Her lips part. Something lingers on her tongue, but she doesn't say it. The name, the thought, the thing. It doesn't matter. It never has.
She exhales sharply, adjusting the strap of her bag against her shoulder. The hallway hums around her—scuffed floors, fluorescent lights, voices that swell and fold over each other like waves breaking in the distance. None of them are speaking to her. They never do.
She glances down. Her nails are uneven, one split near the middle. A clean line. Like a sigil. Like something carved in wax, or traced in blood, half-formed and half-veiled. She presses her thumb against the jagged edge, hard enough that it should hurt. Should.
There's a sudden, sharp impact. A dull thud reverberates up her arm. Her hand smacks into something solid, and she stops, looking down.
A metal railing.
Her fingers curl around it, knuckles whitening. It's a bruise. Bruises swell. She keeps moving.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, a voice—not hers, not really—mutters about the weight distribution of impact, how flesh bruises deeper when it collides with metal, how blood pools under skin before rising. She shoves the thought away, keeps walking. Her fingers rub against her palm absently, twisting against themselves, a habit unnoticed until a flash of raw red skin catches her eye. She stops. Stares at it. Then pulls the sleeve of her jacket down over her hand.
This is fine. This is how it is.
The air shifts as she steps outside. The sun is wrong—too bright, too stark, too real. She squints against it, pushing forward, slipping into the current of bodies moving through campus. The weight of the day drags against her shoulders, thoughts unraveling in jagged, uneven directions.
She runs through conversations, glances, pauses stretched too long or snapped too short. She knows. She knows.
No, she doesn't.
Her jaw tightens. That's stupid. She can't predict people, not really. They slip, they shift, they slither. Boxes. She wants them in. Wants to fold their edges, press them into shape, make them make sense.
Instead, she just keeps walking.
And then—
Something stops her. No. Someone.
The crowd parts just enough, a fraction of a second, a sliver of space, and there he is. Light blonde hair, blue eyes, a face that belongs to something untouchable. Refined. Holy. Saintlike.
And then he smiles.
A flicker of recognition. Like he knows her. Like he remembers.
The world does not stop, but she does. A sharp, frozen moment, the kind where everything around her blurs at the edges, and all she can see is him.
Her breath catches. Her grip on her bag tightens.
And then—
The world disconnects.
Not like a pause. Not like a glitch. But like a film reel burning mid-frame, distorting at the edges, curling, charring black. On one side, there is her. The girl who walks too quietly, whose presence flickers in and out of notice, a shadow slipping between spaces.
On the other side, there is him.
And the space between them is not distance. It is a barrier. Thin, transparent, the kind that distorts what's on the other side.
Because he is too much.
Too bright. Too real. Too there.
His presence drags against reality like fingers trailing through water, rippling it, warping it. The way light bends around a black hole, curving into something unnatural.
And people respond to it.
She watches them—students moving through the courtyard, brushing past him, catching glimpses, some stopping entirely. They don't know why they're looking, just that they are. That they should. That something about him demands attention, even if he never asks for it.
She understands this in a way she doesn't want to.
There are people in this world who do not force control. They do not need to. Their gravity does it for them, pulling people into their orbit, twisting them into willing satellites.
And he—he is an event horizon.
She remembers this about him. Always has.
The way his voice could carve silence out of a room without ever raising it. The way his hands moved, slow and deliberate, as if he knew the exact moment someone's eyes would land on him.
The way he smiles.
Because that is what he does now. His lips part, just slightly, the edges curving up, but there is something measured in it. Practiced. It is not just recognition. It is an acknowledgment. A confirmation. A tether being pulled taut.
And for a moment—
For one unbearable second—
She sees.
Not him, but something else. A flash of ink-black tendrils curling beneath his skin, something vast and unknowable stretching behind him, twisting through the spaces between people, unseen but present. Like an old god wearing a mask of divinity, a creature whose real form cannot be comprehended without losing something in the process.
She blinks.
And the world slams back into place.
Sound rushes in—voices, footsteps, the scrape of shoes on pavement. The real world. The one she is meant to exist in.
She cannot be here.
Her breath catches sharp in her throat, the edges of her vision tightening, tunneling. There is too much air in her lungs, and yet not enough. She turns.
And runs.
She moves through the world like it is breaking around her.
Her steps are uneven, too fast, wrong. She doesn't care. She can't care. The streets blur, twisting into something too narrow, too wide, shifting with every heartbeat.
The sound of her pulse is louder than the city.
She barely registers the people she brushes past, the hurried, confused voices as she moves too quickly, too recklessly.
A car horn. The distant wail of sirens. The smell of sun-scorched pavement, of something acrid and sharp.
She sees them again.
Not people. Not real.
Shadows stretching where they shouldn't, warping, shifting. Glimpses of shapes that do not belong in the spaces they are occupying. A hand with too many joints reaching from a doorway. A reflection in a window that does not match the person passing by.
None of it is real.
(But isn't that the problem?)
Her lungs burn. Her chest tightens. The weight of everything crushing inward. She moves faster. Faster.
Faster.
Home.
She stumbles through the door, slamming it shut behind her, hands trembling against the wood. The sound echoes, too loud in the silence.
Everything is too loud. Everything is too much.
She presses her back against the door, squeezing her eyes shut. Her breath comes fast, too fast. Her fingers curl into the fabric of her sleeves, pressing against her own skin, grounding. Trying to.
The room is still. The world is still.
She does not feel still.
She swallows. Hard. Her throat is dry.
Slowly, she moves. Her bag drops from her shoulder, landing with a heavy thud. She does not pick it up. Instead, she moves to the bookshelf, fingers trailing against the spines, stopping when she reaches the one she is looking for.
She pulls it free.
The book is old. The kind that smells like dust and time and something heavier beneath it. The cover is black, no title. But she knows it. She has read it before.
She flips it open.
Pages filled with things that should not be known.
Her fingers hover over a familiar passage, one that has settled into the recesses of her mind like a parasite, latched and waiting.
She reads.
"A demon's greatest trick is not deception. It is admiration."
She shuts the book.
Her hands shake.
She cannot be here.
But she cannot go back, either.
She presses a hand against her chest. Feels her heartbeat beneath her palm.
He is here.
He is here.
And she does not know if she has been running from him.
Or toward him.
She strikes the match.
The color is wrong.
It doesn't burn orange. It doesn't burn blue. It doesn't burn like anything she's ever seen.
But she feels it.
Heat bleeds from the flame, yet the air around it grows colder.
She holds it too close. Too long.
Pain blooms.
Her skin sizzles.
She bleeds.
The flame does not flicker.
She lets it fall.
It lands inside the circle.
Something shifts.
There is something alive in the walls.
It is not a thing. It is not a person. It is not her.
But it is watching.
The air is thick. The pressure folds inward.
It's pouring.
Her hand jerks to her face. Warm. Wet. She blinks—
Her hand is clean.
Her breath shudders. She sways.
She speaks.
Not words. Not language.
A sound.
It presses outward. The room flinches. The walls shudder.
Something pulls back.
Then—inhaling.
Slow. Deep. The force dragging itself into existence.
Her skull rings.
The sigils burn. Their glow swallows the dark, yet casts no light.
She blinks against it, but the glow is inside her. Behind her eyes. In her ribs.
Something moves.
Not a shadow.
Not a shape.
A limb—long, jagged—peeling from the circle like a wound opening in space.
Her breath catches. She flinches back—
Her body folds.
Her hands hit the floor. She's sinking.
No.
She needs to stand.
She needs to—
Her skull slams against the wood.
She blinks. Her vision lurches.
The air rips.
The pressure crashes.
And then—
A hand.
No. Not a hand. A concept of one.
Reaching through.
Grasping.
Pulling reality apart—
Her body gives.
A flicker. A shift. A whisper of movement.
Just before the dark swallows her, she sees it—
A sliver of blonde.
Wrong. Too bright. Too sharp.
Like light bleeding through a crack in a door that should not be open.
She thinks—
Another one.
Another thing that should not be here.
And then—
End of Chapter 1.