『"The truth doesn't care if you're ready for it."』
Everyone in the amphitheater was lying about something. Because all seventeen of them were glowing red.
Amara Murray sat there, coffee stain on her white tucked-in shirt, watching as the eighteenth red aura pulsed around a guy stepping into the building with friends.
He was bragging about sexual conquests to anyone within earshot, and the color of his lies surrounded him like a warning.
Liar.
She knew it the way she knew the sun would rise. A bone-deep certainty that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with whatever was going on with her.
She told herself it was just stress, or exhaustion. Definitely not signs of awakening. Except, the whispers were getting louder and harder to ignore.
Cut through.
The words had no source, no speaker. Just a voice in her head.
Amara's fingers squeezed without realizing, and her coffee cup shattered in her grip.
"Whoa. You look like you're planning a murder there."
Amara blinked and looked up to Hiro who dropped beside her in an oversized 'Pacific Northwest' tee.
"Just the usual homicidal ideation," she said, forcing her attention away from the colors and hiding her bleeding fingers beside her lap. "Nothing to worry about."
"What are we not worrying about?" Raj arrived next, carrying enough food for three people. He was big enough that people moved without thinking, but he sat gentle, careful not to jostle the table.
"Okay, see, that is not comforting." Hiro continued. "Because you've had that look for like three weeks now and I'm pretty sure you haven't blinked in the last hour and—"
"Hiro," Amara called.
"I'm just saying, if you're planning a murder, I wanna know if you need an alibi or a shovel—"
"Hiro."
"—because I'm a good friend and I'd help hide a body but I draw the line at federal crimes—"
"Here." Raj interrupted, pushing half his sandwich toward her. "Eat. You don't look so good."
"Charming as always."
The voice came with that particular tone of amusement that she recognized as infuriating. Ethan slid into the seat across from her in a dark henley.
"Don't you have a yacht to be on somewhere?" she said.
"Sold it." He reached over and stole a chip from Raj's plate without asking, without even looking. "Too much maintenance."
"Hey!" Raj protested, but Ethan was already chewing, unbothered.
"Rough night?" Ethan asked, his dark eyes scanning her face with an intensity that made her want to look away.
She didn't. She'd learned months ago not to show weakness around him.
"I'm fine."
"Right." He leaned back, but his eyes never left her face. "Because you always look like you're about to vibrate out of your skin when you're 'fine'."
Amara sighed softly, but she was glad to see them. These guys were her anchor. Her reminder that the world made sense.
Then Professor Malstone stopped by their table, fake smile firmly in place as always. A look Amara knew he practiced in the mirror.
"I must say, Hiro, your paper wasn't your best work," Malstone said like he gave a damn. "You'll have to push harder if you want to pass my course."
The red shroud flared around Malstone the instant he spoke. That crazy, tingling sensation again that her brain interpreted as lies.
Amara had helped Hiro study for that exam. Quizzed him until he could recite every answer backward. She knew he'd aced it.
So it didn't come too much as a surprise when she blurted out, "That's bullshit."
The words were out before she could stop them, and the table went quiet. Even the ambient noise of the amphitheater seemed to dim.
Malstone's smile tightened at the edges, something ugly rearing up behind his glasses. "Excuse me?"
"I said it's bullshit." Amara met his eyes and repeated. "Hiro's paper was flawless. We both know it. Whatever game you enjoy playing with students, you need to leave him out of it."
For a brief moment, Malstone looked like he might explode. His face flushed red. Then he adjusted his glasses and walked away without another word.
However, the damage was already done. Hiro looked down with that particular anxiety that came from never feeling good enough no matter how hard you tried. Raj was staring at her like she'd just declared war.
And Ethan, he was watching her with an intensity that made her skin prickle.
"What?" she snapped, more defensive than she meant to be.
"Nothing." But he didn't look away. "Just wondering when you got so good at reading people is all."
"I'm pre-law. I think it's my job to read people?" She deflected.
"Right." His eyes lingered on her face for one more second before he turned. "Just wondering."
"I'm fine," she said, to herself as much as to them. "Just tired."
***
By 8:00 PM, Amara was in the library, pretending to study while her mind ran through every crazy thing that had happened in the past three weeks.
Three weeks of whispers. Three weeks of red auras and bone-deep certainty about when someone was lying. Three weeks of telling herself it was stress, exhaustion, anything but what it actually was.
Graduate summa cum laude. Intern at Caplan & Gold. Make partner before thirty-five.
That was the plan. That was always the plan. Awakening was never part of it.
Suddenly, the building shook.
Books crashed from shelves as the ground heaved beneath her feet, the floor tilting at an impossible angle. Amara grabbed the desk as the wood groaned under her grip.
The lights flickered on, off, on, throwing the library into a nightmare of shadows and screaming students.
Dust rained from the ceiling. This was an earthquake. An earthquake that every student knew meant one thing:
Wraiths.
The sirens confirmed it a second later. A distinctive warble they'd drilled into every student since freshman orientation: Get to open ground. Don't run towards the sound of screaming.
Without wasting any time, she put her glasses away, grabbed her bag, and ran.
Students poured through the exits in a chaotic stampede, all emergency protocols forgotten in the face of primal fear. There was no order. No organization. Just bodies pushing and shoving.
Amara burst through the glass doors into rain and chaos.
It was a nightmare. Students scattered in every direction, silhouettes against the strobing red and blue emergency lights.
The rain came down hard, soaking through her white shirt in seconds. Thunder rolled overhead, or maybe that was another tremor, she couldn't tell anymore.
She needed to find her friends. Needed to get to open ground, away from buildings that could collapse, away from—
A scream was heard even in the midst of the chaos. High-pitched, terrified, and young.
Amara's head turned toward an alley between the science building and the old chapel.
Keep running. Find Raj. Find Hiro. Find Ethan. Get to safety. She thought.
She turned toward the scream instead, sprinting to the alley, bag bouncing against her hip, white locs already heavy with rain and plastered to her face.
The alley opened before her, and she saw it.
A girl, couldn't be more than twenty, was pressed against the wall beneath a bench, hands over her mouth, eyes wide with terror.
And walking toward her, joints bending backward, head tilted at an angle that should've snapped his neck, was what used to be a man.
Shadows poured from his skin like smoke, reaching toward the girl. His eyes were gone, just hollow sockets. And when his mouth moved, the sound that came out wasn't human.
This was a wraith. Its host was freshly possessed. She could tell by the body still fighting the intrusion, which somehow made it worse.
The girl whimpered, a small broken sound that undid Amara's paralysis.
"Hey!" Her voice came out stronger than she felt. "Leave her alone!"
The wraith's head swiveled toward her with a sound like cracking bones. The movement was too fluid, like something imitating human motion without understanding the mechanics.
Run, her brain screamed. Run run run—
But she stood firm. And in that desperate moment, heat bloomed in her right palm, prompting Amara to look down as she watched light pour from her hand, bright enough to paint the alley.
What the hell—?
It twisted and coalesced, solidifying into a shape that her mind recognized even though she'd never seen it before:
A longsword.
Pitch black, like it was carved from the spaces between stars with constellation patterns that swirled across the blade's surface like captured starlight.
The crossguard curved like wings, and the grip fit her hand like it had been made for her specifically.
One moment she was running through rain toward a girl's terrified cries, the next, she was holding a sword that looked like it had been forged from midnight and starlight.
In the blade, her reflection stared back— blue eyes wide with shock, and an expression she barely recognized as her own.
Something whispered directly into her thoughts and she instinctively knew the name of what she held in her hands. Angel's Bane.
The wraith lunged, but Amara's body moved before her brain could catch up, muscle memory for a skill she'd never learned taking over.
The sword came up in a guard position her conscious mind didn't know, and the whisper that had haunted her for three weeks finally made sense:
Cut through.
So she swung.
The blade didn't just cut the wraith. It cut everything. The very air split, and the rain divided around the arc of her swing.
Droplets froze in mid-air for a heartbeat before gravity remembered they existed. Even the sound was cut, creating a moment of perfect, terrible silence.
Silence that was then broken by the wraith's scream.
The shadows dissolved where the blade touched them. Black steam hissed and bubbled, smelling like sodium, and the wraith... the man... collapsed to the wet pavement.
He was trembling now, body convulsing, but he was alive. If you could call his broken, pitiful state living. This was the thing about wraiths. Even liberated, the damage was done.
The shadows retreated into whatever cracks in reality they'd crawled from, and all that was left was a man in torn clothes, sobbing into the rain.
"EL," he whispered with a broken voice. "EL... EL... EL..."
The word meant nothing to Amara, but it sent ice down her spine anyway. Something about the way he said it.
She stood frozen, chest heaving, staring at the unwanted weapon in her hands as rain sizzled where it touched the blade's edge, turning to steam that curled past her dark fingers.
"Thank you," the girl gasped out, already scrambling to her feet. "Thank you, thank you, oh my god, thank you—"
And then she ran. She didn't stick around for explanations, and Amara couldn't give one anyway.
If this was her awakening, she despised every implication of it. She wasn't supposed to be this. She was supposed to be a lawyer.
But you know what they say about plans and making God laugh.
Other than what was passed on through socialization, she learned about wraiths in high school. Shadows that wore human skin like ill-fitting coats.
They were entities that slipped through unseen cracks in reality, with no one knowing where they came from, only that they left chaos and broken bodies in their wake.
When they manifested in an area, the arrival was always heralded by an earthquake, and Amara always believed this was reality's way of trying to reject their presence.
They taught them about Awakeners also. People who manifested abilities capable of doing damage to a wraith.
If you awakened, you had a choice: Enlist with one of the branches of the Institute that kept the rest of humanity blissfully ignorant from most supernatural occurences, or vanish into a quiet life of normalcy... if you could survive on your own.
She took a step back, then another. "This was not part of the plan," she whispered, staring at the blade in her grip.
The sword hummed in response, a sound she felt more than heard, vibrating up through her arm and settling in her chest.
Behind her, footsteps splashed through puddles. Amara spun, blade raised instinctively, and found Ethan Bass standing in the rain like he'd been waiting for this exact moment.
His dark hair was plastered to his forehead, water streaming down his face, but his expression was calm. Almost relieved.
He looked at her, at the sword in her hands, at the man still whimpering on the ground, and something in his dark brown eyes said finally.
"Ethan?" Amara's voice shook. She couldn't lower the sword or make her hands stop trembling. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Looking for you." He took a step closer, his hands open at his sides. Like he was approaching a spooked animal. "I know you must be freaking out right now. But we need to talk."
"Talk?" She almost laughed. "I just—there was a sword, and that thing—" She gestured at the whimpering man on the ground.
"I know." He stepped closer, and something in his voice made her go still. "Amara, you need to listen to me very carefully—"
But the sword flared hot in her grip, and suddenly she could see it, although for just a moment: a faint blue aura wrapped around Ethan like armor. Different from anything she'd seen before.
He wasn't normal either.
"What are you?"
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AMARA MURRAY | The Sword
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Spirit Weapon: Angel's Bane (Sword of Truth)
Rank: Dream Walker (Newly Awakened)
Ascendant Sigil: ▮ (1 Bar - Right Ribs)
Abilities Unlocked:
┣ Lie Detection
┣ ??? [LOCKED]
┣ ??? [LOCKED]
Status: Confused, Furious, Concerned, Running on Adrenaline
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