Chapter 16: The Blood Rust Rain
The rain that fell on Aethelburg's campus was not the weeping, glycerin confession that had greeted Michelle Finch. This was a colder, quieter affair—a needling, silver drizzle that iced the cobblestones and made the ancient gothic lanterns bleed haloes of wan gold into the dusk. It was the kind of rain that seeped into the bandages, a chill that started at the skin and worked its way inwards, towards the bone.
Aurelia stood under the stone archway of the infirmary, the deep livid of her hair—a bruise-purple in this light—damp and clinging to her temples. Her left arm was a sculpted landscape of white gauze and surgical tape, cradled in a black sling that felt both like a cage and a badge of shame. Every throb from her bruised ribs, every fiery itch from the sutures along her forearm, was a reminder of the fight. Of Alessia. Of the crystalline shards that had sung through the air with murderous intent.
"You should be resting," Mei's voice was a soft, steady pressure against the drumming rain. She materialized at Aurelia's side, a compact fortress of concern in a practical trench coat, her umbrella sheltering them both. "The nurse said severe muscle tears. Possible nerve bruising. You can't just—"
"I have to check Cassian's dorm." Aurelia's voice was flat, analytic, cutting through Mei's warmth like a scalpel. She didn't look at her friend; her gaze was fixed on the path leading to the boys' residence halls, a dark ribbon gleaming under the lamps. "He was there. During the… incident. His reactions were statistically anomalous. Not fear. Calculation. And the pendant he wears—the non-descript grey stone—it matches the description of the tertiary talismans used by the Ruby's Crystal cult in last semester's comparative theology lecture."
Mei sighed, a plume of white in the cold air. "Aurelia, not everything is a data point. People get weird in fights."
"Precisely. But they follow predictable patterns of 'weird'. Cassian's pattern was cultic. Ergo, he warrants investigation." She finally turned, her eyes—the color of a winter sea—holding not argument, but simple, unassailable logic. "He's a variable. An unaccounted-for coefficient in the equation that nearly resulted in my dismemberment. I need to solve for X."
She stepped out into the drizzle, Mei scrambling to keep the umbrella over her. The chill kissed Aurelia's cheeks, sharp with the scent of wet stone, dormant earth, and the distant, green melancholy of the pine forests encircling the campus. Her shoes made soft, sucking sounds on the flagstones, a rhythm of muted purpose.
"Well, aren't you two a picture of gloomy dedication."
The voice was a shift in the atmospheric pressure. It came from the doorway of their shared dormitory, and it was layered, like old varnish over a cracked painting.
Iris stood there, leaning against the frame. Or, rather, one of them did. Her posture was a teenager's—a slight slouch, one ankle hooked behind the other. But the eyes that tracked them held a weary, ancient knowledge that belonged to the twenty-three-year-old paramedic who had once owned this body. The one who had been compressed, folded down into the vessel of a fifteen-year-old.
"Aurelia should be horizontal," the paramedic's pragmatic tone surfaced. "Elevation. Ice. Observation for compartment syndrome."
Then, a smile—sudden, dazzling, and utterly fifteen—broke through. "But you're never one to follow the rules, are you? Look! I finished the underpainting!" She stepped back, revealing the common room behind her. The air was thick with the turpentine-tang of linseed oil and the earthy scent of pigments. A massive canvas, six feet tall, dominated the far wall. On it, in washes of umber and sienna, sprawled the beginnings of a monstrous, gorgeous flower. Its petals were suggestions of fleshy curves, its center a dark, abyssal vortex. It was beautiful and vaguely predatory.
But Iris wasn't looking at the painting. She was vibrating with a different energy, her fingers—stained with phthalo blue—twisting together. "I met someone," she chirped, the teenage girl fully at the helm now. "At the art supply store downtown. She's from New York City. Can you believe it? Actual NYC."
Aurelia paused at the threshold, the warmth of the dormitory washing over her, carrying the smells of oil paint and Iris's jasmine tea. A peculiar sensation, cold and tight, coiled in her stomach, unrelated to her injuries. "Oh?"
"Her name's Elara," Iris breathed, the name a sacred incantation. "She's a legacy transfer. She's… oh, Mei, you'd adore her. She's perfect. Like, storybook perfect. She has this laugh that sounds like wind chimes, and she knew everything about grinding your own pigments, and she said my composition had 'feral potential'." Iris's eyes were stars. "We talked for three hours. She's my new bestie."
Mei, ever the romantic, clasped her hands together, her earlier concern momentarily eclipsed. "That's wonderful, Iris! She sounds amazing."
"She is," Iris sighed, blissfully unaware of the storm cloud gathering in Aurelia's neutral expression. "She's coming over tomorrow to work on her portfolio. She does these incredible photorealistic pieces with crystals and light. Maybe you'll finally meet her, Lia! You'd have so much to talk about. She's so smart. And kind. And perfect."
Each repetition of "perfect" was a tiny, precise needle. Aurelia catalogued the physiological response: increased heart rate, shallow breath, a slight tightening of the jaw. Jealousy. An inefficient, irrational emotion. It consumed resources and offered no tactical advantage. Yet, there it was, a hot, sour tide in her throat. This Elara had achieved in one afternoon what Aurelia, with her shared living space and survival history, had not: the title of 'bestie'. The data was… disagreeable.
"Fascinating," Aurelia said, her tone expertly void. "I'm sure her understanding of crystalline structures is… profound." She moved past Iris, her bandaged arm held stiffly, towards her own orderly side of the room. Her desk was a testament to analysis: stacked notebooks, a sleek laptop, a microscope. No paint. No "feral potential."
The paramedic in Iris watched her go, a flicker of diagnostic concern in her gaze. But the teenager was too effervescent to notice. "She told me about this gallery in SoHo…"
Aurelia tuned her out, focusing on the tactile feel of her wool blazer as she shrugged it off with difficulty, the rough texture of the bandages beneath her sweater. The smell of her own skin, sterile from antiseptic soap, undercut by the persistent, coppery hint of old blood. She was a constellation of pain, each star a specific injury, mapped and categorized. The jealousy was just another data point, albeit a chaotic one.
Her phone buzzed on the desk. The name on the screen—Lilith—sent a different, more complex chill through her. Not fear. A kind of gravitational dread.
"Mother."
"Aurelia. The voice on the line was like smoked glass, smooth and cool. "The vernissage at the Galerie des Ombres is next Thursday. Monsieur D'Arcy has… reconsidered his featured artist. There is a vacancy. You will fill it."
Aurelia's breath caught. Not in excitement. In the suspension of all feeling. "My recent work is… insufficient for a full exhibition."
"The Sanguine Bloom series from the autumn will suffice. They are evocative. They sell. Pack them. I've already sent for a courier." A pause, the sound of a pen tapping. "This is not a request. It is realignment. Do not embarrass me."
The line went dead. Aurelia stood holding the phone, the silence in the room now roaring. The Sanguine Bloom series. Paintings of flowers that looked like open wounds, petals of clotted crimson and bruised violet. They had poured out of her after the first major incident with Iris, after she'd first seen the thing they called Atlas emerge. They were paintings of visceral, unprocessed terror. And her mother found them "evocative." Marketable.
Iris had fallen silent. The paramedic was back, the painter observing. "Lilith?" she asked softly.
"She requires my presence at a vernissage. In her place."
Iris wiped her hands on a rag, the blue stain spreading. "The… the Aethelburg Annual Painting Competition submissions are due the same week," she said, her voice small, the fifteen-year-old resurfacing, vulnerable. "I'd… I'd hoped… I mean, after what happened with the Headmistress, I thought you might…" She trailed off, her gaze dropping to Aurelia's bandaged arm, her empty, clean desk. "You haven't touched a brush in months."
Aurelia turned. The emotion was gone, locked away. What remained was pure, crystalline logic. "I have been replaced as a combatant by Alessia and her crystals," she stated, as if reading a report. "Therefore, my utility must be recalibrated. My mother's network provides strategic advantage. Painting for a competition does not. The opportunity cost is unacceptable." She met Iris's hurt eyes. "I am being replaced, so I will replace. It is efficient."
The words hung in the turpentine air, cruel in their truth. Iris flinched, and for a second, a flash of something colder, greener, flickered in her eyes—a glimpse of Atlas, the heartless florakinesis wielder who saw living things as mere arrangements of cellular matter. But it was gone, replaced by a well of sadness that belonged entirely to the original Iris.
"I'm going to the library," Aurelia announced, breaking the tension. "I need to cross-reference some cult symbology with post-thaumaturgical mineral residues." She picked up her satchel with her good hand. "Do not come with me. Do not look for me."
It was not a request. It was a firewall.
Hours later, the library was a tomb of whispered knowledge and dust. Aurelia moved through the stacks, her fingers trailing over leather spines, her mind a humming lattice of connections. Ruby's Crystal. Geomantic resonators. Sacrificial lithography. The words from her mother's old grimoires blended with dry academic texts. But one reference eluded her—the specific, phosphorescent crystalline residue mentioned in esoteric crime reports.
Frustration, a hot and unfamiliar beast, gnawed at her. She needed a primary source.
Midnight found the silver drizzle unchanged. Aurelia, a shadow in black jeans and a dark sweater, the white of her bandages a faint ghostly streak, stood behind the oak tree facing Cassian's dormitory window. It was dark. Empty. A void.
Picking the lock was a matter of thirty-seven seconds of tactile feedback—the scrape of the picks, the subtle vibration of the pins yielding, the final, satisfying clunk. She slipped inside, closing the door without a sound.
The room was… unsettlingly barren. Not just tidy, but empty, as if scrubbed of identity. Standard-issue desk, bare. Bed made with military precision. No books, no posters, no laundry. The air smelled of lemon-scented cleaner and underlying mildew, but nothing human—no sweat, no cologne, no lingering scent of a life. It was a stage set waiting for a performance.
Her penlight cut a narrow beam through the darkness. She moved methodically: desk drawers (empty), closet (three identical grey sweaters, pressed trousers), under the mattress (nothing). The silence was absolute, a sensory vacuum that amplified the rustle of her own clothes, the soft thump of her own heartbeat.
Then, the beam caught a glint from the far corner, behind the plain wooden desk. A loose floorboard.
Kneeling sent a jolt of pain through her ribs. She pried the board up with her knife. Nestled in the dust and darkness below was a small, velvet pouch. She upended it into her palm.
It rolled out, cool and strangely heavy. A crystal, the size of a robin's egg. It was not opaque, nor transparent. It seemed to hold its own light—a faint, internal, phosphorescent glow, the color of a corpse's fingernail under moonlight. Milky, yet with a sinister greenish-blue luminescence at its heart. As she stared, her analytical mind racing, a memory, not her own, clicked into place with terrifying clarity.
…the perfect, smoking hole, edges glittering with tiny, phosphorescent crystals—frosting on a cake of oblivion.
The description from the file, from the incident report on a Chicago dock years ago. The calling card of a power that didn't belong here. Her breath hitched. This wasn't just a cult talisman. This was a byproduct. A residue from a breach. Cassian wasn't just a believer; he was a custodian, or a collector, of something far more dangerous.
The sound of footsteps in the hall—firm, purposeful—froze her blood. Not the shuffling of a late-night student. Two sets. One measured, one lighter.
There was no time for the closet. Aurelia rolled, biting back a cry as her injured arm took her weight, and slid under Cassian's bed just as the door lock clicked open.
The lights snapped on, a blinding invasion from her dusty, confined world. Two pairs of shoes entered her narrow field of vision: polished men's loafers and a pair of chic, ankle-high boots speckled with fresh rain.
"—assured, the transfer is seamless," Cassian's voice, usually languid in class, was now brisk, professional. "The exhibit will provide perfect cover. The resonance of so many 'sensitive' individuals in one room… it will be a feast."
"Your optimism is noted." The girl's voice was new. Mellifluous, layered with an accent that was both cultured and unplaceable. It was a voice that could discuss art theory or arterial spray with equal warmth. "But the variable remains. The Aurelia girl. She paraded enough raw, untrained aura after the duel to light up this entire quadrant. It was… indiscreet. And delicious. Like a beacon."
Aurelia's blood turned to ice under her skin. She held her breath, the dust on the floorboards filling her nostrils with the scent of dry rot.
"Alessia is handling her," Cassian said dismissively. "The 'rivalry' is a perfect pressure valve. And distraction."
"Alessia is a hammer. Aurelia is a scalpel. Do not confuse the tools." The girl's boots stepped closer to the bed. Aurelia could see the fine droplets of rain on the leather. "The girl is a puzzle. Lilith's daughter, yet seemingly unaware of the deeper game. A painter who doesn't paint. A warrior laid low. All that potential, crystallizing into pure, beautiful frustration." The boots turned. "You're sure the sample is secure?"
"Of course. In the usual place."
"Good. The pattern is almost complete. The Blood Rust Rain is not just prophecy; it's a recipe. And she…" the girl's voice softened, almost lovingly, "…she may yet be our most exquisite ingredient."
Aurelia's mind, usually a sanctuary of order, screamed. Alessia. The new girl. Crystal control. The rival was not just a rival; she was part of the apparatus. And they were discussing her, Lilith's daughter, as a component in a recipe. The Ruby's Crystal wasn't just a cult. It was a mechanism. And she was a cog, placed by design or by fate, grinding against its gears.
The girl's boots began to move towards the door. "Clean this place again. The silence here should be absolute. It should taste of nothing."
"Understood."
The lights went out. The door closed. The lock turned.
In the profound, smothering darkness under the bed, surrounded by the scent of dust and dread, Aurelia lay perfectly still. The phosphorescent crystal in her clenched fist pulsed softly against her skin, a cold, silent star in the void. The hollows inside her, the ones she thought were filled only with analytic silence, now echoed with a new, terrible understanding. They weren't empty.
They were, as a voice from another story had warned, listening posts.
And now, they had received their first, horrifying transmission...
...TO BE CONTINUED...