A collective, horrified murmur swept through the assembled students. The dripping, oily runes swelled and thickened, then snapped back into the spiderwebbed core Mavris still gripped. The vibration intensified against her knuckles, a jagged thrum that threatened to crack bone. Then, the core didn't just vibrate; it *grew*. A swirling pool of lightless shadow welled from the obsidian sphere, spreading across the flagstones. It rose in absolute silence, swallowing the gaslight, the pale moss along the walls, and the fading blue sparks around Nymar’s boots. A chill that had nothing to do with the night air spread, sucking the warmth from lungs, leaving a raw, empty ache. “Quarantine Protocol! Secure the perimeter!” Professor Aeldric’s voice, usually a calm rumble, cracked with genuine alarm. Bells, not the usual chime marking lecture hours, clattered in uneven, harsh strokes from the clock towers. Heavy iron shutters, usually only lowered during the deepest Mires-storms, began to descend over every arched window, sealing the sprawling High Conservatory into a suffocating, gas-lit box. The dark breach churned with blind hunger, scouring the mason-work clean. Intricate ward-grooves chiseled into the flags vanished beneath it, not shattered, but erased. Panic broke loose; boots scrambled over stone, bodies surging toward the narrow arch of the carriage gates. Nymar shoved off from the masonry, eyes fixed on the encroaching void. “Mavris, the core! Drop it!” he barked, his voice dry. He lurched forward, but a knot of fleeing novices collided with his shoulder, knocking him back. A shrill cry sheared through the clamor. Javya Khol folded against the paving, limbs seized in rigid spasms. Her skin took on the color of wet lime, staring past the rooftops. Wisps of black vapor, thin as soot, coiled taut against her sternum, wrenching inward. She clawed at the air, her scream morphing into a guttural moan of agony. “[Despair Harvest: Incomplete. Soul Extraction: Commencing.]” The black text flared, not on any mirror, but directly above Javya’s thrashing form, visible to anyone who dared look. The vaporous cords jerked taut, bowing her spine off the flags as a choked rasp tore from her throat. “No! Stop it! It’s her fault! All her fault!” Javya shrieked, her voice raw, glaring toward Mavris with sudden venom. “She never broke! She never cried! I was the villainess, the *villainess*! You were supposed to be crushed, to give it despair! I transmigration–I… I just wanted a quiet life! You’re supposed to suffer!” The accusations spilled in a jagged torrent between wheezing breaths, accompanied by the wet sound of unseen fibers straining. The dark cords thickened, dragging her toward the widening rift. Mavris hardly took in the words; her eyes fixed entirely on the writhing filaments, matching the sketches of fungal blight she had studied in the sub-vault herbals. “Javya! You’re delirious!” Mavris cried, dropping the now-inert, light-devouring core. It landed with a soft *thud* on the stone, the black hole continuing to expand from it. Mavris slipped past a panicked student, shoving through the fleeing pack toward her relative. “It’s the Mires-parasite! It’s burrowed deeper—that explains the fever and the outbursts!” Nymar halted near the pillar, watching the black text drift above Javya’s head. He struggled to parse the wild babble of other worlds against Mavris’s stubborn diagnosis of marsh-fever, his hand half-raised before the sheer absurdity choked the words in his throat. “No, not a parasite! It’s the System! It’s taking me! You did this!” Javya wailed, her voice growing weaker, her eyes glazing over. She reached a trembling hand out to Mavris, not in supplication, but accusation. The dark threads pulled tauter, knotting around her ribs. Mavris knelt beside the thrashing girl, untying a leather pouch from her sash with steady fingers. From the oiled cloth she drew a broad, fleshy leaf that shed a mild violet luminescence—a cutting taken from the silver-veined vine on her wrist, tended through three seasons of fog. “Hold still, Javya! This will soothe the lining, I know it will!” She braced the back of Javya’s head against her forearm, batting away a wild slap, and brought the luminous leaf against the girl’s teeth. “Swallow this, Javya! Let the sap work!” Javya, weakened and disoriented by the soul extraction, weakly struggled. “No! Get away! It’s a trick!” But Mavris, with the unyielding stubbornness of someone convinced they were saving a friend from a terrible sickness, pressed the glowing leaf against her cousin’s mouth. With a gentle but firm push, Mavris forced Javya’s jaw open, then quickly pushed the glowing leaf inside. It melted on contact, a rush of sweet, earthy scent filling the air. Immediately, the soot-colored cords wrenched backward from Javya’s chest. A high, ringing pressure hummed in the air like singing metal. Javya drew a sharp breath, her limbs loosening as panic drifted into blank stupor. The soul extraction had halted. “[ERROR! ERROR! HOST SOUL INTEGRITY RESTORED. PROTOCOL ABORTED. CONSUMPTION INITIATED. ACADEMY HEART MERGE – IMMEDIATE!]” The black text flared one last, furious time above Javya. The dark sinkhole across the flags hitched with a violent jolt. With a sound like grinding teeth, it began to retract, shrinking rapidly, not back into the inert core, but towards the very foundations of the Conservatory. The ground beneath their feet trembled. The gas lanterns hissed and died, dropping the open yard into gloom lit only by the pale violet sheen of Mavris’s wrist-vine and the damp sap on Javya’s mouth. A new, deeper hum vibrated through the stone, radiating from the central clock tower. The black text, instead of disappearing, reformed, not in the air, but etched directly onto the face of the towering clock above them. [“ABANDONING HOST. FINAL PHASE: GAIA-GHAZA PROTOCOL. CLOCKWORK HEART ASSIMILATED. FOG-WEAVE DETONATION IMMINENT. CATASTROPHE IMMINENT. ONLY A PURE SOUL’S SACRIFICE CAN REVERSE THE CONSUMPTION. OFFER YOURSELF. OFFER YOURSELF!”] The words blazed, black fire against the clock face, before dissolving into a torrent of crackling energy that surged into the central clock tower, making the massive gears within shriek and groan. A sickening *CRACK* ripped through the silence, and then, slowly, majestically, the great central clock began to spin backwards. The tremors intensified, and from the towering clock tower, a sickly, yellow-green fog began to billow, not the familiar, filtered miasma of the city, but a denser, more caustic vapor, carrying the distinct, metallic tang of the Weeping Mires. It was raw, unfiltered, lethal. The air grew heavy, suffocating. The entire Conservatory was groaning, tearing itself apart from the inside, its clockwork heart now a ticking bomb that threatened to detonate the toxic fogs over the entire city of Ghavary.

The Quarantine Zone