The Calculus of Censure
The gate of the Hemlock Institute looked like a nightmare made permanent, iron twisted into shapes that might once have been thorns, or faces caught mid-scream. Lira Vance didn’t need her gift, the involuntary sense called Sensory Dissonance, to recognize theatrical gloom when she saw it. The Institute reeked of gothic posturing, of architecture trying too hard to whisper secrets.
She sat in the back of the van, tightening the buckle on her single black suitcase.
“It seems my expulsion from St. Jude’s has been compensated for by architectural melodrama,” she said dryly. The driver, a man with a trembling mustache, merely grunted and muttered something about patience and propriety.
The cliffside campus overlooked a coastline perennially veiled in fog. The students here were called the Gifted individuals with mutations or anomalies labeled as Variations. Lira’s own Variation was a curse disguised as insight: she could see the echoes of fractured timelines, memories that didn’t belong to the present. Not ghosts, worse. Distorted patches of the past bleeding into now.
The effect sharpened the instant her boots met Hemlock ground. The air throbbed with old fear, and under the fog’s whisper, she heard the metallic scrape of something that wasn’t supposed to exist anymore.
Ms. Evelyn Reed greeted her at the entrance, a woman carved from mahogany and protocol.
“Lira Vance. Welcome to Hemlock. The Headmaster will speak with you once you’ve had time to settle in. Dr. Thorne takes a particular interest in students with... unconventional forms of analysis.”
“Stability is just an illusion invented by people terrified of truth,” Lira replied, even as her gaze drifted toward a quiet alcove where something unseen clattered, then screamed. Her Dissonance painted flashes of panic: a young voice, a fall, then silence. Someone missing.
Her assigned room came with a surprise: a roommate. One half of the room was empty but neat, her own; the other was an explosion of color and greenery.
“Oh, thank the gods! You must be Lira!” said the boy surrounded by twisting vines. “I’m Jax! What’s your variation? Fire? Telepathy? Glow-in-the-dark?”
“I’m Lira Vance. I’d prefer silence. I solve cold cases for fun and avoid human contact out of necessity.”
Jax grinned without missing a beat. “Perfect. You hate talking; I talk a lot. Symbiosis! So, you look into mysteries does that include the one about the founder’s missing son? Or the recent one?”
Lira’s attention snapped into focus. “Which recent one?”
Jax hesitated. “Elara. They found her down by the Whispering Pond.”
The Fissure in Time
He spoke softly, green aura trembling at his fingertips. “They said her heart stopped from cold exposure, but… she wasn’t frozen. She was stone. Solid. Eyes open.”
Lira crouched by the scene hours later, tracing her fingers along damp ground as her gift struck her like static. A vision flooded in Elara, frozen mid-breath while a shadow tore free from the trees. A void that consumed light, form, and sound. When it vanished, Elara stood still, transformed, as if all time had evacuated her body.
By the time she met Dr. Alistair Thorne later that day, suspicion had already taken root. Thorne was immaculate and charming in the way dangerous men often are, voice smooth as varnish.
“Lira,” he said, settling behind his desk. “The world has failed to value your unique perspective. Here, you’ll learn control, not suppression.”
“My gift is the reading of broken timelines, Doctor. Most people prefer denial dressed as stability,” she said. Then, almost casually, “The staircase near the west wing carries a strong echo of violence. Someone removed?”
He smiled without blinking. “An incident best forgotten. The institute values peace over gossip.”
Peace. The word pulsed like irony.
Cryptographic Curiosity
Beneath the campus library, Lira, thanks to the skeptical town archivist, Maya found a sealed chamber layered in dust and time. Inside was a thing of myth: The Obsidian Scrolls.
A journal made of volcanic glass, written in layered ciphers, recounts the thoughts of Silas Thorne, a man horrified by his own bloodline.
Father calls it the Harvest. I call it a feeding.
Silas spoke of a guardian bound within the Institute’s foundations—the Sentinel designed to preserve life but corrupted to preserve the building itself. When the energy reversed, it consumed life instead of protecting it. The “Life Siphon,” Silas named it a mechanism powered by Variations, draining their vitality to prolong another’s existence.
The implications were clear. The Thorne family had built the Institute to sustain themselves. And Dr. Thorne wasn’t teaching the Gifted; he was farming them.
The Harvest Moon
When the next victim fell, a telekinetic, not far from where Elara died, Lira was ready. She brought Jax, his vines twitching nervously.
“Elara was around the last full moon,” he whispered. “This is another.”
“The pattern’s ritualistic,” Lira said. “He’s feeding on Psychic Variations. Their energy’s clean, malleable. The Obsidian Scrolls called it Harvest. Every month, a test. He draws from the strongest to prime the ritual.”
“So who could do that?” Jax asked. “Only someone with massive access to the students.”
“Or someone who built the walls we live in,” she replied.
Kaelen’s Shadow
Lira’s attention turned to Kaelen, the eccentric history professor. His obsession with Hemlock’s founding myths and his secret late-night excursions made him suspicious, even if Jax insisted he was harmless.
She baited him with a line from the Scrolls, “The shadow follows the Thorn,” and waited.
Kaelen came, not furious but afraid.
“You found the Scrolls,” he said quietly. “Then you know what the Headmaster is.”
Lira hesitated. “You’re saying Thorne is the one feeding on the students?”
Kaelen nodded, eyes heavy with years of secrets. “I tried to stop him. He nearly killed me for it. The petrified victims? They’re not dying. The Sentinel is freezing them in self-defense.”
The realization cracked through Lira like lightning. The monster wasn’t destroying, it was shielding.
The Headmaster’s Virtue
To prove Thorne’s guilt, they needed evidence beyond myth. So at the next school assembly, while Jax created subtle chaos with his vines, Lira watched.
Thorne glowed with unnatural youth, voice dripping warmth. As he passed among the students, Lira saw his ornate family ring pulsing gold as faint threads of energy siphoned from their bodies into his. The Siphon’s anchor wasn’t buried anymore; it was worn.
“The ring,” she murmured. “It’s the conduit.”
“Then Founder’s Day,” Jax whispered back. “He’s going to use it. All of us.”
The Founder's Feast
The announcement came at dawn: an all-night celebration above the Founder’s Stone. The ceremony would unite every Gifted in the building. Perfect symmetry. Perfect sacrifice.
“We can’t stop it,” Kaelen said after hearing Lira’s plan. “But maybe we can break it.”
“Overload it,” Lira corrected. “Force the Sentinel to wake.”
While Jax prepared to flood the foundations with uncontrollable elemental energy, Lira climbed the Tower, carrying her frequency disruptor and the old iron key she'd stolen from Thorne’s office. Somewhere near the top, she could already feel the timelines splitting millennia of silence about to be broken.