Thornhill Academy (By Sheridan Hartin) novel Chapter 164

Chapter 164

Rhaziel

Nightmares are said to belong to mortals, born from their fears, shaped by their insecurities, fed by their deepest shadows, but that is a comfortable lie they

tell themselves to sleep easier. Nightmares come from me, from the place beneath consciousness where all dark things gather, from the Shadow Realm that

responds to the world’s emotions the way lungs respond to air. Every fear they swallow, every tremor they ignore, every midnight secret they bury-those threads drift down into my domain, weaving themselves into shapes and whispers and beasts I have ruled for longer than most of the Council has drawn

breath. And today, for the first time in centuries, the Shadow Realm screamed.

It began with a violent shudder through the Veil, like a tremor against the spine of the world, but immediately wrong enough that every instinct I possessed sharpened into a razor. My throne vibrated beneath me, the stone humming with distress as if pleading for my attention. Shadows retreated from the open floor, skittering like startled animals, pressing themselves into corners as the air thickened with charged fear. I stood long before the alarms sounded; I didn’t need them. I felt the surge like claws dragging through my own ribs before the second wave hit. A wall of nightmares, thousands of them, slamming together in one catastrophic psychic convergence. It was a deafening roar of overlapping panic, terror, despair, grief, every mortal fear igniting at the same moment, forced into synchronisation by a spell so reckless it carried the Council’s fingerprints all over it. My shadows buckled. The floor beneath me cracked. The Veil screamed. The blast tore through my throne room, blowing out the walls in a shockwave of blackened light. Instinctively, I reached outward with my power, catching the debris in a cocoon of shadow before it could flatten the neighbouring towers. The realm felt like an animal being flayed alive.

“Your Majesty-!” one of the nightmare-keepers cried, stumbling forward with panic twisting his voice into something brittle. “It’s too much-the surge is-”

“This is manufactured,” I snarled, cutting him off, fury lacing my tone like poison. “No mortal fear behaves this way.”

Not naturally.

Not accidentally.

The Council had done something. Whether from arrogance or ignorance, they had cast a spell so wide it forced every dreaming mind under Thornhill’s roof to collapse into the same emotional frequency, channelling all their nightmares straight into the Shadow Realm in one violent rush. Idiots. Dangerous, naïve

idiots.

I approached the Veil, lifting my hand to its shimmering surface. The moment my palm touched it, a tidal wave of emotion tore through me-fear so sharp it tasted metallic, panic so deep it felt bottomless, grief so old it seemed rooted in bone. It hit me like a collapsing star, and for a moment, the world narrowed to a single choking breath. And buried within that maelstrom-almost lost, almost swallowed-was a thread of magic I recognised with painful clarity. Her. Her signature, distorted and stretched thin, braided into the surge like a violin note buried inside a scream. A note only I would notice. A note that sent something cold and primal locking into place beneath my ribs.

“Allison,” I whispered. “What have they driven you to?”

The Veil quaked again. Nightmare beasts burst from their cages, swollen with the excess fear, their shapes fracturing into jagged silhouettes made of teeth and shadow. The dream-eaters wailed, thrashing against their restraints. The ground split open, a dark chasm yawning like the mouth of a god that should

never be woken.

I seized the first escaped creature-a horned nightmare stitched together from grief and rage–and slammed it into the floor so hard its form shattered into dust. Another lunged, all spines and dripping shadow; I tore its head free and let its scream dissolve into smoke. Order had to be restored. Balance had to be reclaimed. There was no room for mercy.

“Contain them!” I commanded, voice booming through the collapsing chamber as guards scrambled to wrangle shadows back into cages, to devour loose fear before it destabilised the realm further, to hold back a disaster the Council had crafted and then washed their hands of. But even as the creatures were subdued, the Veil continued to tremble violently. This was not a single lapse. Not a passing ripple. This was a tear waiting to happen. If I left now-if I abandoned my post to run to Allison-the Veil could rupture completely, unleashing nightmares into Thornhill, and the Council would not hesitate to blame

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Chapter 164

her for every atrocity that followed. They would question her. Cage het. Study her. Ot kill her. I could not allow that. So I planted my hands against the Veil and poured my magic into it-shadow winding like smoke through cracks in the world, sealing them, cooling the chaos, slow and agonising, until the nightmare-surge receded and the realm exhaled its first unbroken breath in what felt like hours.

“Hold the line.” I ordered the keepers as the tremors faded to whispers. “No one enters the Shadow Realm. No one leaves. Nothing touches the Veil without

my permission.”

They bowed deeply, still trembling, and I turned away without another word. I had to get to her. Immediately.

I tore myself back through the Veil with a single, vicious pull of power, and I aimed for the one place my shadows knew better than anywhere else-her room. My boots hit the floorboards with the muted thud of a blade being driven into flesh. For one suspended heartbeat, the world held its breath around me. The air was thick with the fading remnants of magic, hers layered with Kael’s and Evander’s, all of it stretched thin and scattered like smoke from a fire long extinguished. The room was a landscape of chaos-chairs overturned, dust unsettled, floorboards disturbed with frantic scrapes, the echo of her energy lingering like a half-forgotten melody. And worst of all, her scent was fading, stretched thin by distance and time.

She was gone.

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