Whatever's coming, it's tomorrow.
Chapter 20: Everly
I can't sleep.
The four magics won't settle. They've been restless since I absorbed the chaos—shifting inside me like animals in a too-small cage, each one jostling for space. The shadows curl and uncurl behind my ribs. The lightning hums at a frequency that makes my teeth ache. The blood magic pulses in time with my heartbeat, and the chaos flickers at the edges of everything, showing me ghost-images of probability branches that shimmer and dissolve before I can focus on them.
I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. Brittany's breathing is slow and even across the room. Herbert is a small dark shape on her pillow, legs tucked, motionless. Outside, the campus is quiet—no storms, no screaming books, no shadows moving where they shouldn't. Just the wind in the old oaks and the distant chime of the clock tower marking one in the morning. Then two.
At two-thirty, I give up.
I sit up slowly, careful not to wake Brittany, and reach for my bag on the floor beside my bed. My fingers find the sphere by feel—smooth glass, cool to the touch, the crack running under my thumb like a scar.
I haven't taken it out in days. Haven't wanted to look at it. But tonight, with the demonstration hours away and four magics churning inside me and the ceiling offering nothing but shadows and silence, I pull it into my lap and hold it in both hands.
The crack is worse than I remember.
It runs from pole to pole in a jagged line, wider now than when Warrick reassembled it on the first day, and the glass on either side has gone thin—translucent at the edges, like ice that's been melting from the inside. I can see the colors through it. Shadow-dark. Storm-blue. Blood-red. Chaos-purple. All four, swirlingtogether in the sphere's center, pressing against the crack like something trying to get out.
This is yours now, Miss Grey. Your responsibility. Figure out how to fix it.
Warrick's voice, weeks ago, in a classroom that smelled like chalk and old wood. She'd reassembled it with her Stylus Mortis after it shattered during the demonstration, and she'd handed it back to me with an expression that I now realize wasn't concern. It was something closer to grief. Like she was giving me a puzzle she already knew the answer to and wished she didn't.
I try channeling into it. Gently—barely a whisper of intention, the way Parker taught us in Elemental Studies.Awareness precedes control.I reach for the shadow magic first, guide it toward my palms, let it flow toward the glass.
The sphere responds.
The dark color inside brightens, deepens, swirling faster. The crack glows faintly—a thin line of light where the magic presses against the damaged glass, looking for a way through. I add the storm—just a thread, the smallest current I can manage—and the blue joins the black in a spiral that makes the sphere vibrate in my hands.
The glass groans.
Not a metaphor. An actual sound—a low, stressed creak, like a beam taking too much weight. The crack flexes. Widens by a hair. The colors inside surge brighter, pressing outward, and I feel the sphere's structure bowing under the strain, the glass thinning, the whole thing a breath away from—
I stop. Pull the magic back. The colors dim. The groaning fades. The crack settles, no wider than before, but no narrower either.
I sit in the dark holding a broken sphere and breathing hard.
Maybe that's what I am. Something that can't be fixed. Something cracked down the middle with too much inside, always pressing outward, always threatening to shatter. You can hold me together if you're careful. You can keep the magic flowing gently, keep the pressure low, keep everything balanced.
But you can't fix the crack. And sooner or later, something's going to push too hard.
I wrap the sphere in a sock—because I don't have a case and because the mundanity of it makes me feel slightly less like a ticking bomb—and put it in the pocket of my jacket.
Then I get dressed in the dark, lace my shoes, and slip out the door.
Campus at three in the morning is a different country.
The paths are empty. The buildings are dark except for the occasional window where some insomniac is burning through a paper or a crisis, and the only sounds are the wind and the oak leaves scraping across stone and the soft, persistent hum of magic that lives in everything at Nyxhaven—in the walls, in the ground, in the air itself, a vibration so constant that you stop noticing it until you're alone and the world goes quiet enough to hear.
The moon is nearly full. It turns the Gothic architecture silver—every spire and buttress and carved stone face lit up like a cathedral in a painting, the kind of beauty that's too old and too heavy to be comfortable. The ivy on the buildings is black in the moonlight, and the shadows it throws are long and intricate, reaching across the paths like fingers.
My shadows reach back. I feel them stir inside me, responding to the darkness the way lungs respond to air, and for a moment—just a moment—the campus feels like it belongs to me. Like I'm the only person in the world, standing in the center of a place that was built for secrets, and the secrets are finally ready to be heard.
I walk northeast first. Toward Ossium Hall.
The Mors building rises out of its valley like something that crawled up from underground and decided to stay. Seven stories of Victorian Gothic, the flying buttresses sharp against the sky, the gargoyles crouching on their corners with expressions that look intimidating and half-feral at this hour. The graveyard in the inner courtyard is visible through the iron gate—headstones catching moonlight, some of them cracked, some of them fresh, the old names worn to nothing and the new names waiting.
I stop at the gate and close my eyes. The shadow magic unfurls inside me—reaching outward, stretching toward the building like a vine toward sunlight. I feel the death magic that saturates this place. Old. Deep. Patient. It's in the stones and the soil and the bones underneath, a cold current that flows through everything Mors touches, and my shadows drink it in like water.
