The locker room smelled like mildew, sweat, and the coppery tang of blood—his blood.
Ethan Cross sat hunched on the cold tile floor, his back against the rusted metal locker that had become his prison for the past forty-five minutes. His left eye was swollen shut, a pulsing orb of purple and crimson that throbbed in time with his heartbeat. Through his right eye, he watched droplets of crimson fall from his split lip, each one splattering against the white ceramic like a macabre metronome counting down to something final.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
"Look at him," Derek Volt's voice echoed off the concrete walls, rich with that familiar cocktail of amusement and contempt. The captain of the wrestling team stood silhouetted against the fluorescent lights, his broad shoulders blocking the exit like a gatekeeper to hell. "He's actually crying. Pathetic."
Ethan wasn't crying. The moisture on his cheeks was involuntary, a physiological response to the nasal fracture he'd suffered when Derek's knee had connected with his face thirty minutes ago. But he didn't bother correcting them. Correction led to more pain. Explanation led to escalation. Silence was the only armor he had left, and even that was rusted through.
"Check his bag," Derek commanded, snapping his fingers.
Two pairs of hands—belonging to Derek's lieutenants, Marcus and Joel—roughly yanked Ethan's tattered backpack from his trembling grip. They spilled the contents across the floor: a water-stained physics textbook, a lunch bag containing a squashed peanut butter sandwich, a notebook filled with sketches of things Ethan could never have, and a worn photograph.
The photograph.
Derek's boot descended on the image before Ethan could react, grinding the glossy paper into the filthy floor. It was a picture of Ethan and Sophia, taken ten years ago when they were six. They were at the city park, her blonde hair catching the sunlight, his arm in a cast from when he'd defended her from a stray dog. She was smiling at the camera. He was smiling at her.
"Oh, look," Derek sneered, lifting his boot to reveal the smeared, torn faces. "The little rat still carries around pictures of Ashford. That's cute. Really cute."
The laughter that followed wasn't human. It was the sound of hyenas circling wounded prey.
"She doesn't remember you, you know," Derek continued, crouching down to Ethan's level. His breath smelled like mint and something acrid, chemical. "Sophia told me. Last night. At my place." He leaned closer, his whisper a blade dragged across Ethan's psyche. "She said you're like a stain she can't wash out. A reminder of when her family was poor and pathetic, just like yours."
The words shouldn't have hurt anymore. Ethan had heard variations of them for three years. But somehow, they always found fresh flesh to carve.
"Please," Ethan rasped, his voice barely audible. It was the first word he'd spoken all day.
"Please?" Derek mocked, standing up. He adjusted his letterman jacket, the fabric expensive, the stitching perfect. "Please what? Please stop? Please leave you alone?" He laughed, a sharp, barking sound. "You don't get it, Cross. You're not a person to us. You're a thing. A stress toy. And toys don't get to say 'please.'"
The final kick connected with Ethan's ribs—specifically the third and fourth ribs on his left side, a precision strike that Derek had perfected over months of practice. Ethan felt something crack, a sharp, bright pain that made his vision whiten at the edges.
Then they were gone, their laughter fading down the hallway, leaving him alone with the smell of urine—his own, he realized with distant horror—and the broken pieces of his life scattered across the floor.
Ethan didn't know how long he sat there. Time had become fluid, meaningless. Eventually, he gathered his things, stuffing the ruined photograph into his pocket like a holy relic. He avoided the mirror above the sinks as he washed the blood from his face, but he caught a glimpse anyway: a scarecrow of a boy, sixteen years old but looking twelve, all sharp angles and sunken eyes. His black hair hung lank and greasy over his forehead. His uniform—secondhand, ill-fitting—hung off his gaunt frame like a shroud.
Skin and bones, he thought. That's all I am. Skin and bones and broken things.
The walk home was a blur of autumn rain and gray skies. He didn't bother with an umbrella. The cold seeped into his bones, mingling with the pain in his side, creating a symphony of suffering that felt almost deserved.
His mother was working the night shift at the hospital. His father was at the bottom of a bottle somewhere downtown, probably. The apartment was empty, silent, filled with the ghosts of conversations that never happened and love that had evaporated years ago.
Ethan moved with mechanical precision. He showered, the water running pink as it washed away the dried blood. He changed into clean clothes—his only other pair of jeans, a faded hoodie that had belonged to his father when the man was still recognizable as human. He wrote a note, short and devastating in its simplicity:
I'm sorry. I tried. The money from my savings account should cover the cremation. Don't look for me. It's better this way.
He left it on the kitchen table, weighed down by a salt shaker.
Then he walked.
Not to the bridge. Not to the pills. Ethan had researched this. He wanted certainty, finality, a period at the end of a miserable sentence. He walked to the old East Wing of Havenridge High—a condemned section of the school scheduled for demolition next month. The building stood like a rotting tooth against the darkening sky, four stories of crumbling brick and broken windows.
The roof access was supposed to be locked, but Ethan had discovered the loose panel in the fence months ago, during another dark night when he'd come here to be alone. He climbed the stairwell, each step sending lances of pain through his fractured ribs, until he reached the roof door.
It opened with a scream of rusted hinges.
The wind hit him immediately, a frigid gale that whipped his hair and stung his eyes. The roof was flat, covered in gravel and puddles that reflected the bruised purple of the twilight sky. He walked to the edge, his sneakers crunching on the loose stones.
Four stories down.
Enough to ensure there would be no hospital visit. No recovery. No return to the locker room, to the whispers, to the way Sophia looked through him in the hallways like he was glass.
Ethan stood at the precipice and looked down. The parking lot below was empty, save for a few abandoned cars and the shadows of the oak trees that lined the property. It looked peaceful from up here. Quiet.
He thought about his life, trying to find something worth staying for. His mother's tired eyes, yes, but she would be better off without the burden of him. His dreams of being an artist, but those had died when Derek had smashed his drawing hand last semester—the bones had healed crooked, and now he could barely hold a pencil for more than ten minutes without shaking.
Sophia.
No. She was gone. Had been gone since they were ten, when her father invented some app and moved the family to the Heights, leaving Ethan behind in the mud. The girl he'd loved—not romantically, not then, but with the pure, fierce love of a child who had found his other half—had become a stranger in designer clothes.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to the wind.
He stepped forward, his toes curling over the edge, his center of gravity shifting into the void.
"Jumping won't fix it," a voice said behind him.
Ethan froze. Not because he was startled—he was beyond startle—but because the voice didn't belong. It was melodic but edged with steel, a contralto that cut through the wind like a knife through silk.
He didn't turn around. "Go away."
"No," the voice replied. Footsteps crunched on the gravel, approaching slowly. "I just transferred here today. First day, actually. And you know what they say about first impressions? I'd rather not start my tenure at Havenridge by watching someone paint the pavement."
"Then don't watch."
The footsteps stopped. Ethan could feel her presence behind him, close enough that he caught the scent—ozone and rain, like the air after a lightning strike, mixed with something darker, something that smelled like old books and shadows.
"My name is Luna Vermillion," she said. "And I'm going to give you two choices, Ethan Cross."
He flinched. She knew his name.
"Choice one," she continued, her voice calm, conversational, as if they were discussing cafeteria menus rather than suicide. "You jump. You die. Your mother finds your body—or what's left of it—tomorrow morning. Your father drinks himself to death within a year out of guilt he never showed you in life. Derek Volt and his friends laugh about it, use it as a scary story to tell freshmen, and forget you existed by graduation. The world spins on. Nothing changes."
Ethan's hands curled into fists. The truth of her words was a fresh laceration.
"Choice two," Luna said, and now her voice dropped, becoming something else entirely. It thrummed with power, with the promise of storms contained in skin. "You step back from that edge. You let me show you something. And in six months, Derek Volt won't dare look you in the eye. In a year, you'll be strong enough to break him in half without breaking a sweat. In two years, you'll be strong enough to break the world."
Silence stretched between them, taut as a wire.
Ethan turned around.
She stood ten feet away, and the first thing he noticed was that she didn't look like she belonged at Havenridge. While the school's elite wore pristine uniforms and carefully cultivated appearances, this girl looked like she'd stepped out of a gothic painting. She wore the uniform—plaid skirt, white blouse, navy blazer—but she wore it like armor. Her hair was silver, not the silver of age, but the silver of moonlight on water, cut in a jagged bob that framed a face that was simultaneously beautiful and terrifying.
Her eyes were the color of amethysts, and they glowed.
Not metaphorically. Not a trick of the light. Her pupils were ringed with a faint, violet luminescence that pulsed in time with a rhythm Ethan could feel in his teeth.
"Who are you?" Ethan asked, his voice cracking.
"I'm the girl who sees you," Luna said simply. She took a step forward, and Ethan saw that she was holding something—a notebook, black leather, embossed with a symbol that made Ethan's eyes water when he tried to focus on it. "I see the Vitalis boiling inside you, Ethan. I see the pressure. The fracture lines. You're not weak. You're a forge that hasn't been lit."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Yes, you do." Another step. She was close enough now that he could see the scars—thin, silver lines that ran along her jaw and disappeared beneath her collar. "You feel it, don't you? The static in your fingers when you're angry? The way the shadows seem too thick around you, like they're waiting for something? The way electricity messes up around you—streetlights flickering, phones dying?"
Ethan's breath caught. He had felt those things. He'd thought he was going crazy.
"You're not insane," Luna said, reading his expression. "You're Dual-Affinitive. Do you know how rare that is? One in ten million. Most people who can channel Vitalis have one elemental alignment. Fire. Water. Earth. Air. Light. Dark. Electricity." She listed them off on her fingers. "You have two. Shadow and Storm. Umbra and Fulgor. The Dark and The Flash."
"You're crazy," Ethan whispered, but he didn't step back toward the edge.
"Am I?" Luna smiled, and it was a dangerous expression, full of sharp teeth and sharper intellect. She raised her right hand, palm up. "Then tell me, Ethan Cross—what am I doing?"
The air between her fingers began to shimmer. Then crackle. Then scream.
Blue-white electricity arced across her palm, not the static shock of a carpet on a dry day, but a living thing—a serpent of lightning that coiled around her wrist, casting stark shadows across her face. The smell of ozone intensified, making the hair on Ethan's arms stand up.
But that wasn't all.
The shadows at her feet—the long shadows cast by the setting sun—they began to move. They writhed like living things, reaching up to twine around her ankles, her calves, dark tendrils that absorbed the light rather than blocking it. The shadows whispered, and Ethan could almost hear the words, promises of oblivion and power and terrible, beautiful freedom.
"I carry Fulgor," Luna said, her voice resonating with the hum of the electricity. "But I was trained to recognize the signs of Umbra. The way the dark gathers around you like a cloak. The way you flinch from the light not because it hurts your eyes, but because it diminishes you. And the lightning..." She closed her fist, extinguishing the electricity with a sound like a thunderclap. "The way the storms call to you. Haven't you noticed? It always rains when you're at your worst. The sky weeps for what you're becoming."
Ethan looked at his own hands. They were thin, pale, trembling. But now that she mentioned it, he could feel it—a pressure behind his eyes, a vibration in his marrow. The wind picked up, whipping around them both, and Ethan realized with a start that it wasn't touching Luna. The air bent around her, charged with potential.
"I can teach you," Luna said, her voice dropping to an intimate whisper. "I can show you how to take that pain—that exquisite, crushing pain—and turn it into power. Not the power of the fist, though you'll have that too. The power of the storm that breaks mountains. The power of the shadow that swallows cities."
"Why?" Ethan asked. The word tore from his throat like a hook. "Why would you help me? You don't know me."
Luna's expression shifted, something haunted passing behind those glowing eyes. "Because three years ago, I stood where you're standing. On a different roof, in a different city, staring down at different pavement. And someone found me. Someone showed me that death is the easy choice. Living—that takes real courage. Living with the intent to become something more than a victim." She extended her hand. "Besides, I need you, Ethan Cross. There are things moving in this city. Dark things. And a Dual-Affinitive... you're a weapon I can't afford to waste."
Ethan looked at her hand. Small, pale, scarred across the knuckles. Then he looked down at the parking lot, four stories down. He imagined the impact. The silence that would follow.
Then he imagined Derek's face. He imagined the power to stand up. To fight back. To stop being the thing they wiped their shoes on.
"I'm broken," Ethan said, his voice shaking. "You don't understand. They broke me. My ribs, my hand, my... me. I'm not fixable."
"Good," Luna said fiercely. "I don't want to fix you. I want to forge you. Broken metal can be reforged into steel, Ethan. But whole metal? It just stays soft."
The wind howled. The shadows stretched. And Ethan Cross, sixteen years old, bleeding inside and out, looked at the girl with lightning in her veins and made a choice.
He took her hand.
The moment their skin touched, the world changed.
It started as a tremor—a vibration that began in Ethan's chest and radiated outward. Then it became a roar. The air around them exploded with static charge, making the gravel on the roof levitate slightly, suspended in a field of electromagnetic force. Ethan's vision tunneled, and he saw—not with his eyes, but with something deeper—he saw the Vitalis.
It was everywhere. A web of light and dark that underlay reality. And inside him, oh god, inside him were two wells of power that had been corked, pressurized, building pressure for sixteen years of suffering.
The first was black. Not the black of night, but the black of nothing—the color of the space between stars, of the bottom of the ocean, of the inside of a coffin. It was cold, absolute zero made manifest, and it reached out with tendrils of shadow that whispered of extinction and the peace of the void.
The second was violet-white, ultraviolet and blinding. It was the scream of electrons torn from their atoms, the fury of the storm contained in a bottle, the kinetic promise of destruction at the speed of light. It crackled and danced and demanded release.
The two forces met in Ethan's heart, and instead of destroying each other, they intertwined like DNA strands, like lovers, like predator and prey locked in eternal dance.
Ethan screamed.
It wasn't a sound of pain. It was a sound of birth.
The shockwave threw Luna back ten feet, her body skidding across the gravel until she caught herself in a crouch, eyes wide. Ethan felt his feet leave the ground—not jumping, not falling, but hovering, suspended by the maelstrom of power that was tearing through his meridians, awakening nodes of energy he didn't know he possessed.
First Nucleus: Root. The base of his spine ignited with cold fire.
Second Nucleus: Sacral. The power forked upward, branching like lightning.
Third Nucleus: Solar Plexus. The shadow and storm met there, creating a singularity of potential.
His body began to change.
It wasn't instantaneous. It was a promise written in flesh. The Vitalis flooded his atrophied muscles, repairing the micro-tears, the scar tissue, the years of neglect. His bones densified, becoming harder than steel. His nervous system rewired itself, synapses firing at lightspeed. And beneath his skin, the muscle fibers multiplied, divided, strengthened.
Ethan screamed again, and this time lightning answered.
A bolt of violet-black lightning—not white, not blue, but a color that shouldn't exist—lanced down from the cloudless sky and struck the roof three feet from where he hovered. The concrete exploded, sending shrapnel flying, but none touched Ethan. The shadows had coalesced around him into a sphere of absolute darkness, absorbing the debris, drinking the light.
Then, as quickly as it began, it ended.
Ethan collapsed to his knees, gasping, steam rising from his skin. He looked down at his hands and saw that they were shaking—but not with weakness. With contained power. The veins on his forearms stood out, pulsing with dark light and electric purple. He was still thin, still wasted, but beneath the skin, he could feel it—the potential for mass, for strength, for violence.
"What..." he choked out. "What was that?"
"Awakening," Luna said, approaching cautiously. Her expression was awed, reverent, and slightly terrified. "Dual-Awakening, actually. I've never seen it happen spontaneously. Usually, it takes years of meditation to unlock one element. You just unlocked two simultaneously because..." She paused, her eyes scanning him. "Because you were willing to die. The Vitalis responds to extremes, Ethan. To the edge of the cliff. You stepped back from literal death and into metaphorical rebirth."
Ethan touched his side where his ribs had been broken. The pain was gone. Replaced by a dull ache of healing so rapid it itched. He touched his face—his eye was no longer swollen. He could see perfectly.
"I don't feel strong," he said, though he felt different. Heavier. Denser.
"You aren't. Not yet," Luna said, extending her hand again to help him up. This time, when they touched, there was no explosion—just a resonance, like two tuning forks of the same pitch. "That was just the ignition. The spark. Now comes the work. The pain. The training."
She pulled him to his feet, and Ethan was surprised to find he was now eye-level with her. Had he grown? Or had he just stopped hunching?
"The power you felt? The shadow and the lightning?" Luna's eyes were serious, deadly serious. "It's going to try to consume you. Umbra will whisper that you should disappear, become nothing, merge with the void. Fulgor will scream that you should destroy everything that ever hurt you. You have to master them, or they'll master you."
"And if I can't?" Ethan asked.
"Then you'll become a monster," Luna said simply. "A Wraith. I've seen it happen. But I don't think that'll be your fate." She smiled, sharp and certain. "Because you stepped back, Ethan Cross. When it mattered, you chose to fight instead of surrender. That takes a special kind of strength."
She turned toward the stairwell, her silver hair whipping in the wind. "Come on. We need to get you off this roof before someone calls the cops about the lightning strike. And we need to start your training. Tonight."
Ethan looked back at the edge of the roof. The drop that had called to him moments ago now seemed insignificant. Small. He could see the pattern of cracks in the pavement below, could count the leaves on the oak trees, could hear the heartbeat of the city itself vibrating through the stone.
He wasn't fixed. He wasn't okay. The despair was still there, a dark river in his soul, but now it had a companion. A bridge across the water. A weapon.
"Where are we going?" he asked, following her.
"Somewhere safe," Luna said. "Somewhere we can bleed in peace. The first rule of Vitalis training: progress requires sacrifice. Blood for power. Pain for strength. Are you willing to pay that price, Ethan? To become something more than human?"
Ethan looked at his hands one more time. He flexed them, and for a split second, he saw the shadow pool in his palms and the electricity dance between his fingers.
"Yes," he said. And for the first time in three years, his voice didn't shake. "I'm willing."
As they descended into the darkness of the stairwell, the storm clouds that had been gathering on the horizon—drawn by his awakening—finally broke. Rain fell on Havenridge, washing away the blood on the locker room floor, soaking the note on the kitchen table until the ink ran like tears, and heralding the arrival of something new.
Something dangerous.
Something that would not be broken again.