I don't know who talked.
Maybe it was the professors. They've been watching me since the sphere cracked in Warrick's class, writing things down in the margins of their notes, exchanging glances over my head when they think I'm not paying attention. Maybe one of them said something to a colleague, who said something to a student, who said something to the entire campus.
Maybe it was the students who saw me absorb Callum's shadow spell in Ossium Hall. Or the ones who watched me pull lightning out of the sky when Atlas lost control in the quad. There were witnesses both times—dozens of them—and I was stupid enough to think they'd chalk it up to a fluke.
Or maybe Callum told them. Maybe his mother did. Maybe the word came from the top down, a quiet whisper through the administration that trickled into the fraternities and sororities and dining hall conversations until everyone knew.
However it happened, by Thursday, the entire campus is afraid of me.
It doesn't happen all at once. It starts small—a shift I almost miss because I'm so used to being hated that I don't immediately recognize the difference between contempt and fear.
Monday: the girl who sits behind me in Magical Theory moves to the last row. Normal. People have been avoiding me for weeks. But when I glance back, she's not scrolling on her phone or whispering to a friend. She's watching me. Both hands flat on the desk, spine rigid, like she's ready to bolt.
Tuesday: I reach for a book in the library and the Sanguis student next to me flinches so hard she drops her entire stack. Papers scatter across the floor and she doesn't pick them up. Just backs away with her hands half-raised, palms out, like I'm a dog she isn't sure about.
"Sorry," I say automatically, because what else do you say when someone treats you like a threat. "I was just getting a book."
She doesn't answer. Leaves her papers on the floor and walks away fast, her heels clicking down the aisle like a countdown.
Wednesday: the dining hall goes quiet when I walk in.
Not gradually. Not the normal dip in conversation that happens when anyone enters a room. This is immediate—a blanket of silence dropping over a hundred people at once, forks pausing midair, heads turning. I stand in the doorway with my tray and feel every single pair of eyes on me, and for the first time it's not the cold disgust I've been getting since I arrived.
It's fear. Real, animal fear, the kind that makes the hairs on your arms stand up and your body tell you to run.
They're afraid ofme.
I sit down at my usual empty table. The conversations resume around me, quieter than before, studded with words I can almost catch.Grimoire. Absorb. Dangerous.The table nearest mine gets up and moves to the other side of the room.
I eat my lukewarm pasta and pretend my hands aren't shaking.
By Thursday, it's not subtle anymore. People press against walls when I walk through hallways, leaving a clear lane around me like I'm radioactive. No one makes eye contact. No one speaks to me. The notes under my door have stopped—Go homerequires a kind of hostility that's been replaced by something worse.
The notes saidwe don't want you here.The silence sayswe're scared of what you'll do if we make you angry.
I didn't know it was possible to miss being bullied. But at least when they were cruel, they acknowledged I existed. At least the cruelty was a relationship—ugly, one-sided, but a relationship. Now I'm something they can't even look at.
"Well," Brittany says on Thursday night, watching me stare at the wall. "At least they stopped leaving notes."
"They won't even sit near me."
"To be fair, they never sat near you."
"It's different and you know it."
She doesn't argue. Herbert crawls onto my pillow and sits there, beady eyes fixed on my face in what I've come to recognize as his version of moral support.
"Do you know how they found out?" I ask.
"Doesn't matter. This place runs on gossip and hierarchy. Once the presidents started losing their shit about you, it was only a matter of time before everyone else caught on." She turns a page of her textbook. "The question isn't how they found out. The question is what happens now."
I don't have an answer for that.
What happens now is the library.
Friday evening. I'm in the restricted history section again, because the restricted history section is the only place on campus where I can pretend things are normal. The screaming books have gotten used to me by now—they still shriek if I open them wrong, but it's more of a tired wheeze than the full-throated howl they used to give. Even the ancient librarian hasstarted leaving out reference materials she thinks I might need, stacked on the end of my usual table without comment.
I'm reading about the Schism when I feel them.
