The test paper landed on her desk with a soft thud. Written in red ink. A perfect score circled at the top like a target.
Iyar stared at it the way you stare at a wall. The girl next to her groaned and slumped over her desk. Someone behind her whispered, "Of course she got full marks." Nobody said it to her face. Nobody said much to her at all.
The worst part of it is, she didnt have any friends, not even someone she could share her teenage drama if there was any. Iyar was completely alone.
She was the kind of invisible that didn't even get noticed enough to be picked on. Just background noise in a classroom of louder, brighter people. She was like a ghost with a backpack.
The bell rang. She packed her things slowly, not because she had nowhere to be, but because nowhere felt like somewhere worth rushing to.
Home was a gray house on a gray street with a gray garden that her mother maintained like a small, angry dictator.
Iyar walked through the front door and her mother was already there. Waiting. Like she'd been timing it.
"Shoulders back."
Iyar straightened them without thinking. Muscle memory.
"You got your results?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
"Full marks."
Her mother nodded once. The same nod she gave when the washing machine finished a cycle. Satisfactory, like she expected, Moving on. She turned back to the kitchen counter without another word.
Her father was in the living room. He didn't look up from his phone. He never did. Iyar sometimes wondered if he'd notice if she just stopped coming home. She imagined herself fading completely, becoming a smear on the wallpaper, and her father squinting at his screen, thinking the light looked weird today.
She didn't bother to call him she never tried to She just went to her room instead of standing feeling unwanted.
Her room had a small bed in the middle and a neat desk in the corner with books stacked by height because her mother had once rearranged them and Iyar never bothered to mess them up again. The walls were plain. No posters, no photos, no evidence that a seventeen-year-old girl lived here. Just cleanliness, Just order and nothing.
She sat on the bed and pressed her back against the wall and thought, very clearly and very desperately..
"I want something to happen"
Not something bad, Not something crazy, Just something Anything.. Color, Danger.
A reason to feel awake. She felt like she'd been asleep for seventeen years, walking through someone else's life, wearing someone else's skin.
Anything but this safe, grey, suffocating nothing.
She went to bed wishing something might change, even if it was for a while.
The next day she took a different route home.
Not for any dramatic reason. She just didn't want to arrive yet. Delaying the inevitable like pulling a bandage off slowly, which her mother always said was stupid, but Iyar didn't care because at least it was a choice.
She passed the park. The one with the rusted swings and the overgrown hedges that nobody bothered to fix. And there, on the pavement, right in the middle of the walking path like it had been placed there on purpose.
A book.
Thick. Leather-bound. The color of dark honey. It looked ancient, like something pulled from the bottom of the ocean or the back of a witch's closet. In a world of smartphones and concrete and plastic everything, this thing felt wrong.
It looked Alien. Like it had fallen out of a completely different reality and landed at her feet.
She picked it up, of course she did. It felt warm in her hands
Not from the sun kind of warm since there was no sun. It was warm from the inside, like it had a pulse, like it was breathing against her palms. And when she held it close, she could feel it the faintest hum, a vibration so soft it might have been her own heartbeat playing tricks on her.
She looked around. The park was empty. No owner in sight, it didn't look like it belonged to someone.
She took it home, obviously.
That night, under the covers with a flashlight like a kid hiding a secret, she opened it.
The first page had no title. No author's name, Just text written in ink so dark it looked wet.
And then she was gone.
Not literally. Her body was still in the bed, still under the covers, still breathing. But her mind,
her mind was pulled through the page like water down a drain.
She reads
The Southern Kingdom had White towers, Silver bridges. A sky so blue it didn't look real. The kingdom had the White Witch Vampires, beautiful and glowing, their hair like spun snow.
And a queen
She was tall, Regal, her eyes were like cracked ice. She stood in a war tent, and across from her stood a man with the same white hair, the same sharp jawline, it was her brother.
"You would side with the monsters?" He said, smiling. "The Northern King butchered our people, and you would shake his hand?"
"I would end the cycle," the Queen replied, her voice steady. "Our people are dying, not from war, but from hunger caused by war. Peace is not a weakness."
The uncle laughed. It was a cold sound. "Peace. You say that word like it means something. The North will never accept us. The East fears us. The West ignores us. We are alone, sister. And alone, we die."
"Not alone," she whispered.
The scene shifted. The battlefield. The Queen drives her sword through the Northern King's heart. His eyes going wide. And then, the horror. His hand grabbing her wrist, and he whispered to her.
"Bound."
The Queen felt it. The link. The blood magic tying their lives together like a knot that couldn't be untied.
She died on her knees, still holding the sword, still thinking of her daughters.
Iyar's eyes were burning. She wasn't crying. She refused to cry. But her chest ached like she'd lost someone, like she'd known that Queen, like the grief was hers.
This wasn't a story.
It felt like a history, a real place, a real death. A world that shouldn't exist but somehow did, pressed between leather covers and humming in her hands.
She turned the page, hungry for more then..
The door opened.
"Iyar, why is your light on?"
Her mother's silhouette in the doorway. Iyar slammed the book shut and shoved it under her pillow so fast she nearly broke her own nose.
"Sorry. Falling asleep."
A pause. Then the door closed.
Iyar lay in the dark, heart pounding, the book warm beneath her head like a secret trying to escape.
She didn't sleep for a long time.