The Shadow That Waits
The fog rolls in from the ruins first, before anything else—before the gates, before the whispers, before the letter crumples further in Kai's fist. It drifts low over the broken stones that jut from the earth like the ribs of some vast buried creature, curling around Ashfall Academy's spires as if the mist itself is reluctant to touch the place. Kai stands at the base of the hill, looking up at iron gates twice his height, wrought into shapes he doesn't recognize: spirals that fold into themselves, sigils worn smooth by centuries of rain. Beyond them, the academy rises in defiance of everything around it—glass towers threaded with steel, gleaming even under this bruised gray sky, and beneath that gleam, older than the metal and older than the mist, crumbling stone walls that look as though they've been swallowed by the modern structure rather than replaced by it.
He has seen the pictures. The brochure his father never opened, the website Kai scrolled through alone at two in the morning, the news footage that used his mother's death as backdrop for a segment about "surging curse-related incidents nationwide." None of it prepared him for the way the building seems to *breathe*,…
