The corridors of Grimoire Academy had transformed into rivers of controlled panic. Students flowed toward their respective dormitories in tight clusters, their voices reduced to anxious whispers that echoed off stone walls centuries old. Faculty members stood at key intersections like sentinels, ensuring compliance with the lockdown protocols while their faces betrayed the same unease that coiled in Niko's stomach.
Ayesha hadn't released his hand. He found himself grateful even as his mind spun through increasingly dark permutations of what multiple disappearances might mean. The very architecture of the academy seemed to press down on them with newfound weight, as if the wards that had protected this place for generations had suddenly proven themselves as substantial as morning mist.
"The boys' dormitory is east wing," Ayesha said quietly as they approached a branching hallway. "Girls' west. They'll separate us."
Niko squeezed her fingers once before letting go. "Third floor study alcove," he murmured, barely moving his lips. "Twenty minutes. Can you slip away?"
Her answering smile was sharp enough to cut. "Please. I've been evading dorm monitors since first year. Twenty minutes."
They separated at the intersection, and Niko forced himself to maintain a steady pace toward his dormitory despite every instinct screaming at him to run, to act, to do something other than retreat to false safety. Professor Chen stood watch at the boys' dormitory entrance, his normally jovial expression replaced by granite severity.
"Straight to your rooms," he commanded, though not unkindly. "No gathering in common areas. Check-in via communication crystal every hour on the hour. Understood?"
A chorus of acknowledgment rose from the assembled boys, and they filed past into the dormitory proper. Niko climbed the stairs to his third-floor single, a privilege afforded to A class students, and locked the door behind him. His room was spartan by most standards: a narrow bed, a desk perpetually buried under theoretical texts and combat manuals, a wardrobe, and a single window that overlooked the academy's eastern gardens.
He moved to the desk and began extracting items from its lowest drawer. A silver compass whose needle pointed not north but toward concentrations of spirit energy. Three crystals of varying opacity, each attuned to different spectral frequencies. A leather-bound journal filled with diagrams and notes in his own cramped handwriting, years of independent research into applications of spirit manipulation that the academy curriculum barely touched upon.
Scrying was forbidden to students for excellent reasons. The technique required projecting one's consciousness through the medium of spirit energy, essentially sending a fragment of yourself out into the world to observe remotely. In the hands of someone with insufficient control, it could result in that fragment becoming lost, the scryer's mind fracturing irreparably. In the hands of someone with too much raw power, it could announce your presence to everything sensitive to spiritual frequencies within a mile radius.
Niko possessed both insufficient control and entirely too much power. It was a combination that should have made scrying impossible for him.
Should have.
He'd discovered the workaround eight months ago, during a bout of insomnia-fueled experimentation that he'd wisely decided not to share with his instructors. The key was distribution: instead of projecting a single concentrated fragment of consciousness, he could diffuse his awareness across his vast spirit pool, creating something more akin to a mist than a spear. The trade-off was reduced clarity and range, but it was sustainable and, crucially, much harder to detect.
But he'd still need help. The technique required maintaining two separate states of consciousness simultaneously, and even his mind struggled with that degree of cognitive dissociation.
Which was where Ayesha came in.
Niko glanced at the small clock on his desk. Fifteen minutes had elapsed. He gathered his materials, checked the corridor outside his door, and slipped out with the practiced silence of someone who'd done this before. The study alcove he'd referenced was barely that: a architectural quirk where two hallways met at an odd angle, creating a triangular space just large enough for a bench and a shelf of reference texts that nobody had opened in decades. More importantly, it sat in a blind spot between the monitoring wards.
Ayesha was already there, having somehow changed from her training uniform into dark, practical clothing that made her nearly invisible in the alcove's shadows. She looked up at his approach, and even in the dim light he could see the electric anticipation in her grey eyes.
"You look like you're planning a heist," he whispered, settling onto the bench beside her.
"You look like you're planning something stupidly dangerous that requires my expertise," she countered. Then her gaze fell to the items he carried, and her expression shifted to one of recognition and concern. "Niko. That's scrying equipment. They expelled two fifth-years last semester just for possessing that compass."
"I know." He began arranging the crystals in a triangular formation on the bench between them. "I also know that whatever took Marcus is still in this academy. Maybe hunting. And I know that if we wait for the faculty to handle it through proper channels, more people are going to vanish."
Ayesha nibbled her lower lip, a tell that meant she was weighing consequences against imperatives. "What do you need from me?"
"Tether," he said simply. "I can maintain the scrying effect, but I need someone to anchor my consciousness to my body. Your control is fine enough to hold that connection without interfering with the technique itself."
"That's not just forbidden, that's phenomenally dangerous. If something severs the connection while you're dispersed—"
"I know," he repeated, meeting her eyes. "I wouldn't ask if I saw another option. But I trust you, Ayesha. I trust your control more than I trust my own."
Color rose in her caramel-toned cheeks, visible even in the low light. She looked away first, something that happened rarely enough that Niko felt the moment's significance even through his focus on the task at hand. "You're an idiot," she said quietly. "A noble one, but still an idiot. Okay. Walk me through it."
He explained the theory as quickly as he could, sketching the flow of spirit energy with quick gestures. To her credit, Ayesha grasped the principle immediately, already adapting it in real-time to account for the unique properties of his spirit pool. It was one of the things that made them such effective partners: where his strength lay in raw capacity and analytical frameworks, hers manifested in intuitive understanding and precision application.
"I'll need to establish the connection before you disperse," she said, already extending her hands toward him, palms up. "Otherwise I'll be trying to grab smoke. This is going to feel invasive."
"I trust you," he said again, placing his hands in hers.
The moment their skin made contact, he felt the whisper-light touch of her spirit energy interfacing with his own. It was profoundly intimate, this level of connection, like allowing someone to read your thoughts except deeper, more fundamental. He could sense her presence within his own energy field, delicate and precise, finding the optimal anchor points without disrupting his own flow.
"Okay," Ayesha breathed, her voice tight with concentration. "I've got you. Don't make me regret this."
Niko smiled despite the tension, then closed his eyes and began to disperse.
The sensation defied easy description. It was like exhaling and having your breath contain your consciousness, spreading outward in an ever-expanding cloud. The study alcove fell away, replaced by a peculiar dual awareness: he could still feel Ayesha's hands holding his, could still sense his body sitting on the bench, but simultaneously he was expanding through the academy's hallways, a ghost made of observation.
The technique granted no visual clarity, only impressions: concentrations of spirit energy that indicated living beings, the subtle hum of the academy's wards, the baseline thrum of reality itself. He pushed his awareness toward the training hall where Marcus had vanished, searching for any residual signature.
There. A cold spot in the ambient energy, like a wound in the fabric of the world. Even in his dispersed state, Niko recoiled from it instinctively. The wrongness he'd felt earlier was magnified tenfold through the lens of scrying, a discordant note that set every particle of his consciousness jangling.
But there was more. As he expanded his awareness further, he detected similar cold spots scattered throughout the academy. One in the library's restricted section. Another in the dormitory's sub-basement. A third in the administrative wing, which made his non-corporeal blood run cold because that meant faculty were affected too.
And they were growing. Not in size but in intensity, as if whatever created them was feeding, strengthening, preparing for something.
Then his dispersed consciousness touched something that noticed him back.
The sensation was akin to swimming in dark water and feeling something vast brush against you from below. An intelligence, ancient and hungry and utterly alien, turned a fraction of its attention toward his presence. Niko felt himself being perceived, examined, catalogued as prey.
A voice that was not a voice, that existed below language in some substrate of pure meaning, reverberated through his dispersed consciousness:
*BRIGHT THING. POTENTIAL MADE MANIFEST. YOU WILL SUSTAIN ME WELL.*
"Niko!" Ayesha's voice cut through the darkness, sharp with alarm. He felt her pull on the tether connecting him to his body, reeling him back with desperate strength. "Come back, now!"
He collapsed back into himself with a gasp that was half-scream, every nerve ending ablaze with phantom sensation. His eyes snapped open to find Ayesha's face inches from his own, her grey eyes wide with fear that transformed to relief as she registered his return.
"Something saw you," she said urgently. "I felt it through the connection. What was that?"
Niko's hands were shaking. He forced them still through sheer will, his analytical mind already cataloguing what he'd experienced despite the primal terror still coursing through him. "Intelligence," he managed. "Behind the disappearances. Not mindless. Hunting deliberately."
"Did it follow you back? Can it find us?"
"I don't know." The admission cost him, but it was the truth. "But I found something else. There are more cold spots, more places where reality is wounded. At least three more within the academy grounds. This isn't a single incident, Ayesha. It's a coordinated attack."
She absorbed this information with visible effort, her natural optimism warring with the gravity of what he was describing. Then her expression hardened into determination that he'd seen before, usually right before she did something spectacularly reckless. "Then we need to warn someone. Properly, through channels. This is beyond us."
"Is it?" The question emerged before Niko could fully consider it. "The faculty are following protocols designed for standard supernatural threats. But that thing I touched, that intelligence, it's not standard. It's eldritch. The normal rules might not apply."
"So what are you suggesting?" But he could see in her eyes that she already knew, that she was already running the same calculations he was.
"We investigate," he said quietly. "Carefully. We find out what this thing wants, what it's planning. And we find Marcus before it's too late."
Ayesha was silent for a long moment. In the distance, bells began to chime the evening hour, and somewhere in the academy, another student might be vanishing into shadow. Finally, she squeezed his hands once more before releasing them.
"Okay," she said. "But we do this smart. No more scrying without backup plans. No more touching ancient intelligences with our spirits. We research, we plan, and we watch each other's backs. Deal?"
"Deal."
They sat together in the alcove as the bells faded, two students who'd just crossed an invisible line from which there would be no returning. The academy's lockdown continued around them, but both knew that no amount of wards or protocols would keep them from pursuing this thread.
Somewhere in the darkness, something ancient and hungry continued to feed.
And Niko and Ayesha had just made themselves its enemies.