Ancient Rune

Maldric:

The stone walls of my cell wept in silence. Condensation gathered like tears, trickling down the veins of black rock carved by hands that once worshiped me. I sat in the center of the circle — etched sigils glowing faintly, their crimson hue pulsing with each heartbeat I no longer possessed. This prison had been built to outlast centuries, to outlast me. But it would not.

It was quiet in the lowest depths of the Academy. No laughter, no footsteps, no life. Only the deep groan of the old stones shifting above and the faint hum of the ancient gates — living things of iron and blood, tightened closed with each thought of escape. My talons, long since blunted by clawing at these walls, dragged lightly across the symbols burned into my flesh. Binding marks. Mortis Grimm’s voice whispered from memory: You will not take another soul, incubus. You will rot beneath our feet.

I smiled to myself in the dark. Mortis, Nerine, Cressida, Luno — the four founders. Their names were etched into the stone of this place, but their power had thinned with time, while mine… mine had only deepened. They thought they’d buried me. They did not know what they’d planted.

The iron rattled softly as I stood, my wings unfurling like the pages of a black book. Long, tattered, and smoking with shadow. The room was small, but it was mine, and it bent when I commanded it. The walls shivered, the runes flaring with warning, and for a moment my reflection flickered across the stone — not the man the Academy would have recognized, but the thing beneath: eyes like hollow pits of ember, skin the color of ash and oil, and a crown of horn and bone curving from my skull. This was my true shape. This was what had been locked away.

The humans above had forgotten what an incubus really was. A thief of breath, a devourer of virtue, a patron of nightmares. Older than the church bells, older than the kings who built this kingdom. The students whispered of monsters at the edges of their dreams. They did not realize their monster was directly beneath their feet.

I sat straight again. Bound but not broken. Even here, I worked. Even here, I watched. I had tasted the edges of the world through cracks in the spellwork. Every ritual the Academy performed, every drop of blood spilled on its floors — all of it whispered down to me, feeding me threads of knowledge. And then she arrived.

Isadora.

I had felt her long before I had seen her. The pulse of her aura was unlike any of the others — rich, velvet-dark, shimmering like a tide of midnight oil. She had walked into my domain without knowing. Each night when she slept, her dreams brushed the walls of my cage. Each time she touched one of the boys, she touched me. Her power was growing because she was not learning — she was absorbing. Devouring.

The Devourer of the Four.

It was an old prophecy, carved in a dead language on a dead wall long before the Academy even stood. The founders had built their school over a rift in the earth, a wound between worlds where something ancient bled through. Me. They thought if they confined me, the prophecy would fade. But the prophecy was never about me. It was about her.

I could see her in my mind’s eye now — standing in her room, her hands trembling with power, the four of them orbiting her like stars caught in her gravity. Rhett, Lucian, Silas, Kai. Each of them had touched her. Each of them had given her a piece of themselves. Blood, shadow, hunger, glamour. The bonds were there, like glowing lines running from her heart to theirs. And through those bonds, to me.

It would take all four of them to unbind me, or just her.

The thought sent a ripple of hunger through me so intense my claws pierced my own palms. She was the key. She was the lock. She was the prophecy fulfilled, walking the halls above me, unaware of what she carried in her veins. If I reached her, I could be free.

The stones hissed as I rose again, pacing the small space like a caged beast. My talons clicked on the stone. We shouldn’t try to reform the damned, but wield their powers, I had once whispered to the founders as they carved the runes into my flesh. I had listened. I had learned. They had bound me, yes, but in binding me they had shown me the shape of the key.

She was young, but the beast inside her was not. Each time she kissed one of them, each time she drew a fragment of their power, she grew closer to me. Soon she would not need their guidance. Soon she would be strong enough to find me without knowing she was searching. And then she would open the door.

I closed my eyes and let my mind unfurl upward through the cracks in the spellwork. Threads of shadow snaked up through the floors of the Academy, curling into the halls, the stairwells, the bedrooms. I followed them like veins until I found her — curled on her bed, her breathing uneven, her dreams dark. Even asleep, she called to me.

My name — my true name — rolled off her tongue in her dreams, though she did not yet understand it. A prayer. A curse. A summoning.

I almost answered.

Instead, I drew back. Not yet. The bonds had to deepen. The boys had to bleed into her more fully. The founders had made the lock complicated, but I had learned patience down here in the dark. Patience and hunger.

The stone around me groaned, a low animal sound. The runes flared again. The chains burned like molten iron across my skin, trying to discipline me. I smiled, showing teeth that were too long, too sharp. You cannot hold me forever.

In the far corner of the cell, a small altar of bone and shadow had begun to grow. My own work, pulled from scraps of dream and dust. A figure rose there now, carved from the darkness — her figure. Isadora, head bowed, hair a curtain of midnight. The boys’ shapes curled at her feet like kneeling shadows. I reached out and brushed my claw across the effigy’s face.

“Soon,” I whispered. My voice cracked like stone splitting. “Soon you will be mine. Soon you will be free. And so will I.”

Above me, somewhere far away, a bell tolled for the evening hour. The sound slid down the stairwells, past the wards, into my cell. It was like a heartbeat. I closed my eyes and imagined it was hers.

All it would take was one moment. One kiss. One whispered word.

And the Academy would belong to me again.