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 FOURTEEN -
THE NEXUS HOUR
⌿⍀
This isn't just a breather before Day 3 of Zodia Tournament. This is the fracture point. The breath before the scream. The heartbeat before the blade sinks in. Somewhere, above the ground, the Zodiacs sleep uneasily, or they don't. Some lie with eyes open to the ceiling, to guilt, to memories they wish they could rewrite. Others hunt, others study, others wait.
And beneath all of them, below the stone floor of the Academy, past its spell-bound foundations, beyond its twelve-pointed wards something ancient has opened its mouth.
And Violet walks willingly into its throat.
The orb had shattered open like a heartbeat under pressure, and now Violet limps down the stone staircase it left behind. Her boots echo too loudly. The stairs are black, carved from obsidian that drinks the last flash of light and leaves only the shape of her breath in the air.
She's trying not to pant. Trying not to limp too hard. But her spine clicks with each step, a pulse of heat winding down her lower back. Her Zodiac mark glows faintly on her inner wrist, a Virgo sigil, white-hot against her skin. It flickers like it's unsure it should still belong to her.
The descent has no end. The stairs spiral like they're orbiting something beneath her, like she's not going down, but around. Her eyes are sharp, feline and green, focused. Her bangs are slicked back, her latex mission uniform sticking to the soft bend of her arms and the bloodied line of her collarbone. Brown and white; the colours of earth, of order, of who she's supposed to be.
But her heart betrays her.
It's thudding too loudly in her chest. She's trained to be quiet, but it's no use now. She feels it in her neck. In her teeth. Her fingers tighten around the flashlight she packed, flicking it on but the beam barely slices through the dark. It shows nothing. Only more black, and her breath in silver strands.
She mutters under her breath, "of course."
Time stretches. The light from her watch glitches, jumps forward then back 1:17, 3:04, 12:08 again. The second hand jerks. Her stomach flips.
Then the stairwell ends and she steps into a forest but not Zodia's forest. This one is wrong.
The trees twist sideways, like they're growing from the sky downward. The ground curves slightly, like it's concave, like she's walking on the inside of a bowl. The leaves pulse with light, not green, but white. The bark is striped in something that looks like bone. There's no wind but the branches move anyway.
Violet tightens the strap on her mission bag. Her back aches. She feels the pull of something heavy in the air, earth-like, yes, familiar, but muted. Like trying to listen through a wall. She touches the ground. It's not stone. It's some substance pretending to be stone. She closes her eyes, breathing low, trying to connect.
