E L L E

The world comes back in pieces, cold firs, then light. Then voices that don’t sound like mine. White ceiling, humming vent, smell of disinfectant and copper. The nurse’s office. I know it before I move, before I even open my eyes all the way. Someone’s wrapped my hand in gauze so tight my pulse throbs against it. The ache isn’t just pain, it’s alive, like something breathing under the skin.

“…they said she sliced her palm on purpose.” A girl’s whisper from the other side of the curtain. Too close.
“She wanted attention. Same as always.”  Laughter that’s half-scared, half-mean. My stomach twists. I turn my face toward the wall, pretending to sleep, the metal tray beside the bed fogs over, a thin film of frost spidering across the surface. I breathe out slowly. It’s still happening. Even here.

The curtain sways with a draft that shouldn’t exist. Someone, maybe the nurse tells them to hush, but the words have already landed. Cut herself. That’s what they’ll remember. I stare at the bandage until the edges blur. Beneath it, the sigil hums, a low pulse I can feel in my bones, matching the rhythm of my heart.

The nurse finally appears, all soft cardigans and clipped vowels, pretending she hasn’t been listening too. She checks the chart at the foot of the bed. “No fever. Good.” Her hands smell like salt and herbs when she lifts my wrist. The gauze is threaded with a grayish powder that glints when it catches the light. Not hospital tape. Not anything normal.

“Professor Brielle sent word you fainted in class,” she says, like it’s the most ordinary sentence in the world. “Silas left instructions for frost-reaction cases. Lucky you.” Silas. Of course he did, the academy’s invisible custodian, sweeping away secrets before dawn. I picture him in his faded coveralls, measuring salt by feel, writing his recipes on the backs of detention slips.

The nurse tightens the bandage, I bite my lip when the sting flares. The powder warms, then cools again, like something alive deciding whether to help or hurt. “There,” she murmurs. “That should keep it sealed.” Sealed. The word lands heavy.

The door opens without a knock, the nurse straightens fast, like a kid caught copying answers. The boy from the east wing steps inside. No uniform, just black and gray, he always looks like he walked out of a storm that never stopped chasing him. His gaze drops to my wrapped hand before I can hide it.

“She needs rest,” the nurse blurts.

“I’ll make sure she takes it.” His voice is quiet, rough around the edges, the kind that makes the air forget how to move. Something in the temperature changes; even the window frost tightens its lacework. The nurse decides she has somewhere else to be and slips out. He comes closer, boots silent on tile. “You shouldn’t have tried to pull it away.”

“It was choking me.”

His eyes flicker, gray, silver and impossible. “It was listening.” That word again. Listening. Like the thing under my skin has ears. He sits beside the bed, elbows on his knees, studying the bandage like it’s a riddle. “It reacts to your pulse. To fear.” I want to laugh, but a shiver comes out. “Then it’ll never stop.”

The silence between us thickens until it hums. My pulse kicks up, maybe pain, maybe because he’s close enough that the air tastes different. “I can feel it,” I whisper. “Like it’s waiting.”

He doesn’t answer, he lifts a hand, stopping just above mine, not touching. The space between us sparks like static before a storm. When I breathe in, the gauze darkens, blood soaking through in a slow bloom. Then the light begins. Faint at first, silver threads crawl outward from the stain, racing along the edges of the bandage. The hum in my bones sharpens until it’s the only sound in the room.

“Don’t fight it,” he says, voice low. “You’ll tear yourself open.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You are.” His tone softens. “You’re feeling too much.”

The frost spirals stretch up my wrist, pale veins glowing through gauze. Every emotion, shame, anger, fear, wanting, melts together into light.

“It’s me,” I breathe. “It’s answering me.” The glow flares white, searing for a heartbeat, then fades. The smell of iron and salt hangs in the air. My hand feels hollowed out and full at once.

He doesn’t move. His jaw works, a muscle ticking under skin too still.

“You’ve seen this before,” I managed. Silence answers.

“Who did it to you?” He exhales through his nose, almost a laugh but not. “You don’t want to know what happens when the Rift answers back.”

“That’s not..”

“It marks you,” he cuts in. “It takes pieces and gives them back wrong.” He lifts his hand like he might show me, then stops, tugging his glove higher. But I catch it anyway, a flicker of black tracery along his wrist, like burned veins frozen mid-pulse.

“It remembers blood,” he says quietly. “And it never forgets the first time it tastes it.”

The room feels smaller and colder. The bandage on my palm throbs in rhythm with his words. I want to ask what it took from him. But I see it already, in the tightness of his mouth, the distance in his eyes. Whatever the Rift claimed, it left the rest of him hollowed out to make room.

The quiet stretches until I can hear my own heartbeat in the vents.  He’s still sitting there, head bowed, glove pulled tight, and for a second it feels like the world’s forgotten we exist. Then something shifts,  a breath brushes my ear, too close, too familiar.

“Elowen…”

My mother’s voice. Soft and wrong. I freeze. He doesn’t move, but his head lifts, eyes narrowing like he heard it too.

“Elowen,” again, closer this time, sliding through the seams of the room. The frost on the window spiders outward, searching.

I grip the blanket. “Did you..”

He shakes his head once. “Don’t answer it.” The whisper fades, leaving the air hollow. The name still hangs there, vibrating in my chest. No one here calls me that. No one should. It feels like something ancient dragged itself through the walls just to remind me who I used to be.

The silence after feels heavier than the voice itself. He watches me like the whole room might shatter if I breathe wrong.

“You can’t let it pull you in,” he says quietly. “Once it knows your name, it never stops calling.”

“I didn’t invite it.”

His jaw tightens. “It doesn’t need permission.”

The bandage around my palm pulses again, faint light leaking through the seams. I press it to my chest like I can hide it there, like I can hide from all of it. He leans forward, voice barely a whisper. “I won’t let it take you.”

The words hit the air and everything reacts. The light under the gauze surges bright enough to burn through the fabric, silver bleeding onto the sheets. The frost on the window flashes white, then settles into stillness. He pulls back slowly, like he’s afraid he just triggered something neither of us can stop.

I stare at the fading glow, heart racing. “What did you just do?” 

His answer is almost a breath. “Made a mistake.”

The nurse’s office is too quiet after he leaves. He doesn’t say goodbye, just stands there for a heartbeat, eyes on the faint light still trembling through the gauze, then slips into the hall. The door sighs shut behind him. I’m left with the hum of the vents and the taste of salt at the back of my throat.

I try to breathe, slow and even, the bandage is cooling again, the pulse under it faint but steady, like the whole thing decided to sleep. I should sleep too. Pretend this was a hallucination, a stress response, anything human.

But the air feels charged and waiting. A sound breaks it.
Click.

Soft, metallic, somewhere down the corridor. I sit up, every muscle tight, the nurse’s lights flicker once, dim yellow smearing into white. Another click. Louder this time, followed by the faint creak of metal bending. My pulse leaps. I know that sound. Everyone in this academy knows that sound.

Locker 237.

I push off the cot before I can think, bare feet hitting cold tile. The hall beyond the glass door glows faint blue, the kind of light that doesn’t belong to electricity. My breath fogs the pane. At the far end, one locker door stands half open, trembling like it’s breathing.

The bandage on my palm throbs once, then twice, then the sigil under it flares through the fabric, a bright, aching echo.

“No,” I whisper. “Not again.”

The handle of the locker turns by itself, slow, deliberate. Metal groans. The silence around it bends until I can hear the low hiss of frost spreading across the floor tiles. Something moves inside,  a shadow, small and wrong, dragging its fingers along the inner wall as it leans forward into the light. I take a step back, the room spinning with cold. My palm burns, the whisper slithers through the corridor, soft and certain.

“Elowen.” The locker door swings wide. Then, lights go out.