All Chapters of THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

By the time I returned to the dorm, the corridors of Ashwood had begun their nightly transformation—quiet no longer meant peaceful here. It meant expectant. The lamps lining the stone walls flickered with dull amber light, their flames twitching as though something unseen had passed too close. My footsteps echoed softly in the hall, and every sound—every creak of wood, every distant slam of a door—felt like it was directed at me.I hesitated at the door to our room. My fingers hovered near the handle, and for a brief second, I considered walking past it—going somewhere else, anywhere else—but the exhaustion in my body pulled me inward like a riptide.The door creaked open. Familiar shadows stretched across the floor. Ingrid was already there.She sat cross-legged on her bed, her arms wrapped tightly around a pillow, hair half-loose like she’d been running her fingers through it in frustration. Her eyes snapped up the second I entered, wide, searching, her whole body tilting forward as

The carriage came to a gradual, reluctant stop, the wheels sighing against the snow-packed path as though they, too, were breathless with anticipation. A silence bloomed in its wake, deep and velvet-like, disturbed only by the gentle flicker of the lanterns fixed outside, their amber glow catching on the icy air.For a moment, no one moved. Inside the carriage, warmth clung stubbornly to the velvet seats, the windows clouded with our breath, the hush between us thrumming with the weight of what waited beyond. And then—“Oh,” Ingrid whispered, breath fogging the glass as she leaned forward, her voice barely a shape on the air. “We’re here.”Her gloved fingers pressed to the frosted pane, and her reflection—wide-eyed, lips parted—stared back at her with the reverence of someone seeing a holy site for the very first time.Tamsin leaned in beside her. “Is that—” She broke off with a short, stunned laugh. “It’s bigger than I imagined. No—grander.”Neither of them reached for the door just

The corridor stretched ahead of us like a frozen breath held too long. No one spoke, not immediately. We were walking—not rushed, not slow, just… moving. Each footfall softened by the thick carpet that ran the length of the hall, woven in pale silver and ash-grey, a tapestry of stars and tangled branches beneath our boots.Ingrid was the first to break the hush.Her voice arrived softly, not in volume, but in intention—low and curious, as though the idea had only just bloomed behind her eyes. “Do you think,” she murmured, tilting her head just enough to catch my profile, “if we got lost… someone might mistake us for staff still needed for the evening?”I said nothing.She continued, unbothered by my silence. “Or what if I spilled something on my cloak—nothing dramatic, just a little wax or ink or a well-timed unraveling of a hem—and had to stay behind to fix it? Surely, they wouldn’t send a girl into the snow with an undone seam.”Still, I didn’t look at her.“Ingrid,” I said finally,

Ingrid did not wait for permission.As though the cold had melted from her bones the moment opportunity came calling, she strode forward, leaving behind the half-stilled hush of snow and carriage wheels, the tangled breath of hesitation I still hadn’t exhaled. The hem of her cloak, a faded garnet shade, caught on a patch of slush but she didn’t notice—or perhaps she didn’t care. She had the gleam in her eyes again. The one that meant she’d already decided how the rest of the scene would unfold, and all we were meant to do was follow the script she was writing as she went.“My lord,” she called out, her voice alight with an elegance that felt borrowed but not unfitting, “I do hope we’re not interrupting anything too serious.”The man—Evander Dorne, Lena had said, and the name still clung to the edges of my thoughts like smoke to fabric—turned his head at the sound, the folds of his pale outer cloak shifting ever so slightly as he did. He looked as though he’d stepped out of a portrait

For a moment—a long, aching moment that seemed to suspend itself outside the flow of ordinary time—I sat there, paralyzed by the horror of what I believed I had done. The weight of it bore down on me with a suffocating finality, a terrible certainty that I had spoken the words aloud, that the ugly, jagged truth had torn itself free from the fragile prison of my mind and now hung between us, irreversible, unerasable. I thought I had ruined everything. . My heart hammered against my ribs, wild and frenzied, as if it, too, sought some desperate means of escape. I could already imagine the narrowing of Lord Evander’s pale eyes, the tightening of his mouth into a grim line, the cold shift of his manner from politely indifferent to dangerously intent.But then, very slowly, reality began to filter back through the thick fog of panic—first in the steady rhythm of the carriage wheels slowing against the snow-muffled road, then in the low murmur of voices weaving seamlessly together, so ordina