CHAPTER 59 — The Eye of Orientation
The disappearances had stopped.
Not because the culprit had been found. Not because the Academy had tightened its security. Not because someone, somewhere, had decided the hunt was over. No. The disappearances had stopped because the victims had ceased to exist. There were no longer enough familiar faces in the corridors for their absence to be noticed.
The dormitories were quieter. The classrooms emptier. Meals, once noisy with laughter and commotion, were taken in awkward silence, as if the words themselves were afraid to take flight. Students walked with their heads down, avoided blind corners, and did not linger near windows.
Zayn walked through the empty corridors.
His footsteps echoed against the stone floor, a monotone echo that broke against the walls, returned, weakened, and died in the silence. The doors were closed. The classrooms silent. The torches, suspended at regular intervals, flickered gently, casting dancing shadows on the walls that never stopped moving.
But the shadow, it had not stopped.
He felt a gaze.
Not a human gaze. Not a direct threat. Not a presence that could be named or described. Just a sensation, like a cold prick at the base of his spine, an invisible pressure that would not go away. He stopped. He turned. Nothing. Just the empty corridor. The torches. The shadow.
He resumed walking. The gaze followed.
He turned into a side corridor, one he had never taken, one of those forgotten passages where the torchlight barely reached, where dust gathered on the window ledges, where no one ventured without reason. And he stopped.
Ranmaru was there.
Sitting on the floor, back against the wall, knees drawn up to his chest. His face was lifted toward the ceiling, but he was not looking at the ceiling. He was looking through it. A complete stillness, as if he had always been there, as if he were part of the stones, the shadows, the silence. He barely breathed.
His hair was short. A pure white, almost luminous in the gloom, cut irregularly — uneven strands, as if hacked by a trembling hand or a blade that had lost its way. Some jutted forward, others flattened against his skull, others still formed strange angles, like fragments of a broken constellation. It was not a hairstyle. It was a scar of hair. A tamed chaos.
His eyes were green.
A deep green, almost emerald, streaked with dark reflections that danced when he moved his head. The colour was strangely familiar. Zayn blinked. He knew those eyes. He had seen them in mirrors, in reflections, in the memories of his own gaze. It was exactly the same shade as his.
But Ranmaru's gaze held nothing familiar.
Where Zayn's eyes burned with fever, defiance, anger, or hope, Ranmaru's were fixed, dull, like two polished stones at the bottom of a dead river. They did not blink fast enough. They did not move often enough. They seemed to be looking at something on the other side of reality, something Zayn could not see.
Zayn approached. His footsteps, for once, made no sound. The ground seemed to soften, as if it too wanted to listen.
"Ranmaru."
The boy turned his head. Slowly. Too slowly, as if his neck had forgotten how to pivot at normal speed.
"Zayn."
His voice was calm, almost inaudible, like that of someone who is not sure words are necessary.
"What are you doing here?"
"Watching."
"What?"
"The cracks."
Zayn crouched before him. Ranmaru's green gaze caught his for a moment, then slid sideways, as if following an invisible fly.
"What cracks?"
Ranmaru did not answer. He placed a finger on his right eye, without touching it, as if to point it out to Zayn without having to name it.
"My eye sees what has not yet happened. Not the future. Not clear visions. Not sharp images, not prophecies carved in stone. Just possibilities. Shadows of what could occur, drifting like dead leaves on a frozen river."
"And what do you see there?"
Ranmaru tilted his head. His green eyes fixed on a point behind Zayn, a point that did not exist.
"Someone is going to disappear. Not in the labyrinth. Not in the night. In the light."
"What are you talking about?"
"A door will open. A light will draw them in. He or she will enter. And he or she will not come back."
Zayn felt a chill at the nape of his neck. He forced himself to stay calm.
"You see who?"
"I don't see. I've never seen. Just shadows. Silhouettes without faces. But I know it will be someone you know."
"How do you know?"
"Because I know you. And because I feel your breath when you're afraid."
A silence fell between them. Not an awkward silence. A heavy silence, charged, like a door one dares not open.
The wind blew through the corridor. The torches flickered, casting trembling shadows on the walls, dancing like spectres. Ranmaru's face, lit intermittently, seemed to belong to another world, older, colder.
Zayn stood up.
"You should warn Yojuro. Or Azel."
"They can't see what I see."
"Why?"
Ranmaru turned to him. His green eyes — so like his own — fixed him with an intensity that was not human. A grey, dirty gleam passed through his iris, like a crack in a windowpane.
"Because they look at the world. I look at what is not yet the world."
He stood up slowly. He was taller than Zayn had imagined, but his silhouette seemed to sag, as if his shoulders bore the weight of his visions. His white hair fell over his forehead, his hands gripped his arms, and his green eyes — so familiar and so strange — glowed one last time in the darkness.
"If the other disappearances continue, the next one will be one of your friends."
"How do you know?"
"I saw it. Not his face. Just a shadow, a shape. But it was someone you know."
He walked away. His footsteps made no sound. No creak. No brush. He disappeared into the darkness, absorbed by the corridor like receding water.
Zayn stood alone.
The corridor was empty. The torches flickered. The shadows danced. But an invisible crack seemed to have opened somewhere, and Zayn could feel its cold breath on his neck.
He did not know if it was a prophecy or a hallucination.
He only knew that, for the first time in a long while, he was afraid.
---
Zayn told everything to Yojuro the next day.
They sat on a stone bench in the empty courtyard. The sky was grey, the trees still, the grass damp. Yojuro listened without interrupting, his fingers clasped under his chin, his gaze fixed on a horizon he did not see.
"He said someone was going to disappear. Someone I know."
Yojuro was silent for a long moment. The wind lifted his hair, made the leaves shiver.
"Ranmaru sees possibilities. Not certainties."
"And if it's true?"
"Then we stop it."
"How?"
"We find them first."
Yojuro stood up. He looked out the window. The courtyard was empty. The trees still. The sky grey.
"The ash, the window, the disappearances. Ranmaru is a symptom, not a cause."
"What is the cause, then?"
Yojuro turned to him. His eyes were calm, but there was something new in them — a dark, almost precise gleam.
"The cause is someone who wants to bring back the dead. And who is willing to erase the living to do it."
He fell silent. The wind blew. Dead leaves scraped the ground.
Zayn looked at his own hands. He wondered if one day he would be capable of making a choice as terrible as the one Yojuro had just described.
He hoped not.
In the distance, a door slammed.
Silence returned.
The labyrinth of the living, it seemed, had just grown larger.