Living Nightmare

Isadora:

Fire.

Everywhere.

One moment I’m standing in the academy, the next the night is swallowed whole by flames. They surge up the stone walls in great orange waves, licking at the gargoyles until their snarling faces blister and split. The air tastes of copper and smoke.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t move.

Ash rains down in a slow, deliberate snowfall. Each fleck is a dying ember, whispering against my skin like a warning. I press my palm to the nearest column—scalding. The burn bites deep, but I can’t let go. If I let go, I’ll float away into the inferno.

Somewhere beyond the crackle of fire, something moves.

A shape, broad-shouldered and black as midnight, prowls along the ruined arches. No face. Only eyes—two molten coins gleaming through the smoke. They watch me with a hunger that isn’t human. The flames bend toward the figure like it owns them, like the entire blaze is nothing but an extension of its will.

“Who—” My voice dies. The smoke steals it.

The figure tilts its head. Closer.

Closer.

Every instinct screams run, but my legs betray me, knees locking like stone. My heartbeat is the only sound I own, a frantic drum swallowed by the roar of the fire. The heat claws at my throat, searing the breath from my lungs. I want to scream. I want to wake up.

Then I hear it. A low growl, ancient and wrong. It ripples through the flames, sinking into the marrow of my bones.

The figure takes another step. The fire follows, stretching long, skeletal fingers across the stone walls.

There is no exit. No door. No sky. Only flame.

I try to move. My foot lifts an inch, then another. Each step feels like wading through molten tar. The shadows on the walls twist into shapes—wolves with gaping maws, serpents coiling in endless loops, a woman’s silhouette with a crown of thorns. They whisper my name.

Isadora…

I spin, searching for a break, a stairwell, anything. But every path ends in fire. The halls has become a labyrinth of living flame, walls folding in on themselves, narrowing until the heat is a vise around my ribs.

The figure is suddenly behind me.

I feel it before I see it: a chill so sharp it cuts through the heat, a cold that has nothing to do with air. I whirl around. Nothing. Only smoke—and the sound of slow, deliberate footsteps.

Closer.

A flicker of movement to my right. I turn—and the world erupts.

The ground splits open with a thunderous crack. Fire belches upward in a pillar of blinding light, and from within it a whisper curls into my ear. Velvet. Deadly.

You can’t hide from what you are.

The words don’t belong to any voice I know, yet they ring familiar, as though someone buried them in my blood long before I was born. My knees buckle. The courtyard tilts. I fall—

I jerk awake.

For a heartbeat I don’t know where I am. My body is slick with sweat, the sheets twisted tight around my legs. The air in my dorm room is frigid, sharp enough to cut. Moonlight seeps through the cracked window, pale and ghostly, painting everything in silver and shadow.

My pulse is a war drum in my ears.

It takes a full minute before I can draw a steady breath. I drag a trembling hand across my face. Damp. My skin feels fevered, like the flames followed me out of the dream.

It was only a nightmare.

Wasn’t it?

I sit up, every muscle tight. The room smells faintly of smoke. I tell myself it’s the old radiator, the faint burn of dust on metal—but the scent is too rich, too real. My heart kicks faster.

A soft creak echoes from the hallway.

I freeze. Listen. The academy is a hive of old sounds—pipes groaning, wood settling—but this is different. This is footsteps. Slow. Measured. Coming closer.

I swing my legs off the bed, toes sinking into the chilled stone floor. My breath fogs in the moonlight. Each inhale tastes of iron.

The handle of my door twitches.

I swallow hard, every nerve screaming. I should call out, demand to know who’s there. Instead I stay silent, trapped between dread and a strange, inexplicable pull—like the nightmare has followed me and wants to finish what it started.

The handle stills. Silence.

I wait. Ten seconds. Twenty. The only sound is my heart slamming against my ribs.

Finally I move, crossing the room on bare feet. The boards groan under my weight, loud enough to make me flinch. I press my ear to the door. Nothing. Just the echo of my own ragged breathing.

I slide the lock into place.

The click is too loud in the quiet.

For a long while I stand there, palms flat against the wood, waiting for another sound, another sign that I’m not alone. Nothing comes.

But the scent of smoke lingers.

I return to the bed, though sleep feels impossible. The moonlight pools across the floorboards, pale as bone. Every shadow seems alive—the wardrobe bending into a hunched figure, the chair stretching into a crouched beast. I keep telling myself it’s just my eyes adjusting, just leftover fear.

Except…there’s something else. A hum beneath the silence. Low. Vibrating through the stone walls, the way a storm announces itself long before the first crack of thunder.

I pull the blanket tight around my shoulders and sit with my back to the headboard, staring at the door.

Questions crowd in like ghosts.

Why fire? Why those eyes in the dream? Why the voice—so intimate, so certain—telling me I can’t hide from what I am?

What am I?

A memory surfaces: Lucian in the hallway earlier, his eyes molten gold, his words dripping venom. She won’t last here.

Rhett, watching me with that hungry, unyielding gaze.

Kai, shadowing me with a trickster’s grin that never quite hides the darkness beneath.

Silas, silent as the grave, presence colder than any night.

All of them orbiting closer, like planets pulled by a gravity I never asked for.

The nightmare felt like a message. A warning. Or maybe a prophecy.

I stare at the moonlight until it blurs. I tell myself I will stay awake, guard against the dream. But exhaustion drags me under inch by inch, and the last thing I hear before sleep finally takes me is the faintest echo of that velvet voice:

You can’t hide…