Chapter 38: The nightmare's aftermath finds Alyce drenched in sweat, her weapon-form flickering uncontrollably as she clutches the sheets - when Angel's gentle hand presses against her chest, their souls resonating in a soothing harmony that slowly extinguishes the blue flames licking up Alyce's arms.
The nightmare didn’t fade so much as detonate.
One moment Alyce was drowning in it—Asura’s dark eyes pits of nothing, his tendrils of darkness whipping around Angel, who lifted Alyce’s scythe-form like a shield. A searing, soul-deep pain radiated through her entire metallic being, a shriek of violated steel. Then Angel threw her aside, a protective, sacrificial shove. Angel took the killing blow. The Kishin’s face melted and reformed—Crow’s silver-eyed snarl, back to Asura’s despair, then to Medusa’s cold smile, to Arachne’s predatory glee, cycling through every enemy that had ever made Angel bleed. Angel bled out now, a dark pool spreading on impossible stone, her eyes losing their light.
Then the other voices came. Her parents, faces blurred with disappointment. Her brother, leaning on his crutch, the stump of his leg a brutal accusation. “You couldn’t even hold your form.” “Clumsy, useless girl.” “Now you’ll fail your meister too.” “Not good enough.” The words weren’t shouts; they were a tidal wave, filling her ears, her mouth, her soul, crushing her into a speck of worthless dust.
She woke with a choked gasp, tangled in a damp nest of sheets. Her hands were on fire. Literally. Blue flames licked up her forearms, the sharp edges of scythe-blades partially formed from her fingertips, gleaming in the dim emergency light of their dorm. She gasped, squeezing her eyes shut, forcing the transformation back. The fire snuffed out, leaving behind the smell of ozone and a phantom ache in her bones.
Across the room, Angel slept on. Peacefully. Her breathing was even, the tight lines of pain that had marked her face for weeks finally softened. She looked healthier, the frailty receding. She’d almost died so many times. For her.
Alyce slid out of bed. The digital clock glowed 3:17 a.m. The sterile quiet of the Second Year EAT dorm pressed in on her, a silence full of whispers. She pulled on a pair of shorts, shoved her feet into sneakers, and grabbed her gray hoodie, yanking it on and tucking her still-tingling hands deep into the pockets.
She didn’t think. She just moved.
The chilly night air in the courtyard was a slap. It cleared nothing. Her feet carried her on autopilot, past the sleek dorm towers, into the older academic wing with its gargoyle shadows. Downstairs. The air grew colder, damper. She passed the restricted section entrance, where a guard in a stiff-backed chair snored softly, head lolling. Her sneakers made no sound on the stone.
She stood before Asura’s cell door. The heavy iron looked impregnable.
He needs to die. The thought was a cold, clean stone in her gut. All the suffering. Every nightmare. Every time Angel had ended up in the infirmary because of the chaos that followed him, even freed. He was the root. Pluck the root, burn the disease. Simple.
A flicker of Angel’s face, pleading and gentle as she embraced the broken Kishin on the balcony, tried to surface. Alyce brushed it off like lint.
She placed a hand on the cold metal door, half-expecting an alarm. Instead, there was a soft, metallic clunk. The lock disengaged. She stared at her hand, then at the door. Had she done that? Some latent weapon resonance with the academy’s old magic? Or had someone, or something, left it open?
She pushed. It swung inward without a sound.
The smell hit her first. Ammonia sharpness of urine, underpinned by the sweet-rot scent of unwashed flesh and hopelessness. It was dark, only a sliver of hall light cutting across the floor.
He was lying in a heap on the bare stone, wrapped in a thin, stained blanket. They’d just dumped him here after the balcony. No care. No hygiene. If Angel knew… but Angel didn’t know. Angel saw his soul. Alyce saw the filth.
He stirred at the light. Turned his head slowly. His dark eyes found her in the doorway. They held no surprise, no fear. Just a vast, exhausted recognition.
“Are you here to kill me, Alyce?”
His voice was a dry rustle, worse than on the balcony. Thirsty.
She stepped inside, letting the door close partially behind her. The darkness settled again, her eyes adjusting. She stared down at the pathetic creature, the source of myth and terror. Her fists clenched in her pockets. This was it. She could transform her arm right now. One clean swing. It would be a mercy, really.
“All you do is cause pain,” she said, her voice tighter than she wanted.
“Yes,” he whispered to the wall.
She knelt.
Not to strike. She let out a shaky breath she hadn’t known she was holding and shrugged off the small backpack she’d instinctively grabbed on her way out. It had a canteen of water, a cloth, a bar of harsh lye soap from the communal showers, a thin towel.
She uncapped the canteen. “Here.”
He didn’t move. She nudged his shoulder with it. Slowly, he pushed himself up onto trembling elbows and took it. His hands were shockingly thin, the nails long and grimy. He drank with desperate, greedy gulps, water sloshing down his chin and neck.
“Slowly, idiot,” she grumbled. “You’ll puke.”
He slowed, finishing the canteen. He handed it back, a faint tremor in his fingers. “Thank you.”
“Don’t.” She wet the cloth from a second, smaller bottle. “Sit up. Against the wall.”
He obeyed, moving with the stiff, painful care of something long broken. She knelt beside him, the smell overpowering. She worked methodically, her face a mask of fierce concentration. She started with his face, wiping away the grime and dried salt tracks from old tears. The cloth came away black. She wet it again. His hair, matted and lank, was next. She poured water carefully, working the soap in with rough, practical fingers, rinsing it as best she could with the remaining water.
She didn’t speak. He didn’t either. The only sounds were the drip of water, the scratch of cloth on skin, her occasional annoyed huff.
She moved to his hands, scrubbing each finger clean. The filth was centuries old, ground into the cracks. She saw the scars there, fine and white, over his knuckles. Weapon-calluses, from a time before madness.
“You were a weapon,” she said, not a question.
“A glaive,” he murmured, his eyes closed. “A long time ago.”
“What happened to your meister?”
A long pause. The damp air grew heavier. “I consumed her,” he said, the words hollow. “The fear… it was a voice. It told me she would leave. It told me to make her part of me so she never could. I listened.”
Alyce’s scrubbing slowed. She saw her brother’s leg again, the shocking spray of blood, her own childhood scream. A different kind of consumption. “Does the voice ever shut up?”
“For eight hundred years, it was the only voice. Now… it is quieter. Since…” He didn’t finish. Since Angel.
She nodded, a short, sharp jerk of her head. She understood voices that didn’t shut up. She moved to his feet, filthy and bare. The task was clinical, distancing herself from the reality of who he was. This was just a maintenance job. Cleaning a tool. Purging a stain.
When she was done, she tossed the filthy cloth and the empty canteens into her pack. He looked marginally more human, though pitifully thin and draped in damp, cleanish rags. The cell still stank, but the immediate miasma around him had lessened.
She stood up, her knees cracking. “They’re neglecting you.”
“It is a cell. Its purpose is not comfort.”
“Bullshit. Even prisoners get water.” She zipped her pack with angry force. “She’s trying to fix you. The least they could do is not let you rot in your own piss.”
He looked up at her, his dark eyes catching a sliver of light. “You came to kill a monster. Why did you not?”
Alyce slung the pack over her shoulder. She looked at the door, then back at him, her freckled face stark in the gloom. “Because she wouldn’t.” The admission cost her. “And because the monster I saw in my nightmare… he wasn’t just you.” It was Crow, it was Medusa, it was her family, it was the voice in her own head. Killing the one in front of her wouldn’t change that.
She turned to leave.
“Alyce.”
She stopped, hand on the door.
“The school,” he said, his rustle-voice barely audible. “It is not just a school. The madness here… it is not an accident. It is a garden. They are growing something.”
A cold trickle, unrelated to the dungeon’s chill, went down her spine. “What are you talking about?”
“The lines… the power lines in the walls. They hum a certain frequency. It whispers to the damaged parts of the soul. It prunes some branches. Encourages others.” He leaned his head back against the stone. “I have heard its song for weeks. It is very old. And very hungry.”
She stared at him, her heart hammering against her ribs. Was this more madness? Or a warning from someone who’d been listening to madness for centuries?
“Tell Angel,” he whispered, and closed his eyes, spent.
Alyce fled. She pulled the door shut behind her, the lock clicking back into place with a finality that sounded like a tomb sealing. She passed the sleeping guard, her sneakers slapping now on the stairs as she ran, taking them two at a time, the chilly night air no longer a relief but a carrier of whispers. A garden. They are growing something.
She burst back into their dorm room, breathing hard. Angel hadn’t moved. Still sleeping. Still peaceful.
Alyce stood there, shivering in her hoodie, smelling of soap and dungeon, staring at the one person who had ever looked at her and seen a weapon worth holding. The warning echoed in her skull, mingling with the nightmare voices.
She couldn’t tell her. Not yet. Angel was finally getting better. She had enough to carry.
But as Alyce crawled back into her cold, tangled sheets, she knew one thing with absolute certainty. Her job wasn’t just to be a blade anymore. It was to be a shield. And she’d failed at that once, horribly. She wouldn’t fail again.
Even if the thing she had to guard Angel from was the very academy that trained them.
The next morning in the training yard was a study in silent friction. Alyce braced herself as Angel swung her scythe-form hilt again, the wood-and-steel weight cutting a wobbly arc through the air. A sharp grimace twisted Angel’s face, a telltale flare of pain in her jawline as she overexerted her still-healing core.
“You’re favoring the left side again,” Crow’s voice called from his shadowed perch on the bleachers, not even looking up from his scroll. “Your arc is sloppy. It needs to be a clean crescent, not a ragged hook.”
Alyce had already scolded her twice about pushing too hard. “Your ligaments are still knitting, you idiot,” she’d hissed earlier. Angel had just brushed her off with a tight smile and a stubborn, “I can do this.”
Now, panting, Angel lowered the hilt, her knuckles white. Her strength was improving, the gaunt hollows from her injuries filling out, but she was still far from a full recovery. Every session was a battle against her own body’s warnings.
Alyce could feel the new tension between them, a live wire strung taut in the air. It wasn’t the old, easy dynamic. It was something heavier, charged with unspoken arguments and the memory of shattered classroom furniture.
During a break, Angel gulped water from a bottle like she’d been thirsty for days, sweat plastering strands of dark hair to her temples. Alyce nudged her boot with her own.
“Have you been to see Asura lately?”
Angel blinked, swallowing hard and lowering the bottle. She seemed curious at the question, then guilty. “I haven’t been able to. I wanted the rumors to die at first, so I distanced myself. Then I got really busy with reconditioning and,” she paused, her eyes flickering almost imperceptibly toward Crow, who was now watching them silently, “other things.”
The tension solidified, obvious and cold.
“You will tell me about the ‘other things’ later?” Alyce whispered, leaning in.
Angel gave a tiny, quick nod, her gaze darting away. She knew Crow wouldn’t appreciate them discussing their fraught, secretive sex life and on-again-off-again whatever-it-was here in the open.
A bell chimed sharply through the academy grounds, signaling the change to second period. “Gotta run,” Alyce said, grabbing her bag. “Advanced Resonance Theory. Thrilling.”
Angel just waved, staying put with Crow since her official classes hadn’t been resumed yet.
Alyce spent the day partially listening to dry lectures on wavelength harmonics and partially planning. Between classes, she ducked into the cafeteria and shoved extra packaged rolls and fruit into her bag, her movements quick and furtive. Over the next few days, she made a habit of sneaking down to the dungeon to give Asura some of the food.
Today, she was hoping for more. The filth she’d cleaned from him last night had been a visceral shock. Tonight, she wanted to get him to a shower.
That night in their dorm, she lay perfectly still, waiting. She listened until Angel’s breathing changed into the deep, even rhythm of true sleep. Only then did Alyce slip from her bed, grab the stuffed backpack from under her desk, and glide out into the corridor.
The journey to the dungeon was a familiar stealth exercise now. The same guard snored in his chair. She ghosted past, her heartbeat a dull drum in her ears.
The heavy door to Asura’s cell was, once again, unlocked the moment her fingers touched the cold iron. It simply yielded, that soft clunk echoing in the silent hall. She didn’t have time to question the how.
Inside, he was awake, sitting against the wall as if waiting.
“We’re going to the showers,” she stated, no room for argument in her whisper.
It took a bit of convincing, a hissed back-and-forth about guards and noise. Finally, he stood, unfolding his too-thin frame from the floor. Together, they moved like ghosts through the academy’s lower levels, Alyce leading him to the empty locker room adjacent to the training pools.
The room was tiled and echoey, smelling of chlorine and mildew. Alyce pointed to a shower stall. “You turn this. Water comes out. You get wet, you use this,” she shoved the bar of soap into his hand, “then you rinse off. Understand?”
He stared at the fixtures with genuine, bewildered curiosity. He’d never used a shower before. Without a word, he began pulling at the ragged, damp tunic they’d given him.
“Whoa, hey!” Alyce spun around, her back to him, heat exploding across her face and neck. “What are you doing?”
She heard the rustle of fabric dropping to the floor. “You said to wash,” he replied, his voice flat with confusion. “The garments are also dirty.”
“Yeah, but you—you don’t just strip in front of people!” she sputtered, eyes screwed shut.
“Why not? It is just a body. We all have one.”
She couldn’t even begin to explain modern modesty to an 800-year-old former deity who’d spent centuries as a monstrous idol. She heard the squeak of the faucet, the sudden spray of water. A soft, almost inaudible sigh escaped him.
After a minute of standing there rigidly, she gritted her teeth. “Are you actually washing, or are you just standing there?”
Silence. Then, “The soap is slippery. It is difficult to reach my back.”
“Unbelievable,” she muttered to the lockers. With a frustrated groan, she kept her gaze strictly fixed on the tiled floor and shuffled backward into the stall, hand outstretched. “Give it here.”
Her fingers closed on the wet soap. She took a breath, steeling herself, and turned around, keeping her eyes locked on the space between his shoulder blades. Water plastered his long black hair to his pale skin. His back was a canvas of intricate, raised tattoos, dark ink woven into patterns that seemed to shift subtly in the steam, depicting cosmic cycles and eclipsed suns and things she had no name for.
She focused on the task, scrubbing the soap over his skin. He was all taut muscle and sharp bone beneath her hands. She worked the grime from his shoulders, following the strange lines of the ink. One particular tattoo, centered near his spine, looked less like art and more like a scarification, a series of interlocking seals that felt raised and rough even under the suds.
“What are these?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper over the water.
“A story,” he said simply. “And a cage.”
She didn’t ask more. She rinsed him off, tossed him the thin towel, and turned her back again. “Hurry up.”
He dressed in the clean, soft sweats she’d stolen from a lost-and-found bin. As they sneaked back through the silent halls toward his cell, he walked a little easier. The reek of the dungeon was gone from him, replaced by the sterile smell of academy soap.
At his cell door, he paused before stepping inside. He looked at her, his dark eyes less hollow than before. “The garden’s song was louder today,” he murmured. “It is nearing a harvest.”
He disappeared into the dark. Alyce stood alone in the corridor, the words coiling around her bones like frost. She touched the cell door to lock it, her fingers lingering on the cold iron. Her own reflection in a polished rivet was wide-eyed and afraid, a girl in over her head, guarding a secret that was starting to breathe down her neck.