The rain didn't fall; it bled. It streamed down the car window in thick, wavering lines, blurring the world outside into a watercolor of greens and grays.
Elena pressed her forehead against the cool glass, feeling the vibration of the engine thrumming through her bones.
It was a low, constant hum, a sound that should have been soothing but instead felt like a prelude to a scream.
She had been in this car for hours, she thought. Or maybe it had only been minutes. A gap in her memory, clean and quiet, had swallowed the drive whole.
She couldn't remember the last town they passed, or the moment the city's concrete skin had peeled away to reveal the teeth of these dark, endless woods.
All she remembered was the feeling of leaving.
Not a place, but a piece of herself.
It was a hollow ache behind her ribs, the phantom limb of a life she was supposed to forget.
Her hands rested in her lap, her fingers still, her palms facing up as if waiting for something to be placed in them or taken away.
The driver, a man whose face was just a silhouette against the weeping sky, hadn't spoken a word since they left the city limits.
He was a function, not a person. A pair of hands on a wheel, guiding her toward a destination she hadn't chosen.
The rhythmic thwump-thwump of the windshield wipers was the only conversation in the car, a mechanical heartbeat counting down to something she couldn't name.
Each sweep of the blades revealed the same scene: trees clawing at the sky, their branches like black veins against the bruised-purple clouds.
This was a place that had forgotten the sun.
"We're almost there," the silhouette finally said.
The voice was flat, devoid of comfort, as if announcing the time.
Elara didn't answer.
She traced a line on the fogged glass with her fingertip, watching it bead with condensation.
The world felt distant, a film she was watching from a great, unbridgeable distance. She was a spectator to her own life.
Then she saw the gates. Wrought iron, twisted into cruel, ornate shapes that looked like sleeping thorns.
They were slick with rain, gleaming like wet bone in the dim light. They opened inward with a low groan of metal, a sound of reluctant welcome that vibrated in Elara's teeth.
The car rolled onto a gravel path, and the sound of the tires crunching over stone was sharp and violent against the soft percussion of the rain.
The path wound upward, a slow, deliberate ascent.
And as they cleared the final line of trees, the academy came into view.
It didn't just sit on the hill.
It commanded it.
Redwood Academy was a beast of stone and shadow, a sprawling gothic monster that seemed to have grown from the earth itself.
Towers pierced the low-hanging mist like broken fingers, and its countless windows were dark, vacant eyes staring out at the storm.
It wasn't just a building; it was a presence.
It felt ancient, hungry, and it loomed over the landscape as if waiting to swallow her whole.
The car came to a stop before a massive oak door, dark and heavy enough to hold back an army. The air outside seemed to press against the windows, thick with a silence that the rain couldn't penetrate.
"We're here, Miss Vance," the driver said, his job complete. He didn't look at her. He didn't have to. The academy was looking at her for him.
Elena's hand tightened on the worn leather handle of her violin case beside her. It was the only familiar thing in this alien world, the only part of her that still felt real.
The weight of it was grounding, a small anchor in a churning sea of dread. She took a breath, but the air in the car was stale, used up.
The oak door creaked open, and a woman stood framed in the entrance. She was tall and severe, her hair pulled back so tightly it seemed to strain her pale skin. Her smile was a thin, bloodless line.
"Elena Vance. Welcome to Redwood."
The rain stopped.
For a single, breathless moment, the world went silent. The drumming on the roof ceased, the wind held its breath.
All Elara could hear was the frantic, trapped-bird beating of her own heart. She knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the marrow, that this was not a beginning.
It was an arrival.
She opened the car door, the handle cold beneath her fingers.
She stepped out onto the gravel.
The air was cold and smelled of wet earth and something else, something sharp and lonely.
She didn't look back at the car as it pulled away without a sound, its red taillights swallowed by the mist.
She only looked forward, at the woman and the dark, open maw of the academy behind her. She was a ghost arriving at her own grave.
And all she could do was take the first step toward it.