Silas:
The Academy is never truly quiet. Not really.
Even now, with the wards down and the storm clawing at the towers, there are voices. Low, hissing things in the cracks between stone. Shadows that gossip like spiteful courtiers, eager to tell me what they see. They laugh about the banshees wailing through the quad, whisper about the creatures picking their teeth with the bones of first-years, hum hymns of doom that were old when the founders still breathed.
But tonight, they are louder. Too loud.
I find Isadora in the bottom of the scriptorium, standing near the window as though the storm might answer her instead of me. The candles have guttered to weak spines of flame, and the lightning outside paints her in white flashes—fragile one second, terrible the next. The kind of girl who
