other than the monster he was forced to become.
The darkness swallows us both.
And somewhere in its depths, the chalice's light continues to glow—ancient power finally awakened, destiny finally in motion, the Wicked Academy finally remembering what it was always meant to be.
Not a school for the cruel.
Not a trial for the desperate.
But a crucible for love.
The kind of love that survives betrayal and grows stronger through adversity.
To finally unravel the truth of Wicked Academy is the finale we’ve all been yearning to unravel.
And it begins depending on whether I pierce through the blanket of death…
CHAPTER 1
The Seventh Piece
~GWENIEVERE~
One minute, I'm surrounded by darkness.
Not the comfortable darkness of sleep or the terrifying darkness of death—this is something between. Something that exists in the spaces where consciousness hasn't decided whether to wake or surrender. It presses against me from all sides, thick as velvet, heavy as grief, and yet somehow not threatening. Just...present. Patient. Waiting for something I can't name.
The void has texture here.
I can feel it against what should be skin—soft undulations of nothing that brush against my awareness like curious fingers examining something new. There's no temperature, no scent, no sound beyond the distant echo of my own thoughts trying to organize themselves into something coherent. Time doesn't exist in this space, or if it does, it moves sideways rather than forward, each moment bleeding into the next without clear boundaries.
Where am I?
The question forms slowly, like honey dripping from a spoon. It feels important, but the urgency that should accompany such uncertainty is absent. Everything is muted here. Dampened.As if the darkness itself absorbs emotion the way black fabric absorbs light.
Then the voidshifts.
The sensation is like being turned inside out by gentle hands—disorienting but not painful. Reality restructures around me in waves of impossible color, darkness bleeding into something else entirely. Shapes emerge from the nothing, solidifying with the dreamlike logic of places that exist only in the spaces between heartbeats.
Flowers.
They rise from soil that materializes beneath feet I'm only now aware I possess. Not ordinary flowers—nothing in this place could be ordinary—but blooms that seem to exist in multiple states simultaneously. Petals that are solid when observed directly but translucent when glimpsed from peripheral vision. Colors that have no names in any language I know, shifting through spectrums that shouldn't exist, each hue bleeding into the next like watercolors on wet paper.
The field stretches in every direction, an endless carpet of impossible beauty that makes my chest ache with longing I don't understand. Some flowers pulse with soft bioluminescence, their glow rhythmic as heartbeats. Others seem to sing—not with sound but with sensation, their presence creating harmonics that vibrate through whatever I've become.
Warmth touches me.
Not the harsh heat of the Infernal Realm I vaguely remember, but something gentler. The flowers radiate comfort the way hearths radiate heat, their impossible colors carrying with them the sensation of beingwelcomed. Of beinghome, though I can't remember where home is or if I've ever had one.
I look down at myself.
Oh.
My hands hover before my face, but they're not hands—not really. They're suggestions of hands, outlines filled with nothing, translucent as morning mist. I can see straight through them to the flower-strewn ground below, each petal visible through flesh that has forgotten how to be solid.
I'm a ghost.
