The room became his world. Four walls of white stone, a bed, a desk, and a small shelf with assigned reading. That was it. The hum in his head had grown too loud for classrooms or courtyards. He told Seret he was sick. She didn't press. Maybe she knew better than to ask. Maybe she could sense something inside him had started to rot.
Kael sat on the edge of the bed, staring at his hands. The veins along his arms were faintly visible, glowing under the skin in thin, silver traces. They pulsed sometimes, like breathing. He would touch one, press down, feel nothing, then it would twitch again on its own. The first night it happened, he thought it was a trick of light. By the fourth, he knew better.
The hum never stopped now. It shifted in tone when he moved, when he blinked, when he thought about the cult. It wasn't noise exactly. It was something deeper, a vibration that came from his bones. Sometimes, in the stillness, he could hear words forming inside the vibration, not in his language, but in one he almost remembered.
He started writing them down. Scraps of letters, shapes of runes, anything that might help him make sense of it. The pages filled with crooked symbols that seemed to move when he wasn't looking. One night, he woke to find every page laid out across the floor, arranged in a spiral that led to his bed. He had no memory of doing it.
He stopped sleeping after that.
The academy lamps flickered often, but only near his room. Maintenance replaced them twice. The third time, the technician refused to enter, muttering something about the air feeling wrong. Kael didn't argue. The air was wrong. It felt heavy, like breathing through fog.
He began hearing footsteps in the hall. Always stopping outside his door. Never walking away. Once he opened the door fast enough to catch the hallway empty, the candles unlit, and a smear of something dark on the handle, like old ink or blood. He cleaned it, but it came back the next morning.
Every night, the shadows got thicker. They stretched longer than they should have, even when the lamp was dim. Sometimes, he caught shapes inside them. Not solid. Just faint impressions of limbs, faces, outlines of movement. When he blinked, they would be gone, but the hum would grow louder, as if mocking him for noticing.
The mirror above the desk had cracked from his earlier outburst, a fine spiderweb of fractures across the glass. It distorted his reflection, made it look like a dozen versions of him were staring back, each one slightly off. He covered it with a cloth, but sometimes, when the light hit just right, he swore he could still see the faint outline of a grin moving beneath the fabric.
On the fifth day, the hum changed. It grew deeper, heavier, almost melodic. Kael woke in the middle of the night to find his room drenched in a red glow. The runes he had drawn on the paper were burning faintly, each one flickering like a small ember. The spiral had reformed on its own. He could feel the air vibrating, a rhythm that seemed to sync with his heartbeat.
He tried to move, but his body refused. His pulse slowed. The hum wrapped around his thoughts like smoke. A whisper came, slow and careful, close to his ear but from inside his skull.
"You remember me."
Kael's throat went dry. The words weren't in any human tongue, but he understood them. The sound pressed against his mind like a hand. It was familiar. Too familiar. He had heard it once before, years ago, in the cult's deepest chamber, when they made him kneel before something that wasn't alive and wasn't dead either.
He whispered back before realizing he had spoken. "What are you?"
The whisper didn't answer in words this time. Instead, the papers on the floor lifted slightly, curling upward as if caught in invisible breath. The ink bled, spreading into new shapes, runes older than anything he had studied. They formed a circle around his feet.
The hum became a voice again. "You carried me with you. They could not take me away. You bled for me."
Kael gritted his teeth, forcing himself to move. His hand reached for the knife he kept under the bed. The blade felt heavier than usual. He dragged it across the floor, cutting through the edge of the glowing pattern. The light hissed and dimmed. The voice fell silent.
He sat there until morning, shaking, the knife still in his hand. When sunlight finally crept through the window, the floor was clean. The papers were gone.
He searched the whole room. Nothing. Not a single mark of ink or burn remained. The only sign anything had happened was the faint metallic scent of blood, though he didn't know whose it was.
That night, he locked the door again. He turned the desk toward the corner, away from the mirror, away from the light. He sat there in silence, listening.
The hum didn't return.
Instead, something started breathing on the other side of the wall.