Chapter 3 The Boy Who Breaks the Pattern

By morning, Blackthorn had decided to pretend it was normal.

Light slid in through the high windows of the dining hall, washing everything in a soft, indifferent glow. It turned chipped mugs into small halos and made the steam from industrial-sized kettles look almost holy. Large metal trays of eggs, toast, and something gray were laid out with mechanical care, as if the mere routine of breakfast could flatten whatever the bell had done the night before.

Students leaned over tables and plates, shoulders pressed together, voices low with sleep and gossip. A knot of first-years crowded around the toast station like it was a border checkpoint. Someone laughed too loudly at a joke. Someone else was fretting about an essay.

The air buzzed with that specific kind of tension where everyone had decided, unanimously and silently, not to bring something up.

Anil nudged scrambled eggs around her plate with her fork.

She told herself she was just tired. That the ringing she still felt in her bones was in her head. That the image of a burning hallway, of a boy with bare feet and eyes too full of history, was just a dream.

It didn’t feel like a dream.

It felt like something she’d once tried hard to forget.

“Morning, ghost girl.”

Mira’s tray landed opposite hers with a solid clatter—toast, jam, porridge, and something beige that might have been breakfast or might have been a dare.

“You look haunted,” Mira observed, but gently. “Strong aesthetic choice. Very on-brand for this place.”

“Just… new bed,” Anil said. “New building. New… everything.”

“New ghosts,” Mira suggested, taking a massive bite of toast.

“Apparently,” Anil murmured.

She’d dreamed again.

Not of monsters chasing her down corridors or of falling down endless staircases. The dream had been simple: her dorm door, half-open. A voice on the other side saying, you always find this room, the words balanced between accusation and promise.

She’d woken with her heart racing and her wrist burning.

She didn’t say that out loud.

Her fingers drifted toward that spot now, to the thin raised scar on her inner wrist. It itched more than it hurt—itchy in a way that felt like pressure from the wrong side of her skin. She pressed her thumb into it, trying to ground herself.

“Hey.” Mira swallowed her toast and nodded toward Anil’s hand. “You okay under there? You’re going at that spot like it owes you money.”

“It just… itches,” Anil said.

“Tattoos do that too,” Mira said, reaching for the jam. “Yours invisible?”

Anil hesitated.

“Something like that.”

She didn’t remember when she’d gotten the scar. Her mother told her once, when she was small, that she’d been born with it. Later, on a different day, her mother said it came from an accident with a broken glass table. After that, whenever Anil asked, the answers changed in small ways, like someone rewriting a story and assuming she wouldn’t notice.

Eventually, she stopped asking.

Blackthorn felt a little like that scar. Like a place born with something it had decided not to explain.

The hall buzzed louder as more students filed in. Someone yawned theatrically behind Anil. Someone else dropped their fork and swore softly. Magic hummed in the room, low and restrained, like static gathered in the walls.

“So,” Mira said around a spoonful of something vaguely porridgelike, “I checked our schedules. You, my haunted roommate, are stuck with me for at least two classes. Introductory Warding first, then probably something distressing like Latin of the Damned.”

“Please tell me that’s not what it’s actually called,” Anil said.

“Technically it’s ‘Liturgical Chant’ or whatever,” Mira replied, pulling a face. “Which is worse, if you think about it.”

A bell chimed somewhere overhead—this one small, sharp, completely ordinary. The simple call to class. Students began scraping their chairs back, grabbing bags, shoving last bites of toast into their mouths.

“Come on,” Mira said, pushing to her feet. “Before we get lost and end up drafted into the choir or something.”

Anil stood, her tray rattling slightly in her hands. For a brief second she felt the phantom echo of another bell under the normal one, deeper, older, like the memory of a sound that no longer existed.

She shook it off.

They dumped their plates, blended into the current of uniformed bodies, and headed toward Introductory Warding.

The Warding classroom smelled faintly of chalk, ink, and ozone—the scent of things that once misbehaved and had to be contained.

Blackboards encircled the room from floor to ceiling. Intricate diagrams were already drawn in white and yellow and faint glowing lines. Circles intersecting circles, shapes nested inside other shapes. The air near the diagrams felt thicker somehow, as if they weren’t quite done working.

The man at the front of the room looked like he’d been teaching since the invention of the alphabet. Professor Ingram had a crooked nose, gray-flecked hair, and the hunched, sharp patience of someone who had watched every possible magical mistake unfold at least once.

“Good morning,” he said without much enthusiasm. “Welcome to Introductory Warding, or, more accurately, ‘How Not To Tear Holes In Reality On School Property.’”

A few students snorted. The sound died quickly.

Ingram tapped a piece of chalk against the air. Instead of falling, it hovered and then drew a symbol on its own, lines curling and intersecting. The symbol hung there glowing, then sank into the dark wood of the desk, leaving a faint sheen.

“Our job,” he went on, “is containment. Not of you, much as some of you may deserve it—” his gaze flicked toward a boy in the front row, who winced—“but of what you might unleash.”

He paced slowly along the front. “Most of you are here because somewhere else, your… gifts…” he chose the word carefully, “caused problems. We are here to make sure that your accidents don’t rupture anything important. Again.”

A quiet murmur rippled through the class. In the second row, someone flinched at the word accidents.

Anil’s skin prickled. She shifted in her seat, suddenly too aware of her own empty hands. She had never blown anything up. Never triggered a haunting. She couldn’t even make candlelight flicker on command.

Yet, a small, unwelcome voice added.

She looked up at the board.

The chalk had drawn an array—circles within circles, lines radiating outward like spokes. Symbols at the intersections.

Something about it tugged at her.

Not as a surprise.

More like recognition.

Like seeing a word in a language she’d once known how to speak.

“Basic containment arrays,” Ingram said, pointing with the chalk. “Low-level manifestations. Residual echoes. Minor entities. Distracted poltergeists. And—” his gaze swept the room and, for the briefest moment, caught and held on Anil—“repeating anomalies.”

Her heartbeat stumbled.

Repeating anomalies.

The phrase landed in her like it had already been there, waiting.

By the time class ended, her notebook was only half-filled with notes. Diagrams crammed the margins, but around them—in smaller, tighter handwriting—she’d written a few words without quite deciding to:

Repeating.

Again.

Scar.

Mira bumped her shoulder as they left the room. “Please tell me I wasn’t the only one whose brain leaked out of their ears. What even is a ‘memetic residue knot’?”

“A headache that’s learned how to think,” Anil said without really planning to.

Mira stopped. “Okay, no, you did not just pull that out of nowhere. That was very ‘Professor Ingram, but less exhausted.’”

“I don’t know where it came from,” Anil admitted.

Mira studied her more carefully, her playful expression softening. “You sure you’re new here?”

“Pretty sure.”

“You ever feel like you’ve… been somewhere before?” Mira asked. “Not in the ‘I went on vacation here in 2013’ way, but in the ‘my bones recognize this floor’ way.”

Anil hesitated, fingers tightening on the strap of her bag.

“Is this one of your podcast questions?” she deflected.

“Possibly,” Mira said. “But also—you walked into that classroom like you recognized the chalk.”

Anil didn’t have an answer.

So she didn’t give one.

The rest of the day folded in on itself—one class bleeding into another, like ink spreading in water.

Hallways that curved where they should’ve gone straight.

A staircase that muttered under its breath as they climbed, numbers appearing faintly in the air beside each step.

Windows that reflected not just the courtyard but, sometimes, a blurred overlay of something else.

In Astral Histories, they sat under a domed ceiling painted with constellations that shifted when you weren’t looking directly at them.

Professor Kallan, who wore her hair in a long silver braid and glasses on a chain, drew two lines on the board.

The first was straight.

The second looped back over itself three times.

“Most lives,” she said, tapping the straight line, “move forward like this. Messy, yes, but still moving in one direction.”

Her chalk moved to the looping line.

“Other lives,” she said, “do something more… complicated.”

She circled the loops. “These are what we call ‘unfixed sequences.’ Souls that don’t obey linear cause and effect. They fall through stories more than once.”

Someone scoffed. “Reincarnation?”

“Not exactly,” Kallan said. “Reincarnation is a clean slate. This is not that. The problem isn’t that they return.” She looked over the class, gaze sharp. “The problem is what they take with them.”

For a moment, her eyes lingered on Anil, just long enough to feel intentional.

Anil’s breath shortened.

Then someone behind her dropped a pen, and the spell shattered.

You’re paranoid, she told herself.

Or you’re late, another part of her replied.

By the time the sky outside had begun to bruise into evening, Blackthorn had shifted into its nighttime version.

Candles flared awake in wall sconces. The polished floors lost their brightness, trading it for depth. Shadows stretched long in doorways, no longer content to crouch at the edges.

Anil and Mira almost collided in the corridor as they left their last class.

“Chapel,” Mira said, looping her arm through Anil’s. “Mandatory first-night service. They make us sing something in Latin so we feel fancy while ignoring our impending doom.”

“Is it actually mandatory?” Anil asked.

“Technically.” Mira shrugged. “But also, the last girl who skipped it woke up with Latin carved into her door.”

Anil stopped. “You’re kidding.”

Mira considered. “…It might have been a prank. Still. Come on.”

They joined the slow, shuffling river of students heading toward the chapel. Up close, the building looked different than it had that morning. Its stained-glass windows glowed from within, each panel thick with color and shadow. The stone around the entrance was worn smooth by countless hands.

Inside, the chapel smelled of old wood, wax, and incense.

Students filed into pews. Teachers, robed in simple black, lined the sides. Somewhere near the front, a faint choir warmed up, voices overlapping in complicated harmonies.

Anil and Mira found a space near the back.

Anil sat down, feeling the wooden pew beneath her like an anchor. Her pulse was still off from the day—from Ingram’s too-knowing glance, Kallan’s looping lines, Ashworth’s strange half-warnings in Mysticism. From the way the school itself seemed to breathe around her.

She let her gaze wander.

The unnamed angel statue watched the students in silence, wings half-unfurled, eyes lowered like it knew something it wished it could forget.

The window with the cloaked woman and the two winged figures glowed softly above the altar.

Her wrist pulsed once under her sleeve.

She tried to focus on her breathing.

Then she saw him.

Not Lucien.

The other one.

The boy she’d only glimpsed before—far across the cloister, walking with light moving oddly around him.

He stood near the front now, speaking quietly to Headmaster Vale. The altar candles lit his profile in soft gold.

Up close, he looked even more out of place. Like he’d been drawn with sharper lines than everyone else. White shirt, dark blazer, tie just slightly loosened like formal rules didn’t quite know how to hold him. Hair catching the light in faint, deliberate glints.

He turned his head and glanced over the crowd.

The moment their eyes met, the noise in the chapel dulled.

Not completely—but enough.

The low buzz of conversation blurred. The candles near the aisle seemed to lean toward him for a second, then steadied.

Around her, students shifted, unaware.

“Cael,” someone murmured near her. “That’s the headmaster’s ward.”

Cael.

The name settled heavily into her mind. Not unfamiliar. Not new.

More like a book sliding into the space on a shelf that had always been meant for it.

Cael stepped away from Vale, scanning the pews again. It wasn’t casual. It was searching.

His gaze passed over the rows—faces bored, nervous, half-attentive—and then found her.

His expression faltered for one heartbeat.

His eyes widened—barely—but it was enough.

Like he’d seen a ghost wearing her face.

Heat flooded her cheeks. Her fingers dug into the wood of the pew.

Don’t stare, she told herself. Don’t be weird.

The choir began to sing.

The melody was low and old, wrapped around words she didn’t understand. Latin, maybe. Or something older that Latin had been made from.

The sound curled up under the rafters and around the students.

It moved through her like water.

She knew this song.

Her rational mind insisted she didn’t. She’d never been to this school before, never attended a service like this. But the rise and fall of the melody tugged at something deep inside, like a muscle memory.

Her throat tightened with the urge to join in.

Next to her, Mira swayed slightly off-beat and whispered, “This one is definitely on some ‘haunted abbey ambience’ playlist.”

Anil’s lips formed the shapes of the words without sound.

Her chest ached.

When the hymn finally ended, Headmaster Vale stepped forward again.

“Welcome,” he said quietly, “to the year Blackthorn has been dreading.”

Nervous laughter stirred in the chapel.

“I joke,” he added, though his face didn’t quite match the word. “Mostly.”

He spoke of rules and expectations, of discipline and privilege. Of the honor of studying where, as he put it, “the veil has grown thin.”

His gaze drifted across the rows of students with practiced evenness.

Until he said, “Some of you have come further than others to be here.”

This time when his eyes moved, they landed in the back rows.

Right on her.

Anil’s heart tripped over itself.

“And some of you,” Vale continued, “have been here longer than you think.”

The words seemed to hang in the air around her for a moment, then evaporate as he continued on to more ordinary school talk.

He didn’t mean you, logic insisted.

He did, something older replied.

By the time the service ended and students began filing out, Anil’s whole body hummed with an unease she couldn’t name.

Lucien didn’t appear.

But Cael did.

The cloister garden at night looked like another world.

The stone arches hunched like watching shoulders. Statues of angels and saints and stranger figures loomed more sharply in the half-light. Lanterns swayed on iron hooks, casting soft, puddled circles of light on wet stone.

She didn’t set out to go there.

She meant to go straight back to her dorm. That was the sensible choice. Bed. Blankets. Maybe a conversation with Mira about how weird the chapel felt.

But her feet—

knew another route.

By the time she realized where she was, she’d already stepped out under the open sky, the chapel door closing quietly behind her.

The air bit at her lungs.

Fog clung low over the grass and winding path like the aftermath of an extinguished candle.

“Of course,” she muttered to herself. “Haunted garden. At night. This seems wise.”

“Not in this story.”

The voice came from her left.

She turned.

He was standing by the memorial fountain, where water slid over worn names carved into stone. His tie hung a little loose. His blazer was unbuttoned. The posture looked wrong on him, like he’d been taught to stand properly and hadn’t quite shaken the habit.

Cael.

Up close, he was not perfect in the way saints were depicted. He was perfect in the way of something dangerously well-made. Jaw too sharp. Eyes too intent. Hair that insisted on catching light even when it shouldn’t.

The space around him felt… adjusted.

Not brighter.

Not darker.

Just aware.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” he said quietly.

“I didn’t plan to,” she answered, which was true. “I was heading back to my dorm. Then somehow I was here.”

“That happens,” he said. “The grounds remember paths better than we do.”

He studied her face, and the intensity in his gaze made her want to look away. Instead, she held it.

“You feel…” he started, then stopped himself.

“Please don’t say ‘different,’” she said. “I’m at my limit with that word.”

Something like a real smile tugged at his mouth for a fraction of a second.

“Familiar,” he said instead.

Her heart stuttered.

“Do we know each other?” she asked.

He went still.

The question hung between them. She braced herself for the standard responses—No, I just meant you remind me of someone, or We’ve probably seen each other around.

He didn’t reach for any of those.

He didn’t answer at all.

Wind moved through the garden, rustling the roses and ivy. One of the lanterns near them flickered.

“You’re new to Blackthorn,” he said instead.

“Yes,” she said. “I transferred in this term.”

“And you came from…?”

“Thessaloniki,” she replied automatically, because that was what the paperwork said.

“That’s where your body came from,” he said gently. “I meant you.”

Her breath hitched.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked, anger and fear mixing sharp in her chest.

“It means—” He cut himself off, jaw tightening. The words seemed to hurt on the way out. “It means I’m not supposed to talk about this.”

“About what?”

He glanced up toward the dark outline of the bell tower, as if expecting it to disapprove.

“Patterns,” he said at last. “Loops. The way this place keeps catching the same souls in the same nets.”

His eyes met hers again, and for a moment they looked endless.

“Am I one of them?” she whispered.

He exhaled, the sound soft and resigned. “Yes. You are.”

Cold spilled down her spine.

She tried to laugh it off. “That’s… dramatic. Did the headmaster write that line for you?”

“I wish it were a line,” he said. “I wish it was something I only said once.”

“You’re telling me I’ve been here before?” she asked, more quietly this time.

“Not like this,” he answered. “And not always here. But something in you keeps being pulled to the same storm.”

Her heart pounded so hard she could feel it in her fingertips.

“And you just know that?” she asked.

His gaze dropped, then lifted again.

“When you walked into the chapel,” he said, “the wards in the stone shifted. The air tightened. It only reacts like that when something that’s already been written crosses the threshold.”

“‘Something,’” she repeated. “Not someone.”

His jaw clenched. “You felt it too.”

“What I felt,” Anil said sharply, relief turning to irritation, “was a room full of strangers staring at me.”

“You felt it when we sang,” he insisted gently. “You knew the melody.”

She opened her mouth to deny it.

Stopped.

She remembered the way the notes had settled in her chest, like stepping onto a path her feet already knew.

“I didn’t know the words,” she said, more to herself than to him. “But I knew where the song was going.”

“Memory doesn’t always come back as pictures,” Cael said. “Sometimes it returns as a tune your voice remembers. Or the way you walk around a corridor because once the straight way down filled with smoke.”

Images flashed behind her eyes—the suggestion of fire, coughing, hands grabbing for hers.

She flinched.

“Stop,” she whispered.

Immediately, he stopped talking.

The wind eased as if it had been listening too closely. One of the lanterns, which had begun to gutter, steadied.

“If any of that is true,” she said after a long moment, “then who are you to me?”

He went very still.

Not in the way of someone posing dramatically.

In the way of someone who had been asked a question he’d been avoiding for a long time.

“I don’t know the right answer to that anymore,” he said.

“That’s not an answer,” she said.

He took a small step closer. Not enough to crowd her. Just enough that she could see the strain at the edges of his carefully controlled expression.

“You asked me who I am,” he said softly. “This is the one part I know how to say. I am the one who keeps trying to make the story end differently for you.”

His throat bobbed.

“And I’m the reason it never works.”

The garden seemed to sharpen. The roses’ scent thickened, cloying. Even the sound of the fountain faded, as if the whole space had gone quiet to hear this.

She stared at him.

The words slid into place one by one, heavy as stones.

He looked away first.

“Every time the pieces line up,” he said, voice lower now, “I make the wrong choice. Or the right one too late. And you’re the one who pays the price for that.”

Her mind tried to reject it.

It was too big. Too strange.

But something inside her—the same part that knew the hymn—didn’t reject it at all.

“Are you saying I’ve… died because of you?” she asked.

The question felt like stepping off a ledge.

Silence spread between them.

He didn’t say yes.

He didn’t nod. He didn’t move.

“I’m saying,” he answered quietly, “that when things go wrong around you, it’s usually because I tried to fix them.”

Wind tugged at the edges of his blazer. The lantern near the fountain flickered and went out.

“Why would you keep trying,” she demanded, anger rising to fill the fear’s emptiness, “if you know it ends badly? If you know it hurts me?”

“Because doing nothing hurt worse,” he said.

He looked at her then, properly, all pretense stripped away.

There was no perfect light in his eyes now. No carved holiness.

Just a boy who looked exhausted in a way that sleep couldn’t cure.

“You should stay away from me,” he added.

“Is that a threat?” Anil asked, her voice unsteady.

His mouth twisted, almost amused, almost broken.

“No,” he said. “It’s a wish.”

Somewhere beyond the arches, the main bell shivered once—too softly for anyone inside the dorms to notice. Just loud enough to make the garden feel like a held breath.

Anil glanced at his hand.

It hung at his side, fingers slightly curled inward, like they were used to reaching out and being told not to.

“If you’re that bad for me,” she said slowly, “then why do you look at me like that?”

“Like what?” he asked.

“Like every time I walk into a room,” she said, “you’re both relieved and horrified.”

He closed his eyes for a moment.

“Because that’s exactly what I am,” he said.

“And because I keep hoping that this time,” his voice dropped to almost a whisper, “you’ll stay alive long enough to hate me for it.”

The words hit her in the chest like a blow.

Before she could respond, he turned away as if he’d already said too much, already stepped too far past whatever line he’d sworn not to cross.

“Go back to your dorm, Anil,” he said. “Pretend this is just a difficult school. Go to classes. Drink terrible coffee with Mira. Let everything be ordinary for as long as it can.”

“And you?” she asked.

“I’ll do what I always do,” he said without turning around.

“Which is?” Her voice was smaller now, but steadier.

“Try not to tear the story in half,” he said.

She almost listened.

She almost turned and walked back up the stone path, through the door, up the stairs, into the shared brightness of her room with its cracked music box and Mira’s scattered clothes.

Instead, she called after him.

“If I’ve been here before—if I’ve done this before—if I keep walking into the same storm…”

He stopped.

She took a breath that felt like it had been waiting for more than one lifetime to be drawn.

“…then maybe,” she went on, “it’s not just you who keeps choosing wrong.”

He didn’t look back.

But his shoulders shifted once, like a laugh or a sob had tried to get out and been stopped.

“Go inside, Anil,” he said, softer now.

She didn’t.

Not immediately.

She watched him disappear beneath the archway, swallowed by shadow and the faint, uncanny brightness that clung to him like regret.

Then she lifted her gaze to the dark windows of Blackthorn’s upper floors, to the faint lit skeleton of the library, and to the tower where the bell slept.

Her wrist burned under her sleeve.

The scar wasn’t just warm now.

It was insistent.

In the hush of the cloister, with the garden pressing in and the school holding its breath, she whispered into the cold:

“Then maybe this time, we both learn why.”

The garden didn’t answer.

But the air shifted.

As if somewhere, some part of the story had heard her and paused.

Just for a moment.

Just long enough to wonder what would happen if she did.