The door stuck on the swollen frame. Asher shoved once, hard. The latch popped and the dorm gave him that wrong quiet—the kind that holds its breath before it bites.
Cedar oil, polished leather, a sting of citrus cologne. Money had a smell, and Vetrax reeked of it. His cloak dripped onto stone.
Cain was waiting. Of course he was.
He lounged on his bunk like a bored prince, boots muddy on a white blanket. His duelist's blade lay across his lap, polished clean.
"You better watch out, worm," Cain said, not moving. "Would be a shame if something happened to you."
Asher wiped rain from his jaw. "Cut the crap. You talk about courage in the ring and send assassins at night?"
A scar under Cain's eye pulled tight. "You can't prove it was me." He tapped a fingernail on the metal. Ting. "Whoever sent them, I'll send flowers."
Cain frowned.
A bedspring creaked. Morgan sat in the corner, barefoot, elbows on knees, eyes too calm. He didn't blink enough. Presence like cold water, no splash.
Rainley looked up from a medical manual, pale and steady, freckled hands still. Caesar pretended to write in his leather notebook. He pretended well.
Asher stepped in two paces. Not fast. "Next time you want me dead, do it yourself."
Cain finally stood. Taller than the memory. Or the room had shrunk. "I don't waste my time with gutter trash," he said.
"Gutter trash?" Asher repeated, flat.
The Stone in his spine hummed once—hungry, unhelpful. He kept his face plain. "Good talk."
Rainley closed his book halfway. "You just left the hospital. Sleep," he said, clinic-clean voice.
"Yeah," Asher said, suspicious, like he didn't buy his own agreement. "That's what the healers said."
He tossed his cloak over the footrail, lay back with his boots on, and stared at the ceiling until the cracks blurred. He didn't sleep.
The room breathed wrong.
Rain turned mean overnight. It hammered the courtyard glass and turned walkways slick. Breakfast lines wrapped and snarled. Trays clattered. The smell was hot bread, boiled meat, damp wool.
Asher slid onto the bench across from Ryvak at the Drifter table and set down his tray—eggs and bacon, steam curling up like peace trying.
Ryvak looked him over and snorted. "You look like you argued with your pillow and lost."
"One of the nobles hired assassins to kill me," Asher said, then jabbed his fork into the eggs. "Also the food is good. I can't live with my dormmates."
Ryvak shoveled eggs and bacon like the plate might vanish, swallowed hard, then patted Asher's shoulder. "It's okay, buddy. Vetrax is a tough crowd."
"Understatement." Asher speared a strip of bacon and let the salt wake his mouth. "Cain's a snake with better hair. Rainley lectures like a priest. Caesar argues with his own notes. And Morgan…" He shivered. "He's wrong. Too quiet. He sees everything."
Ryvak chewed, squinted. "You sure you're not just sleep-starved and seeing monsters in the corners?"
"Don't start."
"You called me at sunrise to complain."
"I didn't call. I sat and words crawled out."
A tray slid onto the table opposite. Conversations hiccupped and died in a three-table radius.
Raven sat down.
Black hair, straight and clean. Blue eyes that made you look away. Porcelain skin that somehow didn't belong to this damp hall. A lot of boys gave her quick glances when they thought she wouldn't notice. She always noticed.
"Just the two I was looking for," she said, like this was normal. She stole a crisp bit of Asher's bacon, checked the grease with her thumb, ate it. "We need to talk."
Ryvak looked at Asher. They said it together, clean timing.
"About what?"
Raven stood without answering. She nodded toward the rain on the windows. The panes rattled.
Asher groaned and got up. "Naturally."
Ryvak scooped the last of his eggs, gulped them, and grabbed his coat. "This better be good."
They followed her out.
They met under the Academy's front arch and the cracked eagle crest. Guards pretended not to see them. Raven's hood caught the rain in curls. She didn't fidget. She read the storm like tracks.
"We're heading into the market," she said.
"For what?" Ryvak asked.
"A book," Raven said.
Asher raised an eyebrow. "So we're book shopping."
"It works like a key," she said, already walking.
They moved through rain. Academy walls behind, clean stone and watch towers. The market quarter pressed close to the outer streets—tarped stalls, shouted promises, faces that knew hunger's different dialects. Vendors watched with hard eyes. The smell was wet stone and boiled broth, tannery and smoke.
Asher's collar rubbed the raw patch at his neck. Empire issue—stiff collars, locking buckles, fabric that ate skin. He tugged anyway. "Wires. Really?"
Ryvak kicked a puddle at him. "Focus."
"Trying. Weather keeps yelling."
Raven cut down a narrow lane. The sign above the door had lost half its letters and the rest on purpose. The bell didn't ring when they went in. It coughed.
Inside: paper, dust, old glue. Shelves sagged. A cracked slate counter held a clerk who looked cursed to sit and sigh until the world ended.
Raven didn't browse. She moved like she knew where the rows would end. Asher followed because people who acted like they belonged usually did.
He bumped a stack of periodicals. They tilted, considered falling, decided not to. Barely.
"Why was your bird following us in the desert?" he asked, low.
Ryvak choked on nothing. "Bird?"
Raven smiled with the corners of her mouth. "To help."
"That's not an answer."
"I can see the future," she said. "Versions. Not clean. But enough to send a bird when you're about to do something stupid."
Ryvak blinked hard. "That's a joke."
"It's a burden," she said. Tap of a knuckle on a shelf. "Paths branch. Most die. Sometimes I nudge. A bird. A warning. A door left ajar."
"And me?" The question slipped out before Asher could catch it. "Do I die in those futures?"
"Everyone dies," she said. "But you tend to take other people's endings with you when you go."
"That's comforting."
"Didn't say it to comfort you." She scanned the spines. "Help me look."
Asher and Ryvak traded blank looks. "Who?" they asked together.
"Warden Thalos Rooke," Raven said. "Early Academy era. Brilliant. Cruel. He built a theory the Empire didn't want to test in daylight, so they gave him a basement and called it research. He kept a ledger. He hid things in it—names, places, how to make a door stay closed even when you could see it."
Asher's spine hummed, faint but sure. His attention tugged across the stacks like a thread on a nail. He hated that it felt like guidance. He hated that it worked.
He turned down an aisle marked histories and found religion by mistake. Naturally. A cracked atlas slid out and smacked his boot.
Ryvak called from the next row. "Here! Got it."
Asher and Raven reached him together.
Stuck between an architecture survey and a banned treatise, a faded spine read: The Black Ledger of Warden Rooke.
"Perfect," Asher said.
"Perfect," Raven said at the same time.
They stared at each other for a beat too long. Ryvak made a noise like a cough that wanted to be a laugh.
"Pay," Raven said, already turning.
At the counter, Asher held out his student watch. The clerk dragged the old scanner across it until the thing beeped like it hurt. Credits flashed, deducted. No speech about pain. Just a transaction that felt like losing blood.
The man wrapped the book in brown paper. The stamp he used left an ink blot that looked like a broken eye.
Outside, the rain softened to a hiss. The market smelled cleaner, which only meant you could finally smell the rot under it.
"So this opens the library?" Ryvak asked, tucking the bundle into his coat like a child he didn't know how to hold.
"Archive," Raven said. "And it doesn't open a door. It tells us where the door is."
"Why do we want to go there?"
"Power," Asher said.
"Knowledge," Raven said.
Neither smiled.
Raven started walking. "There are answers we need. The mural. Room 313. The boy who never speaks."
Asher's jaw tightened. "You know the mural changed."
"Yes," she said. Just that.
They reached the arch again. The three of them stopped where the stone forced you to look up.
The mural had once shown a god with a spear raised over a dead serpent.
Now only the serpent remained.
Ryvak exhaled, long and slow. "It creeps me out," he said.
Asher didn't answer. He didn't like that his stomach had just dropped. He didn't like that it felt like the stone had noticed him back.
They didn't debate meaning. They didn't have words yet. They stepped inside and the building felt like it tasted them.
Raven waited near the east stair with her hood down and eyes bright like she hadn't slept. "You have it?"
Asher nodded once.
"Good," she said. "We move after midday drills. Old wing."
"Old wing?" Ryvak asked. "We're going to the broom graveyard?"
"Something close," she said.
Asher rubbed the raw collar mark and thought of the line he hadn't read yet but already knew would be there. Open only when watched.
Watched by what?
They started down the hall. A pack of second-years laughed too loud, then went pale and quiet as a first-year in a blank uniform drifted past.
No House crest. No name on his badge. No sound. When he passed the window, the rain on the glass rippled outward like something had breathed on it from the other side.
Asher tracked him until he vanished around the corner. The air behind him felt colder.
Ryvak leaned close. "That's him."
Raven watched the glass settle. "Don't follow," she said. "Not yet."
Asher's skin prickled. He didn't like how the building bent around that boy. He didn't like the number sitting in his head like a weight. He didn't like 313. He did like that it wasn't meant to be there.
They peeled off at the next junction and took the servant stairs up two flights. The old wing waited behind a row of cracked pillars and a rope someone had hung and forgotten. Dust lay thick enough to write with a toe.
Ryvak drew a smiley face with his boot and wiped it away, guilty as charged.
Raven scaled her voice down. "After drills," she said again. "Bring the ledger. Don't let it touch bare stone."
"Why?" Ryvak asked.
"So it doesn't wake anything we're not ready for."
Asher swallowed. His mouth tasted like iron again. "Define ready."
Raven didn't. She looked at him, and in that look were a dozen futures she didn't want to pick. "Don't be late."
She left first. Ryvak followed, muttering about socks and doom. Asher stood one more heartbeat in the empty wing and listened to the old bones of the place creak like a ship.
He pictured the spiral. He pictured the number. He pictured a door that shouldn't exist and a glyph that hurt to see.
The bookshop door opened again, long past midnight.
No bell. No cough. Wet boots dragged across warped boards. The clerk's chair at the counter turned slowly by itself, as if it still remembered a weight.
Gloved fingers traced spines with either reverence or contempt. They stopped at an empty slot between architecture and the banned treatise. Then slid two inches left.
Another copy of the same ledger waited there. The Black Ledger of Warden Rooke. Same faded spine. Same dust.
The intruder pulled it free and cradled it like a relic. Dry leather. Sharp paper edges.
A knife whispered out of a sleeve. A fingertip got nicked with professional boredom. One drop of blood fell to the first page.
The paper drank it.
Ink that had slept for years lifted its head. Letters rose from blankness. Lines crawled. Margins warmed a faint scarlet and cooled, like a breath taken and held.
The intruder smiled. Not wide. Grim satisfied.
"It is beginning," a voice said, too quiet for ears.
The glow dimmed. The page held a map now.
Not of the market.
Of the Academy.
Three towers. Four wings. A spiral etched faint in a corner that didn't exist on standard prints. A number written small and steady beside the spiral: 313.
The intruder's gloved knuckle traced it once, then again, as if memorizing pressure points on a throat.
A thin slip fell from the back cover. Names. Dates. A single line underlined until the paper almost tore: Open only when watched.
The ledger closed with a soft sound.
The knife vanished.
The book slid back into its gap.
Rain hissed outside. Dust settled slow as sleep inside. The clerk's chair kept spinning, a fraction at a time, like the room remembered a different ending.
Asher woke with iron on his tongue. His heart sprinted without permission. Dark shape near his footlocker. He didn't move. He let his eyes adjust slow.
Nothing. Just the locker. Just the bedpost. Just the wrong quiet.
He threw the covers back and set his feet on stone. Cold stung him awake. He cracked the locker and pulled the wrapped ledger out with both hands. The paper felt warm in one spot, as if someone else had just touched it.
He set it on the bed. He didn't breathe. He unwrapped the brown paper with careful fingers.
Black leather. Simple. Mean.
The cover opened with a whisper.
First page: blank. Second: blank. Third—
Letters crawled into place like they'd been there all along and only needed remembering. Names. Measurements. Rooke's neat hand. Clinical, cruel.
Halfway down the page, a small drawing—a spiral. Edges cut with a thin blade. The ink had a sheen that wasn't ink.
He turned the page.
A diagram of corridors, drawn from memory or from something worse. The lower hall with a door that shouldn't exist. 313, written in the corner. A glyph sketched beside it, the kind that made your eyes water if you stared too long.
Another page.
A note in smaller script: Only Void-marked can see the seal. Only the broken can pass it.
He swallowed. Broken was one word.
Soft steps outside. One pair. Then another. He slid the ledger under the blanket and lay back, breathing slow. The door hinges sighed. Cain entered like he owned the floor. Morgan came behind him like a shadow that had grown legs.
Asher kept his eyes slitted.
Cain stopped at his bunk, exhaled. "Training day," he muttered to the air. "Let's see who survives."
Morgan didn't answer. He didn't need to.
They left. The door clicked. Asher waited three breaths longer than comfortable, then sat up and fished the ledger back into his hands.
He stared at the spiral and the number until his vision prickled.
Room 313.
He should show Ryvak. He should tell Raven. He should burn the thing and go live in a hole.
He pressed his thumb to the page. The Stone thrummed, a low note that made the bedframe sing.
He closed the book. Wrapped it. Stowed it. Stood.
At the arch, he stopped. He always stopped now.
The mural once held a god with a spear fighting off a serpent.
Now only the serpent remained.
Ryvak came up beside him, dripping. "Creeps me out," he said.
Asher didn't answer. He stepped inside with him and felt the building taste them.
Raven waited near the east stair with her hood down and eyes sharp. "You have it?"
Asher nodded.
"Good," she said. "We move after midday drills. Old wing."
"Old wing?" Ryvak asked. "We're going to the broom graveyard?"
"Something close."
They broke apart for drills. Routine kept hands busy while the mind lied. Asher hit where told, moved when ordered, and didn't look at the windows too long.
Midday bell. Lukewarm water. Cheap towel that left lint. He cut from the crowd and took the servant stairs. Two flights. Old wing. Cracked pillars. Rope that meant nothing.
Raven was already there. Ryvak jogged up half a minute later, breath fogging.
"If we die, I'm haunting Cain," he said.
"Get in line," Asher said.
Raven tilted her head. "Moment of silence."
They gave it. Not for the dead. For the stupid part that still hoped this would be easy.
Raven nodded. "Okay. We find 313. We don't force anything. If the ledger points, we follow. If it doesn't, we leave."
Ryvak scratched his cheek. "If the door only opens when watched… by who?"
Asher unwrapped the book and opened to the map with the spiral and the number.
The ink glimmered like a breath taken in the dark.
Was the door going to open now that something was finally watching?
Deep beneath the Academy, the stone tunnels pressed in like ribs. Old air. Rust. Water dripped somewhere, counting seconds that did not exist. A ring of ward stakes circled a pit, their glyphs dull as ash.
In the pit, something large slept curled around its own armor. Plates like black glass. Chains grown into bone. It did not breathe so much as tremble, a pressure you felt in your teeth.
Far above, a page turned.
Down here, one lid lifted.
Two eyes opened, red and steady, as if the dark itself had learned to stare. Light crept along the chains. A slow, grinding exhale rolled up the shaft and died against the stone.
The Guardian was awake.
And if it was awake, who had called it?