In a world where supernatural beings exist, Zodia Academy is where you'll find twelve unique teens. Locked behind the soaring four walls of Zodia, a place they train, live and call home, only to visit reality in times of jeopardy. They are Earth's H...
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- CHAPTER ELEVEN -
FIRST BLOOD
⌿⍀
She wakes to silence. Not peace, not calm, not the soft quiet of sleep easing into morning. No, this silence is heavy. Stale. Medical. It clings to her skin like sweat.
Violet blinks, and the world blinks with her. White ceiling. Too white. A strip of runes pulsing gold along the arch of light above her. A quiet humming, magical, rhythmic and clinical. There's a window, closed. A curtain, drawn. A pulse monitor, beeping, slowly.
Her breath catches. Catches again. Then something aches. Not a limb. Not a bruise. Something beneath her body. A weight, a throb, a hollow ringing from bone to skin.
Her head rolls, sluggish. Every joint protests. Her fingers twitch. Her eyes sting. And then she remembers. The boulders. The air. Levi's sound slicing toward her. The snap. The fall. The—
She gasps. The room tilts. Her breath splinters. She tries to sit up, instinct first, warrior reflex, Virgo pride, always up, always strong. Yet her body doesn't move. She frowns and breath shakes and she tries again.
Nothing.
Her arms drag upward like they're stitched to concrete. Her hips don't twitch. Her thighs don't respond. Her legs—her legs. She can't feel them. Not numbness. Not pain. Just... absence. As if they were never there to begin with.
"W-What..." her voice cracks, unfamiliar, choked. "What the hell—"
Panic strikes like a match. The slow, suffocating kind. Her chest hitches. Her body lurches as much as it can. She claws at the sheets, at the bandages wrapped across her waist, her thigh, her abdomen...too many. Everything hurts and nothing responds.
"I can't—" She rasps, louder now, eyes wide, wild. "I can't feel my legs—!"
The machines scream in tandem. The curtains rip open and Megan storms in, the medical team behind her like a unit of soldiers trained in speed. Runes light up across the ceiling. One nurse chants in Latin. Another levitates a vial of something gold and glowing.
Violet thrashes or tries to. Her hands reach and slip. Her nails claw at the railings. She sobs without meaning to. Tears run down her temple and into her hair.
"I can't feel—I can't feel them—!" She screams. "What did he do to me? What did he do—"
"Violet," Megan's voice slices through the room, sharp but anchored. "You're okay. You're alive. You're in recovery. Your body is repairing."
"I CAN'T MOVE!"
The lights flicker. One of the healing crystals overcharges and bursts. A rune shorts out in a fizz of smoke.
