The news broke quietly, almost conveniently.
The headline read: "Local Student Found Dead in Brackley Lake: Suspected Suicide."
No bylines, no photos. A single column on page seven of the Brackley Courier, buried between an ad for a luxury condo development and a puff piece about the academy's spring gala.
To the outside world, Lyra Sato was another troubled girl swallowed by pressure.
To Brackley Academy, she was a liability erased.
The official statement was brief: "We are heartbroken by the tragic loss of one of our students. We urge our community to grieve with respect and compassion."
Counselors were made available. Candles were placed on the steps for a single night. The next morning, janitors swept away the wax before sunrise.
Her classmates barely noticed she was gone.
Some pretended to care for the optics. Most didn't even try.
Her name disappeared faster than her art did.
No one talked about the journal, found bloated and peeling on the rocks by the lake's edge.
No one admitted it existed.
But someone read every page.
Every shaky sketch of a scream. Every water-stained confession. Every desperate scrawl of "Please make it stop."
Someone remembered.
Someone who had watched Lyra return to their dorm room with trembling hands and bruised knuckles. Who noticed the way she stared out windows too long. The way she flinched when laughter echoed in the hall. Who saw her grow quieter and thinner, her color fading like a figure erased from a sketchbook.
Someone who saw the signs.
And saw who caused them.
A year passed. The lake thawed. The grass grew back.
Brackley Academy returned to its curated rhythm: late bells, lacrosse tryouts, hollow charity drives.
The school painted over her presence—literally. Lyra's mural in the art wing was scrubbed, replaced with a commissioned piece by a local alum. No one asked why.
The five students who had driven her to the edge walked the halls with renewed confidence, as if the silence had baptized them clean.
They were beautiful, rich, and well-practiced in the art of forgetting.
Rika Delacroix, now student council president, spoke at assemblies about leadership and "moving forward."
Josh Mendez, shoulder-deep in scholarship offers, smiled for sports pages like a golden boy.
Mara Villareal posted TikToks in the student lounge, her face filtered to porcelain perfection.
Dane Foster flirted and partied and still bragged.
Camille Yu floated quietly in the background, a model student, untouched and unbothered.
None of them knew they were being watched.
Not by ghosts.
But by someone living.
It began on a Tuesday.
Rika was mid-speech in the auditorium—something about eco-initiatives and Brackley pride—when her phone buzzed in her pleated skirt pocket. Annoyed, she glanced down.
The image had airdropped without permission.
A sketch in muted blues and grays.
A girl underwater, her hair haloed like ink in motion, eyes wide open. Her mouth parted in a silent scream, bubbles trailing upward.
Above the surface, five reflections looked down—warped, melting, unrecognizable but unmistakably them.
Distorted echoes of guilt.
Below the sketch, scrawled in a trembling red script that looked eerily like Lyra's:
"I hope you remember."
Rika's voice faltered mid-sentence.
Her throat went dry. Her gaze darted across the auditorium, eyes scanning the crowd for the sender.
No one looked up. No one reacted. Everyone just… watched.
Then her screen flickered.
The sketch shifted — animated now. The girl's eyes moved. Bubbles escaped her lips. The five faces above the water began to ripple.
Rika blinked, shaken, and turned the phone off.
But it was too late.
For the first time in a year, she felt fear.
Not guilt.
Not regret.
Fear.
That night, a post appeared on the anonymous student confession board:
"It's starting. Drowning Season is back. Watch the surface."
No one knew what it meant.
Not yet.
But by morning, five people would.
And one of them would find a printed copy of that same image slipped into their locker, edges soaked and curling, with a new message written in smudged graphite:
"You laughed. You watched. Now drown."