Chapter 2: Skull Candy and the Lollipop Pact
The sterile stone of the Academy gave way without warning. One moment, Crow was leading her down a generic, torch-lit corridor; the next, he pushed open a heavy oak door that shouldn’t have been there, and the world outside was a tunnel of impossible architecture.
They stepped into a corridor of shifting Tori gates.
Each crimson archway stood mere feet from the next, forming a dizzying, infinite perspective that folded in on itself. The wooden beams pulsed with a soft, internal light, and as Angel walked beside Crow, each step warped reality. Passing through a gate didn’t move her forward in a straight line; it twisted the path, sent the previous gate spinning away behind them, and presented a new, identical one ahead. The air smelled of cherry blossoms and static. There was no sound but the rustle of their clothes and a faint, discordant chime that seemed to come from nowhere.
“What is this?” Angel breathed, her head swimming.
“Shortcut,” Crow grunted, not looking at her. His focus was ahead, his jaw tight. “Don’t think about it. Just walk.”
She tried not to. She focused on the scuff on his boot, the frayed edge of his jacket. But the gates kept moving, the space between them breathing. On her tenth step, she saw a brief, impossible reflection in the polished red lacquer of a post—not her face, but a glimpse of the university lecture hall, empty and silent. She blinked and it was gone.
After what felt like an eternity of disorienting steps, they passed through one final gate.
The world snapped into a new, impossible focus.
They stood at the edge of a graveyard that stretched to a flat, painted horizon. The sky was a cheery, artificial azure dotted with puffy white cartoons of clouds. The gravestones were lumpy and exaggerated, some leaning at comical angles, others shaped like giant lollipops or thumbs. The grass was a bright, unreal green.
And on a hillock in the middle of it all, on a throne constructed from oversized, candy-colored bones—pink, baby blue, mint green—lounged a towering figure.
Headmaster Death was nine feet tall. He wore a pristine black suit that contrasted violently with the saccharine landscape. His face was concealed behind a gigantic, grinning skull mask with wide, empty eye sockets and cheekbones painted with rosy red circles. He twirled a lollipop the size of a wagon wheel in one gloved hand. It hummed, a low, dissonant chord that vibrated in Angel’s teeth, and within its swirling red-and-white candy, tiny, screaming faces swirled and melted before reforming.
“What the hell?” Angel whispered, the words crumbling in her dry throat.
Death looked up. A single, glistening drop swelled in the corner of one hollow eye socket and rolled down the porcelain cheek with an almost audible plink.
“WHAT?” he boomed, his voice a jarring, exaggerated cartoon baritone, full of squeaky emphasis and bombastic reverb. “I CHANGED MY APPEARANCE AND VOICE BECAUSE EVERYONE SAYS I’M TOO SCARY!” He gestured broadly with the lollipop. “I CAN’T BE SCARING THE STUDENTS, CAN I? IT’S BAD FOR MORALE!”
The room—the world—started to spin for Angel. The candy-colored bones, the screaming lollipop, the skeletal jester before her. This couldn’t be real. This was a psychotic break, a final fracture from the stress of everything since the lecture hall. Her lungs seized. She couldn’t draw breath. She was standing before a literal cartoon version of Death, and the sheer absurdity of it was more terrifying than any dark throne or shadowed figure. Her knees buckled.
Crow stepped next to her. His hand came down on her shoulder, not in comfort, but in firm anchor. “Calm down, little one. Everything is fine.” His voice was low, a scratch of sanity in the candy-coated madness. “Your spirit energy is doing the macarena. You need to mellow it out before you pass out.”
His hand squeezed. A sensation flowed from his palm, through the fabric of her sweater, and into the knot of panic in her chest. It wasn't warmth or cold. It was a frequency. A steady, resonant thrum that opposed her own frantic vibration. She felt it in her soul, that newly-exposed nerve. His wavelength was jagged, frayed at the edges with a chronic, humiliating pain, but at its core was a stubborn, disciplined stability. He pushed that stability into her, not overriding her panic, but gently leaning against it until her own chaotic energy had no choice but to sync, to slow, to match his slower, more deliberate pulse. Her breath hitched, then deepened. The spinning scenery stabilized into mere, insane clarity.
“There,” Crow said, removing his hand. The connection snapped, leaving her feeling oddly hollow, but stable.
Death watched the entire exchange, his giant skull head tilted. “SEE? HE’S USEFUL! A LITTLE GRUMPY, BUT A GOOD RESONATOR. WHICH BRINGS US TO YOU, ANGEL MICKELSON.”
He leaned forward, the bones of his throne creaking like plastic. The giant lollipop pointed at her like a accusatory finger. “YOU SEE WHAT YOU SHOULDN’T. YOU HEAR WHAT ISN’T THERE. YOU BLOCKED ME OUT OF YOUR MIND, THAT ISN’T NORMAL. LET’S TALK ABOUT NORMAL.”
He snapped his fingers. A holographic screen flickered to life in the air beside his throne, showing schematic diagrams of human figures with glowing auras. “THIS IS THE SHADOW WORLD. IT EXISTS LAYERED ON TOP OF YOURS. MOST PEOPLE ARE BLIND TO IT. MEISTERS ARE NOT. THEY ARE BORN WITH THE ABILITY TO PERCEIVE SOUL WAVELENGTHS—THE ESSENCE, THE VIBRATION OF A BEING. SOME, THE POWERFUL ONES, CAN RESONATE THEIR OWN SOUL WITH ANOTHER’S. USUALLY, WITH A WEAPON.”
The diagram changed, showing a Meister’s wavelength syncing with that of a hammer, a blade, a gun. “WEAPONS ARE PEOPLE TOO. THEIR SOULS MANIFEST A FORM—USUALLY IN LATE TEENS, EARLY ADULTHOOD—THAT CAN BE WIELDED. A MEISTER CHANNELS THEIR POWER THROUGH THAT FORM TO PURIFY CORRUPTION. IT IS A SYMBIOSIS. A PARTNERSHIP.” The screen glitched, the faces of the schematic figures dissolving into static for a second. “YOU… YOU ARE DOING IT BACKWARDS. YOU ARE A RECEIVER, A MIRROR. YOU RESONATE WITH EVERYTHING. IT’S UNTETHERED. DANGEROUS. FOR YOU, AND FOR EVERYONE NEAR YOU.”
Angel found her voice, thin but steady. “So I’m a faulty radio.”
“YOU’RE AN UNSCOPED RIFLE IN A CROWDED ROOM,” Death corrected, his cartoon voice suddenly losing its squeak, dropping to a resonant, serious baritone for a single sentence. Then it bounced back. “SO! YOU WILL JOIN THE ACADEMY! WE WILL STUDY YOU! WE WILL FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU ARE, AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, HOW TO STOP YOU FROM ACCIDENTALLY SUCKING THE SOUL OUT OF YOUR DORM-MATE DURING A NIGHTMARE!”
“Just to be your guinea pig?” Angel scoffed, a flare of her old defiance cutting through the surreality.
“TO BE CONTAINED. UNDERSTOOD. AND PERHAPS, IF YOU DON’T IMPLODE, TRAINED.” Death leaned back. “YOU WILL BE ENROLLED IN THE ‘NOT’ CLASS. THE ‘EAT’ CLASS IS FOR THOSE ON THE GRADUATION TRACK—COLLECTING ONE THOUSAND KESHIN EGGS AND ONE WITCH SOUL. THE ‘NOT’ CLASS IS FOR… OTHER PURPOSES. SUPPORT. RESEARCH. DAMAGE CONTROL.” He waved a dismissive glove. “PEOPLE TYPICALLY SCORE THE BARE MINIMUM ON THE RESONANCE APTITUDE TEST IN THE NOT CLASS—BUT; EVEN WITHOUT AN EXAM, I CAN TELL BASED ON YOUR APPEARANCE.”
The indignity was a cold shock. A bare minimum. A lab rat. It was exactly what she’d feared, what she’d run from her whole life: being a problem to be managed.
“AND YOU,” Death boomed, swiveling his skull toward Crow, “WILL BE HER TUTOR. HER HANDLER. YOUR SOUL, WHILE CRACKED, HAS A STABILIZING EFFECT ON HERS. YOU WILL TEACH HER CONTROL. YOU WILL KEEP HER FROM SELF-DESTRUCTING. YOU WILL REPORT ON HER PROGRESS. TO ME.”
Crow’s entire body went rigid. The fine tremor in his hands became a visible shake. “No. Sir. That’s not a good idea. I’m not… I’m not a teacher. I’m barely—” He cut himself off, biting down on the rest of the sentence.
“YES, WE ARE ALL AWARE OF YOUR NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION!” Death chirped, the tear reappearing. “BUT SHE CALMS DOWN WHEN YOU TOUCH HER. HER WAVELENGTH SETTLES. IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT’S WORKED SO FAR. SO IT’S SETTLED! TAKE HER TO HER QUARTERS IN THE ‘NOT’ WING. GET HER A UNIFORM. TRY NOT TO BREAK HER BEFORE WE CAN RUN TESTS!”
Death shooed them away with a flick of his giant lollipop. The gesture seemed to push at the very air, and the cartoon graveyard began to dissolve at the edges, the Tori gate corridor reasserting itself behind them.
Crow didn’t speak. He just turned on his heel and stalked back toward the infinite gates, his shoulders hunched against a weight that seemed to have just doubled.
Angel had no choice but to follow, the humming silence between them louder than any lecture, her future now a cage painted in the colors of madness and candy bones.
Angel had no choice but to follow, the humming silence between them louder than any lecture, her future now a cage painted in the colors of madness and candy bones.
She was three steps into the disorienting tunnel of Tori gates when she heard it—a dry, ragged clearing of a throat. It didn’t come from Crow. She stopped, the sudden halt making her sway in the scent of cherry blossoms and ozone. She turned.
A man knelt on the polished floor just off the main path, a place her eyes had slid over before. He was maybe fifty, his hair a tired gray, his shoulders slumped under a simple brown tunic. He looked exhausted, his hands resting on his knees as if meditating or simply too weary to stand.
Something about him felt different. The air around him didn’t warp with the gate’s magic; it was still, and heavy. She stared.
Her new perception, that raw and screaming nerve, focused without her consent. The endless crimson arches, Crow’s dark form, the very floor beneath her feet—all of it bled away into a featureless gray. The world vanished except for the man’s soul wavelength.
It wasn’t a shape like the wolf or the serpent she’d seen in the atrium. It was a sound, a feeling. A deep, resonant chord, but one where every note was frayed, sustained past its natural end, vibrating with a profound and lonely ache. It was a bell cracked down the middle, still ringing. And within that dissonance, woven into the fabric of its resonance, was a thread—a single, clear, familiar note that plucked something deep in her own chest. It felt like a memory of a lullaby, heard through a thick wall.
She was drowning in it, this strange, familiar stranger.
The man cleared his throat again, a sharper, intentional sound.
The gray blankness shattered. The Tori gates snapped back into existence, too bright, too red. The man was looking directly at her, his eyes a calm, weathered blue. There was no anger in them, only a deep, patient tiredness. “It’s considered rude,” he said, his voice as rough as sandstone, “to stare at someone’s soul without their consent.”
Heat flooded Angel’s face. “I… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
“You are new,” he stated, not unkindly. He unfolded from his knees, rising with a soft grunt of effort. He was taller than he’d looked. That strange, familiar resonance pulled at her again, a ghost of a feeling she couldn’t name. “It is a difficult thing to control. Like keeping your eyes from blinking.”
“Angel.” Crow’s voice cut between them, flat and final. He hadn’t moved far. He looked at the older man, gave a slight, barely perceptible nod that wasn’t quite respect but wasn’t disregard either. “Kilson. Didn’t see you there.”
“You were preoccupied,” the man, Kilson, said. His weathered eyes flicked to Angel, then back to Crow. “A new student?”
“Something like that.” Crow’s hand closed around Angel’s upper arm, his grip firm. “We have to go. Dorms. Paperwork.”
He pulled her away, back into the warping path of the gates. She stumbled after him, throwing one last glance over her shoulder. Kilson was watching them go, his hands now tucked into his sleeves, that immense, cracked-bell soul radiating a quiet, watchful sorrow. Then a Tori gate passed between them, and he was gone.
“Who was that?” Angel asked as the corridor finally spat them out into a normal, torch-lit hall.
“Professor Kilson,” Crow said, not slowing his pace. “He is one of headmaster Deaths, death weapons . Don’t bother him.” He delivered the information like reading a sterile manifest, offering no room for further questions.
The ‘Not’ Dorms were a testament to institutional neglect. The hallway was a dull, industrial beige, the carpet thin and stained with ghosts of old spills. Crow stopped at a numbered door, shoved it open with his shoulder, and gestured inside. “Home sweet Home. Don’t get comfortable.”
It was a cell. A narrow bed with a thin blanket, a battered desk, a closet, a door leading to a tiny bathroom. A stack of folded black and grey garments sat on the desk—the ‘Not’ uniform. It smelled of dust and lemon-scented disinfectant. It was, she realized with a sinking heart, cleaner and quieter than any room she’d ever had. The horror of that truth was almost worse than the cartoon graveyard.
“Get changed. Be ready in 5 minutes,” Crow said, leaning against the doorframe and looking at the ceiling.
She changed in the bathroom, the fabric of the uniform scratchy and impersonal. It fit poorly, the skirt too short, the jacket tight across her shoulders, and the shirt tight across her chest. She looked like a cosplayer playing dress-up. When she emerged, she set her old clothes on the bed while she tried to pull her skirt down, he looked her up and down, snorted, and pushed off the wall. “Next. The ring.”
The training ring was not in some grand arena. It was a windowless, circular room deep in the academy’s underbelly, its padded floors scarred with burns and cuts, the air thick with the sweat of countless failures. A few other students were drilling in corners, their movements a blur of controlled power. They paid no attention to the new arrival in the ill-fitting ‘Not’ uniform.
Crow walked to the center of a marked circle and turned. “Control starts with the vessel. Your body is a leaking sieve, screaming your soul’s location to anything with half a perception. We plug the leaks. Run the perimeter.”
“What?”
“Run. The. Perimeter.” He pointed a blunt finger at the edge of the circular room. “Until I say stop.”
It was simple. It was brutal. She started running. The first lap was okay. The second, her breathing hitched. By the fifth, a stitch like a hot knife gouged her side. Her lungs were rags, her throat a raw, burning pipe. She’d spent her life being still, being small, hiding in libraries and cramped jobs. Her cardio was a myth.
She tried to be useful. She focused on the rhythm of her feet, on the sound of her own ragged breath, on the distant, efficient sounds of other students training. She pushed, her vision spotting at the edges. The uniform was a soggy prison.
“Don’t you dare stop,” Crow called, his voice echoing in the cavernous room. He hadn’t moved from the center. He was just watching, a statue of judgment.
Tears of sheer, humiliating frustration welled hot behind her eyes. They mixed with the sweat stinging her eyelids. She wasn’t crying from the pain, not really. She was crying because this was it—her great, terrifying power had led her here, to this moment of utter, public inadequacy. She was a resonance anomaly who couldn’t run a mile. She tried so hard not to let them fall, swallowing against the burn in her throat and the hotter pressure in her sinuses.
She failed. A sob escaped with a gasp, then another. She kept her feet moving, the world a watery, humiliating blur of padded walls and indifferent strangers. The tears carved clean tracks through the sweat on her cheeks. She didn’t make a sound beyond her ruined breathing, but they fell, a silent testament to her breaking point.
“Enough.”
She staggered to a halt, doubling over, hands on her knees, dripping sweat and tears onto the mat. Her entire body shuddered with the effort to pull air into her screaming lungs.
Crow walked over. He didn’t offer a hand. He just looked down at the damp patch forming beneath her. “Your body is weak. Your control is non-existent. Your soul is a spotlight. Everything here will see you coming.” He paused, letting the truth of it sink into her bones alongside the lactic acid. “Tomorrow, we start earlier. We run twice as far. Eventually, your vessel won’t betray you the moment you need to think.”
He turned to leave, then glanced back, his gaze lingering on her tear-streaked face. For a fraction of a second, the cold drill-instructor mask slipped, and she saw it again—that flicker of shared, fractured understanding, the madness held barely in check. It was almost worse than his contempt. “Clean yourself up. Find the cafeteria. Try not to get lost, and be be here again before sunrise.”
He left her there, trembling in the center of the ring, utterly alone and profoundly seen. The echoes of training around her felt like applause for her disgrace. She straightened up, wiping her face with a scratchy uniform sleeve, the salt of her tears a sharp, familiar taste. It was the same flavor as every silent cry in every dark room she’d ever known. The cage, it seemed, had many rooms, and she was just learning the layout.
The cage, it seemed, had many rooms, and she was just learning the layout.
The first week passed in a blur of agonizing routine, a mechanical procession of pain that stripped her down to raw nerve and stubborn will. Angel had never hated anyone in her life, nobody, not even her adoptive father, but in this moment, she decided that she hated Crow.
The past few days he had made her get up at the ass crack of dawn and run well past her burnt lungs and jelly legs. Then, against her will still, she was forced to attend classes on battle strategies, freshman classes about soul resonance, Meister theory 101, and training after lunch, another few classes, and then Crow made her do strength training in the evening. Every night she barely had enough energy to muster a shower, and then she blacked out for the night, being woken by an alarm on the night stand every morning without fail. Her closet had been stocked with some of her clothes from home somehow and extra uniforms that somehow got washed everyday. This had to be some form of medieval torture.
She collapsed into the bed on Friday night. Finally, the weekend. Hopefully her captors would be merciful enough to let her sleep in tomorrow.
She was wrong.
The alarm screamed at the same pre-dawn hour. Crow was at her door, his knuckles a brutal metronome against the wood until she stumbled out. He wordlessly led her not to the track or the weight room, but to a secluded, sun-dappled clearing within the Academy’s impossible internal biosphere. The air smelled of damp earth and pine.
“Blocking,” he said, settling into a loose stance. “Today, you learn to stop a thing from hitting you.”
Angel grunts as she’s thrown backwards onto the grass. She stares up at the tree canopy sky, sweat beading down her forehead while the world spins. They had been at this for over an hour, Crow was teaching her basic blocking techniques while verbally giving her lessons on soul types and things about resonance with Weapons, also correcting every single move she makes.
“Your forearm is a door, not a wet noodle. Make it solid.” His own strike was a controlled tap, yet it still sent shocks up her bone. “A keshin’s touch doesn’t just bruise. It corrodes. It infects. A weak block lets the madness in.”
She surged up, deflecting his next jab. Her arms screamed in protest.
“Better. Now, soul types. You’re broadcasting a pure harmonic, all treble, no bass. Like a lighthouse. Annoying.” He feinted low, swept her legs. She hit the dirt again, the wind punching out of her. “Weapons have complementary frequencies. A blade soul is sharp, focused. A shield soul is dense, dampening. My job—a Meister’s job—is to match them, conduct them. Your job is to not be a lighthouse.”
It had been hard for Angel to grasp the concept that she was not fully human. Crow explains it as them having drops of angelic blood, or potentially being like Angels of Death, or even just angelic demon hunters. Depends on your beliefs.
“Which is it?” she panted, scrambling back to her feet, her knees grass-stained and trembling.
“How the fuck should I know?” He didn’t let her rest, advancing again. “The archives are a mess. Old texts call our kind ‘Watchers.’ Some say we were meant to observe, not interfere with the mundane world, but we all have one basic instinct and that is to destroy keshin eggs before they turn into a full blooded keshin.” Angel is too tired to ask what a full blooded Keshin is
She had to admit though, her body was changing quicker than that of a human. In just a week she had already gained some muscle in her arms and her waist line seemed less strained in her uniform. The transformation was eerie, visible, a factory recall on her very biology. It felt less like growth and more like an unveiling, as if the person she’d been was just a poorly-fitting casing.
She begged Crow for a break, and he refused.
“You think a keshin cares you’re tired? You think the madness checks your schedule?” His voice was a flat, relentless grind. “Your body is adapting. Your soul is a screaming infant. Sync them. Now.”
He came at her again, not with a punch, but with an open-handed push aimed at her center. Instinctively, she crossed her arms, bracing. This time, she didn’t just use muscle. She thought of that feeling in the Headmaster’s office, of Crow’s stabilizing frequency leaning against her chaos. She imagined her own wild energy not as a light, but as a wall, dense and quiet.
His palm connected.
There was a soft thump, not of impact, but of pressure. The air between his hand and her forearms visibly shimmered, a heat-haze distortion. She skidded back on the grass, but didn’t fall. The block had held. A weird, hollow silence followed, the birds in the canopy having gone still.
Crow lowered his hand. He stared at the space where their energy had met, his expression unreadable. That familiar, fine tremor was back in his fingers.
“What was that?” Angel whispered, examining her own arms. They hummed, a low internal vibration.
“A start,” he said, his voice stripped of its earlier contempt. It was just tired. “You dampened your output. You used your resonance as a barrier, not a beacon.” He turned away, running a hand through his hair. “That’s enough for today.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said.” He didn’t look back. “Go. Shower. Eat. The lighthouse is dimmer. For now, that’s the win.”
He walked away, leaving her standing in the clearing, her body throbbing with a new kind of ache. The hatred she’d nourished all morning coiled inside her, but now it had nowhere to land. It mingled with a confused gratitude and a deep, unsettling fear. She wasn’t just learning to block a punch. She was learning to contain herself. And as she felt the strange, solid quiet settling in her bones, she wondered what, exactly, she would have to become to survive it.