Chapter 6: Midnight Embers
The resonance in Classroom E hadn’t faded; it had simply moved, packed into a single battered suitcase and a backpack overflowing with clothes that smelled like cedar and anxiety. Alyce Kingston stood in the doorway of Angel’s dorm, her freckles stark against her pale skin, looking like a feral cat brought indoors.
“It’s not much,” Angel said, clearing a pile of sketches from the second bed. The parchment crackled, blueprints of theoretical weapons covered in her precise, looping script.
“It’s four walls that aren’t the rejection ward,” Alyce muttered, hefting her suitcase inside. Her eyes scanned the room—the unlit candle on the desk that flickered independently, the framed relics on the walls, the quiet hum of latent energy in the air. “You draw?”
“I try to understand,” Angel said, stacking the papers. A pang, sharp and familiar, lanced through her chest. It was the ache for the little sister she’d lost to the labyrinth of foster care years ago, the one with gaps in her teeth and a laugh like shaking bells. That loss was a hollow space nothing could ever truly fill. But as Alyce cautiously set a chipped mug on the nightstand, a small, unexpected warmth settled in that hollow. It wasn’t the same. It was different, bristly and defensive, but it was a presence.
The first night was the test.
A scream tore through the dark, guttural and raw with terror. Angel was awake instantly, her hand already reaching for the dagger on her wall before her mind caught up. The blue light came next—a sudden, silent eruption of cold cerulean flame from the other bed, illuminating the room in stark, dancing shadows.
Alyce was sitting bolt upright, her eyes wide and unseeing, trapped in a sleep-terror. From her outstretched palms, two brutal, beautiful scythe blades had manifested, composed entirely of raging blue soul-fire. They hummed a dangerous, metallic frequency, slicing the air and grazing the ceiling, leaving blackened scorch marks on the plaster. The smell was ozone and burning sugar.
“No, no, no, not again, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” Alyce was sobbing, choking on the words, her body rigid. The blades flared, threatening to lash out.
Angel didn’t hesitate. She didn’t grab for a weapon. She crossed the room in three swift strides, the heat of the flames kissing her skin. She didn’t try to grab Alyce’s wrists. Instead, she sat on the edge of the bed, placed her hands gently on either side of Alyce’s feverish face, and pressed her own forehead against the girl’s.
“Shhh,” Angel whispered, her voice a low, steady stream in the chaos. Then she began to sing. It was a forgotten lullaby, the words half-remembered, the melody something from before the system, from before the knowing. It was pure, instinctual sound.
She poured her soul-wavelength into that sound, not as a command, but as an offering. A deep, calm harbor against the storm. She didn’t try to morph Alyce’s frantic weapon-soul, to force it into a shape. She adapted her own resonance to wrap around the chaos, to breathe with its jagged rhythm.
Adaptation, not domination.
Slowly, the violent flare of the blue flames softened. The dangerous hum lowered to a whisper. The razor-sharp edges of the scythe blades melted back into harmless light, then embers, then nothing, leaving only the scent of ozone and the salt of Alyce’s tears on the sheets. Alyce shuddered, a full-body convulsion, and collapsed forward into Angel’s shoulder, crying in earnest now, quiet and broken.
“I took my brother’s foot off,” she gasped into Angel’s nightshirt. “I didn’t mean to. I just got scared.”
“I know,” Angel said, holding her. “It’s okay. You’re here now.”
The shared, unspoken truth hung in the dark between them: she hadn’t morphed the weapon’s soul. She had adapted to it. Something that never happened. Well, except Crow had some ability to do it, but after decades of training and practice. For Angel, it was just… what felt right.
Crow started tutoring them both the following Monday, in a barren, dirt-packed training ground on the academy’s eastern ridge. The wind there was a constant, gritty companion.
“Now that you have a weapon to wield,” Crow said, his voice like dry leaves crushed underfoot. He looked worse, the tremor in his hands more pronounced, the shadows under his eyes a permanent violet bruise. “And it’s a scythe at that. A difficult, elegant instrument. We begin with basic resonance during active combat.”
He didn’t use a weapon. He stood across from them, hands loose at his sides, his coat hanging off his gaunt frame. He was their opponent because he could fight a meister and weapon without a weapon. He was that powerful, a testament to a time before the sickness—the Madness—began its slow crawl through his veins.
That Saturday, they broke the dirt ground.
Angel held Alyce in scythe-form, the weapon a stunning arc of polished steel with a haft of dark, wound leather. Blue flame licked gently along the blade’s edge, a contained potential. She lunged, aiming a sweeping strike at Crow’s legs. He didn’t dodge. He shifted his weight infinitesimally and stamped down on the flat of the blade with his boot, driving it into the earth. The impact jarred up Angel’s arms, and he used the leverage to shove forward.
Angel flew backwards, landing hard on her shoulder in the dirt, the scythe clattering from her grasp and reverting to a stunned Alyce a few feet away. A sharp pain bloomed on Angel’s cheek. She put a hand to it, her fingers coming away wet and red. Crow had knocked a sharp-edged rock loose with his force, and it had sliced her on her way down.
“Pathetic,” Crow stated, no malice, just a cold fact. “You are thinking of the steps. One, hold weapon. Two, swing. You are not thinking of the flow. Your souls are separate cables, not a woven rope.”
From inside the bond, Angel felt it—a hot, coppery burst of frustration. Kick his ass, Angel, Alyce’s thought-voice gritted in her mind. What are you waiting for?
What was she waiting for? She looked at Crow, at his trembling fingers, at the weariness that made his bones seem too heavy for his skin. Was she afraid of hurting him?
The thought ignited a different kind of fire. She pushed herself to her feet, spitting dirt from her mouth. She held out her hand. Alyce shifted back into the scythe, flying to her grip. This time, the connection was instant, warmer.
Crow waited, patient as a stone.
Angel didn’t just take hold of the weapon. She closed her eyes for a single, focused second. She reached down the bond, past the technique, past the fear, and she grabbed Alyce’s soul—not with force, but with a fierce, welcoming embrace. She pulled it inside her own, let their wavelengths collide and merge not as meister and tool, but as partners in a shared breath.
And together, they resonated.
The air around Angel crackled, thickening. The blue flame on the scythe’s blade erupted, not wildly, but with a focused, hungry intensity. The very dirt at their feet shuddered, cracking in a web-like pattern. Small rocks broke free and began tumbling down the hill behind them.
“There you go,” Crow murmured, and for the first time, she saw a flicker in his dark eyes that wasn’t pain. It was recognition.
Angel moved. The world narrowed to the flow. She didn’t think. She let the resonance think for her. The scythe became an extension of her will, a whirlwind of blue flame and deadly steel. She didn’t just attack Crow; she channeled their combined soul into a technique, the name forming on her lips from instinct alone.
“Witch Hunter.”
The blue flame condensed, shooting from the scythe’s tip in a screaming, twisting lance of concentrated soul-energy, aimed directly at Crow’s center mass.
He didn’t move. He raised his open hand.
The brilliant blue lance of Witch Hunter hit an invisible wall an inch from his palm. The air screamed with the conflict of forces. Angel pushed, pouring everything she had into the attack, sweat stinging the cut on her cheek. She saw Crow’s arm tremble, not with his illness, but with real strain. For a glorious, twenty-second eternity, she held it, the technique roaring against his unparalleled defense.
Then, with a sound like shattering crystal, Witch Hunter exploded into a million dying embers of blue light.
The rebound knocked Angel to her knees, the scythe reverting to a panting, sweating Alyce beside her. The silence rushed back in, broken only by the distant clatter of their displaced rocks reaching the bottom of the hill.
“Dammit!” Alyce snarled, punching the dirt.
Crow lowered his hand. A faint, almost imperceptible sheen of sweat glistened on his brow. “Better,” he said, the word sounding like a gift. “The technique is instinctive. Good. The power, however, is unfocused. You waste energy screaming. Learn to whisper with the same force.”
The summons to the Headmaster’s antechamber came that evening. Angel, Alyce, Amber, and Leo stood in a stiff line on the smooth, cold stone. The atmosphere was different from the throne room—less oppressive, more pragmatic. Headmaster Death was not present. Instead, Kilson Delacroix leaned against a wall, picking at his nails, his eyes lingering on Amber with a mixture of heartbreak and pride. Professor Crow stood before them, a scroll in his hands.
“A supplemental lesson,” Crow announced, his voice brittle. “Two purposes. For Angel and Alyce, a first field mission. For Amber and Leonardo, a remediation. An opportunity to collect souls and demonstrate reformed competence.”
Amber stood straighter in her grey NOT jumpsuit, her jaw tight. Leo’s expression was carefully neutral.
“Your target is not a Keshin egg,” Crow continued, unrolling the scroll. It showed a map of the city’s shadow-ward, an old industrial sector. “Your target is a person. Professor Aris Silas. He has been missing for nineteen days. His last known location was here, investigating anomalous soul activity.”
A missing Death Weapon. The air in the room grew colder.
“Silas is a formidable weapon. His disappearance is… concerning.” Crow’s eyes swept over them. “You will search the location and surrounding area. You will ascertain what occurred. You will find him, or evidence of his fate. Amber, you will lead.”
Amber blinked. “Sir?”
“You have operational field experience. They,” he gestured to Angel and Alyce, “do not. You have twenty souls to your name, after your… setback. This mission is a chance to build that count meaningfully. Leonardo will, of course, be your weapon. Angel will act as secondary meister and support, with Alyce as her scythe. A team of four. Find Silas.”
He rolled the scroll shut. The assignment was clear. It was a test, a probation, and a mystery all wrapped in one.
Angel felt Alyce’s nervous excitement vibrate through their nascent bond. She saw Amber share a long, complex look with Leo—humiliation, determination, a chance to claw back from the grey. And she saw Crow, his weary gaze resting on her finally, the unspoken question hanging in the air between them.
This was it. The first step out of the sterile rooms and into the whispering, dangerous dark where souls went missing.
The first step out of the sterile rooms and into the whispering, dangerous dark where souls went missing began in a garage that smelled of gasoline and damp concrete. The “Death” Jeep was a hulking artifact, its black paint scoured down to primer in patches, the academy’s skull emblem spray-painted haphazardly on each door panel. It had no doors and no roof.
“Home sweet home,” Leo said, slapping the fender. The metal rang with a hollow, weary sound.
Amber vaulted into the driver’s seat, her grey NOT jumpsuit a stark contrast to the vehicle’s grim pageantry. Angel climbed in beside her, with Alyce and Leo taking the rear. The engine coughed to life, a sound like grinding bones, and they lurched out into the fading ochre light of Death City’s shadow-ward.
The city quickly unraveled at the edges. The paved streets gave way to cracked earth highways, which then dissolved into a hard-packed wasteland of grey soil and skeletal shrubs. The air grew thin and cold, carrying a metallic tang. The sky here wasn't a sky at all, but a perpetual twilight dome of bruised purple and indigo, lit by no visible sun.
“So it’s always night?” Angel asked, raising her voice over the wind whipping through the open frame.
“It’s not night,” Amber shouted back, her eyes scanning the barren horizon. “It’s the Shadow Realm. Think of it as another dimension stacked on top of the mortal one, but out of phase. The frequency’s different. Mundanes just walk right through it, feel a chill maybe.”
She swerved around a crater that looked like it had been burned into the earth by acid.
“Some places are purely shadow,” Amber continued, her voice shifting into a lecturing tone that was familiar, a remnant of her old confidence. “Like the Academy itself. This wasteland. They exist because belief, or tragedy, or just weird soul-energy pinned them here, solid.” She gestured ahead. “Like that.”
The ruins emerged from the gloom like the bleached ribs of a colossal beast. It was a town, or had been. Walls stood without roofs, staircases climbed to nowhere, and everything was carved from the same pale, pockmarked stone. Silence hung over it, thick and complete, swallowing the Jeep’s growl.
“No Keshin eggs,” Leo noted, his voice low. “No soul-wavelengths at all. It’s just… dead.”
Amber brought the Jeep to a halt near a shattered fountain. “Silas’s last signal was traced to this general area. We fan out. Look for signs of a struggle, or his resonance trail. It’ll feel like a cold pulse of tempered steel if you can sense it.”
They split into pairs. Angel walked with Alyce, their footsteps echoing unnaturally in the absolute quiet. The sensation was oppressive, a vacuum where life should hum. They found nothing in the crumbled buildings but dust and a profound, aching emptiness.
It was Leo who called out, his voice cutting through the stillness. “Over here! A path.”
It wasn’t a road. It was a parting in the strange, greyish grass, a trail of flattened vegetation leading away from the dead town and into a copse of stark, bare-limbed trees. The grass along the path was bleached bone-white.
They followed it in the Jeep, the trees closing in like thin, grasping fingers. The path opened suddenly into a clearing.
An amusement park lay before them, its cheerful paint long since leeched away by the strange atmosphere. The colors that remained were fungal blues and sickly greens. A carousel rested at a permanent tilt, its frozen horses grinning with malign emptiness. The path led toward a massive ferris wheel, half its support structure sunken into the soft, sucking earth, leaving it cocked at a drunken angle.
“Not creepy at all,” Angel muttered, her hand going instinctively to the place where her soul would meet Alyce’s.
Amber suddenly stiffened in the driver’s seat. Her knuckles whitened on the wheel. She killed the engine with a jarring abruptness, the silence crashing back in. She held up a closed fist, her eyes wide and sharp.
“Down,” she breathed.
They slipped from the Jeep, crouching low in the bleached grass. Amber pointed two fingers at her own eyes, then toward the listing ferris wheel. Angel understood. She closed her own eyes, pushing her soul-perception outward, past the dead air.
There. A flicker. Then another. Two wavelengths, coiled near the base of the giant wheel. They were strange, guttering and inconsistent, like a damaged fluorescent light—not the clean, corrupt hunger of a Keshin egg, but something sickly and artificial.
Minions, Amber mouthed, the shape of the word clear. She pointed to Alyce, then Leo, and made a fist. Transform. Be ready.
Alyce nodded, her face pale but set. Leo’s expression had hardened into focused calm. In their hands, weapons appeared: Alyce’s scythe with its quiet blue flame, and Leo, transforming not into the massive axe Angel had seen before, but into a sleek, tactical hatchet that fit Amber’s grip perfectly.
They moved like shadows, Amber leading, Angel following, their steps silent on the damp ground. The overgrown midway swallowed them, the skeletal remains of game booths providing cover. They edged closer to the ferris wheel, the strange, sputtering soul-signatures growing stronger.
A voice, rough and aggrieved, slithered through the still air.
“—a whole godsdamned mess is what it is. And we’re on clean-up.”
They froze behind the carcass of a popcorn wagon. Two figures were visible, their backs turned, shoveling debris into a wheelbarrow near a collapsed section of the ferris wheel’s platform. They wore mismatched, dirty clothes, and their souls looked wrong—patched together, unstable.
“We disposed of the problem,” the first one grumbled, heaving a chunk of twisted metal. “That weapon came sniffing, found the notes. Had to dump him in the Cursed Graveyard. End of story.”
The second minion, taller and wiry, threw his shovel down. It clanged against a metal strut. “You fucking idiot, Jerk. How did you even sneak the body into Death? The gates have wards!”
“I just wheeled him in in a barrel,” Jerk retorted, defensively. “Labeled ‘hazardous resonance waste.’ No one stopped me. They never stop the barrels.”
“Unbelievable.” The taller one ran a hand through his greasy hair. “And now this. The whole cache blew. Mistress is gonna flay us. This was supposed to be a simple distillation site.”
“The witch’s notes said the catalyst was unstable,” Jerk whined. “How was I supposed to know ‘unstable’ meant ‘blows the hell up if you look at it funny’? We’re lucky we were out getting lunch.”
Angel’s blood ran cold. The body. The Cursed Graveyard. They were talking about Silas. Amber’s gaze met hers, a shared moment of horrified understanding.
A loose piece of rusted metal, dislodged by Leo shifting his weight, chose that moment to fall from the popcorn wagon. It hit the ground with a dull, definitive clang.
Both minions spun around.
Their faces were sallow, their eyes lit with that same sickly, unnatural wavelength. For a second, there was only the sound of the wind through the rotten Ferris wheel cables. Then the taller one’s face twisted.
“Intruders!” he shrieked, his voice cracking.
Jerk didn’t hesitate. He flung his hand out, and a gout of that same unstable, phosphorescent energy erupted toward the popcorn wagon. Amber and Leo were already moving, a synchronized blur. Amber lunged forward, Leo’s hatchet form slicing a clean arc through the chaotic energy blast, dissipating it into harmless sparks.
“Go! Flank!” Amber yelled to Angel, already charging the taller minion.
The fight exploded. The taller minion’s hands contorted, and jagged shards of crystallized soul-energy shot from his fingertips like splinters. Amber ducked and weaved, Leo a flashing extension of her will, deflecting and shattering the projectiles.
Angel and Alyce were left with Jerk. He bellowed, his form swelling with volatile power, and brought both fists down. A shockwave of distorted force shattered the ground where Angel had been standing a moment before. She rolled, came up with Alyce already in scythe-form, the blue flame roaring to life.
“Witch Hunter!” Angel yelled, pouring her focus down the bond. The lance of blue energy screamed from the scythe’s tip.
Jerk crossed his arms, a shield of writhing, mismatched soul-stuff forming just in time. The attack detonated against it, the concussive boom knocking Angel back a step. The shield held, but cracks spiderwebbed across its surface.
Across the clearing, a more violent explosion rocked the air—Amber and Leo, finishing their foe. But the distraction cost them. A chunk of shrapnel from the blast hit a supporting beam of the ferris wheel with a deafening crack. The entire structure groaned, shifted, and with a rending screech of metal, a whole section of the wheel collapsed between them, a wall of twisted steel and grinding gears separating Angel and Alyce from Amber and Leo.
“Angel!” Amber’s voice was muffled by the barrier.
“We’re okay!” Angel shouted back, her eyes never leaving Jerk, who was now smashing his way through a ticket booth toward her, laughing hysterically. “We’ve got this!”
Alone with her weapon, the reality of the statement clenched in her gut. Alyce’s anxiety spiked through their bond, a sharp, electric current. Angel gripped the scythe’s haft tighter, her palms sweating. She wasn’t Amber, with years of disciplined partnership. She had days. A bond born from panic and lullabies.
Jerk surged forward, a whirlwind of clumsy, powerful strikes. Angel parried, the impacts juddering up her arms. She was forced back, toward the rotten foundations of a tilt-a-whirl. She couldn’t match his brute strength. She couldn’t outlast his chaotic, explosive energy.
Adapt, a voice that sounded like Crow’s, but was her own, whispered in her mind. Don’t scream. Whisper.
She stopped trying to fight the force of his blows. On his next overhead smash, she sidestepped, and instead of blocking, she guided the massive arm down, using his own momentum to bury his fist deep into the soft, wet wood of the platform. He roared, stuck for a crucial second.
Angel didn’t strike with the blade. She dropped the scythe form. Alyce, disoriented, re-materialized beside her. In that heartbeat of surprise, Angel stepped inside Jerk’s guard and placed her palm flat against his chest.
She didn’t push. She listened. Past the roiling, sickly wavelength, she felt the frayed edges of a human soul, tangled and trapped. She poured a thread of her own resonance into that knot, not to attack, but to unravel.
Jerk screamed. It was a different sound—full of pain, but also a shocking, sudden clarity. The artificial energy shrouding him flickered and died. He blinked, his eyes clearing to a normal, confused brown. He looked at his hands, then at Angel, pure terror on his face.
“What… what did you…”
Alyce, understanding in a flash, was already a scythe again. This time, Angel didn’t summon a technique. She simply swung, a clean, merciful arc. The blade, honed by her refined resonance, passed through him without resistance. His form dissolved into a shower of faint, fading sparks—a corrupted soul, finally released.
Silence, heavy and panting, filled the space. The blue flame on the scythe’s edge guttered out. Alyce shifted back, collapsing to her knees beside Angel, both of them gasping for air. Sweat dripped into Angel’s eyes, stinging.
A series of timed, powerful blows rang out from the other side of the metal wreckage. With a final groan, Amber and Leo forced an opening, scrambling through. Amber took in the scene: the fading sparks, the collapsed minion, Angel and Alyce exhausted on the ground.
Her eyes, sharp and assessing, landed on Angel. A slow, genuine smile broke across her face, cutting through the grime and tension.
“Damn,” Amber said, breathless. “You unraveled him. That’s… that’s advanced stuff, Angel.” She offered a hand, pulling Angel to her feet. Leo did the same for Alyce.
“He mentioned the Cursed Graveyard,” Angel managed, her chest heaving. “That’s where they put Silas.”
Amber’s smile vanished, replaced by grim determination. She nodded toward the Death Jeep, visible through the shattered park. “Then that’s where we go. Let’s get out of this funhouse and find our missing professor.”