Library

Home / Fantasy / Ashwyck Academy for the Damned / Free Fall

Free Fall

Author: Novella Wright

Last Updated: 2025-10-01 05:33:23

Rhett:

The moment her door shuts behind us, I’m choking on the silence.

Her perfume lingers, faint and sweet, threaded with something darker—the copper tang of what just happened. My throat still feels raw, scraped from where her power crushed the air out of me.

I should be furious.

I am furious.

But it isn’t at her.

It’s at myself—at my weakness, at the way I couldn’t protect her when it mattered, at the way my veins bent to her like I was nothing more than prey.

I pace the edge of her room like a caged animal, shoulders tight, fists aching to hit something. Every time my eyes flick toward her, curled on the bed with her knees to her chest, I feel the anger dissolve into something worse—something like pity. Something like longing.

I can’t decide what’s worse.

“You should’ve told us,” I grind out, glaring at the others. “Whatever this is inside her—it isn’t new. It doesn’t just happen by accident.”

Kai snaps his book shut with too much force, golden light still trembling faintly around his fingertips. “Don’t put that on her. You think she asked for this? You think she wanted to choke us out in front of half the damn school?”

“She almost killed us.” My voice breaks sharper than I mean, cutting through the heavy air. “And you’re sitting there defending her like it’s nothing?”

Kai’s eyes flare, but before he can spit back, the cold settles in.

Silas

The window pane groans as frost spreads from my hand across the glass. I don’t stop it. I need something to keep me from unraveling.

The shadows haven’t been quiet since the ballroom. They writhe at the edges of my vision, hissing, warning. I try to tune them out, but their message gnaws at me, relentless. This has happened before.

Delphia.

Her name tastes like a wound reopening. I force it down, lock it away.

But Isadora—gods, she sits there trembling, and it’s all I can do not to go to her. To hold her the way I couldn’t hold Delphia. My first love slipped through my fingers because I hesitated, because I tried to defy what I was made to do. The void took her. Death takes everyone, eventually.

The shadows whisper the same fate for Isadora. Death clings to her.

I curl tighter into the window seat, voice low, almost a rasp. “This isn’t the beginning. It’s the middle. You all feel it, don’t you? We’ve been circling the edge of this prophecy, and now she’s caught in the teeth of it.”

Her eyes find mine across the room. For a second, I swear she sees Delphia in me, sees the boy who tried and failed to cheat death. My throat tightens. I can’t hold her gaze.

Because if she asks me to save her, I don’t know if I can.

Kai

Rhett paces like he’s seconds from tearing the room apart. Silas freezes the damn window over. Lucian sits in the shadows, too quiet, too calm.

And Isadora—she looks at me like I’m the only one still on her side.

Maybe I am.

She doesn’t say it, but her silence begs. Tell me it’s okay. Tell me I didn’t mean it. Tell me I’m not a monster.

I want to. I want to tell her the glamour of this world is enough to shield her, that what happened doesn’t matter. But the truth claws at me.

It does matter.

When her power coiled around my veins, I thought I could hold. Thought my magic was stronger. But she stopped my heart like it was nothing. One squeeze, one flicker more, and I’d have been gone. No golden light, no books, no charm could’ve pulled me back.

Still, I smile at her. I soften my voice. “You’re not alone in this, Isadora. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.”

She clings to the words like a drowning girl clings to driftwood. My chest aches. Because I don’t know if I believe them myself.

Lucian

The others waste their breath on fear. I sit back, let them gnash their teeth, because none of it matters. Not really.

What matters is the way she looked at me when her power surged.

Not at Rhett. Not at Kai. Not even at Silas.

At me.

Her veins found mine. Her blood reached for mine. Dominion recognizes dominion. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s already tied to me, whether she wants it or not.

And gods help me, the thought ignites something feral.

I lean forward in the chair, elbows on my knees, and let my voice cut through their arguing. “You’re all asking the wrong question.”

The room falls quiet.

“The question isn’t whether she meant to hurt us. The question is—why her power chose now to wake. Who’s stirring it. Who wants her to break before she can control it.”

Maldric’s name burns on my tongue, but I keep it back. No need to spook her more than she already is.

Her eyes dart to me, wide, desperate, rimmed with exhaustion.

And in that look, I know. She doesn’t want to belong to me. She’s terrified of what she’s becoming.

But she does belong to me. She just doesn’t see it yet.

Isadora

Their voices coil around me like chains. Accusations. Fears. Half-truths spoken in tones meant to sound like protection.

I don’t deserve any of it.

I can still feel the rush of it—the power spilling from me, wrapping around their throats, pressing down on their hearts. The way their eyes bulged, the way their bodies staggered. I’d thought I was protecting Lucian. But in the end, I nearly destroyed them all.

My chest heaves, my corset biting in too tight. I press my palms to my knees, stare at the dark wooden floor, and try not to sob.

I don’t want to lose them. Not any of them. And yet—how can they stay, knowing what I almost did?

I risk a glance up.

Rhett is fire and fury, pacing like a storm. Silas bleeds quiet sorrow into the window, frost ghosting over the panes. Kai—gods, Kai—he’s still smiling for me, even though I know I nearly killed him. And Lucian—he sits with that same fierce, unreadable gaze, like he’s already decided what I am.

Not human. Not innocent. Not safe.

Something worse.

A shiver tears through me, and I whisper the only words I can manage. “I’m sorry.”

The silence after is worse than their arguing.

Rhett’s jaw ticks. Silas doesn’t look away from the frost. Kai’s smile falters. And Lucian—he leans forward, dark eyes catching mine like a snare.

“Don’t apologize,” he says, voice low, deadly. “Control it. Or it will control you.”

The words sink into me like ice. And I know, with the kind of dread that curdles the blood, that he’s right.

But gods—I don’t know if I can.

The room holds us in a fragile balance—fear, longing, desperation coiling tighter with every passing breath. The shadows press closer. The night stretches heavier.

None of us trust each other. None of us trust ourselves.

And yet not one of them leaves.

Continue to read this book for free

Scan code to download App

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Ashwyck Academy for the Damned Into the Grave
Rhett:Dawn crept over the academy like a funeral shroud.The storm had raged all night, splitting the heavens with thunder, tearing at the ancient grounds until only their bones remained. Every nightmare that had waited in the woods, in the shadows, beneath the earth—every monster with teeth sharp enough to rend the world—had come pouring into our sanctuary.And she had met them all.Isadora.I watched her fight until my body ached with the need to tear through the stone and join her. Watched her stand in the rain, hair wild and plastered to her skin, eyes burning with something more than mortal. Watched her wield our magic—the wolf in her muscles, Lucian’s hunger in her pulse, Kai’s light searing from her hands, Silas’s shadows licking her skin like armor.She fought until hours meant nothing. Until the night bled itself into gray dawn.And when the sun finally rose, burning weakly through the fog, the courtyard lay in ruin.Bodies. Carnage. A battlefield soaked in monster blood.An
Ashwyck Academy for the Damned The Truth
Isadora:The scriptorium reeks of blood, sweat, and exhaustion.Rhett slumps in the chair, smeared streaks of red across his skin. Kai hasn’t moved from my bed—his chest rising in shallow, feverish waves, shadows clinging beneath his eyes. Lucian kneels beside the girl he saved, using blood magic to heal her wound, his stare sharp enough to cut steel, though his hand is steady where it presses against her bleeding leg. And Silas—my Silas—is a trembling coil of shadows in the corner, his chest rising with a thousand unshed emotions, his eyes twin pools of obsidian fixed on me, I can hear the shadows screaming, he is living a nightmare right now.They are all wrecked. Broken down to marrow.And me?I’m standing. Alive. My heart a drumbeat, my veins a furnace.But the storm outside howls with things worse than nightmares. I hear banshees shriek, their cries slicing through the stone walls like knives. Minotaur hooves pound the cobblestones in the distance, shaking the ground beneath my b
Ashwyck Academy for the Damned Mercy or Damnation
Kai:Sleep doesn’t come easy anymore. Not when the wards are broken, when screams bleed through the night like a second heartbeat. Not when I know too much.Tonight, I give in. Im too exhausted, too weak to carry on another minute in this hellscape. I sprawl on my narrow mattress, books and notes scattered across the floor, my veins humming with exhaustion. Candlelight flickers low, shadows shudder against the walls. Somewhere beyond the glass, the storm is still raging, battering the towers like fists against a coffin lid.And when I close my eyes—I fall.Not into dreams. Into something worse.The scriptorium’s shelves stretch endlessly before me, though the wood is blackened, charred, dripping blood like resin. Books breathe here, parchment wheezing with every turn of a page. Their voices overlap, discordant, a thousand-throated dirge.She walks with fire, war in skin…She’ll bleed to forge an age unknown…Prophecy coils in the air like smoke, clogging my lungs, slicking my palms w
Ashwyck Academy for the Damned Blessing and Curse
Silas:The Academy is never truly quiet. Not really.Even now, with the wards down and the storm clawing at the towers, there are voices. Low, hissing things in the cracks between stone. Shadows that gossip like spiteful courtiers, eager to tell me what they see. They laugh about the banshees wailing through the quad, whisper about the creatures picking their teeth with the bones of first-years, hum hymns of doom that were old when the founders still breathed.But tonight, they are louder. Too loud.I find Isadora in the bottom of the scriptorium, standing near the window as though the storm might answer her instead of me. The candles have guttered to weak spines of flame, and the lightning outside paints her in white flashes—fragile one second, terrible the next. The kind of girl who could be mistaken for a saint in the chapel and a demoness in the crypt.She doesn’t notice me slip in. She rarely does. The shadows carry me like a lover.“Little dove,” I murmur, and she startles, spin
Ashwyck Academy for the Damned Monsters and Saviors
IsadoraThe room smelled of rain and bloodshed.I sat on the edge of my bed, fingers pressed to the cold nightstand, as lightning stitched its jagged seams across the black sky. Thunder rolled in like a war drum, and with it came the groans and wails of a world that had been shut out until tonight. Banshees howled somewhere in the distance, their cries sliding down the stone walls like knives. The Academy’s wards had fallen, and everything I’d been told was legend now stalked our halls.I felt it all in my blood, in the strange power that pulsed beneath my skin like a second heartbeat. My stomach churned with hunger—not for food, but for something else, something darker. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe.The door burst open.Kai stumbled in first, pale as chalk, his coat torn and smeared with ash. His light magic flickered faintly along his fingertips, a guttering candle on the edge of extinguishing. He didn’t even look at me; he staggered across the room and collapsed onto my be
Ashwyck Academy for the Damned 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

Share