Chapter 12 The Blood Message.
The walk back to her dorm felt like a mile and when Lexi finally pushed open the door to her dorm room that evening, she stopped dead in her tracks.
Belle was packing. Her trunks were wide open on her bed as she was aggressively throwing her clothes, uniforms and spellbooks into them.
“Belle?” Lexi asked, her voice cracking with exhaustion as she took a hesitant step into the room. “Where… where are you going?”
Belle didn’t even look at her, her jaw was set so tight it looked ready to snap. She hoisted a heavy trunk onto her shoulder, marched straight toward the door, and aggressively shoved Lexi aside.
Lexi stumbled against the doorframe, watching in silence as Belle stepped into the hallway.
Directly across the hall, the door to the opposite dorm room swung open and Willow, one of the popular girls from the cafeteria crew stood there with a knowing smirk on her face.
“Toodles!” Willow chirped before waving Belle inside.
Belle stepped through Willow’s threshold without looking back, and the door slammed shut behind them with a loud bang.
Lexi stood alone in the hallway for a long moment before slowly retreating back into her own room, locking the door behind her. The silence in the room was deafening as the emptiness finally hit her.
Her knees gave out, and she sank straight down to the floor right behind the door, burying her face in her hands. The dam broke, and she began sobbing uncontrollably.
Eventually, the violent crying drained the last of her energy, exhausted, Lexi’s eyes grew heavy as she slumped sideways against the floor and completely passed out.
Lexi woke up with a violent gasp to the sound of heavy pounding right behind her head as the door vibrated against her spine.
“Open this door immediately!” a harsh, booming voice commanded from the hallway.
It was the dorm Magister, an incredibly stern and unyielding woman who ran the girls’ wing like a military barracks.
Lexi scrambled up from the floor, frantically wiped her face, smoothing down her wrinkled uniform before unlocking the bolt and pulling the door open. “Good morning Magister, I’m sorry, I was—”
Her excuse was cut off by the woman’s intense stare. From head to toe, her expression dripped with disapproval before she stepped aside, revealing a cowering girl behind her.
The girl was wearing an oversized, thick-rimmed glasses that slid down her nose, clutching a stack of heavy text logs to her chest and carrying a leather bag on the other hand.
She had this meek look, as her eyes darted nervously around the hallway before waving at Lexi.
“This is Rya,” the dorm Magister introduced. “She is a recent transfer from the lower division, and she will be your new roommate. Move out of the threshold, child, and let her in.”
Lexi quickly paved the way, stepping back into the room. Rya scurried inside, dropping her bags onto Belle’s old mattress.
The magister adjusted her robes and fixed Lexi with a warning glare. “Do not give Rya any trouble, Lexi. I am fully aware of the… disruptions that caused your previous roommate to flee yesterday. I will not tolerate another incident. Am I understood?”
Lexi’s chest tightened, an urge to explain herself rising in her throat. “But—”
“Am I understood Miss Finch?” The Magister repeated silencing Lexi.
Lexi’s head fell, her eyes glued to the floor as she spoke, “Understood.”
×××
The Grand Magister stood before a mirror in his private quarters, meticulously wiping a thin layer of shaving cream from his jawline.
The quiet of the room was abruptly shattered by a frantic pounding at his door.
Before he could even grant permission, the door swung open. It was the academy’s chief tracker, his breathing shallow and his boots covered in fresh mud.
The man looked visibly shaken as he stepped inside, quickly bowing his head. “Forgive the intrusion, Grand Magister. I wouldn’t dare break protocol, but the urgency of this matter couldn’t wait for morning.”
The Grand Magister didn’t turn around right away as he calmly folded his towel, “It had better be a matter of life and death,”
“It is, sir,” the tracker said, pulling a rolled piece of thick parchment from his leather coat. “We found a definitive lead in the eastern woods. The entity that dismembered Magister Paul left a localized residual trail and our mages managed to piece together a psychic echo from the foliage. I had an artist draft the silhouette.”
He stepped forward, unrolling the parchment and holding the sketch directly to the Grand Magister’s face.
The Grand Magister finally looked up, his eyes locked onto the charcoal drawing of a towering mass of thick, matted fur and razor-sharp claws.
The geometry of the creature looked completely foreign to their world.
The Grand Magister stared at the drawing for a long moment, his face hardening. “What is this thing?”
“The historical texts call it the Krag, sir,” the tracker whispered, his hands trembling slightly as he held the paper. “A phantom entity from a completely erased era.”
The room fell dead silent. The Grand Magister didn’t speak, his gaze fixed on the drawing as his mind raced back to his tense confrontation with Clovis in the training arena.
“And that… that isn’t all, Grand Magister,” the tracker broke the silence as he reached deep into his robes and pulled out a tightly folded piece of parchment, stained with a dark, crusty residue.
“We found this pinned to the stone wall just outside Magister Miller’s quarters not even twenty minutes ago.”
The Grand Magister took the page and unfolded it slowly.
And written across the center in thick fresh blood was a short message:
“THE COLD GROWS CLOSE. MILLER IS NEXT.”
