By the time Collins switched from burial rites to exam prep, my brain had already left the room. It slid backward, as it always did, to the day in the Academy stacks when I found the hidden panel.
Time doesn't move right when this happens.
It doesn't stop. It doesn't shatter. It just… loosens. Like the world has gone slightly out of focus, edges softening while the center presses too close. I'm aware of the lecture continuing around me—Collins pacing, the projector clicking, someone whispering—but it all feels like it's happening through a layer of thick glass.
My body knows before my mind catches up.
There's a pressure behind my sternum, not pain exactly, more like something pushing outward from inside my ribs. I take a slow breath and it doesn't go where it's supposed to. My lungs fill, but the pressure stays, stubborn and unfamiliar, as if breath alone isn't enough to satisfy whatever's awake in there.
I shift in my seat. The chair creaks too loud. My skin feels tight, hypersensitive—every brush of fabric registering like a whisper against a nerve.
Ground. That's what they teach us at the Academy when things start slipping.
Name five things you can see.
Four you can touch.
Three you can hear.
Okay.
The cracked edge of my notebook.
The faint coffee stain on my sleeve.
The exit sign glowing emergency green.
The dull reflection of myself in the window.
Mr. Collins' tie—blue, patterned with tiny knots.
Touch.
The cool metal ring on my finger.
The rough paper under my palm.
The seam of my jeans pressing into my thigh.
The weight of my bag at my feet.
Hear.
Collins' voice.
The vent hum.
My own heartbeat—too fast.
It doesn't fully help.
Because grounding works when the problem is anxiety. Or stress. Or an overactive imagination.
This doesn't feel like that.
This feels like alignment.
Like something inside me is sliding into place whether I want it to or not.
The thought makes my stomach roll.
I lower my gaze to my notebook, to the half-finished notes and the door I didn't mean to draw. My pen is still in my hand. I don't remember picking it back up.
I haven't written anything new.
But the pressure eases slightly when I keep my eyes on the page, as if whatever's pressing outward prefers attention to resistance.
That scares me more than the pressure itself.
Mr. Collins' voice drones along the walls, a steady hum about Druidic priesthood structures or burial rites or something that might matter on the exam and absolutely does not matter to the part of me fighting not to dissociate.
The marker squeaks against the board.
Someone coughs.
A backpack zipper rasps open, then shut.
I should be writing. I have my pen in hand, notebook open, posture tilted in that polite "I am definitely paying attention" curve professors like.
Instead, I'm staring past his shoulder, out the fogged window. Outside, the sky is a smear of dull light, the glass smudged with the ghost shapes of raindrops. Everything looks blurred, half-real.
Daydreaming. Again.
If Cassie were here, she'd give me that look—brows arched, lips pressed, eyes sharp—the expression that says you're not just checked out, you're standing too close to something you can't see the edges of yet.
Today, she skipped. Or overslept. Or is curled somewhere in the library stacks with a vision migraine and a thermos of peppermint tea, trying to outstare whatever future decided to knock early.
Whatever the reason, she isn't here.
And maybe that's for the best.
Because no matter how hard I try, my mind won't stay in this room.
It keeps sliding backward.
To a hidden panel. To a forgotten scroll. To a prophecy that felt like it was written inside my bones.
I met Cassie my second year.
It wasn't a proper introduction. I was in line at the campus coffee shop, half-awake, clutching a crumpled bill like it might bolt, rehearsing my order in my head.
She was ahead of me. Red hair in a messy bun, chunky boots, oversized sweater, bracelets stacked on one wrist. She turned suddenly, studied me like I was a crossword clue she almost had, then said calmly:
"Don't get the latte. You'll spill it in about six minutes."
I blinked. "Who even talks like that?"
She just shrugged and turned back to the barista. "Large drip, two sugars. And a napkin. She'll need it."
I got the latte anyway.
Six minutes later, walking out of the library, I caught my own backpack strap with my foot and face-planted, coffee arcing through the air in slow-motion disaster.
By the time I groaned and tried to peel my dignity off the linoleum, Cassie was already there with napkins.
"Told you," she said, smiling like this was all very normal. "You have a weak left ankle on stairs, by the way. Watch that."
Some people said she was just freakishly observant. Some called her a witch, a weirdo, a liar. She called herself a Seer, half joking, half not.
I'd grown up in a world where the unseen is taken seriously—where you don't say certain names casually, where you ward your thresholds and respect your dead. Wiccan, pagan, hedge-witch—pick your label. So when Cassie said she saw things, I didn't roll my eyes.
I believed her.
Or maybe I believed her because she kept being right.
We started spending time together in the library. First by accident. Then by design. We'd drift from the main stacks into the older sections—where the shelves leaned and the lights buzzed like angry bees and the dust made you sneeze in Latin.
The Academy wing of the library is worse.
Or better.
Depends on your tolerance for haunted architecture.
Months after we snuck the Aetherion Ascension text off its shelf, the Academy wing of the library decided to get weirder.
That's when I found the panel.
I wasn't looking for anything forbidden. Not that day. I was just wandering, wasting time, tracing my fingers along old spines and wondering what would happen if one of the books decided to whisper back.
I hadn't meant to repeat the crime Cassie always blames me for—"walking into a prophecy like it's a study group"—but the hidden panel didn't care what I meant to do.
Then I saw it.
At the back of a top shelf, where wooden paneling should have been flush, there was a sliver slightly out of place. Too small to be a door. Too intentional to be an accident.
My first thought was: secret snack stash. If I were a stressed grad student, that's where I'd hide chips.
Curiosity won.
It always does.
I pressed the panel.
It creaked.
The sound was small, but my stomach did that flip you get when you realize you've stepped from safe territory into probably-not-allowed without meaning to.
Behind it, a hollow.
Dust, thick and undisturbed. And nestled there, like something the building had been trying to digest for a century, was a scroll.
Not a photocopy. Not a modern printout.
A real scroll.
Parchment wrapped tight and sealed with silver wax.
The moment my fingers brushed it, the air changed.
The lamps overhead flickered. Shadows shifted like they'd just taken a breath. A low hum rolled through the narrow aisle, not loud enough to hear properly, but deep enough to feel in the hollows of my ribs.
It felt like the library had woken up.
"Angela?" Cassie's voice carried softly from the end of the row. "What did you just touch?"
"Nothing," I lied automatically.
The hum disagreed.
Part of me wanted to slam the panel shut and walk away. Pretend I'd never seen it. Pretend the wards weren't prickling under my skin like a warning rash.
The rest of me—the bigger part—reached in.
The shelf groaned, like it disapproved. Dust puffed up, making my eyes water. I pulled the scroll free.
The seal was like nothing I'd seen in any of our lessons: an ouroboros wrapped around a crescent moon, a blazing star set as its eye. Recognition stirred, then slipped away.
My fingertips tingled when I brushed the wax.
There were wards layered into it. Old, stubborn, annoyed wards that murmured Not for you without quite pushing me away.
"Ang…" Cassie appeared at my shoulder, eyes wide. "That feels…loud."
"Loud?" I whispered.
"In here." She tapped her temple. "Like someone knocked and then took the door off its hinges."
Curiosity is a knife that doesn't know how to stop once it starts cutting.
Whoever hid this hadn't prepared for me specifically.
The wax fractured under my thumb. It fell away in tiny, traitorous pieces.
"Okay," Cassie hissed. "That's one way to commit a felony against time."
Cold air puffed out—air somehow different from the dust-choked atmosphere around us. It smelled like ozone and something sweeter, like honey held too close to a flame.
For a heartbeat, I thought I heard my name.
Not Angela.
The other one.
Too faint to be sure. Too close to ignore.
I unrolled the scroll.
First by flame and then her hand,
the Keeper marks the path she treads…
The words weren't ink.
They were light.
Letters shimmered across the parchment, shifting and flaring like fireflies caught in moonlight. I tried to focus on them. They slid, not refusing to be seen so much as insisting on being felt.
The prophecy didn't read like normal text.
It moved.
Each line slid under my skin, into my bones, humming through my marrow.
I remember fragments.
Where gods have severed, blood shall bind,
and torn threads will be stitched once more.
When the Keeper wakes where she was felled,
she calls the others to the door.
"There it is," Cassie breathed. "The Evermore Keeper."
I'd grown up with the sanitized version—the bedtime myth. One chosen soul woven through ages, carrying the burden of balance alone. The kind of story grandmothers soften with cookies and warm blankets when the storm outside gets too loud.
But the scroll kept speaking.
Not one, but seven, bound in light–
Aether-born, the threads of fate.
One sees, one shields, one walks the dark,
One storms, one stirs, one shatters gates–
And one remembers what gods forget.
Together, they unwrite the sky.
Daughters.
Plural.
The Evermore Keeper wasn't a single life.
It was a pattern. A weaving. A role divided and shared.
My lungs went tight. My fingers dug into the parchment to keep from dropping it. The silence in that back corridor was so thick I could hear my own pulse.
Cassie's fingers closed around my wrist, sharp enough to anchor me.
"Seven," she said. "People cling to threes because they're easier to fear. But the first laws—the ones before Olympus—were written in seven pillars. Light, shadow, storm, magic, war, breath… and the hidden one."
Her eyes unfocused, like she was watching something fall apart.
"The pattern's reforming. You're part of it."
"Don't," I cut in. "Don't start enumerating. It's creepy."
The prophecy unspooled further.
It spoke of a prison—an obsidian temple of silence where a Keeper was held, cut off even from her memories. Guarded by a warrior of Ares, shaped from starlight and steel, bound by oath never to let her go.
He watched. He weighed. He learned her song,
the quiet riot of her mind.
My chest clenched.
The words painted him so clearly I could almost see him—tall, armored, eyes like winter lightning. The way he'd stand too straight at first, calling her subject or prisoner, then eventually saying her name like it hurt.
Fate has a twisted sense of humor.
The Guardian fell in love.
Not the easy kind. Not a passing crush. The kind that shifts orbits. The kind that makes gods nervous.
He saw her not as weapon or key, but as a person—bright and fierce and starving for freedom. And she saw him, not as a jailer, but as the man under all that obligation.
Their love became a secret hymn.
And when the moment came, he did the unforgivable.
He chose her.
Over Olympus.
Over oaths.
Over everything.
He loosed the chain. He broke the bar, he tore her name from every scroll. He cast her into mortal days, a ghost of flame in borrowed soul.
He let her go.
With his help, she fell into the mortal world, vanishing into ordinary life, hidden in flesh and paperwork and forgettable details. The gods could have hunted her. The prophecy made that clear.
They chose something worse.
They erased him.
Tore his name from the records, scattered his memory like ash across the sky.
But the Keeper remembered.
Somewhere.
The scroll's light grew almost too bright as the lines shifted.
Yet when the Guardian Games return, she shall not rise in chains, but flame.
"The Aetherion Ascension," I whispered. "Umbra. The Games."
"Different name," Cassie said quietly. "Same nightmare."
The prophecy said she would return not as prisoner, but as something far more dangerous when the cycle started again.
Nearly a century had passed since the last Ascension.
Since that day, the gods had been searching in secret, afraid of the one who could undo them.
The scroll spoke of invitations written in symbols stolen from the edge of creation. Of names chosen when the solstice dawned. Of a Keeper pulled back onto the board right under the gods' noses.
By the time I reached the end, my hands were shaking.
The Evermore Keeper wasn't just a story. It was a pattern that kept coming back. A fracture the universe couldn't quite seal.
And the prophecy was clear about one thing:
When storms return and warwind howls,
when moonlight crowns the broken road,
the Keeper wakes in borrowed skin
and finds the thread the Fates forebode.
The air in the library pressed in then, heavy and expectant.
The last lines burned themselves into me.
She hides beneath a mortal name,
her past unwritten, locked away.
But blood remembers what mind forgets—
and she will choose who falls…and stays.
I swallowed hard.
"That's not—" I began.
"About you?" Cassie finished, very gently.
I snapped the scroll closed like I could shut the idea away with it.
"I'm not—" I gestured helplessly. "Keeper material. I'm barely 'remember to switch the laundry' material."
Her eyes didn't leave my face. "You dream about storms," she said. "About doors. About dying in places you haven't been yet. And you found this."
"That's coincidence."
She tilted her head. "You don't believe in coincidences."
"Then it's a bad joke," I said tightly. "Someone's warning for someone else. Not me."
Cassie let it go.
Out loud.
But her silence said: We'll see.
I rolled the scroll with numb fingers, shoved it back into the hollow, slid the panel shut. My heart wouldn't slow. I could feel the words pacing inside me like caged things.
The Evermore Keeper would return when the Aetherion Ascension began again.
When the first names were chosen.
Back in the lecture hall, the memory releases me.
Mr. Collins' voice slides into focus.
"…and as we can see, the interplay between myth and ritual—"
A raindrop trails down the outside of the fogged window in a slow, wobbly line. My reflection is faint in the glass—shadows under my eyes, lips pressed tight.
My fingers drift unconsciously to my bag.
The invitation is buried in the inner pocket.
Heavy, despite being just paper. The envelope is the exact shade of the seal on that scroll—matte black, with that same ouroboros-and-crescent emblem pressed into the flap. No return address. No logo.
Just my name.
Not Angela Meyler in neat university script.
Angela, written in molten silver ink that shimmered like starlight when I turned it.
When I touched it, my veins buzzed.
It didn't feel like a college event. It felt like recognition.
I tell myself I'm being dramatic.
I am very good at that.
I've lived most of my life balancing two realities—one that believes in spells and wards and old laws, and another that believes in GPAs and parking permits and student loan interest rates. I know how easy it is to let one bleed too far into the other if you're not careful.
So I try to dismantle the feeling logically.
Invitations are just paper.
Symbols are just symbols.
Prophecies are just stories written by people with too much time and not enough accountability.
The Umbra Ascension hasn't happened in nearly a century. That's practically mythological retirement age.
If something that big were really starting again, people would know. There would be signs. Public ones. News coverage. Panic. Governments scrambling. Not… this.
Not a pressure in my chest during a lecture on burial rites.
Not a feeling like the world is leaning slightly toward me when I'm not looking.
I press my palm flat against my stomach, grounding myself again. The skin there is warm. Real. Solid.
Human.
I am human.
I grew up in Lindsey Isle. I scraped my knees on sidewalks and cried when my dad left and learned how to fake confidence in mirrors before school dances. I have student debt and a caffeine problem and a best friend who will absolutely stage an intervention if I don't show up for Masquerade planning night.
I am not a cosmic fracture.
I am not a Keeper.
I am not on anyone's board.
The words feel hollow even as I think them.
Because when I picture the solstice—summer solstice, bright and merciless and exact—I don't imagine it abstractly. I imagine the date. The alignment. The way the sun doesn't just rise but claims the sky.
And without meaning to, my mind supplies the next piece.
My birthday.
Twenty-one.
The realization doesn't hit like lightning.
It settles.
Heavy. Precise. Inarguable.
I don't gasp. I don't flinch. I don't even stop breathing.
I just go very, very still.
Because coincidences are sloppy.
And this isn't.
I remember standing in the kitchen the morning it arrived, bare feet on cool tile, hair a mess, cereal going soggy in front of me.
The envelope was just…there. On the table. Not in the mail pile. Not by the door.
On my plate. Next to my spoon.
Like a place setting.
"New credit card offer?" Mom joked, rinsing her coffee mug. "If it's a pre-approved limit over five hundred, forward it to me."
But when I picked it up, my hand went numb.
The seal's symbol flared in my mind—ouroboros, crescent, star. The same as the scroll.
I should have burned it. Handed it to the headmistress. Given it to a professor at the Academy and stepped back.
I didn't.
I hid it.
I haven't told anyone.
Not Mom. Not the headmistress. Not Shelby.
Especially not Shelby. She'd see it on my face before I finished the story. She'd either snatch it and toss it into a bonfire or drag me to someone in charge and demand they fix it.
I can't explain why I didn't tell her.
Only that when I think about the envelope, something in me whispers: inevitable.
Cassie would say: you can't outrun a horizon.
Mr. Collins changes slides. The image of an ancient stone circle flickers on the projector.
I should be copying notes.
Instead, I'm replaying the prophecy in my head, line by line.
Blood shall bind where gods have severed. Daughters weaving crowns from embers. Keeper hiding in a world of ordinary.
My world.
A chair shifts beside me. My awareness snaps back into the room.
There are very few truly silent moments on campus. Even in lectures, there's always shuffling, muttering, the scratch of pens. But suddenly everything feels…focused.
Like the volume on everything else has been turned down.
Someone moves behind me.
A chair leg scrapes. A breath, just close enough to stir the hair at the back of my neck.
Then—
A tap lands between my shoulder blades—sharp enough to make me jump.