Chapter 117: The Inherited Spirit (4)
Lucien wasn’t sure when exactly the dream ended and reality began.
One moment, he was adrift in the half-light of sleep, floating through strange, senseless dreams, of tides rising in glass halls, of whispering voices in ink-black corridors, and the next, he was staring blankly at the ceiling of his room.
Except… something was wrong.
The air felt heavy.
Too heavy.
The kind of heaviness that pressed against his chest and slowed his thoughts, turning each second into a thick, viscous stretch of time.
His eyes were open, but he couldn’t move.
He tried to blink.
Nothing.
His eyelids refused him.
Panic flared.
He tried to lift his arm to scratch his nose, to brush the hair sticking to his forehead but his body was stone.
The only thing he could move was his breath, shallow and ragged, spilling from his throat in tiny bursts of air that barely stirred the silence.
Outside, the rain still whispered against the window, soft but constant.
The storm had deepened.
Clouds, black, swollen, endless swallowed what little light remained, and the room was bathed in the kind of gray darkness that made the air itself seem rotten.
Lucien’s pulse throbbed painfully in his neck.
‘What’s happening?’
He tried to scream.
Not even a sound.
His throat constricted, his jaw clenched tight.
The only thing that escaped was a strangled, inaudible rasp.
The air had grown cold.
The warmth from the earlier seemed to drain from the room, replaced by a chill that bit into his skin like invisible frost.
He tried to pull the blanket up, desperate for even a scrap of warmth, but his arms wouldn’t move.
His fingers refused him, useless and dead at his sides.
Every heartbeat pounded against his ribs like the strike of a drum.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Each one faster than the last.
The walls seemed to close in around him, and a strange pressure began to build in his ears, a deep humming like the sound of distant thunder echoing inside his skull.
His breath hitched.
The blanket felt suffocating, even though it hadn’t moved.
His chest rose and fell in shallow, stuttering motions.
‘Move.’
‘Please, move.’
Nothing.
For a moment, he thought he could hear something beneath the sound of the rain.
A faint, dragging noise, like fabric brushing against the wooden floor.
Then, silence.
It lasted only a second, but in that second, the world held its breath.
Lucien could feel it.
The presence.
Something was standing near him.
He couldn’t see it clearly, just the edge of it, hovering in the corner of his vision.
A faint distortion in the air beside his bed, so subtle it could’ve been a trick of his tired eyes.
But it wasn’t.
He could feel it watching him.
Every nerve in his body screamed to turn his head, but he couldn’t.
His vision stayed fixed ahead, his eyes dry and unblinking.
The figure shifted, slowly and soundlessly, the edges of its shape slid further into his line of sight.
A shadow.
No, something like a shadow.
It had the outline of a girl, frail and small, her proportions just barely human.
But its surface was wrong, its form shimmered and warped, as though he were staring at smoke trapped inside glass.
The edges of her body rippled like black water, distorting the air around her in slow, nauseating waves.
Lucien’s heart hammered faster.
The figure stood close, too close.
He could almost see the top of her head near the corner of his vision, like a silhouette framed by dying light.
Then, she moved.
No sound.
No footstep.
Just a gliding motion, smooth and impossible.
The air trembled faintly in her wake.
She drifted toward the window, her form briefly outlined by a flicker of lightning.
For a heartbeat, Lucien saw her clearly, her limbs were thin, her posture slouched, and her head hung low as though too heavy for her neck.
And then the light was gone.
In the darkness, she sat.
Sat, like a living person would, on the chair by his desk.
Her shape bent, one arm raised slightly as though resting her face in her palm.
The image was almost absurdly mundane, a tired girl resting her chin, gazing out the window, except that she wasn’t there.
She was wrong.
Every second her body flickered, fading and reforming like a candle flame caught in the wind.
Lucien tried to shut his eyes.
Tried to convince himself that if he couldn’t see her, she’d vanish.
His eyes wouldn’t close.
His muscles didn’t obey.
The air had grown colder still.
His breath came out in pale plumes.
The storm outside moaned low and deep, its voice merging with the groan of the wooden beams above.
The shadow-girl rose from the chair.
She drifted again, closer to the door this time.
Lucien’s mind spun with panic, each thought overlapping, tangled, incoherent.
‘Please leave. Please just go.’
She paused by the door.
The darkness seemed to cling to her there, swallowing her outline until she was little more than an absence, a hole in the world’s shape.
Then, like smoke pulled by a draft, she phased through the wood.
The door creaked a second later.
That sound, mundane and real, was somehow worse than everything that had come before it.
The echo of the hinges slicing through the silence made his stomach twist.
It was as if reality itself had just confirmed what his eyes refused to believe.
Lucien’s gaze stayed locked on the door.
Every instinct screamed that it would open wider, that she would come back through it, that the handle would twist, slow and deliberate, revealing the same shape framed by lightning once more.
The shadows along the walls seemed to stretch.
The whisper of the storm outside grew louder, the rhythm of the rain breaking into chaotic bursts.
But the door stayed shut.
The cold began to ease.
His breath steadied.
His body still wouldn’t move, but the crushing pressure started to fade, slowly, painfully.
The edges of the room blurred, the ceiling swimming in and out of focus.
Lucien’s heartbeat softened, growing sluggish.
His thoughts dulled, their edges fraying into fog.
His body remained frozen, but his mind, exhausted and terrified, began to shut down.
His consciousness drifted, slipping between the flickers of light and shadow, until finally, mercifully, darkness took him.
And for a while, there was nothing but the storm outside.
The low rumble of thunder rolled through the walls, and the last echo of the door’s creak hung in the silence like a ghost of its own.
***
Lucien woke with a strangled gasp, lungs burning like he had been drowning.
For a second, he didn’t know where he was.
The shadows of the room bent and swayed in the flickering light that leaked through the window, gray dawn, washed-out and cold.
The memory of that thing lingered in his mind like the taste of iron on his tongue.
He sat up too fast, heart hammering in his chest.
The air still felt wrong, heavy.
Like something unseen still lingered in the corners of the room.
The suitcase on the floor rattled faintly, the trapped wooden figure scratching inside it, and the sound made Lucien’s entire body jolt.
That was it.
He couldn’t stay here another second.
He jumped out of bed, bare feet slapping the cold floor.
He didn’t bother with shoes, or even his coat.
The only thing that mattered was leaving.
Getting out.
Putting as much distance as possible between himself and that room.
He yanked the door open and sprinted into the hallway.
The corridors were nearly empty at this hour, a few sleepy students just waking up or trudging toward the bathrooms.
Lucien must have been a sight, disheveled hair, wild eyes, shirt half untucked, feet bare and pale against the stone.
His breathing came in fast, shallow gasps, echoing down the hall like the footsteps of a man being hunted.
“Need to- Need to tell someone-”
He muttered to himself, half talking, half panting.
His words tripped over one another, more animalistic noises than coherent sentences.
His mind was still trapped halfway between dream and panic.
By the time he reached the warden’s office, his heart was slamming so hard in his chest it hurt.
He didn’t bother knocking.
He kicked the door open.
“WARDEN!”
The door hit the wall with a deafening bang, startling the man inside so badly he spilled his tea all over the table.
The poor warden nearly choked on his biscuit as he scrambled back in his chair.
“G-GOOD HEAVENS, BOY!”
He wheezed, clutching his chest.
“Have you lost your bloody mind?!”
Lucien didn’t even seem to hear him.
He stumbled into the room like a cornered animal, eyes wide, breathing ragged.
His words came out in bursts:
“-room -dark -couldn’t move -there was -something there! It - t looked at me -walked through the door!”
The warden blinked.
Once.
Twice.
Then slowly set down his tea cup on the desk, now mostly empty and dripping onto his paperwork.
“…You what?”
Lucien started pacing, waving his arms frantically.
“It was right there! I couldn’t move- my body just- just stopped! And then there was this- thing- like smoke, or a person made of shadows- and it walked around my room! It sat in my chair, it looked at me- no, it didn’t- but I felt it, I swear-”
The warden watched him as one might watch a raccoon that had broken into their kitchen.
“Right,” the man said slowly, voice calm but edged with fatigue.
“You’re telling me… you saw a ghost.”
Lucien stopped pacing long enough to glare at him.
“YES!”
The warden rubbed his temples, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like ‘every bloody year it’s something different.’
He stood, adjusting his uniform coat, and gestured for Lucien to sit down.
“Fine. You stay here,” he said, voice clipped.
“I’ll go take a look at your… haunted… room.”
Lucien opened his mouth to protest, but the warden was already marching past him, muttering under his breath about ‘students cracking under pressure’ and ‘why did I ever take this job.’
Left alone in the office, Lucien sat on the edge of the chair, still shaking.
The ticking of the clock on the wall filled the silence.
Each second that passed made him more uneasy.
‘What if it was still there? What if the warden went in and-’
He stopped the thought before it could finish.
He didn’t want to imagine what might happen if the warden actually saw it.
Minutes passed.
Then ten.
Then twenty.
The door finally opened again, except the warden wasn’t alone.
Two nurses from the infirmary followed behind him, both wearing immaculate white coats and sympathetic smiles that somehow made Lucien’s skin crawl.
“Ah, there he is,” the warden said, in that painfully polite tone reserved for someone on the verge of snapping.
“Mr. Lucien, these fine ladies will help you get… settled. You’ve had quite the fright, I imagine.”
Lucien blinked.
“Wait, what-?”
The taller nurse stepped forward, her smile never faltering.
“Don’t worry, dear. Everything’s fine. You just need a little rest.”
Before he could react, both of them were at his sides, one taking his arm, the other guiding him toward the door.
Lucien twisted, trying to pull free.
“No- wait- what are you-! I’m not crazy! There was something there!”
He shouted, digging his heels into the floor.
The warden sighed, sipping what remained of his tea.
“Of course, of course. I’m sure the ghost will be thrilled to know it frightened you this much. Off you go now.”
“I’m telling you!”
Lucien yelled as the nurses dragged him toward the hall, his bare feet sliding helplessly on the polished floor.
“It walked through the door! It wasn’t a dream-!”
“Yes, dear, of course,” one of the nurses cooed as if speaking to a small child.
“Why don’t we get you something warm to drink, hmm? Maybe lie down for a bit?”
Lucien could only look back helplessly as the warden waved him off, mumbling something about filing a ‘ghost sighting report’ if he had the time, which he most certainly did not.
The nurses half-guided, half-carried him down the corridor, his protests echoing faintly behind them.
And as the warden finally shut his office door, he muttered to himself,
“Midterms haven’t even started and they’re already seeing ghosts.…”
Meanwhile, in the distance, thunder rumbled, low and deep, rolling across the academy’s spires.
Lucien’s terrified cries faded into the sound of rain as the storm outside drew closer.
