Monsters and Saviors

Isadora

The 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 bed as if it had been waiting for him. The sheets swallowed him whole. His breathing came ragged, shallow, every exhale trembling against the air.

Rhett followed, his frame filling the doorway like a storm given flesh. His hands were slick with blood—some of it his, some of it not—and his face was shadowed beneath strands of rain-dark hair. He dropped into the chair beside my writing desk, elbows on his knees, and scrubbed at his face with those bloodied hands as if he could rub the night from his skin. The scent of wolf clung to him—wild, earthy, bristling with restrained violence.

Behind them was Lucian. Silent. Controlled. But his eyes betrayed him—dark, burning, restless. They locked onto the girl sprawled across the table, the one he had carried in from the hall like some fallen relic. Her leg was bound hastily, blood soaking through the torn fabric. She whimpered faintly in her sleep, caught between fever and pain.

He stared at her as if she were a question he’d never meant to ask. Then his gaze rose, slow and deliberate, until it found me.

The air between us tightened.

Silas lurked in the corner, his back against the bookshelves, one boot braced against the wall. His shadows twitched like restless wings. He looked… wrong. His usual mask of lazy somber was gone, replaced by something rawer, unshielded. A bundle of dark emotion wound so tightly it might snap.

None of us spoke. The storm spoke for us, rattling the windows until I thought the glass might splinter inward.

Finally, I moved. My knees threatened to buckle as I crossed to the center of the room.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I whispered.

Four sets of eyes turned to me. The weight of their gazes pinned me in place, and yet some part of me craved it, needed it, as if their attention anchored me to the ground while the power inside me tried to claw its way free.

“I need you to listen,” I said, louder now. My voice cracked like the thunder outside. “I’m not—” My throat closed around the words. I swallowed them back down, trembling. “I’m not sure I’m who you think I am. Who you’ve should be risking yourselves for.”

Kai stirred weakly on the bed, his face pale against the pillow. “Isadora…”

“No.” My voice sharpened. “I’ve read the old texts. The scraps of prophecy. The Tamer. The Devourer of the High.” The last name tasted like ashes on my tongue. “The shadows call me that. I hear them whisper it when I sleep. You can't risk it all for me.”

Silas’s mouth curled, but the expression wasn’t amusement; it was a wound. “Prophecies lie,” he murmured. “They’re written by victors to excuse their sins.”

“Do they?” I shot back. “Or do they simply… warn?”

Rhett’s hands dropped from his face. His eyes—wolf-bright, predatory—fixed on mine. “You think this will stop if you weren't here?” His voice was rough, broken on the edges.

I nodded once, a small movement that felt like a confession. “Maybe. And if that’s true, then everything you’ve done—everything you’ve risked—has been for nothing. You’re weakening yourselves trying to save me, and I’m just…” My hands curled at my sides. “…waiting for my turn to help. But it hasn’t come.”

Lucian shifted, finally tearing his gaze from the wounded girl. His voice, when it came, was soft and sharp as a blade’s edge. “And what will you do, little raven, if your turn never comes?”

I met his eyes. “Then I’ll protect you. All of you. Even if it kills me.”

Silence.

The candlelight guttered as if the storm itself had sucked the air from the room.

Kai’s hand twitched on the sheets, fingers curling like he wanted to reach for me but couldn’t muster the strength. “Isadora…” He swallowed, his voice a rasp. “You’re not… You’re not a monster.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” he said, eyes closing as exhaustion dragged him down. “Because if you were… we’d already be dead.”

Rhett’s jaw flexed. He looked down at his hands, still stained crimson, and then back at me. “You’re not alone,” he said gruffly. “Even if you are what they say. We’ll handle it.”

The words should have soothed me. They didn’t. They burned.

Lucian laughed softly, without mirth. “Handle it,” he repeated. “That’s what the founders said when they bound Maldric below the Academy. And now the wards are down, and the dark comes crawling back in.”

At the name, something inside me shivered. Maldric. The ancient incubus. The monster the prophecy whispered about in the same breath as me.

Silas stepped forward, just one step, shadows trailing him like a funeral shroud. His eyes were not kind. “If you are the Devourer, dove, then perhaps you should stop pretending you’re not.”

The air thickened.

I stared at him, at all of them—Kai pale and fading, Rhett blood-slick and wolf-bright, Lucian coiled like a serpent, Silas hungry and haunted—and the power inside me surged. It wanted them. All of them. Not just their strength. Their essence. Their devotion. Their fear.

I clenched my fists until my nails bit my palms. “I won’t,” I said, shaking. “I won’t become what the prophecy wants. I can't let you all risk it all for me.”

The thunder roared so loud the floor trembled beneath us. The windows flared with lightning, and for a heartbeat, the room was cast in white. In that moment, they all looked like strangers—dangerous, beautiful, unpredictable. My monsters. My saviors. My doom.

And I realized with a cold, sinking dread:

I wasn’t afraid of them.

I was afraid of myself.

The storm slammed against the building again, but it wasn’t just rain now. It was the sound of wings, claws, bodies striking stone. The dark things were inside. The wards were gone.

Rhett stood abruptly, chair scraping back. His nostrils flared, wolf instincts snapping to attention. “They’re getting even closer.”

Kai pushed himself halfway up, swaying, but Rhett held out a hand. “Stay. You’re no good out there like this.”

Lucian’s eyes flicked between me and the door, calculating. Always calculating.

Silas smiled, thin and sharp. “Seems the culling isn’t finished.”

I rose slowly, feeling the power gather beneath my skin like stormwater behind a dam. My hunger was a living thing now, pressing against my ribs, whispering that the fastest way to save them was to take them. Their power. Their lives. Their souls.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I stepped between them and the door. “You’ve done enough,” I said. “All of you. Rest. Heal.”

Rhett frowned. “Isadora—”

“I said,” my voice cracked like the thunder, “rest.”

For a heartbeat, no one moved. Then, slowly, Kai sank back against the pillows. Rhett hesitated, then dropped back into the chair. Lucian leaned against the wall, watching me with eyes that might have been admiration or suspicion. Silas tilted his head, the ghost of a grin curling his mouth.

And I stood there, shaking, the storm at my back and my monsters before me.

If I was the prophecy’s destroyer, then so be it.

But not tonight.

Tonight, I would be their shield.

Even if it was the last thing I ever did.