Chapter 69: To Be Seen by the Wrong Eyes

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• THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH   Chapter 73: The Pale Covenant

  LATER THAT NIGHTI knew the moment sleep claimed me that I would not rest.It did not come gently. It dragged me under like a tide thick with memory—like black water churning with the silt of things best left buried. One moment, my cheek pressed to the pillow, breath shallow from exhaustion, thoughts still curled around the words I hadn’t said to Callum. The next, I was falling—not through space, but through sensation, through a cold that was not merely the absence of warmth but the presence of something else. Something watching.It was not like the other dreams—the scattered kind, warped by stress or emotion or the body's strange way of unraveling the day. No, this was different. I knew it in my bones. Knew it in the way the silence wrapped around me like wet cloth, smothering, intimate. Knew it in the way the air took on that too-familiar stillness, like breath held too long. As if the Void itself had reached for me again—eager, patient, unrelenting.And I knew—I knew—before the vis

• THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH   Chapter 72: Tomorrow Belongs to the Council

  When I returned to my dormitory, the hallway felt too long—elongated somehow by the weight of my own silence, the way footsteps echo louder when they're carrying something you can't set down. Each stride along the familiar corridor pulled at something in me, some quiet thread unraveling with every step, until even the soles of my boots felt traitorous for pressing against the worn runner without hesitation, without pause. The sconces along the wall flickered gently with low-burning witchlight, casting long shadows that swayed across the narrow panels, and I found myself watching those shadows more than the path ahead, as if some part of me expected one of them to turn, to speak, to say yes, you were wronged—yes, someone saw—yes, this is unfair.But the corridor said nothing.The key trembled faintly in my hand before I even reached the door. I had not noticed picking it up—had not noticed retrieving it from my pocket, nor the way my fingers had clenched around it so tightly that the o

• THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH   Chapter 71: A Sovereign's Invitation, A Scapegoat's Sentence

  The chair beneath me was still warm from where I had curled into it moments before, its velvet worn soft with age and faintly scented of ink, parchment glue, and something more elusive—an old, almost bitter fragrance like winter bark stripped too early from the tree. I sat in stillness, the silence stretching between us like a second hearth, flickering and low, catching only on the edges of things.Professor Marwood had not spoken since his last observation, and I hadn’t dared to fill the quiet. Not with my voice. Not yet.But the question pressed against the back of my tongue like a stone I could not swallow, and I knew—knew with the strange certainty that came from instinct and not logic—that I would not leave this room without asking it. Not because I expected a full answer. Not because I believed he would offer it willingly. But because the words on that book’s spine had lodged somewhere in my mind, in the hollow behind my ribs, where dread went to bloom.I turned slightly toward

• THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH   Chapter 70: Scriptum Obscura

  The next thing I knew, I was already standing in Professor Marwood’s office, the heavy door clicking shut behind me with a soft finality that sent a thin ripple across the quiet. I hadn’t meant to walk here quite so absently, quite so entirely on instinct, but somehow the steps had carried themselves, and now I was here, blinking against the mild hush of a space steeped in polished wood and a faint, old scent of something dry and alchemical—like parchment steeped in moonroot, or incense left to die out in the middle of a spell.The professor wasn’t in his chair. In fact, the room felt strangely suspended without him in it, like a stage waiting for its solitary actor to resume the scene. His chair was tucked back, ever so slightly askew as if he’d stood just moments ago, perhaps in a hurry, though nothing in the room itself reflected any particular urgency. Everything was neat. Exact. Unmoving.Then I saw it.A folded square of parchment—small, square-edged, and almost unnoticeable—res

• THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH   Chapter 69: To Be Seen by the Wrong Eyes

  The air outside the infirmary felt heavier than it should have, too still, too watchful—as if even the walls had been waiting for me to reappear. Healer Kathy’s final words, kind but perfunctory, echoed dully in my mind: “You're clear. Just take it slow.” As if slow could undo the way my bones trembled with residual tension, or as if anything short of turning back time could fix what had already been seen, already been whispered, already known. The linen bandage around my wrist was clean, neat, clinical—no sign of the storm that had passed through me.Callum waited just outside the door. His hands were in his coat pockets, the collar turned up to shield against a chill that wasn’t entirely physical. He didn’t smile when he saw me. Not out of indifference—but something else. Worry, perhaps, or restraint. A muted expression worn by someone who understood the weight I now carried and wasn’t quite sure how to lift it with me.He fell into step beside me without a word, a quiet sentinel wi

• THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH   Chapter 68: What Was Mine to Carry

  The name left my mouth before I realized I’d shaped it—quiet, hoarse, almost uncertain in its escape. A whisper half-breathed, not demanded. A name I had spoken a hundred times without thinking, but now it burned against my tongue like a question I hadn’t meant to ask.“Ingrid…”The syllables curled into the stillness like smoke, delicate and almost apologetic in how little they filled the room. But it was enough. Enough to still the air, to fracture whatever invisible thread tethered the quiet voices beside my bed, to summon an instant reaction like breath pulled back into lungs that had forgotten how to draw it.I heard her gasp before I saw her move.“Oh—oh, moon above, you’re awake,” Ingrid breathed, her words tumbling forward in a rush of disbelief and reverence, as though the very act of my voice reaching her had been a prayer answered. She moved fast, faster than I’d seen her in days—no hesitation, no restraint, just a girl coming undone at the sight of someone she thought she’