Bernard stood alone in the observatory, high above the nexus chamber, eyes fixed on the quiet aftermath of the battle below. The ritual had worked; he'd seen it himself, felt the severing wave ripple through the walls, momentarily dulling the lines of reality. The entity had been cast out.
And yet…
A frown tightened across his sharp features. One hand rested on the stone railing, fingers twitching, as if tracing invisible glyphs. The scent of scorched magic still clung to the air, faint but persistent, like a bruise on the world that refused to fade.
"They think it's over," Bernard said, voice low, almost fond. "Poor fools."
He turned from the window and walked slowly to the center of the observatory, where an ancient table waited, its surface etched with a map of the school, but older, stranger. Glyphs crawled like veins through the stone, pulsing with a rhythm no living soul had taught them.
Bernard touched a sigil in the western wing, and the map shimmered.
A second layer appeared underneath. This one darker. Older.
The school's hidden foundation.
"You're awake again, aren't you?" he murmured to the map, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Severed, but not gone. Like cutting a hydra's neck without burning the stump."
He opened the drawer beneath the table and withdrew a thin crystal vial, filled with a faintly writhing red mist. A remnant. A fragment of the entity, siphoned during the chaos. None of the others had noticed, why would they? All eyes had been on Yue, on her bold little ritual.
All except his.
"You latched onto the wrong host, hmpf. I had hoped, given her ancient blood ties as a descendant of that branch leader, the connection would be stronger," Bernard whispered, rolling the vial between his fingers. "But don't worry. I'll do what Sofia couldn't."
He tilted his head back, watching the slow spin of constellations above. The school's magical dome rippled faintly with the effort of regeneration, but Bernard's domain remained untouched. The observatory was his, sealed years ago with his own private sigils. Al-Malik had signed off on its restoration without realizing what Bernard had truly meant to do here.
"You still believe in safety. In hierarchy. In containment." His voice turned sharper. "Fools."
He paced, the hem of his coat trailing shadows across the floor. Each step echoed not just in sound, but in power. A heartbeat beneath stone.
"It was never about the entity," Bernard said. "It's a catalyst. A doorway. A scalpel for the soul."
He reached the far side of the chamber, where a black tome sat chained to a pedestal. One of the five forbidden relics that had survived the Purge of the Cult. The others were locked away, scattered around the empire. He knew the school hid another.
One was enough.
He opened the book carefully, not because of fear, but reverence. Pages turned themselves, drawn by his touch. At the center: a glyph shaped like an eye turned inward, and below it, three words burned into the parchment:
"Ascend through fracture."
Bernard's breath hitched, not in awe, but triumph.
"They've mistaken the cracks for wounds. But they're doors. If only you have the strength to crawl through them."
The entity's scream still rang in his bones, but not as terror. As music.
He pulled the vial closer. "You're not the disease. You're the cure. You just needed someone who knew how to shape the scalpel."
He held the vial to the book. The red mist inside pulsed, then began to seep between the pages, drawn in like ink into parchment. The glyph flared. The whole room dimmed.
And Bernard smiled.
Elsewhere, at that exact moment, Principal Al-Malik paused in his reading. His gaze lifted, drawn by something he couldn't name. A flicker. A wrongness. It passed too quickly to grasp, like a nightmare half-remembered. He frowned and turned back to the scroll.
Back in the observatory, Bernard stood surrounded by growing silence.
"I needed that ritual," he muttered. "Not for what it claimed to do, but for what it exposed."
He pressed a hand to the center of the table. A second glyph, one he'd etched with his own blood, lit with a dull green glow.
The map beneath him rippled again, and a third layer emerged.
Not a map of the school.
A map of the leyline veins beneath it.
The mana heart.
And it was throbbing irregularly.
"You're waking up," Bernard whispered, reverent. "I feel you stirring."
He leaned over the table and began to write in the air, his finger trailing threads of inkless energy. Each gesture built a sigil, each symbol a command, older than Circle One, older than any formalized school of magic.
"Yue thinks she anchored the backlash, while I don't know how someone so young could do such a thing," he said softly. "But she anchored only what she saw."
Beneath his feet, the school trembled, just once.
And somewhere deep, a student woke screaming.
Later that night, Bernard stood in the courtyard, watching the stars.
The burn mark where the entity had been cast out still scarred the air above the nexus chamber. An invisible blister in the magical field. Most wouldn't notice it, but he did.
He saw the way mana still warped there. How shadows bent just slightly off.
He had plans for that wound.
A presence stepped up beside him. Not magical. Physical.
Professor Elena.
She didn't speak at first, only stood with him under the stars.
"You've been quiet lately," she said eventually.
Bernard smiled without turning. "I've been watching. Reflecting."
"That's not usually your style."
"You think I'm just a contrarian, Elena?" He turned now, face warm, voice even. "Sometimes I can be thoughtful."
She studied him, eyes searching. "You supported the ritual more easily than I expected."
"Because I knew it would fail," he said simply. "Or half-fail. That's all it needed to do."
Her brow furrowed. "You're talking in riddles again."
"That's because truth tastes bitter when taken plain." He stepped past her, toward the shadow of the old wing.
"Careful, Bernard, we should've used the dagger on Haku sooner, like I told you," she warned. "There's something still in the walls. Something angry."
He paused. Glanced back with a faint smirk.
"Let's hope it stays angry. Angry things are easy to predict."
And then he was gone.
Beneath the school, in a chamber no map recorded, red light flickered.
A glyph formed itself on a wall that had never been carved.
And inside the darkness, something shifted.
Something old.
Something hungry.
But this time, it was Bernard who knocked first.