Callum is in there somewhere. Third floor, probably. Sitting at his desk in the dark with his cuffs straight and his drawer locked and the diagrams he copied from his mother's office spreading their poison quietly through his thoughts.
I don't think about Callum. I let the shadows settle and I walk on.
Northwest. Uphill. Toward Fulmen Hall.
The Tempest building is the opposite of Ossium—sleek where Mors is ornate, metal and glass and lightning rods piercing the sky like needles. The towers catch the moonlight differently here, turning it blue, and the air changes as I climb the hill.Thinner. Charged. The fine hairs on my arms lift and the storm magic in my chest wakes up, humming, reaching for the rods that crown the building like fingers reaching for a hand.
I can feel the residual energy from Atlas's breakdown—a ghost-charge in the earth, scorched spots in the grass that haven't grown back. Three days ago he stood here and poured his grief into the sky and I pulled it out of him and I can still feel it inside me, heavy and electric, tasting like metal and loss.
Atlas is in there. Somewhere high up, probably. Close to the sky. Close to the storms that speak his language, that translate his grief into a force that can crack the earth open. Sleeping or not sleeping, I don't know which is worse for him.
I don't think about Atlas. I let the lightning settle and I walk on.
Southeast. Downhill, through the gardens. Toward Vitae Hall.
The Sanguis building smells different from the rest of campus. I catch it before I see it—roses, heavy and sweet, the year-round thornbushes blooming in defiance of the season, their petals so dark in the moonlight they look like clots of blood against the black leaves. The building itself is red marble and obsidian, elegant and strange, and the fountains that line the approach are still running—water catching moonlight, the sound of it soft and rhythmic, like a pulse.
The blood magic surges. Warm, insistent, reaching for the building the way the shadows reached for Ossium, and underneath the general pull—underneath the hum of a hundred Sanguis students sleeping behind those walls—I feel something specific. A single heartbeat, quiet and steady, slower than the others. Ren.
He's awake. I know it the way I know my own breathing—through the blood magic, through the connection that's been open since his thumb pressed against my pulse in the library.He's awake and I can feel him and I am almost certain, standing in the rose garden with wet grass soaking through my shoes, that he can feel me too.
I don't think about Ren. I let the blood magic settle and I walk on.
Southwest. The longest walk. Across campus to the place that doesn't follow the rules.
Long Shot Mansion sits in its patch of shimmering air, the exterior Gothic and wrong, the interior unknowable. The probability clouds above it are visible even from outside—faint purple smudges against the dark sky, shifting, churning, the mathematical dreams of a building that runs on chaos.
I stop at the edge of the shimmer. The chaos magic inside me reaches—not toward the building but in every direction at once, outward, upward, branching. I catch fragments of probability at the edges of my vision—flickering ghost-paths, translucent as gauze. The version where I walk away. The version where I go inside again. The version where tomorrow goes well. The version where it doesn't.
I blink and the branches dissolve.
Felix is in there. In a chair, probably, cards in his hands, running the probabilities on tomorrow for the hundredth time and getting the same answer:I don't know.The boy who sees every ending, staring at the one story he can't finish.
I don't think about Felix. I let the chaos settle.
But I don't walk back. Not yet.
Something is pulling me east. Not one magic—all four. Shadow and storm and blood and chaos, reaching in the same direction for the first time since I absorbed them, aligned toward a point on campus I've never visited. The pull isn't aggressive. It's not the sharp tug of an absorption or the magnetic drag of apresident's proximity. It's quieter than that. Older. The feeling of a word on the tip of your tongue, a name you've forgotten, a room you walked into and can't remember why.
I follow it.
The eastern edge of campus is different from the rest of Nyxhaven. The Gothic architecture thins out here—fewer buildings, more open ground, the landscaping gone slightly wild. The oaks give way to birches, their white trunks ghostly in the moonlight, and the stone paths narrow to a single trail that winds through overgrown hedgerows and ends at—
Nothing.
A clearing. Maybe fifty feet across. Grass, long and unmowed, silver-white in the moon. A few birches at the edges, leaning inward like they're trying to close a gap. And in the grass, half-buried, barely visible unless you're standing right on top of them: foundation stones. Old ones—older than anything else on campus, the granite dark and rough-cut, arranged in lines that trace the outline of a building that isn't here anymore.
Not a square. Not a rectangle.
A pentagon.
My four magics go silent.
All of them. At once. The shadows stop pulling. The lightning stops humming. The blood magic's pulse drops to nothing and the chaos goes still—perfectly, completely still, no flickering branches, no probability ghosts, just silence. As if they've found the place they've been looking for and now that they're here they don't know what to do.
I stand in the center of the foundation and I feel it.
Absence. Not emptiness—those are different things. Empty is a room with nothing in it. Absence is a room where somethingused to be, and the shape of it is still pressed into the air like a handprint in wet clay. This ground remembers what stood here. The stones remember. The magic remembers—I can feel it in the soil, faint and deep, a steady thrum that doesn't belong to any of the four disciplines because it belongs to all of them at once. Unified. Whole. The way magic was before someone decided it needed to be broken into pieces.
