All Chapters of Incubus Reborn: Sleepless promise: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The door didn’t just close.It vanished.Seraphina blinked and spun around, heart hammering. Where there had been a silver archway seconds before, there was now only stone—flat and blank, as if no door had ever existed.She touched it. Cold.She pressed harder. Nothing.She was trapped.Not in some cave, not in a room—but in a place outside of the school. Outside of time, maybe. The Sanctum.Her pulse beat loudly in her ears.She turned back toward the room with the mirror—the strange, rippling surface that had shown her a version of herself. Older. Grieving. And then that single word—“Soon.”She tried to replay it in her mind, but it didn’t sound like a warning.It sounded like a promise.The mirror had stilled now. Its glassy surface was dull, no longer humming with energy. But something still lingered in the air—a presence, like breath on her neck.“Hello?” she whispered.No answer.She took a careful step closer.The pillars loomed on either side of her. They were smooth, ancient

The sky over Duskmoor cleared for the first time in days.Golden light filtered down through the old, arched windows of the East Wing, catching in the dust like suspended threads. The rain had gone, but Seraphina still felt the storm beneath her skin.She had broken the loop.She had rewritten the bond.But the silence that followed wasn’t peace.It was waiting.Lucan hadn’t left his room since the night she’d brought him back. He sat in the window seat, facing the forest, staring out like something might come for them still. His color had returned, his voice steadied—but something was missing. Some quiet thread inside him had gone still.Seraphina stood in the doorway, watching him.He looked over his shoulder at her. “I thought you were in the archives.”“I was. Nothing new. Just the same stories carved into stone, twisted to make us look like monsters.”He smiled faintly. “We are monsters. Just the wrong kind.”She crossed the room. “You’ve barely slept.”“I don’t dream anymore.”T

Lucan stood in the hallway before Seraphina could even speak.She hadn’t sent word. No warning. No thread tug. But somehow—he was already waiting.He looked at her with the kind of stillness that meant he already knew.“You found him,” Lucan said.Seraphina nodded. “His name is Calen.”Lucan’s jaw tensed. “I remember that name. Not clearly… but it was in one of the dreams I thought weren’t mine.”She stepped closer, her voice low. “He was the first.”Lucan didn’t ask what that meant. He didn’t need to.Instead, he said, “And now he’s loose.”Seraphina nodded again.“I thought the loop was the curse,” she added. “But it wasn’t. It was protection. It kept me from remembering him.”Lucan exhaled slowly, eyes closing for a beat. “Then the curse wasn’t built to trap you. It was built to protect you. From him.”She looked down at the rune glowing faintly on her wrist. The edges had begun to darken—not with decay, but with saturation. Something was drawing from it. Feeding.“And now the bond

By morning, the whispers had begun.It started in the dining hall—where spoons stopped midair and eyes turned hollow. Four students fell asleep at once during breakfast, heads slumping into plates, their lips moving with forgotten words. Seraphina watched from the corner as one girl—a first-year named Elinora—trembled in her seat and began to hum a song no one had heard in centuries.Lucan and Mara stood on either side of her like shadows, their shoulders tense.“It’s spreading,” Mara whispered. “Whatever Calen unlocked, it’s not stopping.”Seraphina clenched her jaw. “He’s awakening them. One dream at a time.”Lucan stepped closer. “Not all of them are going to survive it.”Seraphina’s fingers brushed the edge of her tray. “Then we have to get to them first.”—The Codex had updated itself again.Runes flickered along the margin, pointing not just to names—but threads. Seven students were marked as dream-sensitive. Three of them were already connected to Calen. One of them was in iso

The silence in the hallway didn’t feel natural. It was too clean, too still. Seraphina’s footsteps echoed softly on the cold stone floors of the east wing, the glow from the overhead dream-lanterns flickering as if warning her to turn back.But she couldn’t.Lucan hadn’t returned to his quarters after the last dreamwalk. And worse, she hadn’t felt his presence—not even in her sleep.Ever since she’d pulled him out of the collapsing dream realm two nights ago, his connection had gone silent. Not dead. Not severed. Just… eerily quiet.Something was wrong.She reached the library door. Locked. That wasn’t unusual—Lucan often sealed himself inside when he didn’t want to be disturbed. But this time, there was a faint heat radiating from the rune etched into the wood. A ward.He never warded her out before.Seraphina pressed her palm to the rune. A spark raced up her arm, but she didn’t flinch. The mark on her own hand—her rune—pulsed faintly in response. She closed her eyes, reached inward