All Chapters of Ashwyck Academy for the Damned: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Isadora:The night tasted of fog and static.The storm had passed, leaving the world in a half-light that clung to the bones of the academy like rot. Every corridor hummed faintly with the aftershock of shattered wards, the stones themselves seeming to whisper as if remembering the screams of the monsters she’d slain hours before.Now, the halls were still. Too still.Inside my chamber, the boys lay scattered in exhausted disarray—fallen saints, warriors turned into sleeping ruins. Rhett collapsed in the chair near the fire, one arm slung across his chest, blood dried to rust down his temple. Kai slept on my bed, skin pale as wax, his light magic dimmed to a faint shimmer that pulsed with his heartbeat. Silas was sprawled at the foot of the bed like a fallen shadow, and Lucian leaned against the wall, eyes half-closed, ancient blood still drying along the cut at his hand.I sat in the middle of it all, the quiet pulling tight around her throat. My body still trembled with residual mag

Isadora:The candle by the bed has burned low, wax dripping over the side like blood down marble.The storm hasn’t stopped. It only changed shape—thunder fading into the hum of wards straining, breaking, whispering their agony through the bones of the castle.Kai’s warmth anchors me.He’s sprawled beside me, half-asleep, his shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, the faint gold shimmer of his magic pulsing beneath his skin like a heartbeat. His arm rests over my waist, heavy, protective. The faintest sigh escapes his lips, and for a moment I let myself believe in peace.But peace doesn’t live here.Not in Ashwyck. Not in me.The book he found—the one that started this unraveling—is open in my hands, its ink still faintly glowing, the script alive and writhing in places as though the paper itself resents being read. The air around it hums like something breathing. Something waiting.My thumb traces the etching of a sigil burned into the margin. A familiar shape. A devourer’s mark.“Maldric,”

Isadora:The dream starts with glass.A thousand shards suspended in midair—silver, sharp, endless—each one catching a flicker of light that doesn’t belong to this world. I stand in the middle of it, barefoot on the fractured reflection of myself. My blood looks like mercury, spilling upward instead of down, gravity bending wrong in the dream the way my reality does now.And then, like clockwork, I feel them.The boys. My monsters. My anchors.Their power hums beneath my skin, too loud, too reckless, too wild. Rhett’s wolf fire burns low and steady in my ribs, Lucian’s ancient hunger coils in my spine, Kai’s light flickers cold behind my eyes, and Silas—his shadows curl around my throat like a whisper. Four heartbeats that shouldn’t live inside me, but do.And I think—no, I know—that’s the only thing keeping me alive.The first crack sounds like thunder.Glass splits in a clean, deliberate line. The pieces begin to fall, one by one, like rain turned into knives.I wake up screaming.E

Silas:The shadows were speaking again.They always did when something terrible was about to happen.Not whispers, not words—hunger. The sound of dry leaves scraping over stone, of breath caught in a coffin. They slithered against the walls of my room in the East Wing, dragging their fingers over the cracked plaster like children craving blood from a scab.They said her name.Isadora.It wasn’t a voice so much as a feeling—warm, then freezing, curling deep in my ribs like the slow turn of a knife.Something’s wrong, I realized. The kind of wrong that doesn’t just wound, it consumes.I stood, the candlelight guttering as I moved. The shadows stretched like veins across the ceiling, writhing toward the door. They wanted me to follow.So I did.The corridor was a black throat, swallowing me whole as I walked. Outside, the storm howled—rain lashing the stained glass, thunder rattling the bones of the ancient academy. I didn’t bother bringing a light; I didn’t need one. The dark was my old

Lucian:The forest reeks of rot tonight.It’s thick in the air—sour, metallic, crawling into my lungs like decay itself has fingers. My mouth is full of blood, but it’s not mine. It never is.I’ve lost count of how many I’ve killed.The creatures come in waves, drawn to the dying wards of Ashwyck like maggots to meat. Things born of shadow and blight. Their eyes glow like coals, their voices a rasping hunger that speaks my name in tongues older than sin.Lucian. Lucian. High King of nothing. Devourer. Damned.I don’t remember when the killing stopped feeling like protection and started feeling like penance.My magic hums low, sated and starved all at once. The earth beneath me drinks deeply from the corpses scattered among the trees. Each one split open like a broken prayer. Blood pools between the roots—dark, steaming, alive.It whispers.Everything whispers, out here.The academy’s bells are silent, drowned beneath the howl of the storm rolling over the mountains. The air itself fee