Wrath emerges once a person feels the need to prove themselves. It's not fury for the sake of fire, it's pain dressed in armor. A burden, really. Self-inflicted, self-fed. And to be quite frank, I don't understand why wrath even exists as something we glorify. It rots more than it redeems. But with every negative, there must be a positive… right? If wrath is the shadow, then somewhere, someone's still searching for the light. People like me.
Time and time again, I ask myself: why am I so naïve? I'm supposed to be intelligent, studying history and natural science, deciphering the patterns that built empires and burned them to ash, but socially? I lag behind like some distant echo of a person still trying to be one.
These thoughts blur together as I sit at my desk, motionless, homework finished hours ago. The half-empty water bottle beside me stares back, daring me to drink it even though I'm not thirsty. That's temptation for you. It doesn't arrive with desire, it arrives with timing. When you're alone. When the world's too quiet. When you're weakest.
The emptiness of the dorm is pierced by the door creaking open. Clover storms in like she owns the universe, wild hair, oversized hoodie, that usual look of mission-fueled mischief in her eyes.
"You're coming out tonight.
I don't move. I keep my eyes on the water bottle. "Pass."
"Achilles," she groans, "you do nothing. You sit here all week, reading books about dead people and thinking too much. Come live, for once."
She's not wrong. I am exactly that, still, silent, afraid of the noise. But something in her voice tonight isn't just prodding. It's tired. She wants me to live because, maybe, she doesn't know how to do it alone anymore.
So I stand.
The house on Willow Street looks like it used to be beautiful before the wrong people loved it. Music pounds through the floorboards and into my ribs. The porch sags under the weight of bodies and secondhand smoke. Inside, the air is thick with sweat, spilled drinks, and cheap perfume.
Clover disappears into the crowd, her natural habitat. I try to blend into the wallpaper, but it doesn't work. I'm recognized almost immediately.
"Achilles? No way, man I didn't think you left the library!"
It's Ezra, from my political theory class, and beside him are two others I vaguely recognize from lectures and shared silence. We exchange pleasantries, small talk, some jabs about how I always look like I'm solving ancient riddles in my head.
They laugh. I fake one back.
"You good?" Ezra asks.
"Just thinking," I reply.
"That's your problem," he smirks. "You think too much. Try feeling something tonight."
Feeling. Right.
That's when I see her.
She's leaning against the hallway wall, plastic cup in hand, clearly tipsy. Long hair curled like it's made of night, eyes that pierce more than stare. Same age. Same quiet. Different energy.
She looks at me like she's already read the first page of whatever I am.
"You don't look like you belong here," she says, sipping her drink.
"I don't," I admit. "But apparently I overthink too much, so… this is me attempting human spontaneity."
She laughs, genuinely. Not the pity laugh. Not the fake one. It sinks into my skin like warmth I haven't felt in a while.
We talk. About nothing. About everything. Her name is Eris, like the goddess of chaos, she tells me with a wink, and somehow it fits. The conversation spirals into philosophy, stories, strange facts about octopus brains and Greek curses. Her voice is a strange comfort, like a familiar dream I can't place.
Eventually, she grabs my hand.
"Come with me."
We slip through a crowded hallway and duck into a bathroom. She locks the door.
The silence is immediate. Thick.
She leans in, and so do I.
Our lips meet like something bound to happen. I don't even know her last name. That should bother me, but it doesn't. Her breath is warm. Her hands are soft. Everything feels amplified, overwhelming, urgent.
But then
Thoughts. Too many.
What am I doing?
Why am I doing it?
Does she like me or the idea of me?
What if this means nothing to her and too much to me?
What if this isn't real?
What if this is just my loneliness dressing itself up in skin and lipstick?
My mind is sprinting and spiraling and sinking all at once. I'm kissing her, but I'm also somewhere else entirely, drowning in questions, in weight, in old gods I don't yet understand.
And still, I don't stop.
Because maybe for once, I want to feel something without dissecting it. Maybe for once, I want to be kissed, and not have to ask myself why.
Our lips meet again, no hesitation now, no flinching from the questions clawing at my brain. Her hands find my waist as mine steady her hips. I press her gently, then firmly against the bathroom wall. It's impulsive, but not careless.
I kiss her neck, soft, then slower. She lets out a sound, not loud, but enough to quiet the noise of the party beyond the door.
My lips meet hers once more, but this time I don't drift. I bite her lower lip, just enough for her to squeal in surprise, a faint, playful wince blooming into a smile. Her breath hitches when my hand, cold from the air outside, slips gently around the back of her neck. She jolts a little, leans into me more.
"I needed this," she whispers, not looking away.
"Mm. I'm glad I could help," I murmur, trailing two soft kisses down the curve of her neck.
Then our eyes lock, her pupils slightly dilated, her lips parted, unsure if she's in control of this or letting it take her.
My hands circle her waist again. I stare into her like she's a question I'm dying to answer, but too scared to ask out loud.
"Tell me your problems," I say, gently rubbing her back. "I'll listen."
There's a beat. She breathes out like she's been holding something in all night.
"You first," she says.
That catches me off guard.
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.
Because how do you explain that you're terrified of your own reflection lately? That you feel watched, not by people, but by fate? That your thoughts aren't always your own anymore? That your nights are haunted by books that whisper and gods that might not be metaphors?
I want to tell her that I'm unraveling. That I feel like I'm being rebuilt by something ancient and unseen. That every step I take lately feels like it's already been made in a dream.
But instead, I say:
"I feel like I think too much and exist too little."
She smiles, but it's sad. Like she understands.
"I feel like I exist too much and think too little."
We're mirrors, fractured differently, cracked on opposite sides. That thought terrifies me. But it draws me closer, too.
She leans her forehead against mine.
"I'm not used to talking like this at parties."
"I'm not used to being at parties," I reply.
She chuckles again. It's soft, real. She slides her hands up under my hoodie and rests them on my chest. Not to seduce. Just to feel something living. Something human.
"Can I tell you something weird?" she asks.
"Please."
"You feel…familiar. Like I've met you before. Not just in a déjà vu kind of way. More like…you've always been in the room, just out of sight."
That makes my heart stop for half a second.
Because lately, I've been feeling the same thing. About her. About the world. Like something is pressing at the seams of reality and I'm the only one hearing it creak.
"Maybe we knew each other in another life," I say, half joking.
"Maybe," she says. "Or maybe this life just has too many ghosts."
We stand there in silence, breathing each other in.
And for a moment, I stop thinking.
Her hand lingers at my chest for a moment longer, then falls.
The silence cracks open, just a little, as she exhales and leans back.
"I should get back," she says, adjusting her shirt slightly and unlocking the bathroom door with a soft click.
I nod, lips parted like I want to say something, stay or what are we? or don't go yet, but nothing comes out. Words fail me in real time. She turns her head toward me one last time before she steps out.
"Find me sometime, Achilles."
And like that, she's gone.
The hallway swallows her, along with the music, the neon pink haze, and the static of drunken laughter.
I step out a moment later. Not because I'm ready, but because I can't stand the stillness behind the bathroom door anymore.
The party feels too loud now, too bright. My skin itches beneath the overhead lights, and everything smells too much like liquor and loneliness. I search the crowd, but I don't see her. I don't see Clover either. Just strangers and silhouettes.
I make my way through the crowd and out the door, leaving the warmth of bodies for the crisp bite of night air.
The sidewalk outside glistens from a thin layer of dew, even though it hasn't rained. The sky is an overcast black sheet with only the occasional hole for a dying star to peek through. My breath fogs in the cold, and I start walking, no destination, just distance.
My hands are jammed in my pockets. My hoodie's pulled up. The farther I get from the house on Willow Street, the quieter my head becomes.
I pass the closed café, the flickering bus stop, the library steps where I've spent too many nights pretending I had somewhere else to be. I don't check my phone. I don't want to see the time.
Eventually, my legs carry me to the edge of campus. The old science annex looms ahead, decommissioned, condemned, supposedly off-limits. But the gate's been broken for years. No one patrols here.
There's a gravel path behind it most students don't know about, one that curves behind a forgotten garden and dips into a dead-end lot filled with overgrowth and half-swallowed benches.
It's quiet here. Unnaturally quiet.
The kind of silence that feels listened to.
I slow my steps, breath coming out in clouds. The night has weight now, thicker than just cold. Like something pressing gently on the back of my neck. Like being watched.
That's when I see it.
At the base of a hollowed, out oak, half-buried beneath moss and fallen leaves…
a book.
At first, I think it's just a notebook. Maybe someone dropped it, maybe it was part of a botched ritual some kids left behind. But then I get closer. And I see the cover.
It doesn't have a title. Or a spine. The leather is cracked like dry skin, veined with gold threading that moves, not reflects, moves, when I tilt my head.
Like veins. Or roots. Or runes.
I crouch. My fingers hover over it, hesitant.
Then I touch it.
It's warm.
The forest around me exhales. I swear it does.
A low, near-subsonic hum begins to ring somewhere behind my ears, too deep for the world to hear. My vision tunnels briefly, the trees seem to pull back, like space is folding inward.
I should walk away.
But I don't.
I pick it up.
The instant my hand wraps around the binding, I feel something shift inside me, like a thread being pulled taut from the base of my skull to my chest.
I blink.
And in that moment, just for a second, the world glitches.
The stars above bend slightly inward, as if leaning closer. The ground feels… tilted. Not in motion, but watching me. Or adjusting to me.
I flip the cover open.
Blank pages. One after another. Dozens of them. Until..
Page 111.
There it is.
Symbols. Ones I've never seen but somehow recognize. They shimmer faintly. My eyes burn just staring at them. Not from pain, but from recognition. Like something in me has seen this before, in dreams I've never had.
My fingers twitch. My right eye itches, badly.
I rub it, and when I pull my hand away… my fingertip is stained with something faintly silver. Not blood. Not ink.
Something else.
I look up.
The forest isn't silent anymore. It's pulsing, like it's breathing with me.
The book grows hot in my hand.
Then, behind me, a voice, soft, genderless, distant.
"You've opened it."
I whip around. No one.
Nothing.
Just the wind in the branches and the sound of my heart trying to leave my ribs.
"And now… it opens you."
The light flickers behind my eyes. Not around me. Inside.
And then, just like that, it's over.
The wind dies.
The forest exhales again.
The book in my hand cools.
And something new now lives in my right eye.
I don't know what it is. But I know it's not mine alone.