By the time Mr. Collins reaches his third slide about ancient Druidic burial rites, my brain has slipped its leash.
His voice buzzes over the projector like a sleepy wasp. The fluorescent lights hum. The AC moans in the vents.
Somewhere behind me, a guy clicks his pen like he's trying to Morse-code his way out of consciousness. Two rows over, someone's perfume is aggressively vanilla—warm sugar and artificial comfort—which would normally make me hungry and now just makes my stomach twist.
The girl to my left types like her keyboard owes her money. The boy to my right keeps shifting his knee so it bumps the underside of my desk in a steady, mindless rhythm. I want to turn and tell him to stop. I don't. I never do. I'm too practiced at being "easy."
Mr. Collins clicks again.
The slide changes, and the projector's light flares on the screen—a harsh white rectangle that makes everything else feel dimmer. For a second, the glow catches floating dust in the air and it looks like ash suspended in sunlight.
My throat tightens.
I blink hard, but the room still feels…wrong. Not dangerous in a normal way. Just slightly misaligned, like I'm wearing my life half a size too small.
I rub the pad of my thumb over the side of my index finger—one, two, three—counting because counting is control. It's what I do when the buzzing starts behind my eyes and I can't tell if I'm about to faint or remember something that will ruin me.
Under my desk, my foot taps once.
Then again.
The tapping doesn't calm me. It feels like knocking.
It all blends together into a muffled drone. I catch fragments.
"…ritual sites…sacred groves…sky burials…"
My pen moves across the margin of my notebook, but I'm not writing about Druids.
I'm drawing a door.
Not just a door.
A door with weight.
My pen goes heavier when it hits the curves, like the paper resists. Like ink doesn't want to hold the shape but does anyway. I can feel the burn of it in my wrist, the way my tendons tighten as if my hand is being guided by a memory muscle.
I try to stop. I really do.
I press the tip of the pen to the page and hold it there until a blot forms—until it turns into a little dark wound in the margin. My fingers ache with the effort of not moving.
Then the pen drifts again.
A spiral.
An eye.
A line that becomes a wing, becomes a thread, becomes something I don't have a name for.
It's humiliating, in a quiet way. Like my body is disobeying me in public and nobody notices because I'm good at looking normal.
My pulse keeps speeding up, as if it knows where the drawing ends.
My hand remembers even when I'm trying not to think about it. Ink etches the same pattern from my dreams over and over—the door in the road, darkness behind it pulsing like a heartbeat.
I used to think daydreaming was my coping mechanism.
Back then, it was gentle.
A soft exit. A private door.
Now it feels like a shove.
Like something inside me yanks my focus away from the room and drags it toward the dark parts I keep trying not to look at. Like my thoughts are a leash and someone else is holding the other end.
And the weirdest part is how *familiar* that loss of control is.
I've felt it in the nightmares—the second before impact, when time seems to stretch and my instincts scream RUN even when there's nowhere to go.
I've felt it in the library at Northwood, when the old shelves creak like they're speaking and the air thickens around certain texts like it doesn't want you breathing near them.
I've felt it walking to Delmont, when the sound of an engine crawls under my skin and my body reacts like it recognizes the driver.
Daydreaming used to be me choosing escape.
This feels like something else choosing for me.
When Dad walked out and Mom sat at the kitchen table staring at nothing. When arguments became silence and silence ossified into our new atmosphere. When the house felt like a stage set after the actors left—half-empty, too quiet.
I'd vanish between my ears.
Daring escapes. Hidden identities. Secret ambassadors from forgotten kingdoms. Sometimes, when the stories felt too vivid, I'd swear I'd actually lived something like them and misplaced the memories.
Dad hated it.
He said it like a warning, but it always landed like a punishment.
Like the crime wasn't zoning out—it was having an inner world at all.
The fights weren't explosive in our house. They were quiet. The kind where voices stay low and sharp and nobody says the real thing, because saying it would make it permanent.
But Dad's anger always had a target: my softness.
My "head in the clouds." My drawings. My stories. My tendency to stare out windows like there was something better out there than whatever was happening inside our walls.
I learned early how to fold myself smaller.
How to look attentive while my mind ran.
How to smile like nothing in me was screaming.
So when people tease me for daydreaming now, I laugh with them.
I keep my throat tight.
And I never tell them the truth:
The daydreams aren't always mine anymore.
Mom never agreed.
"The worlds in your head are where your best ideas are born," she used to tell me. She wasn't wrong. My favorite designs started as daydreams. Dresses that didn't exist but should. Silhouettes that belonged in oil paintings and in some future street style all at once.
Like the spring formal freshman year—woodland nymph meets Manhattan. Hunter-green halter, keyhole bodice, twin slits, gossamer trim that caught the light like dew. When I walked, it whispered around my ankles, showing just enough.
People still bring up that dress.
For a while, daydreaming was my magic trick. A talent.
Then it became survival.
When Dad's affair came out and Mom filed for divorce. When we divided our lives into weekends and weekdays, houses and calendars. When I learned how to sit at a dinner table, nod, and smile while my mind walked somewhere that didn't hurt.
After the dust settled, I ended up with two actual worlds on my schedule: Mercy University by day, Northwood Academy on the weekends.
Mom's idea.
"You need to know where your blood comes from," she said when she dropped the glossy Academy brochure onto the table. "Not just this town. Older. Deeper."
So at ten, while other kids figured out how to cheat at dodgeball, I was learning about Mayan blood rituals, Babylonian star charts, Greek rites, and Druidic circles. No wands. No flying brooms. Just long hours, dust-heavy scrolls, and more herb rashes than feels medically advisable.
And spells.
Real ones.
The Academy's rules are clear: no unsupervised casting off-campus. We're not fully trained. Not fully initiated. Too young for the kind of power some of the texts whisper about.
Mom signed the waiver anyway.
"She has control," she told the headmistress. "She'll be careful."
I wasn't always.
Case in point: the sleeping potion. Recipe from a scroll older than anything we'd covered in class. I made "a few tweaks." Added some ingredients. Removed others.
I named it Snow White Glamour.
I slept for seven days.
They called it a "medical anomaly" at first.
Mom hovered like I was about to evaporate. She kept pressing the back of her knuckles to my cheek, checking for fever, checking for…something else. Her eyes never left my face. Not even when she thought I was asleep.
Northwood's instructors were worse.
They didn't look scared.
They looked interested.
Like I was a problem they hadn't solved yet and suddenly the universe handed them a new variable.
I remember snippets: voices muffled behind the door, the headmistress saying my name like it was a caution sign, someone else insisting, "It isn't possible unless—" and then cutting off when my mom spoke, low and fierce.
I remember waking up thirsty enough to cry.
I remember the silence in my own head—clean, empty, almost peaceful.
And then I remember the strangest part:
For the first time in my life, I didn't dream.
Seven nights. Nothing.
No nightmares. No whispers. Just black, like my mind had been turned off completely.
At the time, I thought it was relief.
Now?
Now it feels like evidence.
Mom nearly had a heart attack. The Academy nearly expelled me. The instructors lectured me so hard my ears rang.
But when I woke, I'd never felt clearer. Like something in me had been hard-reset. Like I'd gone offline and come back with fewer corrupted files.
I never brewed it again. The name still makes me laugh and wince in equal measure.
"…burial mounds, alignments with the solstice, mythic interpretations…"
Mr. Collins keeps talking.
My half-hearted Druid notes trail off mid-sentence. My pen stalls.
Without meaning to, I write two words into the margin:
Aetherion Ascension.
My stomach rolls like I just swallowed a stone.
Because that isn't just "oops, random phrase."
That's a word with a smell.
Old paper. Smoke. That dry, dusty library air that makes your throat itch. The faint sting of herbs the Academy burns in braziers when the moon is wrong.
I can feel my pulse in my fingertips.
I press my pen down again, like I can pin the words to the page and stop them from spreading, but the ink has already soaked in. The letters look too confident.
Like they were waiting for me to remember how to write them.
A tiny laugh tries to claw up my throat. It comes out wrong—more breath than sound.
Mr. Collins clicks to the next slide and says the word solstice, and my body reacts like it's been slapped.
Heat flares behind my eyes.
My hand tightens around the pen until my knuckles ache.
I don't write anything else.
I'm afraid of what will come out.
I stare at them.
That term doesn't come from this class. It doesn't come from Mercy at all.
It comes from the forbidden shelves at the Academy.
The ones you're not supposed to touch unless an instructor stands over your shoulder. The ones that talk about the thing everyone pretends not to know exists.
Aetherion Ascension. That's what the oldest scrolls call it.
Newer copies—a few centuries young—use a different name.
The Umbra Ascension.
They made it sound prettier, more abstract, when they finally realized where the invitations come from.
A realm above Olympus.
Above the gods who think they rule everything.
Aetherion.
Even at the Academy, where stone rises if you call it right and fire bends if you speak its true name, the Aetherion Ascension is taboo. It sits at the edge of conversations like a bruise under a sleeve.
We don't touch it.
We don't name it.
But it shapes everything.
I remember the first time I heard the phrase out loud.
Cassie and I were buried under scrolls in the Academy library—my herbology notes open, her divination charts spread like exploding spiderwebs.
"Don't go past the third row," she'd murmured without looking up. "The shelves there…feel wrong today."
"You see that in the cards?" I'd asked.
"In the air," she'd replied. "In the way the words lean."
Naturally, I went exactly where she told me not to.
The library at Northwood has a different kind of quiet.
Not the cozy, bookish hush of Mercy's stacks.
Northwood's quiet feels like a rule. Like a throat being held.
The lights are always a shade too dim. The air is always a degree too cold. The old stone holds moisture, so everything smells faintly like rain even when the sun is out. Even the dust feels curated—soft, fine, ancient.
I remember the way my footsteps sounded that day: too loud.
Each step echoing like a confession.
Cassie didn't follow me. She never does when she warns me. She just stays where she is and waits, like she already knows I'm going to disobey.
And I did.
Of course I did.
Because the worst thing about me is that when someone tells me something is forbidden, my brain translates it into: this is important.
Curiosity is my worst trait and my favorite.
Tucked between crumbling tomes on Olympian law, I'd found it: a narrow, hand-copied text with half-faded ink and singed edges.
Title, in flaking gold: AETHERION ASCENSION. No seal. No hidden panel. Just filed away, like a horror story someone hoped would stop being true if they shelved it high enough.
I can still feel the texture of that book's spine under my fingers—dry, cracked leather, warm at the edges like it had been held recently even though nobody touched it. When I pulled it free, the shelf groaned, not like wood shifting, but like something alive resenting the disturbance.
The whisper that brushed my neck wasn't a voice.
It was pressure.
Like someone stood too close behind me and breathed.
I remember turning—fast—expecting to see a teacher, expecting to see Cassie, expecting to see literally anyone.
There was no one.
Just shelves.
Just shadows.
Just the sensation that I'd been noticed.
I opened it anyway.
It begins with disappearances.
Not officially. Officially, it begins with a "blessing"—a thinning of the veil, a rare convergence of realms, a once-in-a-century opportunity.
The scrolls don't care about PR.
They count.
Every hundred years, names start dropping off the rolls.
That line was the first thing that made my mouth go dry.
Not because it was shocking—missing people are everywhere, if you pay attention.
Because the scroll didn't mourn them.
It catalogued them.
No fear. No grief. Just pattern recognition.
Like the person who wrote it was so used to bodies vanishing that compassion had become a waste of ink.
I remember sitting there with my finger resting on the page, tracing the first recorded name without meaning to. My skin tingled, like even touching the letters was a kind of contact.
Cassie had appeared beside me at some point—silent as fog—and when I looked up at her, her eyes were already tight.
"Don't," she'd said.
Not don't read.
Don't connect.
Because connection is what makes something real.
Connection is what makes a door.
At first, it's quiet. A student who doesn't show up for morning drills in the tower. Another who goes to fetch her cloak and never comes back. A third who gets up to wash her hands before bed and never returns to her mattress, leaving her blanket still warm and her shoes neatly lined up.
Human-born witches, semi-divines, pureblood scions—doesn't matter.
The gods don't care what you are.
Only what you can do.
My pen moves again.
First wave: Academy / witch covens / mortal campuses.
The words look wrong in my handwriting.
Too neat. Too certain.
I underline them once, then immediately regret it, like underlining is agreement.
My palm goes cold against the paper. I flip my pen in my fingers and watch the tiny smear of blue ink on the side of my thumb. It won't rub off. It just spreads faintly, staining the lines of my skin.
My mind tries to jump ahead, racing, compiling: if the first wave is the Academy and campuses, then Mercy is on the list. And if Mercy is on the list—
My stomach twists hard enough that I have to press my elbow into it, subtle, like I'm just slouching.
I glance around the lecture hall.
Everyone looks normal.
Tired students. Half-open laptops. A girl chewing gum like it's vengeance. A guy scrolling sports scores under his desk.
But the thought won't let go:
What if "normal" is just what it looks like right before people start vanishing?
Because it's not just us.
The world calls them tragedies. Accidents. Kidnappings. Missing persons. We cling to words like "random" and "isolated" and "senseless," because the alternative is admitting someone is choosing.
The scrolls chart the pattern.
A Serbian basketball phenom who never comes home from practice. A violinist in Italy who slips out between rehearsals and vanishes. A U.S. swimmer who disappears from a locked dorm room, her towel still damp on the bed.
Names. Ages. Talents. Circumstances. All different.
One thread: potential.
The best. The brightest. The ones people point to and say, She could change everything.
It's easier not to connect the dots. Easier to send thoughts and prayers, hold vigils, repost their faces, then let the next crisis wash over us.
The Academy keeps records. The old witches writing in ink and blood and memory keep records. Their charts spike every century like clockwork.
We're not the hunting ground.
We're one of many.
The gods cast their net wide. Anywhere young people gather with ambition and hunger—colleges, academies, training centers, arenas—becomes a field.
Sometimes, late in the library, when the lights flicker and the air goes thick, I swear I hear the old librarians whispering.
It is never just us. The entire world is a field.
They take three, always. One who breathes life. One who takes it. One who knows when it ends.
I'd laughed when I first read that.
"I'm not any of those," I'd told Cassie later. "I can barely lift the mannequin in lab. I cry at dog food commercials. The only thing I 'take' is extra breadsticks."
"You're training to breathe life back into people," she'd said, tapping my nursing textbooks. "That's one."
"And the others?" I'd asked.
She'd just tapped her temple. "I know things. That's two."
"And number three?"
"Not our problem," she'd said too fast, too flat. "Put it back, Ang."
The scrolls say the first trials belong to the sea.
Poseidon doesn't call them trials. He calls them "opportunities." The texts, careful as always, name his stage: The Storm Without a Shore.
Athletes and spellcasters dragged onto moving islands of black sand rolling over a roaring ocean. Waves taller than cathedrals crash around them, scripted currents yanking them away from whatever safety they think they've found.
Witches try to bind the tide. Demigods try to outswim a god. Mortal swimmers thrash, lungs burning.
The sea doesn't care if you win.
It wants to see how long you can keep from drowning.
Then comes war.
Ares' arena is never the same twice. The scrolls try anyway: a battlefield so vast the horizon curves. Sand that sometimes glassifies underfoot, slicing straight through boots. Drums beating like a second heartbeat behind your ears.
Combatants from every realm.
Mortal boxers and soldiers. Demigod wrestlers, divine-adjacent. Pureblood heirs wielding light-blades and old war magic that smells like lightning and iron.
At first, they fight each other.
Then the arena joins in.
Sand rises like spears. Weapons fall from the sky like meteorites. Monsters and curses are dropped into the chaos just to see who adapts and who breaks.
The scrolls are blunt: the survivors aren't always the bravest or the strongest.
They're often the ones who know when not to swing.
By the time Ares is finished, half the list of names is gone.
Then Hades takes his turn.
His realm doesn't test bodies.
It tests souls.
No stadium. No sky.
Just a labyrinth.
Not stone and hedge, but memories and doors.
No two accounts agree on how it looks. Some say it's an endless hall of doors, each labeled HOME in a dead language. Others say it's your childhood streets, looping, voices from the past echoing down alleys that twist like intestines.
The constants are the voices.
Long-lost mothers calling your name.
Dead brothers laughing from the next room.
Lovers who should be gone whispering into your ear.
They're not real, the texts insist.
Try telling that to the girl from Cairo who ran toward her brother's laugh and never returned. Or to the demigod from Athens who followed his father's shadow through a door that slammed behind him.
The labyrinth doesn't kill everyone.
It just doesn't let all of them leave.
By then, most names are already crossed off.
But the Ascension isn't done.
That's when the Fates step in.
They don't roar like the sea or war. They don't whisper like the dead.
They rearrange.
Maps shift under your fingers. Rivers braid into ropes and nets. Riddles appear in languages you almost understand, phrases that tug at the edges of memories that aren't yours.
Failure doesn't always mean death here.
It means your path shortens. Your options close. Your margin for error evaporates.
In the Ascension, time kills as efficiently as any blade.
By the winter solstice, whatever survivors remain wear tally ropes around their necks.
The scrolls describe them in painful detail: cords woven from threads of light and shadow, each knot a memory of something done—a choice, an act. Some glow with clean, unblemished victories.
Others burn dim with the weight of compromises.
Slamming a door on a friend to keep the monsters out. Stepping on a hand reaching up from a cliff because you can't pull them and yourself.
The ropes remember.
Even if you don't want to.
I remember asking Cassie, finger tracing that passage, "Do the ropes ever come off?"
She'd said, "Some chains aren't meant to break. Only to rattle loud enough that other people hear them."
Comforting.
The scrolls don't say "winners" at the end.
They say claimed.
At the winter solstice, when the Ascension ends, there's no podium. No medals. No speeches about triumph against all odds.
There is a claiming.
Survivors stand before the gods they impressed—intentionally or not. Some step forward willingly, eyes bright with the promise of power. Others tremble. Some cry. Some go still, hollowed out by what they had to become.
They're called Watchers. Guardians. Hounds. Chosen.
Olympus prefers Guardians.
The oldest texts use another phrase.
Property of Aetherion.
Vows are etched under their skin, invisible to mortal eyes but blazing in the frequencies gods care about. Their souls wear sigils like brands.
They go home.
They do not live free.
Some gods are "kind." Miracles in exchange for service. Protection for family. Boons. Blessings.
Others prefer chains. Pain. Threats. Fear.
Every realm builds an army that way.
The Umbra Ascension isn't a game. It isn't a celebration of heroism.
It's a harvest.
A mechanism to seek out the brightest, sharpest, most dangerous young talents across all realms—mortal, divine, in-between—and chain them before they can become a threat.
The outside world sees tragedy.
The gods see quality control.
A tiny, burned note in the margin of that scroll had added, in a different hand: Some say this was not the gods' idea. That something older wanted the names first.
Someone had tried to scratch that line out. Ink still bled through.
"Now, if you look at the relationship between ancient ritual sacrifice and community identity…"
Mr. Collins' voice fuzzes out again.
My pen digs into the paper.
I wasn't supposed to know any of this—and something in the room seems to hold its breath with me, as if aware I've crossed a threshold I can't return from.
The Umbra Ascension is a horror story we keep in the restricted section.
It is not supposed to feel like a weather forecast.
Lately it does.
Lately, when the lecture hall lights shudder for no good reason—like now—something in me goes very still.
The fluorescents flicker. The vent hum dips, then rises, like the building inhaled at the wrong time.
It isn't a dramatic flicker.
Not horror-movie strobing.
Just a tiny hiccup in the light that makes every shadow sharpen for half a second.
But my body reacts like it's a siren.
My heart slams once—hard—like it's trying to break the cage of my ribs. The hair on my arms rises. The back of my neck goes cold.
It's the same sensation as the dream, right before the rain freezes.
Right before the world stops and something looks at me like it's been waiting.
I hold my breath without choosing to.
Some part of me is listening.
Not for Mr. Collins.
For something underneath the building noise. Underneath the AC. Underneath the hum of electricity in the walls.
And for a split second, I swear the room has a second layer—like there's a version of this lecture hall superimposed over the real one, older and darker, with the faintest suggestion of symbols carved into the linoleum.
My pen jerks.
Ink scratches a line too deep into the paper, tearing it slightly.
Then the moment passes.
The lights steady.
The lecture continues.
And I'm left sitting there with my lungs burning from the breath I forgot to take.
The air.
The silence.
The space between my ribs.
Something cold presses along my spine, like phantom fingers that never quite touched my chest in the dream.
A whisper threads into the hum of the vents—soft, deliberate, impossibly close.
Too familiar to be nothing.
Aetheria.
My head snaps up.
Mr. Collins is still droning. My classmates are still typing, doodling, zoning out. No one else reacts.
My heart tries to punch its way out of my ribs.
I look down at my notebook.
Somewhere between the Fates and my half-legible note about the property of Aetherion, my handwriting changed—sharper, narrower, as though someone else borrowed my hand for a breath.
Three words sit at the bottom of the page, written in my ink in not-quite-my script:
We are choosing.
The hairs on my arms stand up.
I snap the notebook shut.
The slam is louder than I expect.
A few heads turn. Just briefly. A guy in front of me blinks like I interrupted his nap. Someone behind me makes an annoyed sound.
Heat crawls up my neck.
I want to vanish.
I want to rip the page out, chew it up, swallow it, erase the evidence that something wrote through me like I'm paper too.
My fingers shake as I stuff the notebook into my bag. The zipper catches. I yank it too hard. It frees with a sharp sound that makes me flinch all over again.
Mr. Collins says, "Everything alright, Angela?"
A normal question.
My stomach drops anyway, because for one sick second I hear it as: Do you know what you are?
I force my face into a smile. "Yes, sir. Sorry. Just—pen exploded."
He nods, already bored, and turns back to the screen.
I sit there for the last minute of class with my pulse galloping, counting my breaths like I'm trying to stay stitched together.
The bell rings. Chairs scrape. People stand, chatter, file out. My body moves on autopilot—pack, stand, sling bag.
I blink, and I'm already in the hallway, students brushing past me in a blur of noise and perfume and locker doors.
My fingers won't unclench from around my pen.
The changed handwriting glares up at me in my mind, sharp strokes carved into the page like a confession. Someone had written through me. Or I had written something I'm not ready to remember.
In the hallway, the fluorescent buzz feels louder. Footsteps echo deep. Every face is too sharp, like someone turned the saturation up on reality.
I fish my phone out with numb fingers and text the only person who won't laugh.
Me: If I say the phrase "We are choosing" and tell you it just wrote itself in my notebook, how much trouble am I in on a scale of 1 to "move to Antarctica"?
Cassie's reply comes before I reach the end of the corridor.
Cassie: …Did you hear anything with it?
Me: A whisper. The other name.
Dots appear. Disappear. Reappear.
Cassie: Okay. Don't panic. Don't make deals. Don't say yes to anything that feels bigger than a quiz. I'll explain later.
Me: I DIDN'T SAY YES TO ANYTHING??
Cassie: You walked into a prophecy once. It might remember.
I stop in the middle of the hall.
Someone bumps my shoulder and mutters an apology. I barely register it.
Walked into a prophecy once.
She means the first time we saw the scroll about the Keeper. About daughters. About a door that doesn't stay closed.
Cold crawls up my spine.
I shove the phone into my pocket and keep walking.
The double doors at the end of the corridor swing open as someone pushes through from outside. Light—muted by clouds but still brighter than the hall—spills in, a rectangle on the floor.
For half a second, as my eyes adjust, the light frames a shape.
Tall.
Still.
Watching.
My heart jumps.
I blink.
It's just a student holding the door, the brightness flattening his features into an ordinary silhouette.
Except my body doesn't believe in "just" anymore.
My vision keeps trying to fill the silhouette with something else—taller, stiller, too deliberate. Like my brain has learned the shape of danger and now it sees it everywhere.
I swallow and my throat clicks loud in the sudden quiet between hallway noises. It feels obscene, making sound when I'm trying so hard to be invisible.
The student smiles, polite, already looking past me, and I hate how relieved I am.
I hate that relief.
Because it means a part of me expected the other thing.
Expected winter-blue eyes.
Expected the door.
Expected the moment where the world tilts and I fall through.
Instead, I walk out into air that's cool enough to shock me, and I pretend the goosebumps are from the temperature, not from the fact that my skin feels…aware.
The light lingered longer every evening now. It made the shadows feel dishonest.
Like it's waiting for a hand to hover near my chest again.
Like it remembers the pull.
Someone laughs behind me. Someone swears about an exam. A backpack brushes my arm.
The door swings shut. The light narrows, then disappears.
I let out a shaky breath.
"Get a grip," I mutter.
Somewhere, faint and wrong and familiar, an engine purrs.
I turn toward the lot.
Empty.
No black truck.
No hooded stranger.
No pale eyes behind glass.
Just rows of cars and the wavering shimmer of the road.
The rational part of my brain insists this is nothing.
Stress. Sleep deprivation. Old stories resurfacing because I let them. The Umbra Ascension is a theoretical horror locked behind wards and warnings. It doesn't reach into lecture halls. It doesn't mark ordinary girls with birthdays and student IDs.
It doesn't need to.
Because theory or not, something has already adjusted.
Not the world.
Me.
I feel it in the way sound carries differently now. In the way my pulse syncs too easily with the hum of the building. In the way the date keeps repeating in my head—not flashing, not screaming, just present. Waiting.
Spring equinox came and went quietly. I barely noticed it at the time.
Summer solstice hasn't arrived yet.
But I have the unbearable sense that something already knows exactly where I'll be standing when it does.
I close my notebook with deliberate care, like sound might matter. The door I drew disappears between the pages, but the shape of it lingers behind my eyes.
Around me, students stand, pack up, complain about exams. Ordinary life resumes on schedule.
I follow them out into the hall, my movements practiced and calm, my smile intact.
No one looks at me twice.
No one knows.
And that—more than anything else—is what terrifies me.
Because whatever is coming doesn't need spectacle.
It doesn't need permission.
It has already marked the date.
And it's waiting for me to catch up.