Thornhill Academy (By Sheridan Hartin) novel Chapter 174

Chapter 174

51

Cage

We have been travelling since long before dawn-long enough that the darkness has begun to thin into the kind of washed-out twilight that doesn’t feel like morning so much as the world holding its breath, waiting to decide whether it wants to let the sun return at all. The wilderness stretches endlessly around us, wild in a way I never bothered to imagine, violent in its quiet, indifferent to the life or death of anyone foolish enough to wander through it. I’ve never been this far from Thornhill, not in this direction away from the city. Never needed to be. Never wanted to be. Strays live out here. Unregistered magicals. People who didn’t belong anywhere. I used to spit the word “stray” like an insult. But now, with frost crunching under my boots and the wind slicing through the gaps in my coat, I understand the truth of it-this place doesn’t care if you live or die. You survive because you are clever, or vicious, or because you refuse to let the world swallow you whole. She lived out here….Alone. For years. Each step feels heavier as that truth sinks deeper.

The trackers walk ahead of me, rune tablets raised, the glowing lines flickering with every shift in the air currents. Enforcers flank us, silent and rigid, breath puffing in pale clouds that vanish almost instantly. We pass claw marks on trees that are deep, fresh gouges that make even the enforcers tense. We find old campsites, burned out and abandoned, ashes scattered like black snow across the ground. A rusted tin cup lies half-buried beside one fire pit, a blanket torn apart by animals near another. The trackers whisper about territorial shifters who haunt these woods, about rogue witches who trade curses for scraps of food, about pockets where the veil thins and nightmares slip through from realms they were never meant to leave. I never knew any of this. I never wanted to know…And she lived here as if it were normal. Guilt settles deeper beneath my ribs. The ground grows uneven as we continue forward, roots jutting up like bones beneath the soil. The air grows colder. The trees grow taller, their trunks thick and twisted, their branches stretched so high they blot out what little light remains. Everything feels older out here-ancient in a way that makes me feel smaller than I’ve ever felt. The trackers grow nervous, I can see it in the way their bodies tense. The enforcers keep their hands near their weapons. Me? I keep feeling for a bond that refuses to answer. Every few steps, I reach inward, trying to catch even a whisper of her-an echo, a spark, the faintest pulse of connection. But the farther we walk, the more suffocating the silence becomes. It feels like walking with a hand around my throat, like my chest is hollowing itself out piece by piece. The bond should be tugging. It should be pulling me toward her. But it just… isn’t. And that absence grows sharper, more alarming, until-

It hits. A violent, crushing snap that tears through my chest so hard I stumble forward. My hand flies to my sternum, nails digging into my jacket as if I can claw the connection back into existence. The bond doesn’t just falter. It breaks. The shock is immediate, visceral and total, like someone reached inside me and cut a wire that kept my heart beating. I gasp, choking on cold air. The trackers stop in the same moment I do. Their devices flicker once-twice-then all the glowing runes gutter out entirely, plunging the screens into a dead, lifeless black.

“No,” one of them whispers. “No, that’s not-that can’t-reset it, reset it-”

The lead tracker fumbles with his rune tablet, his fingers trembling, but it refuses to respond. The ley-lines on the map don’t realign. The directional needle spins twice, then falls limp.

“It’s gone,” he says, voice hollow. “The Pulse is gone.”

My breath stutters out of my chest. Gone. Gone, Gone.

Another tracker tries to argue, voice shaking. “Maybe it’s interference-maybe they crossed a broken ley-field or a dead zone or-”

“It’s not interference,” the enforcer captain says flatly. “Pulse collapse is absolute.”

The trackers keep running checks, desperate and frantic, but each rune returns the same empty reading.

No signal.

No direction.

No resonance.

1/2

17:15 Thu, Jan 1 M

Chapter 174

No her.

My knees nearly buckle.

“I…” My voice is barely sound. “I can’t feel her.”

Everything I feel after that hits too fast. The fear, grief, disbelief, the crushing suffocation of failure-but it all condenses into one unbearable truth: The bond is dead.

The enforcers exchange grim looks. One mutters, “So she’s gone.”

My lungs seize.

Dead.

Dead.

Dead.

The word echoes in my skull like someone pounding on a door I can’t reach. I barely hear the trackers arguing, the enforcers swearing, the wilderness wind cutting through the trees with a low, mournful howl. My pulse is a hammer inside my ears, drowning everything else out. She can’t be gone. She can’t. But the bond doesn’t lie. It never lies.

A tracker turns toward me, his expression searching. “You feel nothing?”

“Nothing,” I rasp. The word tastes like blood. “It’s just-gone.”

He nods once. No sympathy. No pause. No grief. “Then we continue. The body must be recovered.”

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