All Chapters of THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

The chair beneath me was still warm from where I had curled into it moments before, its velvet worn soft with age and faintly scented of ink, parchment glue, and something more elusive—an old, almost bitter fragrance like winter bark stripped too early from the tree. I sat in stillness, the silence stretching between us like a second hearth, flickering and low, catching only on the edges of things.Professor Marwood had not spoken since his last observation, and I hadn’t dared to fill the quiet. Not with my voice. Not yet.But the question pressed against the back of my tongue like a stone I could not swallow, and I knew—knew with the strange certainty that came from instinct and not logic—that I would not leave this room without asking it. Not because I expected a full answer. Not because I believed he would offer it willingly. But because the words on that book’s spine had lodged somewhere in my mind, in the hollow behind my ribs, where dread went to bloom.I turned slightly toward

LATER THAT NIGHTI knew the moment sleep claimed me that I would not rest.It did not come gently. It dragged me under like a tide thick with memory—like black water churning with the silt of things best left buried. One moment, my cheek pressed to the pillow, breath shallow from exhaustion, thoughts still curled around the words I hadn’t said to Callum. The next, I was falling—not through space, but through sensation, through a cold that was not merely the absence of warmth but the presence of something else. Something watching.It was not like the other dreams—the scattered kind, warped by stress or emotion or the body's strange way of unraveling the day. No, this was different. I knew it in my bones. Knew it in the way the silence wrapped around me like wet cloth, smothering, intimate. Knew it in the way the air took on that too-familiar stillness, like breath held too long. As if the Void itself had reached for me again—eager, patient, unrelenting.And I knew—I knew—before the vis

The moment Professor Marwood’s footsteps vanished beyond the stone archway, it was as if the air thinned with his absence. The tension he left behind did not dissipate—it hovered, thick and immovable, like the remnants of smoke after something sacred has burned. I stood in the echo of it, wrists clasped too tightly behind me, the cold from the flagstone floor beginning to seep through the thin soles of my shoes and into the bones of my heels.Callum hadn’t spoken. Not yet. Not since the final pronouncement.His silence wasn’t cold, but it was restrained—tightly wound, as though he was holding something back with both hands and wasn’t sure whether it would come out as words… or fire.I turned to him, slowly. I didn’t try to mask the tremor in my voice.“Callum,” I said, and the sound of his name felt strange in the stillness—too soft, too human for what we were standing inside. “What is it? The Ember Marking?”He didn’t look at me right away. His eyes were still fixed on the archway wh

The next thing I knew—though perhaps “knew” was too generous a word for the way time frayed after trauma—I was sitting in the dining hall, legs folded stiffly beneath the table’s edge, hands curled in my lap, the scent of honeyed pastries and brewed coffee wafting faintly beneath the vaulted ceiling, as though nothing had happened, as though my skin hadn’t almost been branded in front of an entire courtyard filled with faculty only hours ago. Across from me sat Callum, posture straight but not rigid, the corners of his mouth slack with the sort of careful, quiet restraint he wore when the world around him cracked but he hadn’t quite decided whether to patch it or let it break clean through. He wasn’t speaking. Not yet. Just watching, the way one might watch a storm cloud that hadn’t decided whether to pass or strike. His gaze wasn’t on me, though—not entirely. No, his attention—like mine—had been commandeered by the third person at our table, who, for all intents and purposes, appear

For a moment, I didn’t move.Didn’t breathe.Didn’t blink.The name echoed in my mind like a bell rung too close to the ear—sharp and resonant, reverberating long after the sound itself had faded. Atlas Blackwood. Two words that unraveled something in me, pulled a hidden thread I hadn’t realized was holding so many things together. My name still hung in the air, unanswered. Aubrey Sinclair. It didn’t feel like mine anymore. It felt like a summons.I stared at the boy who had delivered it, as if doing so long enough might cause him to vanish. But he didn’t. He simply stood there—silent, still, patient in the way only someone who had never been denied could be. He wasn’t older than us, not by much, but he wore his legacy like armor, polished and unyielding. His blazer was pressed without crease, his collar starched to severity, and the insignia on his chest—Blackwood’s crest—gleamed cold as a winter star. His hands were folded behind his back. Not as a gesture of politeness, but of cont