Chapter 16: The Silent Exodus
The demon box in Elara's pocket had grown heavier since midnight. She led Jack through the academy's bone-white corridors, her boots silent against the tiles that pulsed faintly beneath their feet. The air smelled of iron and something older—something that had been buried long before Lorian's spires pierced the sky.
"You need to understand the world beyond these walls," she whispered, pressing her palm against a stretch of wall that looked no different from any other. The stones groaned apart, revealing a hidden chamber where star charts bled into maps of something far more dangerous.
Jack's fingers traced the glowing contours of a massive obsidian map table. "This isn't the Ntuli continent they teach first-years."
Elara smirked. "This is the truth the Veil protects." Her gloved hand hovered over the eastern coast where jagged cliffs met a blood-red sea. "The Bloodsalt Expanse—where even Lorian's reach fails."
A sound like cracking bone echoed through the chamber.
Jack's head snapped up. "We're not alone."
The walls *breathed*.
Elara froze as the temperature plummeted. The map's glowing lines dimmed, as if something was draining their light.
"Jack—"
He moved faster than thought, his hand clamping over her mouth as he dragged them both into the space between two towering bookshelves. The stones beneath their feet trembled—not from footsteps, but from something far larger moving through the academy's bones.
Through the crack between shelves, they saw it.
The headmaster.
His three-meter frame filled the corridor, the hem of his robe whispering against stones that blackened where he passed. The darkness beneath his cowl swirled like a living thing, pausing as if sensing their presence.
Elara's pulse hammered against Jack's palm.
Then—a chime like shattered glass echoed through the halls. The headmaster's hood tilted toward the sound before he glided away, his form dissolving into shadows at the corridor's end.
Jack waited five full breaths before releasing her.
"We leave. Tonight."
Elara's eyes flashed. "Have you lost your—"
"Not here." Jack's voice carried the weight of the church's endless nights. "Outside the walls. Then I'll explain."
---
They took the path even fourth-years didn't know—a spiraling stairwell hidden behind a tapestry depicting the Hollow Maw's first feeding. The steps were slick with something that wasn't water, the air thick with the scent of rotting parchment and older sins.
At the bottom waited a door.
Not iron. Not wood.
*Skin.*
Elara's glove hovered over the surface. "This isn't in any academy schematic."
Jack pressed his palm against the membrane. It peeled open with a wet sigh, revealing a tunnel that sloped upward toward fractured moonlight. "This was their escape route. For when their experiments needed to disappear. I got this information from the memories from the demon I gave you. I briefly checked them."
The tunnel tasted of copper and despair. Their footsteps echoed strangely, as if something walked just out of sync behind them. Elara's breath came in shallow gasps, but Jack moved with the certainty of someone who had spent years listening to things that whispered in the dark.
They emerged in the petrified forest beyond Lorian's walls. The trees stood like broken sentinels, their branches clawing at a sky streaked with unnatural colors.
Jack didn't stop until the last glow of Lorian's windows had vanished behind them.
---
Elara whirled on him, her gloves sparking with restrained magic. "Explain. Now."
Jack exhaled slowly, watching his breath fog in the unnatural chill. He knelt, sketching symbols in the ashen soil with one finger. "The headmaster isn't human. He's anchored." The lines he drew blackened as if burned. "Lorian isn't a school. It's a prison. And we're the warden's feeding trough."
Elara's breath hitched. "That's impossible. The rituals—"
"—are shackles." Jack completed the final symbol—a perfect replica of Lorian's crest. The ground beneath it darkened, the earth swallowing the mark like quicksand. "Every 'demon' they give students is another chain holding him there. Every ritual ties you tighter to his hunger."
The wind howled through the dead trees, carrying whispers that might have been words. Somewhere in the distance, something that was not an owl screamed.
Elara's voice barely rose above the wind. "Then why can't he leave?"
Jack's smile held no humor. "Because some doors only open from one side." He stood, brushing ash from his hands. "And I woke up in that church for a reason."
---
Dawn painted the horizon in shades of bruise-purple and wound-red. Elara stared at the crude map between them, her gloves tightening around the demon box.
"You're saying we walk into the one place even Lorian fears."
Jack nodded toward the pulsing vortex on the map. "Where better to hide from a prisoner than in the house of his jailer?"
A sound echoed from the direction of the academy—a deep, resonant tolling that made the petrified trees shiver. The call to morning rituals. The sound of chains tightening.
Elara met Jack's eyes for the first time since their escape. "We'll need supplies. Contacts."
Jack reached into his coat, producing three blackened fingernails strung on a cord. "From a Domain Demon who escaped Lorian. They'll get us past the Drowned Choir."
The first true light of dawn broke across the dead forest as they turned east, toward the sea that burned crimson. Behind them, the academy's bells grew fainter, their sound swallowed by the hungry earth.
And deep in Lorian's heart, in a chamber no student had ever seen, the headmaster's hood tilted toward the spot where two shadows had vanished from his web.
---
The dead forest gave way to rocky foothills as Jack and Elara moved east. The three demon-nail talismans clicked together around Jack's neck with each step, their faint chimes keeping the worst of the forest's whispers at bay.
Elara adjusted her gloves for the seventh time in an hour. "You still haven't told me *why* the headmaster can't leave."
Jack scanned the tree line. "Same reason a spider can't leave its web." He kicked aside a skull half-buried in the loam. "Lorian's built on his essence. The more students he consumes, the further his threads spread—but the core stays anchored."
A twig snapped to their left.
Both froze.
The bushes rustled, revealing not a beast but a child—a girl no older than eight, her dress made of stitched-together leaves, her eyes solid black. She tilted her head, sniffing the air like a hound.
"Me"-