Chapter 10
The remnants of night had not yet completely left the skies above Blackwood Academy when Iris pulled Clara away from the dormitory hallway toward a hidden corner on the second floor of the main library. Thick dust danced lazily beneath the moonlight filtering through the cracked stained-glass windows. Both their breaths came fast, sending thin wisps of vapor into air that had suddenly grown far colder than usual.
Clara was trembling violently, her entire body hunched beneath her thick wool coat. Her fingers squeezed Iris's arm so hard—clutching it until her nails nearly pierced the uniform fabric, leaving a stinging pain that went unnoticed amid the panic overtaking her.
"You have to stop digging, Iris," Clara hissed desperately, silent tears spilling down her pale cheeks. "You have no idea what you're uncovering. This place isn't merely old; it's a graveyard for the stubborn."
Iris slowly pried Clara's grip away, but her gaze remained sharp and blazing. She unrolled the old archival paper she'd just found on the reading table—a missing-person report from the previous year.
"I can't stop, Clara," Iris replied, her voice low but trembling with intensity. "Look at this document. The student who disappeared last year... her name was Sarah. And look at her physical description: dark hair, the same height, even an almost identical face shape to mine. This isn't a coincidence."
Clara's eyes widened in horror as she looked at the sheet. She swallowed with difficulty, her throat constricted by overwhelming fear.
"Of course it isn't a coincidence, you idiot!" Clara whispered hysterically, her broken voice quivering. "Sarah wasn't the first. All of them—girls with physical features similar to yours—were taken one by one. They were made into sacrifices for Mr. Zephyr's loneliness, feeding his immortality in this cursed place. And now... it's your turn. You were chosen to fill the empty bed in his underground room!"
"A sacrifice?" Iris hissed, feeling her blood suddenly boil amid the horror and the strange wave of desire churning in her chest at the memory of that man's touch the night before. "He isn't making me into a sacrifice, Clara. He... he wants me in a different way."
"You've gone mad!" Clara cried, clutching her own head. "You've been bewitched by his gaze!"
Before Iris could respond to her friend's argument, the library's silence was suddenly torn apart by a strange sound. The slow creak of old wood shifting came from the highest row of bookshelves rising at the end of the darkest aisle.
Crash!
In the middle of their tense conversation, an old diary bound in pitch-black leather fell from the library's highest shelf by itself, landing squarely on the marble floor at Iris's feet. The impact forced it open, revealing pages yellowed with age.
Iris froze, staring at the book with bated breath. Clara backed away in fear, refusing to come closer.
With trembling hands, Iris knelt and turned through the pages of Sarah's diary—the student who had disappeared the previous year. The handwriting looked chaotic, reflecting the desperation of a girl slowly losing her sanity in the maestro's grip.
But when Iris turned to the very last page, all the blood in her body seemed to stop flowing.
On that final page was a meticulously detailed charcoal sketch of a face—the handsome, cold, deadly face of Mr. Zephyr. Beneath the sketch, in bloody handwriting beginning to dry brown, was a line:
‘He is not a teacher. He is not a ghost. He is my husband in the darkness, and I never wanted to be saved from him.’
Iris gasped and dropped the book onto the floor as if it had burned her palm. "Her husband..." Iris whispered shakily. "So... Sarah surrendered herself?"
Before Clara could answer or mourn the horrifying discovery, the temperature inside the library plummeted in a single second. The heavy scents of old sandalwood and cold tobacco suddenly enveloped the room, so strong they constricted Iris's chest.
Screeech...
A tall shadow in a black suit swept past behind the library's bookshelves, moving soundlessly with a speed no ordinary human could possibly possess.
Clara let out a muffled scream, covering her face with both hands.
Iris rose to her feet, breathing hard, her wild eyes fixed on the darkness at the end of the bookshelves. No figure could be seen, but the remnants of the maestro's cold breath and dense scent of opium still lingered in the air, whispering of an absolute possession she would never be able to escape again.