Something was wrong with Xavier.
Not obviously, and that was the irritating part.
If he had been acting completely insane, Thorn could have confronted him immediately and forced the issue. But instead, it was small things.
Tiny shifts that most people probably wouldn't have noticed.
Except Thorn, unfortunately, noticed everything about him.
The way he kept drifting off mid-conversation, like he was listening to something farther away than the room around him.
The way his eyes kept finding Marcellus across campus without meaning to.
The way he'd gone quieter over the last few days.
He wasn't cold, not even distant, exactly, but distracted in a way that made her shadows restless.
And the worst part about it?
Every time she tried to look at him directly, really look at him, the Resonance between them felt… uneven.
Like a skipped heartbeat, or static where there used to be clarity, and it was starting to piss her off.
By the third day, after hours of Xavier staring blankly into space, he barely said anything to her.
She marched straight across campus toward Xavier's dorm.
The hallway outside his room was quiet when she got there, the old oil lamps flickering faintly against the stone walls.
She knocked sharply and waited.
Finally, the door opened.
Xavier stood there in a black hoodie with charcoal coated the tips of his fingers.
"Hey," he said carefully, startled to see her.
Thorn narrowed her eyes immediately, arms crossed over her chest.
"What's going on with you?"
His brow furrowed slightly. "What do you mean?"
"You've been weird all day."
A faint breath of amusement escaped him. "I'm always weird."
"Not like this." Her voice lowered, a discernible concern etched into every syllable.
That made his almost-smile disappear.
The silence stretched just long enough to confirm her suspicion.
Thorn pushed past him with a groan, forcing herself into the room before he could stop her.
The dorm smelled faintly of graphite, coffee, and the lingering scents of oil paint and weed from Malrick's side of the room. Sketches covered nearly every available surface, some pinned to the walls, others scattered across his desk in loose piles.
Xavier carefully shut the door behind her.
"Thorn—"
"No," she cut in sharply, turning toward him. "Something happened after the courtyard."
His expression tightened almost imperceptibly.
"There's nothing—"
"That's bullshit, and you know it!"
The word hissed out immediately.
Her shadows curled sharply around her boots as she crossed her arms.
Xavier paused for a moment as he swallowed thickly. Trying to think of something to say, something that could help the situation.
"Reichenbach feels more wrong than normal, and I know you can feel it too," Thorn whispered, her gaze flickering over to the drawings pinned near his desk.
That got Xavier's attention, and almost at the same moment, the lights above them flickered once.
Neither of them acknowledged it.
But both noticed, both knew something about her, or her shadows affected the lights. That was one of the few things he remembered from the incident with Marcellus.
"The other students have been acting strange all week." Thorn continued, turning back towards Xavier sharply.
"One girl in my lit class with Pippa was crying outside the door because she got detention for missing class the day before."
"Why was she crying?"
"She said she had forgotten where the classroom was and didn't mean to skip class."
And underneath all of it, the Resonance had gotten louder.
Like the entire school was humming beneath their feet.
Xavier looked away first, which told Thorn everything.
Her eyes narrowed.
"You know something."
"I don't."
"You're lying to me."
"I'm really not trying to."
That answer made her pause, because it wasn't denial.
It was guilt. In the only way Xavier knew how to show it.
Thorn's irritation sharpened instantly.
She turned toward his desk before he could stop her, grabbing the edge of his sketchbook and flipping it open.
"Wait, what are you—"
He stopped abruptly because it was too late.
Every page was covered in the same shape.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Circular carvings, Geometric spirals, and an indentation carved into dark stone.
Thorn stared at the drawings for a long second before slowly looking back up at him.
Displeased wasn't even close to the word for the expression on her face.
"You've been drawing these all week. Does it have anything to do with how out of fucking whack the school has been?"
Xavier immediately reached for the sketchbook, but Thorn pulled it slightly out of reach first, sliding it across his desk.
"It's nothing, and no, it doesn't," he said too quickly. "It's just a coincidence."
She blinked once.
"Wow," she muttered flatly. "That was a terrible lie."
His jaw tightened.
Thorn could feel it now.
Not just suspicion, but distance, and Thorn didn't like it.
"You're keeping something from me."
"I'm not trying to."
"There's that sentence again, Xavier. What the fuck? We've been partners on this since day one. You can't leave me out of whatever is happening here."
Xavier rubbed a hand over his face, visibly exhausted now.
"It's complicated."
"No," Thorn snapped. "What's complicated is the fact that the school feels like it's about to split open and you're acting as if you've already seen what's inside, and I'm here in the dark!"
The room went still.
Xavier looked at her sharply, a nd Thorn immediately knew she was right.
A chill crawled slowly down her spine.
"Xavier..."
Before he could answer, the dorm door slammed open hard enough to rattle the walls.
Both of them turned immediately.
Danny stood in the doorway, breathing hard, his face pale beneath the overhead lights.
"We have a problem," Danny blurted out.
Xavier straightened immediately. "What happened?"
Danny laughed once, sharp and unsteady.
"Okay, so remember when we said maybe this whole thing was just extremely cursed?"
Thorn's shadows snapped violently beneath her feet.
"What thing?" she asked more sharply this time.
Danny looked at Xavier first, and Thorn caught it immediately.
That look.
That hesitation.
Her head turned slowly toward Xavier.
"…What does he know?"
Xavier closed his eyes briefly as he opened his mouth to answer, but Danny spoke first.
"I ran into Marcellus outside The Aviary."
Thorn stepped forward to get a better listen to what he was about to say.
"And he said, 'You should really stay away from places that weren't built for you.'"
Silence.
Real silence this time.
Thorn looked slowly toward Xavier.
The sketchbook was still open in her hands.
The repeated carvings stared back at her like accusations. She pointed her finger out towards him,
"You two went somewhere."
Xavier didn't answer quickly enough.
And that hesitation alone told her everything.
Thorn's expression hardened almost instantly, disbelief giving way to anger so fast it made the shadows at her feet twist sharply across the floorboards.
"You lied to me."
"I didn't mean to lie to you," Xavier said immediately, stepping forward before she could turn away completely. "I just didn't want you worrying about something before we knew what it was."
"Oh, well, fantastic job," Thorn snapped, throwing her hands slightly into the air. "Because now I'm worried and pissed off."
Danny immediately took one cautious step backward.
Both Thorn and Xavier noticed.
But that didn't stop the trajectory of Thorn's anger.
"And you," Thorn said sharply, whipping around toward Danny so fast he nearly flinched. "What exactly is wrong with you?"
Danny looked genuinely offended now. "I would just like the record to show that I was peer-pressured into these crimes."
"You went somewhere with him?" Thorn demanded. "Without telling me?"
Danny opened his mouth and closed it again.
Then looked helplessly toward Xavier, trying to get a little bit of backup.
Xavier glanced at Thorn, then back at Danny, and gave him the smallest, most useless shrug imaginable.
Danny's mouth fell open.
"Wow," Danny muttered. "Cool. Love the support system happening here."
"Danny." Thorn's voice sounded more like a warning than anything friendly.
"Okay! Okay!" He lifted both hands defensively. "In my defense, Xavier had a vision, there was a secret staircase that led under the school, and honestly, the whole thing escalated really fast."
"That is not a defense," Thorn hissed.
"It felt compelling at the time!"
Her shadows lashed violently across the floor.
"And when exactly," Thorn continued, stepping closer now, "did you start going on mysterious underground adventures with Xavier Thorpe?"
Danny blinked once before gesturing vaguely between himself and Xavier.
"…Shockingly recently?"
"That's not funny."
Xavier exhaled slowly before finally speaking.
"There's something under the courtyard."
That stopped her cold.
And once he started talking, he couldn't really stop.
Xavier exhaled slowly, one hand dragging across the back of his neck as the room settled into an uneasy silence around them.
Thorn stood rigid near the door, arms crossed tightly over herself, shadows moving restlessly around her boots like they were feeding directly off her anger.
Danny wisely stayed quiet.
For once.
Xavier looked down briefly at the sketchbook still open in her hands before finally speaking.
"It happened when we were trying to stabilize the courtyard."
Thorn's gaze sharpened immediately.
"The moment your hand touched my chest," he continued quietly, "everything sort of… locked together for a second."
That made something flicker across her expression.
Not softness.
It was recognition, because she remembered it too.
The sudden stillness in Xavier's movements as he gazed fell somewhere else. Somewhere she couldn't see.
Xavier swallowed before continuing.
"The magic stopped feeling external." He frowned slightly, visibly struggling to explain it properly. "It didn't feel like I was standing in the courtyard anymore. It felt like the courtyard was standing around me."
The room stayed completely still as he spoke.
"I looked down," he said, quieter now, "and the stone underneath my hand just… disappeared."
His eyes drifted slightly unfocused as the memory resurfaced.
"It opened up."
Thorn's shadows twitched sharply.
"For a second, I wasn't above ground anymore. I was underneath the school."
Danny visibly paled again, hearing the whole thing out loud for the first time.
Xavier kept going.
"There was a corridor down there. Narrow. Carved directly into the stone." His jaw tightened slightly. "The walls had the same runes from the courtyard, except they weren't weathered down. They looked… active."
He paused briefly before continuing.
"Not decorative," he said softly. "They were functional."
Thorn didn't interrupt him once.
Didn't move.
Didn't even blink.
Which honestly made the whole thing harder because he couldn't look away from her emerald eyes.
"There was an entrance hidden in the wall," Xavier continued. "Not an actual door. More like…" He searched for the right words. "An absence pretending to be stone."
Danny grimaced faintly. "Still hate the way you describe things."
Xavier ignored him.
"I could see where the seam was hidden," he said. "Left side of the courtyard near the archway."
Thorn's expression softened, but only slightly, as if she was actually hearing the distress under the explanation.
"You saw all that from a vision?"
Xavier nodded once.
"But it wasn't like one of my normal visions," he admitted quietly. "It didn't feel symbolic, or even distinct. It felt… recorded. Like someone else's memory was playing in my head."
That landed heavily.
Like memory.
Not prophecy.
Xavier rubbed his thumb unconsciously against the side of his hand as he continued.
"There was blood in the grooves of the wall," he said more quietly now.
"And someone was dragging their hand across the carvings like they were trying to hold themselves upright."
The room seemed colder suddenly.
"A voice was speaking too," he added. "I couldn't understand the words. It sounded distorted, like hearing someone underwater."
Thorn's shadows had gone completely still now.
Which was worse than when they moved?
"The second the resonance destabilized again, it threw me back into the courtyard." Xavier exhaled slowly. "But the feeling didn't leave."
"What feeling?" Thorn asked finally.
Xavier looked at her.
"That something underneath the school noticed me."
Silence crashed down across the room after that.
Danny visibly looked like he wanted to crawl out the window.
Thorn, meanwhile, looked furious in a completely different way now.
Not just angry at him.
Scared.
Which Thorn hated more than almost anything else.
Xavier saw the exact moment the pieces connected in her head.
The weird behavior.
The sketches.
The distance between them that had increased over the last few days.
The Resonance feels wrong.
"You went looking for it after," she said quietly.
Not a question.
Xavier hesitated.
And that hesitation answered her anyway.
Her jaw tightened immediately.
"Xavier."
"We didn't touch anything," he said quickly. "We just needed to know if it was real."
Danny immediately pointed at Xavier. "Again, I would like to reiterate that he emotionally manipulated me into this."
Thorn stared at them for a long moment.
Then turned abruptly toward the door.
"Thorn—"
"Don't."
The word cracked through the room instantly.
Xavier stood up fully now, panic flickering briefly across his face.
"I'm sorry," he said quickly. "I should've told you outright."
Thorn grabbed the doorknob hard enough that her shadows surged violently across the floorboards beneath her boots.
"I'll deal with both of you later," she said tightly.
Then she slammed the door behind her hard enough to shake the walls.
The silence that followed the slam of the door felt different from the others.
Like Thorn had taken all the air in the room with her when she left.
Danny stared at the closed door for a long second, shoulders still slightly raised like he was waiting for her to storm back in and finish the argument properly.
When she didn't, he slowly turned toward Xavier.
"…So," he said carefully, "I'm thinking that maybe didn't go great."
Xavier didn't answer.
He just sank onto the edge of the bed as his legs had finally given out beneath him, elbows braced against his knees as both hands dragged slowly over his face.
The Resonance beneath the school pulsed faintly through the walls around them.
He could still feel it.
Ever since the chamber, it had been impossible not to.
Something had changed down there.
Not just in Reichenbach.
In him.
The feeling lingered beneath his skin constantly now, subtle but impossible to ignore, like the underground structure had left some imprint behind the moment it recognized him.
And for the first time since the vision in the courtyard, Xavier wasn't entirely sure whether he was more afraid of what was buried underneath the school.
Or why it had responded to him at all.
Danny shifted awkwardly near the door before finally walking farther into the room.
"She'll get over it," he offered.
Xavier let out a quiet breath through his nose, staring down at the floorboards.
"Right."
"I mean it," Danny continued, softer now. "Just give her a couple of hours to cool down."
Xavier's jaw tightened slightly.
"I was trying to make things easier for her," he admitted quietly. "She already has the whole school on her shoulders. I didn't want to throw this on top of everything else."
Danny's expression softened a little at that.
"And she'll realize that eventually," he said. "Trust me, I've known Thorn for three years. She's stubborn, sarcastic, emotionally constipated, and honestly way too dramatic for her own good."
That finally pulled a short laugh out of Xavier despite himself.
Danny leaned back against the desk beside him, crossing his arms loosely.
"She's not unreasonable," he continued. "Terrifying sometimes? Absolutely. But not unreasonable."
His gaze flicked briefly toward the closed dorm door.
"She'll realize you were trying to protect her."
The word "protect" made Xavier flinch.
Danny noticed immediately.
"…Okay," he amended carefully. "Maybe not that word specifically."
Xavier huffed quietly.
"Yeah," he muttered. "Definitely not that word."
A small silence settled between them again after that, quieter now, less frantic than before.
Outside the dorm windows, the wind moved softly through the trees surrounding Reichenbach, branches scraping faintly against old stone walls, while, somewhere deeper in the school, a clock chimed the late hour.
Danny exhaled slowly before speaking again.
"For what it's worth," he said, "I probably would've hidden it too."
That made Xavier look up.
Danny shrugged one shoulder.
"Not because she couldn't handle it," he clarified quickly. "Because once Thorn decides something matters to her, she throws herself directly into it without thinking about what it might cost her."
Danny's mouth twitched faintly.
"You've noticed that too, right?"
Xavier's gaze dropped again almost immediately.
Because he had noticed.
Constantly.
It was one of the things that scared him most about her.
And one of the things he admired most, too.
"I just…" Xavier stopped briefly, trying to organize thoughts that still refused to settle into anything coherent. "The chamber felt wrong."
Danny's expression lost what little humor it had left.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "I noticed."
"I mean…" Xavier rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, visibly frustrated with himself. "I can't figure out how Marcellus is tied to any of this. How does a ring he owns end up being the key to something buried underneath the school?"
Danny frowned slightly, leaning back harder against the desk as he thought about it.
"The ring could've been stolen," he offered weakly.
"No." Xavier shook his head immediately. "No, it doesn't feel accidental."
The room fell quiet again.
Xavier stared absently toward the sketchbook still lying open on the desk, pages filled with the same spirals and carvings over and over again, like his hands had been trying to solve something his brain couldn't fully process yet.
"Okay, but Marcellus being involved in ancient underground murder architecture feels insane even for this school."
Xavier went still as something clicked hard enough behind his eyes that he actually looked up abruptly.
Danny noticed immediately.
"…What?"
Xavier's gaze drifted unfocused for a second.
The masquerade.
The woods.
Music echoing through the trees.
The figures hidden in robes beneath the moonlight.
The Choir.
Slowly, Xavier's stomach dropped.
"Oh, my God."
Danny straightened immediately. "What?"
"The Choir."
The words left Xavier quietly, but they hit the room like something heavy collapsing inward.
Danny blinked once. "What about them?"
Xavier stood abruptly, pacing once across the room before turning back toward him.
"The masquerade attack," he said quickly. "The cloaked figures in the woods that were playing instruments. The Resonance responding to sound—"
Danny's expression slowly began to change, too.
Realization.
Cold and creeping.
"And the chamber underneath the courtyard wasn't just hidden," he continued. "It was built around Resonance. Around patterns. Around structure."
Danny stared at him.
"Around Music..."
Silence settled heavily between them again.
Except now it felt different.
Sharper.
Because this wasn't theory anymore.
Pieces were finally starting to align.
"The masquerade attack wasn't random either," Xavier said, more to himself now. "They were trying to destabilize the anchors, and the one person who stood in their way of doing it."
"You think Marcellus was a part of it," Danny added quietly.
Xavier looked at him immediately.
Danny's face paled slightly.
"…You think he's part of the Choir."
It wasn't phrased like a question.
Xavier didn't answer right away.
Because now that the thought existed, he couldn't stop seeing it.
Marcellus in the woods.
Marcellus beneath the masks.
Marcellus has access to something buried beneath Reichenbach Academy.
And suddenly the ring stopped feeling symbolic.
It felt ceremonial.
Like membership.
Like inheritance.
Xavier swallowed slowly.
"I think," he said carefully, "Marcellus knows exactly what's under the school."
The words settled heavily into the room.
Danny let out a disbelieving laugh under his breath, pacing once away from the desk before turning back toward Xavier again.
"So let me get this straight," he said. "The rich psychopath who already tried to kill you might also belong to the creepy resonance cult manipulating ancient magical infrastructure underneath the academy?"
Xavier grimaced faintly.
"When you say it out loud, it sounds worse."
"It is worse."
Danny dragged both hands through his hair again.
"This just keeps getting better," he muttered darkly.
Neither of them laughed that time.
The dorm fell quiet again after that, the kind of silence that only settled once the reality of a situation had finally caught up to you.
Outside, wind scraped softly against the gothic windows, rattling the old glass faintly in its frame. Somewhere deeper in the dorm building, pipes groaned through the walls, followed by distant footsteps overhead that faded almost as quickly as they appeared.
Normal sounds.
Normal school sounds.
But nothing felt normal anymore.