"Now be on your way," Ysara said, her tone carrying that particular brand of finality that didn’t invite response. "The bus will return in two days. Do your best... to stay alive."
There was sothing deeply unsettling about the way she said it.
Not like encouragent. Not like the words a ntor offers before sending soone into danger with the genuine hope they’ll return from it.
More like a quiet test she expected us to fail.
I watched her face for sothing, a flicker of concern, a shadow of guilt, anything human, and found nothing I could hold onto.
I looked away.
A low chanical hum cut through the air.
Then it appeared.
A red bus rolled into the courtyard, moving at a pace that felt unhurried in a way that wasn’t quite peaceful. Its surface was too clean, almost aggressively pristine against the muted stone tones of the courtyard.
It didn’t look old, but it didn’t look new either.
It looked like sothing that had simply existed for far too long, accumulating years without accumulating wear, the way certain things do when they’ve been preserved for a purpose rather than lived in.
The doors creaked open with a slow, drawn-out hiss, almost theatrical, like a held breath finally released.
Two Sentinels occupied the front. One in the driver’s seat, one beside him. Their bodies were rigid.
A bind was placed at the back of their seat, so we couldn’t speak to them neither can they to us...
Without another word between any of us, we boarded.
The inside of the bus was dim not dark.
The difference mattered. Dark would have been honest about itself. This was sothing softer and more insidious, the kind of dim that made you unsure whether the light had always been like this or whether your eyes were failing you slowly. The windows were slightly tinted, the outside world reduced to dull shadows and muted shapes, stripped of color and detail like a photograph left in the sun.
I counted the seats.
Nine.
I walked to the back.
It was instinct before it was logic and I slid into the seat at the very back.
A second later, Elion dropped down beside like it was the most natural thing in the world, like he had never considered sitting anywhere else, and the seat had been his before he sat in it.
I didn’t comnt or protest.
At the front, Thorne took the first seat. His posture was stiff, spine straight, the kind of stillness that cos not from peace but from discipline, from the practiced suppression of things he’d rather not show.
Ivy sat beside him, quiet but watchful, her eyes moving in small, constant arcs like she had already decided danger was a matter of when rather than if and was simply tracking the variables.
In the middle section, Kaden, Lyra, and Theo filled the seats sowhat closer together... proximity as comfort, or sothing like it.
Then...
Ashriel. He walked down the aisle slowly, without urgency, without the slight self-conscious awareness most people carry when they’re moving through a space where people might be watching.
He simply walked...unhurried, purposeful.... and as he passed each row of seats I registered his trajectory and thought, distantly, he’s coming to the back.
He didn’t look at .
Didn’t say a single word.
He just reached the back, turned, and sat beside on the other side.
So now
Elion on my left.
Ashriel on my right.
I stared forward at the back of the seat in front of and had a brief, private mont of deeply sincere irritation.
Ashriel pulled his hood up over his head, settling it with the practiced ease of soone who had done it thousands of tis before. He leaned back against the seat, closed his eyes, and went still.
Whether he had actually fallen asleep or was simply choosing not to participate in whatever the rest of us were doing, I genuinely could not tell.
The line between his sleeping face and his awake face was, apparently, that thin.
I looked at him for exactly one second... then I looked away.
The bus started moving.
Slow at first.... a gentle, almost reluctant forward pull, like sothing easing into motion after a long rest. Then faster. The engine settled into a steady hum beneath us, low and even and oddly hypnotic, the kind of sound that fills your ears until you stop hearing it and start feeling it instead.
No one spoke.... Not a single word.
The silence that fell over us was not the easy, comfortable kind. It was thick with sothing unspoken, not quite fear, but sothing adjacent to both.
The weight of a shared understanding that none of us had asked for. An awareness of the thing waiting at the end of this road that we were all carrying separately, privately, without looking at each other.
Maybe it was fear.
Maybe it was the particular exhaustion that cos from facing the unknown without enough information to plan around it.
Or maybe.... in so quiet, wordless way.... we all understood that nothing any of us could say would change what was coming. That the words would be hollow against it. That silence, at least, was honest.
The seats creaked occasionally.
Outside the tinted windows, the world slid past in muted shapes, indistinct and grey.
Ti blurred.
Minutes into hour. The distinction stopped mattering sowhere in the middle of it, the way it does when you’re in motion without control and the destination is fixed regardless of how you feel about it.
And at so point.... without aning to...
I fell asleep.
The bus jerked.
A short, sharp deceleration. Not violent, but enough.... to pull back into my body with the sudden, disorienting awareness that I had been sowhere else.
My eyes opened.
For a mont I didn’t move, held still by the particular fog that follows deep sleep in unexpected places.
I had actually slept.
My body had apparently assessed the situation, determined that fear was not going to solve anything between departure and arrival, and taken what it needed without consulting .
A quiet breath left .
And strangely.... I felt better.
Not that I wasn’t afraid anymore but better than I had been before coming here.
I looked around.
Everyone was just waking too.... the small, groggy movents of people erging from sleep they hadn’t quite planned on.
So it wasn’t just .
That feels good.
The bus doors opened with another long, slow hiss.
One by one, we stepped out into the grey air.
And there it was.
A sign.
Old. Weathered in the specific way of things left outside for decades.... the wood soft at the edges, the grain raised, the surface worn unevenly by years of rain and wind that had long since stopped caring about it. It leaned slightly, tilted at an angle that suggested the ground beneath it had shifted at so point and the sign had simply stayed, stubbornly, in whatever position it found itself.
An arrow, carved deep into the face of the wood, pointed forward.
MORVALIS
Below it, in letters slightly smaller but no less deliberate:
Go in if you dare.
A humorless smile found its way to my lips before I could stop it.
I didn’t dare.
Infact I was the opposite of daring. I was here against my will, propelled forward by rules I hadn’t agreed to, toward a place with a na that felt like a warning in every language I knew.
But here I was anyway.
Here we all were.
Sowhere behind us, the bus doors hissed shut.
The sound of the engine starting.... the pull of it moving away... was enough to know it was gone.
To return in two days.
Two days.
Fucking forty-eight hours.
All I had to do.... the only thing asked of ,
Was survival at any cost.
"Guys."
Elion’s voice broke the silence with the particular energy of soone who had been holding sothing back for a while and had finally chosen his mont.
"Before we go in... there’s sothing you need to hear."
We stopped and turned. Everyone did
Only Ashriel stayed as he was... standing slightly apart from the rest of us. Close enough to hear. Far enough to remain separate. He didn’t turn. But he didn’t leave either.
"You all know the academy has a seer," Elion said.
The word dropped into the air.
"The beautiful one from the field?" Theo said imdiately. "The one who was exempt from the fight?"
I almost rolled my eyes..... Liora, apparently, had already accumulated admirers despite having been present for approximately one scene.
"What about her?" Kaden asked, his voice stripped of Theo’s distraction, practical and direct.
Elion glanced at .
A brief look. Not quite a question.... more like a handoff.
"She had a vision," I said quietly. Clearly. Like the words were stones I was setting down rather than throwing. "About this."
The attention in the group sharpened.
"Eight of us went to Morvalis...".I let the pause exist. "...but only seven ca back."
Silence.
Complete and total and ringing with the specific frequency of information that has just rearranged sothing in several minds simultaneously.
Then...
"But there are only seven of us," Lyra said slowly, her brow furrowing as she counted, eyes moving across the group. "Seven. I count seven."
"No."
Thorne’s voicee calmly. He disi explain further simply pointed at Ashriel.
"There are eight."
The word landed like a key turning in a lock.
And just like that....
Click.
And it clicked into place so perfectly.
The first part of the vision had already co true. Ashriel wasn’t supposed to be here. He had no reason to be here.
The vision had said eight would go in.
And here there were eight of us, standing outside Morvalis.
Which ant... My thoughts hit a wall.
Because I felt it before I finished the sentence in my own head.
Their eyes.
All of them.
On .
Shifting, one by one, with the quiet inevitability of a conclusion being reached.
Kaden.
Lyra.
Theo.
Ivy.
Elion.
Even Thorne.... whose gaze I felt more than saw, steady and assessing and entirely without malice, which sohow made it worse.
Like they had already assigned the empty seat.
Like they already knew whose na belonged to the number that didn’t co back.
The only person who didn’t was Ashriel.
He stood at his slight remove, hood still up, gaze directed sowhere forward and absent, giving nothing. If he had done the sa math, he wasn’t showing it. If he had reached the sa conclusion, he was keeping it entirely to himself.
I wasn’t sure if that made him better or worse than the rest of them.
I clenched my jaw.
Drew a slow breath in through my nose.
Fine.
Let them think whatever they wanted. Let them decide, in their heads, which one of us was the variable.
I refused to accept it.
I was not dying here.
Not because so vision.... however accurate, however precisely it had already proven itself....
Not because I was the easiest one to lose.
No matter what it takes.
I will not die.
But will live.
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