Chapter 4- Build her or break her
1282 Words
Lilith did not expect the summons to come so quickly.
She had barely finished re-sheathing her dagger when a third year student approached her at the training floor and slid a letter to her like it was a living thing. It fell at her feet, pulsing once. Her name appeared in precise, elegant script.
Rothwell. Follow.
The room shifted around her. Conversations faltered. A few students glanced away too quickly. Others stared outright.
Francoise did not look at her.
Lilith stepped onto the light with the student.
He led her down a corridor she hadn’t seen before: narrower, older, the stone darker and etched with runes worn soft by time. The air felt heavier here, as though the sound itself hesitated to move.
At the end stood a door without markings.
Inside, three instructors waited.
Not the ones she had seen on the training floor. She had met one of them during her admission. Dean Gerard Black.
They were older. Sharper. One, the dean, leaned against the desk like he owned it. Another watched her with thinly veiled curiosity. The third, a woman with iron-gray hair braided tight against her skull, did not sit at all.
“You exceeded expectations,” the woman said.
Lilith said nothing.
“That’s not a compliment,” Dean Gerard added lightly. “It’s an observation.”
The third instructor slid a parchment toward her. No crest. No seal.
“You’ve been reassigned.”
Lilith frowned as she read.
Advanced Field Cohort.
Immediate placement.
Instructor discretion.
Her gaze snapped up. “That group isn’t for first-years.”
“No,” the woman agreed. “It isn’t.”
“Then this is a mistake.”
The man smiled. “There are no mistakes here.”
Something cold settled in Lilith’s chest.
“Why?” she asked.
The instructors exchanged a look: quick, practiced and cryptic.
“Because we’re curious,” the woman said at last. “And because you’re… adaptable.”
Lilith folded the parchment carefully. “Adaptable to what?”
No one answered.
Isn’t this what she wanted?
—
The lecture hall smelled wrong.
Lilith took a seat near the back, instincts pricking. The students around her spoke in low murmurs, eyes forward. No one acknowledged her presence. Not openly. The lecturer began without introduction.
“Monsters,Beasts,” he said, voice echoing cleanly through the chamber, “are instinct-driven aberrations. They do not reason. They do not feel. They do not hesitate. They are not human.”
A projection flared to life above the dais: sketched anatomy, exaggerated claws, distorted jaws.
Lilith’s fingers curled against her knee. She agreed with it before today but she paid attention to the diagrams.
The diagrams contradicted themselves. Neural clusters are too dense for mindless behavior. Defensive markings where predatory ones should be. Scar tissue that told stories of survival, not mindless aggression.
She raised her hand.
The lecturer paused, eyes narrowing slightly. “Yes?”
“You said monsters don’t hesitate,” Lilith said evenly. “Then why do half of these species display avoidance patterns? Why do they retreat?”
A ripple passed through the room.
The lecturer smiled thinly. “You’ll find, Miss Rothwell, that what looks like hesitation is simply misinterpreted instinct and last minute desperation.”
Lilith held his gaze. Silence.
The lecturer moved on before casting one last look at her.
But the lie lingered in the air, thick and undeniable.
After the lecture, Lilith passed through an archway she hadn’t meant to enter, steps slowing as voices drifted from behind a half-closed door.
“…arrival window was exact.”
“…bloodline wolfs are confirmed.”
“…she doesn’t know yet.”
Lilith’s breath stilled.
“She was always going to come,” someone said. “The Academy was built for hunters like her.”
A pause.
“Or for hunters like her to be contained. We will know.”
Lilith backed away silently, heart hammering. Her family were always too cryptic about their time at the Academy, what were they hiding? Then the words from her mother hit her,
“Don’t ask such questions at the Academy, Lilith!”
Built for her.
Or built to break her…
—
She returned home the next day. Ravenshore greeted her with salt air and narrow streets, familiar and sharp-edged. The bookstore sat quietly at the corner, windows glowing warm against the dusk.
She was about to climb upstairs to her apartment when a man stepped out of the bookstore. pushed inside. She has seen him once or twice last week working in the bookstore. He was older, with ink-stained fingers and eyes too alert for a man who sold forgotten books.
“You’re late,” he said mildly.
Lilith stiffened. “I am sorry?”
He held out an envelope.
No name.
No return address.
Just thick, aged paper.
“It was left for you,” he said.
Lilith took it slowly.
Inside, a single sheet.
Three lines.
Leave Ravenshore.You don’t know what awaits you. If you stay, it will be too late.
Her pulse thundered. She looked up.
The owner was already inside shelving a book, humming softly, as though the moment had passed. Lilith folded the letter and slipped it into her coat.
Outside, the ravens screamed.
Who left this letter for her? And what could possibly await her?
—
Zane had learned early that dangers in Ravenshore never announced itself. It lets them settle first.
The garage was quiet in a way that felt intentional, as if the town itself had paused to listen. The overhead lights were dimmed, tools laid out with obsessive precision across the steel workbench. Everything in its place.
Unlike the rest of his thoughts.
Zane wiped his hands slowly on a rag and stared down at the map spread across the table. Old. Hand-drawn. Marked and re-marked so many times the paper had softened at the folds. Red ink clustered near the cliffs. Near the forest line. Too close to him for comfort.
A new mark bled fresh into the margin.
Rothwell.
He exhaled through his nose.
Too soon.
The bell from the cliffs had carried even this far earlier that day, a low vibration that settled into bone rather than air. The Academy has opened its gates yet again. His phone buzzed against the metal surface.
Zane closed his eyes briefly.
Nothing was co-incident. He folded the map carefully and slid it into a drawer beneath the bench. Locked it. Zane crossed the garage and pulled down the shutter, metal rattling softly as it sealed. Outside, ravens cried from the rooftops, sharp and restless. He paused with his hand on the latch.
“She doesn’t know,” he muttered to the empty space.
That was the problem.
Lilith had always looked like someone who understood the rules of the world. The kind of woman who saw danger clearly and stepped into it anyway. But the truth was darker than that.
Hunters were never told the whole story.
They were shaped.
Zane reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope identical to the one she now carried in her coat. Thick paper. No name. No return address. He turned it once in his fingers before sliding it back where it belonged.
Dangers were lurking in shadows too long, now they are showing themselves.
“You don’t know what you’re walking into,” he said softly.
And the truth he didn’t let himself voice, he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to protect her from what was coming…
Or protect what was coming from her.
Somewhere beyond the cliffs, unseen and unacknowledged, something old shifted.
And for the first time in years,
Zane wondered whether Ravenshore would survive the return.
- Writer
