Chapter Seven – Blood in the Shadows

Malick’s POV

He didn’t follow the crowd when the bell rang. Didn’t grab his bag. Didn’t care that his shirt clung to him with sweat from the match. Malick walked the opposite direction—down a side corridor and straight into the bones of the Academy, where light thinned and whispers echoed too long.

Something inside him had snapped.

Maybe it was the shadows. Maybe it was her voice—half-forgotten, half-sung—in Old Shadowborne. Or maybe it was the way their darknesses had tangled like they knew each other. Like they’d danced together in another life.

“Sierra Vale,” he muttered under his breath, fangs barely hidden in the shape of her name. The syllables curled around his tongue like a secret he wasn’t meant to say out loud. “Who the fuck are you?”

He could still see her—the cut of her jaw, the bruised flush on her cheek, the fire in her eyes when she thought no one was watching. She wasn’t just some tortured loner. That much was clear. Whatever she was… she was familiar in a way that gnawed at his spine, burrowing down into the places he didn’t let anyone touch.

Malick’s boots echoed down the narrow passage as he slipped through an unmarked door into the Deep Archives, a restricted part of the Academy most students didn’t even know existed. The air hit him immediately—stale and heavy, reeking of spell-burnt paper and old secrets. Dust motes drifted like ash in the thin strands of light that managed to break through the cracks.

He lit a flame between his fingers.

No torches. No magic crystals. The school didn’t want you down here. Which was exactly why he was.

The firelight licked across endless shelves of scrolls and stone boxes, names etched in languages older than the kingdoms themselves. Each step deeper tugged at him, as if the walls themselves remembered his blood.

The current student registry was his first stop.

He found the scroll marked “V”, but there was no Vale listed. Not in the official records. Not even a forged background. She didn’t exist.

That was clue number one.

He shoved the scroll back and moved deeper. Past the historical war shelves. Past the curse-bound bestiary files that rattled faintly in their cages as his flame passed. Shadows crawled along the edges of his vision, whispering, urging him onward.

Straight to a cracked wooden drawer marked:

“EXPERIMENTAL SUBJECTS – Fortress Alpha | Years Lost.”

The words made his jaw clench.

That’s where he’d been born. Where he’d been trained. Tortured.

That was the place he escaped from… barely.

And he remembered the woman who had helped him flee—the one who whispered in Old Shadowborne as the alarms blared:

“I have a little girl here. Just a little younger than you. One day… I’ll do the same for her.”

His heart thundered as he opened the drawer.

File after file. Most redacted.

Most stamped “Deceased.”

But one wasn’t.

Subject 21-B

Status: Escaped | Presumed Dead

Lineage: Dragon-enhanced | Shadowborne fusion | Mother: High-tier shadow sorceress (missing)

Power Level: Suppressed due to magical trauma | Potential: Extreme | Instability: High

Notable Traits: Heterochromia (blue/green), irregular freckles, reactive shadow aura.

Subject considered dangerous. Unfit for training. Recommend termination if found.

His breath caught.

That’s her.

It had to be.

Sierra wasn’t just another girl hiding in the back of a classroom. She was the ghost of a project that was supposed to be wiped from history.

And her mother—the sorceress—she was more than just powerful. She’d been feared. Feared by kings. By generals. By the Dragon King himself.

He stared at the note again.

“Reactive shadow aura.” He watched her go.

Her retreating figure framed by the doorway, fragile and fierce all at once. The sharp set of her shoulders, the way she tried to hold herself together even as the weight of something unseen pressed against her—it carved into him. He tried to shake it, tried to ignore the way his gaze lingered, but he couldn’t.

His heart pounded, hard and fast, each beat laced with that strange warmth twisting in his gut like wildfire. The moment they’d shared—the shadows, the touch, the pulse—had rattled something loose deep inside him. Something ancient. Something he had spent years pretending wasn’t there.

He’d seen it wrap around her. Felt it touch his. Their darknesses recognized each other like lovers meeting in secret.

And gods, the memory of it still burned through him—the way her shadow had curled against his, bold and curious, like it had wanted him. Like it had been waiting.

His flame guttered as something else stirred in his chest, hotter than fear, sharper than recognition. Desire. He hated how easily it rose, how natural it felt to picture the way her mouth had parted when the shadows had touched, the tremble in her breath, the shape of her body fighting to stay composed under the weight of it all.

She didn’t even realize what she was doing to him.

And that was the most dangerous part.

In that silence, another memory bubbled up from the deep—his own past pressing through the cracks. A woman’s voice, gentle and raw, whispering as his newborn body burned with unnatural fire:

“Ix vel’ara zha. Kai thrak’eth nex ix, ix-lir kharuun.”

“I love you… be strong for me, my little warrior.”

His mother’s final gift. The Shadow Queen.

Her death hadn’t been for nothing.

And now, after all this time, he wasn’t the only one marked by that place. Not the only one broken… or built for more.

He closed the file gently, rage and clarity thrumming beneath his skin. His flame danced wilder, answering the beast inside him.

She doesn’t even know what she is…

But I do.

Malick lingered there for a moment, staring at the drawer as though the shadows themselves might lunge out and drag him back into the Fortress. He left it slightly open, like a warning to anyone else who dared come searching.

The corridors hummed when he stepped back into them, his magic crackling beneath his skin like stormfire.

If the Dragon King had bred her like a weapon…

If her mother’s blood still stirred inside her…

If fate had brought us both to this damned Academy—

Then this wasn’t coincidence.

This was our destiny.