The infirmary was a sterile, white-walled haven smelling of antiseptic and dried herbs. The healer, a gentle-faced woman with water-affinity magic, had clucked her tongue at the clean, precise cut on Barry's forearm.
"A close call, Mr. Crimsonwood. Another inch deeper and you'd have needed stitches," she'd murmured, her hands glowing with a cool, blue light that soothed the burning pain and sealed the skin, leaving only a faint pink line.
Barry had said nothing, merely nodding his thanks. The physical wound was the least of his concerns. The internal countdown was a drumbeat in his skull. He'd used precious minutes of his control containing the shadows in the Sand Pit. He had maybe ten minutes left of shaky stability before the backlash from stirring the darkness would hit him. He needed solitude, and he needed it now.
He left the infirmary and didn't head for the dorms. Instead, he moved with purpose towards the ancient, sprawling woods that bordered the eastern edge of Tokohashi's grounds—the Whispering Woods, a place students were warned against entering due to its wild, untamed magic and dangerous flora.
It was the perfect place to fall apart.
He didn't hear the soft footsteps trailing him. His senses were too focused inward, battling the rising tide of fatigue and the Voice's triumphant crooning.
"You see? You need me. You cannot keep caging me. Let me out. Let me protect us."
Never, he thought, the response a weak, automatic reflex. He pushed through a thicket of trees with blue-veined leaves, his breathing becoming more labored. The world began to tilt slightly at the edges. Eight minutes.
Deep in the woods, where the canopy was so thick it cast the forest floor into perpetual twilight, he found a small clearing. A single, gnarled Blackwood tree stood in the center, its bark twisted into agonized shapes. Barry stumbled toward it, his legs buckling, and slumped against its rough trunk.
He ripped the bandana from his face, gasping for air. The left side of his face, usually hidden, was pale, and the skin around his hellish crimson eye was dark and strained. Warm, black tears of exhaustion and pain began their familiar descent, tracing paths through the grime on his cheek.
This was the price. Every time he bled, every time the shadows were teased into existence, the monster demanded its due. He had fifteen minutes of borrowed control before the energy required to keep it leashed sapped him completely, leaving him weak, exposed, and vulnerable to its whispers.
He was so focused on his internal war that he didn't notice a figure silently emerge from the shadows of the trees.
Belinda Frostvale stood frozen, her hand pressed over her mouth to stifle a gasp. She had followed him out of a burning, inexplicable need for answers. The sight of his blood had ignited a fire in her memory, a flicker of a long-lost nightmare. And now... now she saw him.
Not the stoic, intimidating transfer student. But a boy in clear, agonizing pain, hiding in the dark. The black blood weeping from his eye was terrifying, unnatural. But it was the sight of his face, fully revealed, that struck her like a physical blow.
The sharp jaw, the defiant set of his mouth, the startling blue of his right eye... and the terrifying, beautiful tragedy of his left. It was a face from a dream. A face from a life she couldn't remember.
Barry's head lolled back against the tree. His control was slipping. The carefully constructed walls in his mind were crumbling. The memory he kept locked away, the one that fueled his every nightmare, began to bleed out, not in images, but in raw, unfiltered emotion.
"He called me a monster," Barry whispered to the empty clearing, his voice ragged and broken, unaware of his audience. "And she... she believed him."
Belinda took an involuntary step forward, a twig snapping under her boot.
Barry's head snapped up, his crimson eye flaring. "Who's there?!" he snarled, trying to push himself upright, but his body was too weak. The movement jostled his injured arm, and a fresh bead of crimson blood welled from the nearly healed cut.
Drip.
It was the final trigger.
The drop of red blood hit the dark earth.
And the world exploded.
Shadows erupted from the blood, not as faint tendrils, but as a torrent of liquid midnight. They swarmed over Barry, enveloping him in a shroud of darkness. He threw his head back and screamed—a sound of both agony and terrifying release.
Belinda watched in horror as the darkness solidified. When it receded, the boy was gone.
In his place was a demon.
His form was wreathed in shifting, blood-red shadows. Veins of darkness pulsed under his pale skin. His hair seemed longer, tipped with crimson. And his eyes... both were now pools of infinite blackness, centered with burning red coals. It was the monster from her deepest, most buried nightmares.
The monster from the alley.
The memory didn't return in pieces. It returned as a flood.
The rain. The cold. The man in white. The searing pain in her shoulder. The warm, spreading wetness of blood on her yellow raincoat. The terrifying, beautiful shadows that ripped the world apart. The boy turning to her, his face a mask of concern under the grotesque, demonic transformation. Her own voice, shrill with a fear she didn't understand, screaming words that now echoed in her soul with devastating clarity:
"Get away from me! Monster!"
A choked sob escaped Belinda's lips. The world spun. The carefully constructed walls of ice her father had built around her mind shattered into a million pieces.
Barry—no, the creature that was Barry—turned its hellish gaze on her. It let out a low, guttural growl, taking a step toward her. It was a being of pure, protective rage, and she was an intruder in its domain.
But Belinda didn't run. She didn't scream. She stood her ground, tears now streaming freely down her own face, freezing into tiny crystals on her skin.
"B... Barry?" she whispered, her voice trembling.
The creature halted. The growl died in its throat. It tilted its head, the movement unnervingly animalistic. The name, spoken in that specific, heartbroken tone, was a key.
"Barry," she said again, stronger this time, taking a step forward. "It's me... it's..." The name felt foreign and familiar on her tongue, a secret she'd been forced to forget. "It's Meli."
The effect was instantaneous. The swirling shadows around the creature faltered. The burning red of its eyes flickered. A war was being fought within it—between the unleashed demon and the soul of the boy trapped inside.
Belinda closed the distance between them, her heart hammering against her ribs. She ignored every instinct telling her to flee. She reached out a trembling hand, not towards the monster, but towards the memory of the boy.
"I remember," she choked out, her voice thick with tears. "I remember the rain. I remember the man. I remember you... trying to protect me. And I... I said those awful things. I called you a monster."
The creature shuddered violently, growling and clutching its head. The shadows began to recede, pulling back into his skin like a tide going out. The demonic features softened, blurred, and finally collapsed.
Barry fell to his knees in the center of the clearing, fully himself again, gasping and trembling with the aftershocks. The transformation had taken everything. He was pale, shaking, and utterly broken.
He looked up at her, his two eyes returned to their normal state—one sky-blue, the other a weary, human crimson. The look in them was one of such profound vulnerability and pain that it stole the breath from Belinda's lungs.
"Meli..." he breathed, the childhood nickname a prayer and a curse on his lips. "You... you remember."
She sank to her knees in front of him, the pristine white of her robes soaking up the dark earth. "I remember everything," she whispered, her voice breaking. "Barry... I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for what I said. I was scared... I didn't understand..."
He looked away, his shoulders slumping. The tough guy persona was gone, leaving only the raw, scarred core of the boy who had lost everything.
"Ten years," he said, his voice hollow, empty. "Ten years since your words left a hole in my heart that nothing could ever fill. I thought you were dead. And then I thought you hated me. Every day since then... has been a fight against this... this *thing* inside me. To keep it contained. To keep anyone from seeing the monster you saw."
He gestured weakly to the clearing, to the lingering scent of ozone and shadow. "This is what I am, Meli. This is the curse I live with. I created the gravity magic... all of it... just to build a cage. So I wouldn't be discovered. So I wouldn't be executed."
Belinda listened, her tears falling silently. She saw it all now. The hood, the bandana, the silence, the cold demeanor—it wasn't arrogance. It was a fortress. Every day was a battle for him, a countdown to a collapse he always had to face alone.
Her heart shattered for him. The boy who had been her protector, her best friend, had spent a decade believing he was a monster, haunted by her last, fearful words.
Without thinking, she reached out and cupped his face, her touch as gentle as a snowflake. He flinched for a second, then leaned into it, a single, clean tear—a tear of water, not blood—tracking through the dirt on his cheek.
"You're not a monster, Barry Crimsonwood," she said, her voice fierce with a newfound conviction. "You never were. You were a scared little boy who saved my life. And I am so, so sorry you had to carry this alone for so long."
In the quiet of the Whispering Woods, the frost heiress and the blood-shadow boy knelt together in the dirt, the past finally, painfully, reconciled. The walls were down. The truth was out.
But in the shadows of the trees, unseen by either, a small, intricate ice-crystal, shaped like a listening ear, slowly melted into nothingness. Its purpose served, the spell dissolved, but the information it had carried had already been received.
Miles away, in his frozen office, Headmaster Gregory Frostvale stared into a scrying pool, the image of his daughter comforting the abomination clear in the water. His face was a mask of cold, furious betrayal.
The anomaly had just become a catastrophe.