Absolution and Damnation

Lucian:

The storm rattled the stained-glass windows of the scriptorium, thunder cracking like a whip across the heavens. Lightning carved the vaulted ceiling in jagged veins of white, illuminating the shelves of cursed tomes and dust-choked grimoires in unnatural light. Each flash felt like it might set the parchment ablaze, and yet the books only seemed to hum darker, as if feeding on the chaos outside.

I leaned against the black-marble column, arms folded across my chest, watching Isadora tremble on the small oak nightstand. Her hands rested flat on the surface, white-knuckled, as if she were bracing herself against the world itself.

Her lips moved soundlessly, whispering some prayer that would never be answered.

The screams outside had been growing for hours—screams that didn’t belong to students, or even to the living. Banshees wailed along the halls, their cries so sharp they rattled the glass of lanterns until they cracked. The guttural roar of something massive—ogre, troll, or worse—rolled beneath it, punctuated by the frantic shriek of young voices cut short.

The wards had fallen. The Academy’s last illusion of safety was gone.

Silas, ever the shadow, lounged near the far shelves with a dazed look on his face. He didn’t look at Isadora. He didn’t look at me. He stared out into the world burning around us was merely an inconvenient distraction. But I could feel his eyes flicker over now and then, just to drink in her trembling form the way a starving man might scent meat.

She was unraveling. Beautifully, dangerously unraveling.

When another scream rattled down the corridor—this one sharper, younger—Isadora flinched so violently the chair beneath her scraped against the stone.

“Stop,” I said, voice low, coiled like smoke. I pushed away from the column, circling the table until I stood near her. “You’ll drive yourself mad before anything touches you.”

Her wide eyes darted up to me, luminous with fear, and gods help me—it almost undid me.

“I can’t just sit here,” she whispered. Her voice broke like glass. “They’re dying. Can’t you hear them?”

Of course I could. Every scream cut down the hall like a blade, peeling flesh from sanity. But unlike her, I knew what to do with that kind of sound. I swallowed it whole.

Silas shot up from his trance. “She’s not wrong,” he murmured, voice soft yet rotten. “They are dying. Perhaps that is the point.”

Her head snapped toward him, horrified. “How can you say that?”

“Because it is truth, dove.” Silas stepped from the shadows, his face a pale smirk in the stormlight. “Some were meant to survive this place. Others… never were. It is not cruelty. It is a culling.”

She trembled harder. I wanted to tear his throat out for the way he looked at her in that moment—like she was one scream away from falling into his arms, into his darkness.

Another crash rattled the doors of the scriptorium, and this time the sound wasn’t just distant. It was close. Too close. A scream followed, shrill and cut short by a heavy, wet thud.

Isadora jolted from her chair.

“Sit.” The command tore from me before I could think, sharp as a whip crack. Her knees bent automatically, as if her body couldn’t resist. She sank back down, eyes wide, chest heaving.

Her pulse thundered so loud I could almost taste it.

Then we heard it—slower, dragging. Something large. The guttural pant of an ogre filled the hall, accompanied by the sick scrape of claws against stone. The iron stink of blood wafted beneath the door.

And then—the scream.

Not a banshee’s howl this time. Not a monster’s roar. A girl’s scream. Fragile. Mortal.

Isadora shot to her feet, eyes blazing with a kind of wild, frantic determination.

Before she could move, I was already at the door. My body moved before my mind caught up, instincts older than morality snapping into place.

The corridor reeked of copper and smoke. A student lay sprawled across the floor, her leg bent grotesquely beneath her, crimson blooming from a jagged gash down her thigh. Her hands clawed at the stone as she tried to drag herself away from the ogre looming above her—massive, tusked, its skin gray and slick with rain that dripped from the shattered window above.

Her scream tore through the hall as it lifted its spiked club.

Something inside me—something I’d buried beneath years of hunger, rage, and restraint—snapped.

I lunged.

Shadows licked my heels as I crossed the distance, faster than human, faster than most creatures dared to be. My blade was in my hand before the ogre’s club swung down. The steel caught the beast’s wrist, severing tendon and spraying black ichor across the stone walls.

It bellowed in fury, swinging the ruined limb toward me, but rage makes beasts sloppy. I drove my dagger into its throat, twisting until its scream turned into a wet gurgle. The sound was… intoxicating.

Its body crashed to the floor, rattling the entire hall.

The girl whimpered, curling against the stone as blood poured from her leg. Her face was pale, her eyes glossy with shock.

“Please,” she gasped. “Don’t let me—”

I crouched beside her, every instinct screaming at me to walk away. To let the weak fall as Silas said they should. To leave her for the shadows and the carrion feeders that already whispered in the walls.

But when I looked back over my shoulder, I saw Isadora in the doorway.

Her hands clutched the frame as if it were the only thing holding her upright. Her eyes weren’t on the girl. They were on me.

And for the first time in longer than I cared to remember, I wanted to be seen.

I tore my sleeve, binding it tight around the student’s wound. Her cry was sharp, then softened as the pressure slowed the bleeding. I lifted her, one arm beneath her knees, the other cradling her back, as if she were something fragile worth saving.

Her head lolled against my chest.

The silence that followed was heavier than the storm.

I carried her back to the scriptorium, my boots slick with ogre blood, my heart thundering like a war drum I didn’t recognize. Silas’s brows arched when I entered, his smirk curving deeper, like a man watching his rival unravel.

But it was Isadora’s face that stopped me cold.

She looked at me as if she didn’t know whether to fear me… or thank me.

That was worse than any scream.

“Lucian,” she whispered, voice frayed at the edges, fragile as glass.

And gods help me—hearing my name on her lips felt like both absolution and damnation.

I set the girl down gently on the table, shadows curling restless at my back. The storm outside howled louder, the wards groaning against whatever else pressed at the Academy’s gates.

But the only thing I could feel was her eyes, pinning me like daggers, unspoken words drowning between us.

For the first time in centuries, I had saved instead of destroyed.

And it terrified me more than any monster ever could.