The second room was somebody else's nightmare.
The change was almost polite. One step we were in the too-clean corridor; the next, the space opened up around us, and the Domain said: try this one.
It looked like a classroom.
Rows of desks stretched out in front of us, each with a single chair tucked in neat as teeth. A blackboard covered the far wall, its surface smeared with ghost-writing that wouldn't decide what language it wanted to be.
Everything was wrong by degrees.
The desks were a little too narrow, the chairs a little too tall. The proportions made you feel like a kid even if you weren't. The walls had that same smooth stone texture as the courtyard, painted over with flaking off-white that never quite flaked.
And at the front of the room, hanging where a clock should have been, there was a heart.
Not a cartoon heart. Not a realistic one either. Something in between: a big, round shape with numbers painted on its surface, and thick hands like needles.
It ticked.
Each beat echoed in my ribs a half-second slow, like the sound had to remember how to arrive.
I didn't have to look at the instructor to know this was hers.
She'd told us about the school. About the clock that grew and started beating. The walls trying to become bones.
The Domain had liked that story enough to build a set.
The air smelled of chalk and cold metal and something faintly, unpleasantly organic.
Behind me, someone whispered, "Nope," under their breath.
The door we'd come through sealed itself with a soft scrape. No visible seam remained.
The heart-clock ticked again. The hands jerked forward one second—then two—then back one, as if it was arguing with itself about how time worked.
"Stay back from the desks," the instructor said quietly. "Until we know what they want to be."
Her shoulders had gone tight the moment we stepped in. Now I saw her force them loose, one by one.
I realized I still didn't know her name.
"Uh… Instructor?" one cadet asked, voice thin. "You, um… you've been here before?"
"Not here," she said. "Domains don't repeat exactly. But they like themes. They pull from memories, rumors, whatever leaks into them when they open."
She took a slow breath.
"My name is Captain Lysa Dorn," she added, loud enough to carry. "Surveyor Corps, Fifth Division. And I don't take notes from haunted architecture."
That got a small, badly timed laugh from somewhere in the back. It died quickly, but it was there.
The heart-clock thumped. The sound crawled along my bones.
As it beat, faint shapes flickered into existence around the desks—blurry outlines hunched in the chairs. Kids, maybe. Too small to be us. Heads down. Hands on invisible pencils.
They weren't solid. They were impressions. Smudges of weight in the air where people might have sat once.
One of them turned its head, slowly, toward us.
Its face was static. Not bloody, not skeletal, nothing dramatic. Just a gray blur, like someone had erased all the detail.
My fingers twitched.
The letters "PRIMARY ROLE: PROTAGONIST" from the corridor wall still burned behind my eyes. The Domain had picked me out and given me a label. Now we were in a room built from the captain's past.
A casting call, my brain supplied. Next scene.
The heart ticked again.
The blurry students sat up straighter in unison.
Chairs scraped, soundless.
"Don't sit," Captain Dorn said. "Don't touch the desks. Don't—"
The nearest chair to her slid back a few centimeters on its own.
It waited.
The room was offering her a role.
Teacher, I thought.
She smiled at it in a way I wouldn't want aimed at me.
"You had your turn with me already," she told the room. "You failed the first test."
The heart-clock skipped.
The blurred students twitched. Lines of fuzz where their eyes should be tilted our way.
The Domain did not seem to appreciate being told it had failed.
Light crept across the floor from the walls, tracing the edges of the room. It stopped at our feet, outlining each of us in a thin glow. Mine pulsed once, twice, like a cursor waiting for input.
I realized my hand had drifted toward my pockets, looking for the coin I'd given Arlen. Habit. Anchor.
I closed it into a fist instead.
"This thing keeps trying to assign us parts," I said quietly, more to myself than anyone else. "Hero. Mentor. Extras."
"You can ignore casting," Dorn said, still watching the room. "For a while. After that, you subvert it or it eats you."
The way she said it made it sound less like theory and more like biography.
The heart ticked again.
The numbers painted on its surface squirmed. They peeled away from the clock, wriggling free like black insects, then dripped down invisible strings toward the desks.
Where they hit, they stuck. Little globs of changing symbols that merged into shapes on the scarred wood.
Words.
Tests.
I squinted.
The closest desk's writing tried to settle long enough for me to read it. My eyes burned trying to keep up.
Multiple-choice questions. Fragmented math problems. A sentence with a blank in the middle: "A good student always _________."
This place was building an exam.
"You have got to be kidding me," somebody muttered.
As if they'd been waiting for that cue, the blurred students in the front row all turned their heads toward us in eerie synchronization.
The Domain was very clear on what it wanted: sit down, take the test, play the part.
"You said subvert or get eaten," I said. "What's subverting, in this context?"
"Still thinking," Dorn said.
The heart beat faster.
Shadows pooled under the desks, deepening, thickening. The formless kids watched us, heads tilted, like they were waiting to see who broke character first.
My skin crawled.
The ring of light around my feet brightened a fraction. The Domain's focus pressed on me like a thumb.
Protagonist, it whispered without words. Solve it.
I could feel it pushing for something. The kind of neat, clean solution a narrative liked. We sit, we pass the test, we're allowed to leave. Or we fail and get punished in some inventive way.
My Law—or whatever had decided I had one—sat under my skin, restless.
Backpack trip. If-it-reaches-me, she-kills-it. Cues and outcomes.
I could give it a line. I just had no idea how the room would choose to interpret it.
Another tick. Another murmur of movement. The shadows under the desks climbed a little up chair legs.
"Captain," someone whispered. "What happens if we just… don't play?"
"Domains don't like wasted scenes," Dorn said. "They'll escalate until they get what they want or break trying."
She stepped forward.
Not toward the offered chair. Past it, to the edge of the first row.
The blurred student closest to her twitched, like it had been expecting her to sit and now suddenly didn't know where to put that expectation.
"This is what you're trying," she said to the room. "Teacher. Lesson. Neatly packaged trauma."
Her voice stayed steady. Only the tightness in her jaw betrayed anything else.
"You want a line, Domain? You can have this one."
She raised the shard of podium, not as a weapon this time but like a pointer, and fixed her eyes on the heart.
"I am Captain Lysa Dorn," she said. "I don't repeat classes. And no one in my squad dies in a story I didn't sign off on."
The heart-clock missed a beat.
Silence crashed in where the tick should have been.
Then it slammed twice as loud, hard enough that dust shook down from the ceiling.
The blurred students jerked. Their outlines stretched, then snapped back. The writing on the desks warped into jagged scribbles and bled off the edges, dripping onto the floor and vanishing.
The Domain had heard her.
Whether it liked the line was another question.
Light flared around my feet.
It climbed, faster this time, wrapping around my legs like threads. Not outlining this time. Spinning.
The classroom blurred at the edges. For a second, everything tilted—not physically, but conceptually. I felt the room's attention shift hard onto me.
Primary role.
"Jace?" Arlen's voice came from somewhere behind me, thin and small. "You're glowing again, which I'm pretty sure is not healthy."
I swallowed.
The Law inside me—or the part of the Domain I'd accidentally shaken hands with—wasn't just listening now. It was expectant.
The room wanted a move.
If I did nothing, it would keep escalating. The shadows would climb higher. The heart would beat faster. Eventually, something here would stop pretending to be a test and start being teeth.
If I gave it a straight line, I'd be playing exactly into the part it had written.
So… twist.
I took a breath. My lungs still felt too small for the air available.
Okay. Fine. You want a story?
If this room insists on casting me, then it has to follow my pacing. Nobody gets hurt until I say the scene is over.
The thought formed tidier than any panic should have allowed. It slid into place with a click.
The glow around me surged, then snapped outward.
A faint wave rolled across the room. The blurred students shivered. The shadows under their desks… paused. Still there, still hungry, but suddenly waiting.
The heart-clock ticked. Once. The sound was sharp but not faster.
The Domain didn't stop, but it… held.
Every breath in the room synchronized for one hilarious, horrifying beat.
Then the pain came.
Not a spike this time. A deep, dragging pull, like someone had hooked into the back of my mind and scraped.
I grabbed the nearest desk with both hands to stay upright. The wood under my palms felt too smooth, like it had never been touched before.
Memories flickered.
My uncle's face the day the conscription letter arrived, mouth a flat line.
Gone? No. Still there.
The train. The flicker-Rift in the tunnel.
Still there.
The smell of our apartment the first day we moved in—fresh paint, cleaning fluid, the way he'd joked about it being "fancy chemical air."
That last one slipped.
I tried to hold on. My grip closed around nothing. The scent just… vanished, leaving an outline where it had been.
The Domain took its fee and went quiet.
The shadows froze where they were, halfway up chair legs. The blurred students stayed hunched, watching. Waiting.
Breathing hard, I straightened.
Dorn's eyes locked onto me. "What did you do?"
"Bought us time," I said. My voice shook, but the words came out. "Told it nobody gets hurt until the scene's over."
"That's—" she began.
"Stupid?" I offered.
"Expensive," she said. "But useful. How long does your 'scene' last?"
"No idea," I said. "This is my first script conference."
Her mouth twitched, like she was trying not to approve of the joke on principle.
"All right," she said. "Then we move before your contract runs out. Everyone pick a partner. Stay in pairs. If the room tries to split you, you resist."
She took a step between the rows of desks.
Nothing lunged, bit, or tried to rearrange her organs. The blurred students nearest her turned their gray faces, tracking her, but stayed seated.
That somehow felt worse.
I pushed away from the desk, legs unsteady, and reached back for Arlen's sleeve.
"You good to limp?" I asked.
"No," he said. "But I'll do it anyway."
"Perfect. That's the energy we need."
We moved into the forest of desks.
Walking between them felt like walking through a crowd of ghosts that might decide to notice you at any moment. Every empty chair felt like a dare. Every pencil on an abandoned tabletop looked like it was waiting to be picked up.
Somebody brushed a desk by accident. The blurred student sitting there shivered, hands twitching toward where their pencil should have been.
"Don't touch anything," Dorn reminded us, without looking back. "If it's being nice enough not to bite, you don't give it reason to start."
"What are we even looking for?" someone whispered.
"Exit. Trigger. Pattern. Anything that looks like a way out that isn't 'die here'," she said.
The blackboard loomed ahead of us.
Up close, the ghost-writing on it resolved into layers: equations, sentences, names. All half-erased, half-written over each other.
BURIED QUALMS, one line read, before dissolving.
ANOMALY REPORT – CLASSROOM INCIDENT—
Gone.
BEOL—
The last word burned itself a little clearer before the rest of it slid away.
"Beol… what?" I said quietly.
The chalk lines swam when I tried to focus. The board didn't want to be read. The Domain was keeping its own notes.
At the very bottom, a single phrase stayed legible, written in smaller, sharper letters.
THE BELL RINGS WHEN EVERYONE IS SEATED.
My skin went cold.
I pointed. "Captain."
She looked. Her face didn't change, but the knuckles on her weapon tightened.
"Of course," she said. "Of course it wants us in the chairs."
"If we don't sit, we don't pass," someone said, voice thin. "If we do sit, we die creatively."
"That's the test," Dorn said. "Finding the option that isn't printed."
The heart-clock ticked above us, steady for now.
The Law under my skin twisted, restless. The word protagonist pulsed at the back of my skull like an accusation.
The Domain had an expectation: protagonist solves the room. Teacher guides. Extras panic.
But things had already gone off-script. I'd told it to follow my pacing. Dorn had refused its seat. It was listening more than it wanted to.
"Okay," I said, slowly. "What if we cheat?"
It came out louder than I meant. A few heads turned.
"Ren," Dorn said. "If you finish that sentence with 'we blow the room up,' I'm assigning you to stable-cleaning duty for the rest of your short life."
"I'm still recovering from realizing we have stables," I said. "I was going to say: what if we make it think we're seated without… actually being?"
She frowned. "Explain."
"The rule on the board doesn't say 'when twenty cadets sit and fill out their papers,'" I said. "It just says 'when everyone is seated'."
I gestured at the blurred students.
"They're already in chairs," I said. "What if 'everyone' means them, not us?"
Silence stretched for a beat.
"That's… something," Dorn said.
A flicker of interest went through the Domain. I felt it, like a weight shifting.
"Or," I added quickly, "both. Maybe it wants all of us sitting. But it's vague. Vague rules are… exploitable."
"You think you can rewrite its interpretation," she said. Not quite a question.
"I've already made it trip itself and delay its own murder attempt," I said. "Might as well see how far the warranty goes."
She considered that, eyes on the heart.
"Do it," she said finally. "But be ready to tell it what 'bell rings' means too."
Great. Now I was on sound design.
I closed my eyes for a second.
There was a pattern to how this worked. Too neat to be chance.
A condition, shaped like a story beat. An "if." Then an outcome. And after, the Domain took its cut.
Which meant I had to be specific enough that it couldn't twist this into "bell rings and ceiling falls" or "bell rings and everyone's hearts stop out of thematic commitment."
"All right," I whispered. "One more."
I pictured the blurred students. The empty chairs. The chalk words.
If this room counts its own ghosts as students, then the bell rings when they're all sitting at their desks and we're all still breathing. And the ringing bell means the door out opens. Only that. Nothing else.
That was as tight as I could make it without law school.
The Law listened.
The ring of light around my feet flared, then shot out across the room in a thin wave. It skimmed under the desks, through the blurred students, up the walls.
The heart-clock shuddered.
Sound dropped out for a split-second, like the moment before a track drops.
Then the pain hit.
My knees buckled. I caught myself on the edge of a desk, fingers digging into fake wood.
Memories flickered again.
My first day at school. The smell of chalk. The way the teacher's voice had wobbled on my name.
Still there.
The night the Scar first appeared. Sirens, my uncle's arms around me, the way the sky had looked like it was tearing.
Still there.
My own face in the mirror this morning.
That one… blurred.
It didn't vanish. It just… rang wrong. For a half-second, my mind gave me both versions—the boy I'd been looking at, the girl I was now—and couldn't decide which one was "before."
Then the old version receded, like a memory of a haircut.
I sucked in a breath through my teeth.
The Domain had just taken a piece of my certainty about which "me" was original.
"Jace?" Arlen said, closer than I'd realized. "You still with us?"
"Unfortunately," I said. My voice shook. "Room should… be updating."
As if on cue, the blurred students all sat up straighter.
One by one, they folded their hands on their desks. No papers. No pencils. Just the posture of kids who'd been told to behave.
The shadows under the desks trembled—and retreated. Inch by inch, they slid back down chair legs and pooled harmlessly on the floor.
The heart-clock's hands spun.
They whirled around the face twice, then snapped to a position.
A sound rang through the room.
Not the old mechanical bell I'd half-expected. Not some eldritch chime. Just a clear, simple note, like someone striking real crystal once.
The blackboard wiped itself.
The chalk lines dissolved, dripping down the surface and vanishing. In their place, in big, blocky letters, one sentence formed:
CLASS DISMISSED.
The wall opposite the board cracked.
Light leaked through the break. Not Domain-white—real light. Warm. The kind that came from outside, or close enough to fool you.
A rectangular outline appeared as the wall pulled back. A new doorway, already open.
The room had given us our exit.
No blood. No teeth. No one dead.
Yet.
The Law under my skin subsided, satisfied for now. The ring around my feet dimmed to nothing.
The cost sat behind my eyes like a bruise.
Dorn let out a breath I hadn't realized she'd been holding.
"Not bad, Ren," she said quietly. "For a first day."
Coming from her, it might as well have been a medal.
The blurred students stayed where they were, still as photographs.
"Don't look at them too long," she warned. "Some Domains get proud of their props."
We moved for the door.
The class watched us go, empty faces tilted just enough to track our movement. The heart-clock ticked, quieter now.
At the threshold, I glanced back once.
The classroom looked almost normal from here. Rows of desks. Big clock. Silent kids.
If I hadn't felt every second of it trying to pull us into chairs, I might have believed it.
The new corridor beyond the door smelled dusty and faintly of outside air. My head throbbed, my body felt like someone had rearranged it in a hurry, and the word protagonist still pulsed at the back of my mind like a low-grade threat.
Captain Lysa Dorn stepped through first, weapon resting easy on her shoulder.
"As of this moment," she said over her shoulder, just loud enough for us to hear, "the official story is: we walked through a basic Domain, solved two rooms, and made it out alive."
"That's it?" someone asked.
"That's the version you tell anyone who asks," she said. "If the Concord wants a different draft, they can talk to me. Until then, you let them assume I'm the only monster you met."
It was ridiculous and terrifying how reassuring that sounded.
We followed her into the next stretch of the Domain, and behind us, the classroom door shut with a soft, final click—like a book closing at the end of a chapter