The Whisper Beneath the Stacks

Kai:

I have scoured the Academy’s library for three nights straight, and the place is beginning to taste of failure.

Dust bites the back of my throat. Ancient leather spines leer from the shelves, titles half–eaten by time. I’ve pulled every index, every brittle scroll, every forbidden ledger that might breathe a hint of what Isadora Gravelle really is—and every time I end up staring at blank answers.

The sun sank hours ago. The tall windows bleed only moonlight now, silver and cold, pooling on the marble floor like spilt mercury.

I should quit. I should.

Instead, an idea slithers through me like a spark: the Scriptorium.

Not the public archives. Her scriptorium. The private alcoves only a handful of professors and Isadora herself ever haunt—sealed, whispered about, older than the Academy itself. If the truth hides anywhere, it waits there.

The corridors beyond midnight are a cathedral of hush. My footsteps fall without sound; glamour bends the shadows around me until I’m more rumor than flesh.

Isadora’s door stands a few feet from the hidden stair that leads up to the scriptorium. I pause. A single shaft of silver spills across the threshold, painting the stone in pale fire.

I can’t help it. I pick the lock and glance inside.

She sleeps curled beneath a tide of dark blankets, hair a river of ink across the pillow. Moonlight strokes her cheekbones, catching on the delicate flutter of her lashes. She looks carved from quiet, a dream the night decided to keep for itself.

Something in my chest knots tight.

I shouldn’t watch her, bit I can't move.

Her breathing is a soft cadence, a lullaby that frays my control. My kind are built for chaos, for mischief that burns like fever, but nothing has ever undone me like the sight of her stillness.

I force myself to step back before the want turns feral.

The stair curls up behind a tapestry of thorns and moons. The air grows colder, older. Magic hums here—raw, unpruned, the kind that remembers blood oaths and forgotten kings.

Torches gutter as I pass, bowing their flames toward me.

The Scriptorium opens like a wound in the earth: a vast hollow lined with shelves that lean under their own secrets. Tomes of bark-bound vellum, scrolls inked in languages that died before the stars learned their names.

I move between the rows, fingers skimming cracked spines. Whispers breathe against my ears, too old to belong to any living tongue. I let them guide me, a current beneath thought.

A narrow alcove waits at the back, hidden behind a leaning pillar. The air here tastes more still, more dangerous.

One book sits alone on a blackwood lectern. No title on the cover. Only a sigil burned deep into the leather—a spiral of thorns encircling a single eye.

The moment my palm touches it, the wards flare, tasting my bloodline. Fae. Trickster. The sigil loosens with a hiss, and the book falls open of its own will.

The script inside is older than the oldest Fae I’ve ever met, letters curling like smoke across the page. But the meaning blooms in my mind as if the words remember how to be understood.

When silence screams and stars descend,

A Succumb stirs, the veil shall rend.

From depths where mortals fear to tread,

She drinks the strength of kings long dead.

Four thrones undone, their will entwined,

Now pulse within her cursed design.

She walks with fire, war in skin,

A vessel wrought for wrath to win.

The world shall break where she stands tall—

Yet she will be the first to fall.

Her name: a whisper lost to night,

Her triumph paid in flesh and blight.

Though crowned by power not her own,

She’ll bleed to forge an age unknown.

The final line bleeds like a cut across the parchment.

My breath goes razor-thin.

Succumb. Four thrones undone. Power not her own.

Isadora.

Every word strikes like a blade of recognition. The pull she has on each of us—Rhett’s possessive fury, Silas’s haunted devotion, Lucian’s brutal hunger, the madness curling under my own skin—it’s all here, predicted centuries before she ever drew breath.

She isn’t a mystery.

She’s a prophecy.

A tamer of the High. The one who could bind or destroy the greatest of us.

I close the book but the words stay burned behind my eyes, bright as lightning.

A whisper of movement brushes the alcove.

I whirl, glamour coiled, every instinct screaming.

Only silence.

Yet the air carries a scent I know too well—lavender drowned in stormlight.

Isadora.

I picture her below, asleep in moonlight, unaware of the legend tightening around her throat. The urge to run to her, to guard her, to tear down the Academy brick by brick until nothing can touch her—it claws at me until my pulse is a drumbeat of pure want.

But the prophecy hums like a brand against my ribs.

Four thrones undone.

She will be the first to fall.

A chill slides through me, sharper than fear. I am Fae; I have danced with doom before. But this—this is different. This feels like the beginning of an ending no trickster can escape.

I press the book back to the lectern. The sigil seals with a sigh, as if the Scriptorium itself approves of my silence.

My glamour rises again, wrapping me in night as I climb the descend the stairway.

When I reach her door I stop, hand hovering over the wood.

Inside, she sleeps on, the silvermoonlight pouring over her like a benediction. For a moment I imagine waking her, telling her everything, letting the prophecy shatter between us like glass.

Instead, I let the darkness have me.

The secret burns hotter than any flame.

And for the first time in centuries, I’m afraid of what I want.