Chapter 5 The Bell That Forgot the Hour

By morning, Anil almost convinces herself she imagined it.

The mirror.

The flash of burning stone.

Lucien’s voice saying you always say that like they were standing inside a conversation that had already happened.

Almost.

Blackthorn does its best to look ordinary. Sunlight runs down the stone like honey, catching on stained glass and iron railings. The courtyard fills with students in half-buttoned uniforms and crooked ties, breath fogging in the cool air, magic humming low enough that it could be dismissed as old wiring.

“Reality check,” Mira says, pressing a muffin into Anil’s hand as they join the breakfast line. “Did your room smell like incense and old guilt all night, or was that just mine?”

Anil huffs a small laugh, even though her stomach feels too tight for food. “Define old guilt.”

“Like if a church and a funeral home shared a closet,” Mira says. “This whole place is steeped in we did something and no one wants to talk about it.”

“Maybe that’s just boarding school,” Anil offers.

Mira squints at her. “You look like you barely slept.”

“Because I barely slept.”

“Nightmares?”

“Not exactly.” The memory of silvered glass and ash tightens her throat. “Just… thoughts.”

“Disgusting,” Mira says. “Couldn’t be me. Come on, smudge girl. Coffee first, existential crisis later.”

“Stop calling me that,” Anil mutters.

“Earn a better nickname, then.”

They collect food: porridge, fruit, eggs that might be powdered, coffee that will be regretted later. The dining hall smells like toast and burnt bacon layered over something older—wax, stone, and the faint sharpness of old polish.

They take their usual spot by the window. Outside, the bell tower looms, heavy and patient. The bells are still, their dark metal throats turned toward the washed-out sky.

Anil can still feel last night’s hum in her bones, like a bruise that only flares when she thinks about it.

“You heard it too, right?” she asks, trying to sound casual. “The bell.”

Mira snorts. “Everyone heard it. Third floor thought a train was trying to come through someone’s wardrobe. Some upperclassman swears it happened once ten years ago and they had to close the cloister for a term.”

“Because of what?”

“That’s where the story gets vague and involves a lot of screaming and someone saying we don’t talk about that.” She shrugs. “Excellent material for my podcast. Terrible for my life expectancy.”

Anil’s gaze drifts to the staff table.

Professor Ingram drinks his tea as if nothing rattled the wards last night. Headmaster Armitage speaks quietly to a man in a charcoal suit whose presence makes the air feel thinner around him. No one mentions bells. Or cracks. Or fog that moved like it had coordination.

Everyone is eating, laughing, planning afternoons.

Maybe I dreamt half of it, she thinks.

Except dreams don’t usually leave faint burns under your skin. They don’t make mirrors breathe or turn a library into an echo chamber of someone else’s memories.

Mira is still watching her. “You’re doing the face.”

“What face?”

“The one where you know more than you’re saying,” Mira replies. “I recognize it. It’s my face when someone emails me a haunted house story and forgets to mention the part about the basement.”

Anil pulls the muffin apart, crumb by crumb. “Hypothetically,” she says slowly, “what would you do if someone told you that you keep making the same choices. Over and over. And they never really work.”

Mira leans back, considering. “I’d ask who’s keeping score.”

“What?”

“Someone has to be counting,” Mira says. “Otherwise how would they know you’re repeating anything? So whose rules say your choices ‘don’t work’? The ones who rigged the test, or yours?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It never is.” Mira shrugs. “But stories don’t loop without a reason. Someone always benefits when they do. Step one, find out who. Step two, ruin their day.”

A laugh escapes her before she can stop it, rough and brief. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Maybe,” Mira says. “But I can wait until you’re ready to tell me the non-hypothetical version. I’m very patient when the universe is clearly hinting at plot.”

The bell for first period chimes politely overhead: a small, clean sound, nothing like the grinding note that tore through the night.

Students begin to stand. Chairs scrape. Conversations scatter into fragments.

Mira bumps Anil’s shoulder with hers. “If we’re late to Transmutation, we’ll end up as volunteer demonstrations. Move.”

“Threats before nine a.m.,” Anil murmurs. “Impressive.”

“You haven’t seen my ten a.m.,” Mira says.

They join the flow out of the hall.

Normal.

Everything looks normal.

It just doesn’t feel that way.

Transmutation is held in a long room with high windows and sturdy tables that look like they’ve survived centuries of accidents. Shelves line the walls, stocked with jars, dried herbs, labelled powders, and objects that react faintly when looked at too long.

Professor Delaney, all silver hair and stern eyes, spends most of the first half hour talking about ethics.

“Transformation is not a party trick,” she says, as chalk writes on the board without her touching it. “Nothing you change stops counting as real. Living matter does not become less alive because you are clever.”

Only then does she distribute apples.

“Now,” she says. “Feathers.”

The room fills with muttering and concentration. Anil stares at the apple in front of her. The exercises they’ve been given outline the basic sigils and the intent: reshaping structure, not erasing it.

She traces the pattern with her fingertip along the desk, feels a faint tug under her palm, and tries not to think of warm light exploding from her hands in the library.

The apple shudders.

Half its skin ripples and shifts, becoming an awkward spray of pale feathers that refuse to decide if they want to be fruit or wing.

Mira leans over from the next table. “It’s kind of cute,” she whispers. “You made a philosophical question.”

“Yours is perfect,” Anil says.

“Mine is pretending to be perfect,” Mira replies, frowning at her own apple-turned-sleek-feather. “Give it ten minutes and it’ll turn into tax paperwork.”

Delaney passes their table, glances at Anil’s work, and nods once. “Imperfect transformations are more honest,” she says. “Remember that.”

The words settle somewhere under Anil’s ribs.

In Runic Architecture, Professor Halbrook takes them outside to trace the school’s hidden lines.

“Blackthorn stands where it stands for a reason,” he explains, wind tugging at his coat. “The stone remembers where the world is thin.”

He shows them the etched symbols carved low along the cloister arch: sharp lines, intersecting curves, old language burned into rock by steady hands.

“This strand is part of the bell network,” he says. “It wakes under very specific conditions.”

Mira raises a hand. “What conditions?”

“Not something you need to worry about,” Halbrook replies, smiling in a way that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “You are here to understand the structure. The failures are our concern.”

As they move on, Mira leans in close enough that only Anil hears. “Old guilt,” she says again.

Anil’s fingers brush the stone.

For a moment, she feels sound without hearing it—like the memory of a note that hasn’t been played yet.

She snatches her hand back.

By late afternoon, the sky flattens into pale grey. A cool wind blows across the courtyard, collecting bits of conversation and loose leaves.

The common room is noisy enough to disguise most thoughts. Anil tries to use that. Open books in front of her, pen in hand, she attempts an essay that refuses to become sentences.

No matter how she angles herself, her mind slides away from the words and back to the same points: the mirror, the way the seal had rippled; Lucien’s you never say no; Cael’s somewhere between us is where you die.

Her wrist throbs as if in agreement.

She closes the book.

“Library?” Mira asks without looking up from her editing software.

Anil startles. “How did you know?”

“You get a specific look,” Mira says. “Like the stacks offended your honor.”

“Just need somewhere quiet,” Anil says.

“The podcast is finally at a good part,” Mira says with a grimace. “I’d follow, but I have to cut out this guy’s eighteen-minute rant about haunted fidget spinners. Text me if the shelves start moving.”

“Is that something they do?” Anil asks.

Mira doesn’t answer quickly enough to be reassuring.

The library at this hour breathes in long, slow drafts.

Most of the upper lamps are lit now, casting puddles of warm light over the tables. The air tastes like old paper and wax and faint herbs from the librarian’s ever-present teacup.

Anil chooses a table near the tall windows again. From there she can see the courtyard, darker now, and the line of the cloister like a folded shadow. The bell tower rises above everything, its clock face pale and distant.

She sets out her books and notes, but her focus drifts almost immediately.

Back to the mirror.

Back to the feeling that standing in front of it is less like looking at her reflection and more like walking up to a door she has slammed too many times.

She gives up pretending not to be drawn to it.

The mirror waits where she left it, tall and heavy, its frame crowded with carved angels. Their faces are precise but strangely expressionless, wings curved inward like cupped hands.

Her reflection is the same as before: tired eyes, uneven hair, uniform only mostly within regulations.

She exhales. Her breath fogs the glass.

The fog clears.

Her reflection blinks a fraction late.

This time she doesn’t move closer. She stays where she is and watches carefully, counting her breaths.

On the fourth breath, the smile appears on the other side.

Not huge, not fanged, nothing dramatic. Just the barest upward curve of the mouth—on the wrong face, at the wrong time.

She flinches backward. Her hip knocks a side table. A stack of books slides off with a heavy thump.

A few students glance over, then look away again. Accidents happen in places like this.

Mira, across the room, lifts a hand in question. Anil gives a small, shaky thumbs-up.

“Poltergeist check?” Mira mouths.

“Later,” Anil mouths back.

Before she can reassemble her dignity, the air in the aisle cools.

It’s not just a draft. It’s a change in weight, a subtle rearranging of space.

Lucien steps out from between the shelves, hands in his pockets, as if the shadows themselves decided to shape into him.

“You do realize this is one of the worst places in the building to stand still,” he says.

Anil doesn’t jump. She refuses.

“This room?” she asks. “Or the mirror?”

“Both,” he says. “But the mirror is greedy.”

He comes to stand beside her. Up close, she can see the faint silver line of the exile-brand under the open collar of his shirt. It looks old and recent at the same time, like it belongs in every version of him.

“That isn’t a mirror,” he says.

“It reflects,” she says. “That’s usually the requirement.”

“It’s a lock,” he says. “A seal. It’s where the school put what it couldn’t properly bury.”

Something twists inside her. “What exactly needed burying?”

He glances at her wrist, at the place where her thumb gently presses the scar as if she’s only now realised she’s doing it.

“You did,” he says. “Pieces of you.”

Her mouth goes dry. “I don’t remember leaving anything in a magic mirror.”

“You weren’t meant to,” he answers, voice softer now. “That was the point.”

He steps a little closer to the glass. His reflection joins hers, clearer, as if the surface has less trouble deciding what kind of thing he is.

“You’ve stood here before,” he says without looking at her. “Every time the story came close to changing, this started to strain. Every time something bent instead of breaking, it caught a fragment. A promise. A nearly-choice.”

Anil’s laugh comes out thin. “So this is a lost-and-found for bad decisions?”

“Not bad,” he says. “Just ones that didn’t fit the ending they wanted.”

“You keep saying ‘they’ like there’s a committee,” she murmurs.

“There always is,” he says. “They just change robes.”

The words land harder than she wants to admit.

She swallows. “Say I believe you. Say I believe I’ve been here, that I’ve… looped. Why are you the one telling me? Why not Cael? Why not the headmaster?”

He still doesn’t look at her, but something in his shoulders tightens.

“Cael knows,” he says. “The headmaster suspects. The wardens have records.”

“And you?” she asks. “What do you have?”

“Less patience for pretending ignorance is kindness,” he says.

She looks at his reflection, at her own beside it.

“Cael said I’m one of them,” she says. “Whatever that means. That something in me keeps getting pulled into the same storm. That he keeps trying to make it end differently, and I’m the one who pays when he fails.”

Lucien finally looks at her.

“That sounds like him,” he says quietly.

“That’s it?” she demands. “No argument?”

“It’s not quite a lie,” he says. “It’s just missing the part where the storm was built long before he ever stepped into it.”

“Incomplete truth,” she mutters.

“The holiest kind,” he says dryly.

It shouldn’t make sense. Somehow, it does.

He tips his head slightly, studying her. “Do you want to see what you left behind?”

Her heart jumps. “In there?”

“In there,” he says. “In you. This just reflects it.”

“And if I don’t?” she asks.

He meets her gaze. For a second, all the irony is gone from his expression.

“You always do,” he says.

The mirror’s surface darkens.

The dull silver deepens, as if something behind the glass has finally stepped closer. Her own face blurs, stretched thin, then disappears.

Images snap past in jagged pieces:

Rain hammering stone.

A corridor filled with smoke.

Blackthorn’s windows cracked and spiderwebbed.

Students running, faces streaked with ash and tears.

Cael’s voice, ragged, shouting her name.

Lucien’s hand, reaching through swirling darkness toward hers.

The images bleed into feeling, heavy and absolute.

The sense of standing on the edge of something that has gone wrong too many times, knowing that any step forward will hurt someone.

She chokes on a breath.

The mirror clears.

The library is just shelves and light again. The two of them stand there, both breathing too fast.

“That was real,” she says. “Or will be.”

He nods once. “If we do nothing, yes.”

“You keep saying we like we agreed to this,” she says.

“You came to Blackthorn,” he replies. “That’s a kind of agreement.”

Before she can decide whether to be angry at that, the clock near the door chimes ten. Librarian McKee’s tired voice carries faintly through the stacks, announcing closing in fifteen minutes.

“Go back to your dorm,” Lucien says. His tone has lost its teasing edges. “Tonight isn’t a good night to stay.”

“Because of the bell?” she asks.

“Because of you,” he says simply.

Her skin prickles. “What is that supposed to—”

The lights overhead flicker.

Once.

Twice.

They flare brighter than before, then settle into a slightly wrong color. The shadows sharpen.

Behind the front desk, McKee looks up sharply. “Not tonight,” she mutters under her breath, as if scolding the building.

The hum starts low.

Not ringing.

Not yet.

A deep vibration under the floorboards, like something enormous turning over in its sleep.

Students glance up, frowning. The air feels heavier, sound moving sluggishly.

The clock’s second hand jerks forward, then back a notch, then forward again.

“Library’s closed,” McKee calls, too brisk. “Out. Now, please.”

Chairs scrape. Books snap shut. A tide of bodies flows toward the doors.

Anil tries to move with them.

Her legs hesitate.

The hum climbs out of the floor and into her. It runs up her spine, spreads through her ribs, catches under her sternum.

“Anil.” Lucien catches her elbow, pulling her out of the path of the crowd. “Look at me.”

“It’s too loud,” she says, but it isn’t a sound. It’s pressure.

“It’s not loud,” he says. “It’s close. Stay here.”

McKee ushers the last cluster of students out, jaw tight, eyes sharper than they usually are. She locks the main doors with a sharp twist of her wrist, then mutters a ward under her breath and disappears through a side door, clutching her rosary.

The room empties.

The hum deepens into a note, long and wrong, settling like a weight on everything.

Cael steps out from between two far shelves as if he has been there the whole time, waiting.

Light already gathers around his hands, thin and controlled.

“You weren’t supposed to be here,” he says to Lucien, jaw tight.

“Complain to someone who writes schedules,” Lucien replies. “I just follow the bad omens.”

The main bell begins to toll.

It is nothing like its morning call.

The note is lower, dragged, as if someone is hauling the sound up by chains. Each strike rakes through the air and through her body.

Anil’s stomach drops. “What is that?”

Cael’s eyes are fixed on the nearest stained-glass window. “The bell isn’t just sound,” he says. “It’s a gate. Something is pushing on the other side.”

Outside, fog begins to thicken along the ground, curling up around the cloister arches. It doesn’t drift like weather; it crawls. It climbs.

Hair lifts on the back of Anil’s neck.

“We should go,” she says. “We should—”

“I can’t,” Cael says. Faint wings shimmer at his shoulders, there and not. “My place is here.”

“Of course it is,” Lucien mutters. “You never miss a chance to bleed for a system that would happily grind you down.”

A door slams somewhere below. Heavy steps, coming closer. Not panicked. Not running.

“The wardens,” Lucien says. “They felt it.”

“Not in time,” Cael answers. He moves closer to Anil, light gathering around his fingers. “Stay near me. If anything touches you, it will remember more than it should.”

“More what?” she asks.

He hesitates for a heartbeat. “More of you.”

The nearest stained-glass window bows inward slightly like something is pressing against it. The painted saint’s face distorts.

A thin shriek drills through the hum, high and metallic.

The glass cracks down the center.

A hand presses through—long fingers made of smoke and bone, nails like fractured ice.

Light bursts from Cael’s palms in two clean arcs, slamming into the glass. The thing recoils, its surface blistering and curling away from the impact. The air fills with the smell of burnt dust and old incense.

“Keep behind the line!” Cael calls.

“What line?” Anil demands.

Only then does she see it: a faint ring of light has appeared on the floor around them, etched in symbols that weren’t there a moment ago. The meaning skims across her mind—contain, delay, not yet.

Lucien moves opposite Cael, drawing something from the air itself. Darkness condenses into a blade in his hand, its edge humming, shadows pooling along its length like ink.

“You take the ones clinging to the holy images,” he says to Cael. “I’ll deal with the others.”

“Same threat, different costumes,” Cael mutters, but there is no time for more.

More shapes force themselves through the glass.

They drop into the library, made of fog and bone and fragments of faces that look almost human—students she half-recognizes, teachers, blurred saints. Their mouths open in soundless howls that only become audible when they slam against the ring of light.

The circle burns them. They recoil, screaming.

Those that leap beyond its edge go for Cael or Lucien.

Light and shadow meet them.

Cael moves with practiced precision, arcs of radiance slicing through fog, leaving streaks of brightness hanging in the air for a moment before they fade. Lucien’s blade carves through them in a more fluid way, as if he’s cutting through water that happens to be solid enough to bleed darkness.

They move together, not looking at each other, but in frightening sync. Step, strike, turn. Wings flash in and out of view. The shelves rattle as bodies made of smoke and memory slam against them and dissolve.

Anil stands within the circle, heart pounding so hard she can feel it in her throat. Every instinct says move, run, do something.

Then the warmth starts.

It begins in her wrist, along the scar. A small, insistent heat, like someone has lit a candle under her skin.

It spreads up her arm.

Under her sleeve, golden lines bloom, tracing her veins, brighter with each breath.

“Anil.” Lucien’s voice cuts through the noise. “Whatever happens, don’t let it decide for you.”

“What is it?” she presses out.

“The part of you they didn’t manage to chain,” he says.

The heat flares.

It is too much, too fast. Her heart feels like it stutters, then catches a different rhythm, syncing with that deep hum under everything.

Stop, she thinks.

Something hears her.

But instead of retreating, it surges.

Light bursts outward.

It doesn’t seep or glow. It detonates.

A wave of gold radiates from her in every direction, slamming through Cael, Lucien, the circle, the windows, the shelves. For a second everything becomes a negative image: dark figures burned into the brightness, outlines crisp and stark.

The creatures vanish.

Not shredded.

Not scattered.

Just gone.

The fog outside tears apart as if a wind has ripped through it. The cracks in the glass begin to knit themselves back together, noisy and slow, like bone setting.

The bell chokes on its own sound and stops mid-toll.

Silence falls so abruptly she feels it like a blow.

The only sound left is her own breathing, too fast and too shallow.

Her knees buckle. She catches herself on her hands. The floor is warm under her palms, then cooling.

Her arms are still glowing, faintly.

Golden lines trace under her skin like writing, curling across her veins and bones. As she watches, they begin to sink deeper, fading as if someone is erasing them from the surface—not completely, just out of sight.

“What,” she whispers, “was that.”

Cael kneels across from her. His chest heaves, hair mussed, tie askew. There is a scorch along one sleeve where something tried and failed to touch him.

His eyes are on her hands.

“That wasn’t holy light,” he says. His voice sounds scraped. “That wasn’t mine. Or theirs.”

Lucien leans one shoulder against a nearby shelf. The blade in his hand dissolves into black dust and disappears. There’s a burn along his jaw, already healing.

“That was you,” he says quietly. “Just you.”

The ring of light on the floor is gone now. Only faint scorch marks remain where the creatures hit it.

Outside, the courtyard is empty and still. The fog has retreated into ordinary night.

Anil pulls her hands to her chest. They’re still trembling.

“I didn’t mean to,” she says. “I didn’t even know I… had anything like that.”

Cael lets out a short, disbelieving breath that might almost be a laugh. “You changed the rules,” he says.

“That’s not possible,” she says automatically. “I’m just—”

“You’re not just anything,” Lucien says.

He pushes away from the shelf and comes closer, studying her face with new focus.

“The bell called everything that remembered you,” he says. “Whatever you’re carrying answered louder.”

A memory of the mirror flashes through her—the shards of selves trapped behind the glass, the feeling of standing on that edge.

“So now what?” she asks, the question barely more than breath.

Cael looks up at the ceiling, where the ward-lines run like pale scars through the stone.

“Now heaven notices,” he says.

Lucien’s smile is small and without humor. “And when heaven notices something it can’t immediately explain…”

“It tries to claim it,” Cael finishes.

Footsteps pound up the stairs outside now. Heavy. Rhythmic. Not student steps.

Voices speak short, sharp phrases—old words that taste like stone and iron and sanctified ground.

Anil flinches.

Cael closes his eyes for a moment, gathering whatever composure he has left.

Lucien’s hand brushes Anil’s—just once, quick and warm and steady.

“Whatever they say,” he murmurs, so low only she can hear, “remember that this was you. Not borrowed power. Not a mistake you stumbled into. Yours.”

She nods, throat tight.

The library doors swing open.

Headmaster Armitage enters first, robes uncreased, expression carved into something like calm. Two wardens flank him, tall in dark coats marked with stitched symbols that hum faintly when they move.

Their eyes take in the room with one sweep.

The scorched floorboards. The faint cracks still healing in the stained glass. Cael, still half-lit. Lucien, shadowed and steady.

Then they land on Anil.

The nearer warden draws in a slow breath. “Found her,” he says softly.

Not like a discovery.

Like a prophecy fulfilled.

The hair on the back of Anil’s neck stands on end.

Outside, the bell hangs silent in the dark.

For the first time since Blackthorn was built, it doesn’t know what hour to claim.