Page 3

I exhale, adjusting the strap of my satchel. “Then let’s go.”
Lucien steps forward first.
I follow.
Elias lets out a low, amused hum as he falls into step beside me, hands still shoved deep into his pockets. “This is going to be fun.”
The air shifts the second we cross the outer perimeter of Daemon Academy. It’s not immediate, not dramatic, but it’s there, a slow unraveling of something invisible yet absolute. A pressure that’s been pressing down on us for so long we almost forgot it was there.
Until it’s gone.
Lucien keeps walking his long strides eating up the distance between us and the waiting rift. Elias follows with the same loose-limbed ease he always carries, though I don’t miss the way his silver eyes gleam with something sharper than usual. And me?
I hesitate.
Not visibly. Not enough for Lucien to comment. But my fingers tighten around the strap of my satchel, and my lungs feel too full, too light, like I’ve stepped into the thin air of a mountaintop.
Because they were never allowed to leave.
Not truly.
Daemon Academy’s walls weren’t just built to keep outsiders out. They were built to keep the Sins inside. Bound to their roles, to their legacy, to the twisted, centuries-old rules that kept them caged in invisible chains. This is the first time they’re walking free, no tethers, no academy magic leashed around their throats.
I wonder if they feel it too, the absence of it. If they hear the silence where there was once something constant pressing against them. If the weight of freedom is heavier than the weight of captivity.
Lucien doesn’t give any indication. But something about the way he walks is different. Not looser, not exactly, but… deliberate. Like each step is testing the limits of his autonomy.
Elias, of course, doesn’t bother masking his reaction. He inhales slowly and deep, stretching his arms overhead with a lazy, satisfied roll of his shoulders. “Well, well,” he muses, exhaling through his nose. “No chains. No tracking sigils. No overbearing rules about where we can and can’t step. It’s almost like we’re real people again.”
Lucien doesn’t acknowledge him.
Elias grins. “Oh, come on. You have to be feeling something about this.”
“Later,” Lucien says, clipped.
Elias lets out a long-suffering sigh. “You always say that.”
Lucien doesn’t dignify him with a response, and Elias winks at me instead. “He’s excited. This is his excited face.”
I glance at Lucien. His expression is pure stone, glacial and unreadable.
“Right,” I say dryly. “He’s practically beaming.”
Elias laughs, a low, husky sound. “He’ll warm up to it.”
The road stretches before us in uneven cobblestones, the edges blurred by mist that seeps from the cracks, coiling over the ground like something alive. The further we go, the more unnatural the landscape becomes, shadows pooling in places they shouldn’t, shapes shifting just at the edge of my vision. The Rift isn’t far now. I can feel it.
Or maybe it feels like us.
Lucien stops first. We follow, standing at the threshold where the earth itself seems to distort, the fabric of reality rippling like a heat mirage. The Rift is not a door. Not a gateway. It’s something else entirely.
A wound.
A hollow place in the world, cut open by forces that don’t belong here.
And we have to step through it.
Elias exhales, his smirk dimming as he looks at it, something contemplative darkening his silver gaze. “I hate these things.”