AUTHOR NOTE
Pardon this girl for giving y'all another flashback! Please understand, I want y'all to know everything in detail. I'll be writing from the third-person POV for this one. I want y'all to enjoy this book as much as I enjoy writing it!
XOXO
FLASHBACK
One Year Ago: August
Third-Person POV
The humidity of August in Blackwood didn't just sit on the skin; it stifled the lungs. It was the height of summer, a season that usually promised a reprieve from the grueling academic cycle, but for the desperate, it was the season of the forge. This was the time when students—those whose grades were slipping or whose secrets were being unearthed—sought out the shortcut that everyone whispered about but few dared to name.
They sought the Blacksmith.
To the average student, the Blacksmith was a ghost. He was the architect of the "Archives Pass," a forged coin so perfect it could bypass the most intricate magical and physical wards of the school's restricted library. But as with all shortcuts in Blackwood, the path was paved with jagged glass.
The forge was tucked away in the deepest corner of the industrial district, a place where the soot from the chimneys turned the sky a permanent, bruised purple. Very few had seen the Blacksmith in person. He was a man of shadows, always shielded by a heavy leather apron and the blinding orange glow of his furnace. Instead, he employed an assistant—a wiry, nervous boy named Elian—who acted as the bridge between the criminal and the desperate.
The transition was always described as "smooth." You met Elian in the alley behind the clock tower, your price ready in a velvet pouch. The Blacksmith never asked for gold or silver; those were common things. He asked for prices. Sometimes it was a vial of the student's own blood. Sometimes it was a secret about a faculty member. Other times, it was a promise to be fulfilled at a later, darker date. The price was always commensurate with the desperation of the buyer.
But there was a fatal flaw in the Blacksmith's work. His coins were too perfect.
A genuine Archive coin, weathered by decades of use and the touch of many hands, carried a certain "wrongness"—a tarnish that spoke of age. The Blacksmith's coins were pristine. They gleamed with a predatory luster that the Ferryman—the ancient, hooded guardian of the Archive gates—could sense.
The unlucky ones were caught instantly. The Ferryman's skeletal hand would clamp down on a student's wrist, the coin burning white-hot in their palm as the alarm bells began to toll. The lucky ones? They got a year. Twelve months of free access, twelve months of feeling like they had cheated the system. But the "Lesson" always caught up to them.
The punishment for forgery in Blackwood was not a suspension or a lashing. It was a spectacle of anatomical horror.
A heavy iron spike, forged in the very fires of the school's own discipline chambers, was driven through the mouth, pinning the tongue to the jaw, and hammered down through the throat, the chest, and the abdomen until it exited between the legs. These human trophies were then hoisted onto the iron pickets of the Blackwood Gates.
When parents or visiting officials asked what crime could possibly warrant such a barbaric display, the administration had a canned response: "They murdered someone." It was a lie that served two purposes: it justified the cruelty to the public, and it warned the students that once you were caught, your identity was gone. Within twenty-four hours, the student's records—their birth certificate, their grades, their very name—were scrubbed from the school's history as if they had never existed. It was a ruthless price for a coin.
As August reached its peak, the atmosphere at the forge changed. Usually, the alleyways were crowded with hooded figures waiting for their turn to bargain. But on the first Monday of the month, the crowd gathered for a different reason.
The assistant, Elian, was no longer delivering coins. He was the delivery.
His body had been arranged on the Blacksmith's doorstep with the precision of a sick artist. His head had been severed and placed between his feet, his eyes wide in a permanent stare of realization. His hands—the hands that had handled the forged coins—had been chopped off at the wrists and nailed to the doorframe.
A few students, those whose hearts had already been hardened by the school's cruelty, laughed. They whispered that it was a staged prank, a clever way for the Blacksmith to scare off the "weak" customers. But others, the ones who had seen the shadows moving in the hallways at night, stopped going to the forge. They knew the truth. This wasn't a prank. This was a warning from The Circle—the elite, shadowy cabal that truly ran Blackwood behind the scenes.
The Blacksmith, however, did not take the hint. Grief-stricken and terrified, he locked himself inside, stoking his fires even hotter, thinking that his iron doors and his secrets would protect him.
He was wrong.
On September 10th, the end came. The Circle did not arrive with a flourish or a grand announcement. They came like a sudden drop in temperature, a wind that knocked at the door not with a fist, but with a heavy, wet thud.
When the Blacksmith finally cracked the door, he found a burlap sack. Inside was the head of his wife, her hair matted with the same soot that covered his forge. Before he could even scream, they were on him.
The members of the Circle didn't use weapons; they used their environment. They dragged the Blacksmith toward his own anvil. As he trashed and screamed, his cries echoing off the stone walls, they gourged out his eyes with a red-hot poker from his own fire. They wanted him to live, but they wanted him to live in a world where he could never see the glint of a coin again.
"A dead man tells no tales," the leader of the group whispered, his voice like dry parchment. "But a broken man serves as a monument."
They left him there, bleeding and sightless amidst the ruins of his life. They were certain he would die. No one survived the Circle's wrath once they decided a lesson needed to be taught.
Hours later, as the fire in the forge began to die down into gray ash, the heavy boots of the Circle were replaced by the light, rhythmic clicking of heels on the bloody floorboards.
A lady walked in. She didn't flinch at the smell of burnt copper and raw meat. She stood over the Blacksmith, who was curled into a fetal ball, sobbing silently as the blood crusted over his empty sockets.
She spoke only one sentence, her voice a calm melody in the chamber of horrors:
"Do you want to live?"
The Blacksmith didn't hesitate. He couldn't see her, but he felt the aura of power radiating from her—a different kind of power than the Circle's. This was the power of a savior who demanded a debt. He nodded frantically, his forehead hitting the cold, bloody stone. He would do anything to stop the pain, anything to keep breathing.
"Then you are mine," she said.
The deal was struck in the dark. She saved his life, using magic that stitched his wounds but left the scars as a reminder. In return, the forge would never again produce a coin. The fires would stay cold. Instead, the Blacksmith would spend the rest of his days in the shadows, caring for the "trash" of Blackwood—the orphans and the broken things that the school discarded.
Since that night, the doors of the blacksmith shop have remained shut.
To the foolish students who arrived in later years, the Blacksmith was just a coward who had eloped with his riches after ripping off the student body. They complained about the "good old days" when you could buy your way into the Archives.
But the wise students—the ones who look closely at the gates of the school and see the faint, scrubbed stains of old blood—know better. They know that the forge is silent for a reason.
The Blacksmith hadn't just closed his shop. He had finally, painfully, learned his lesson.