Belthrow Campus at night was a different country.
The performed confidence of orientation week drained away to reveal the reality: wet pavement, distant sirens, the specific kind of silence that meant everyone inside was pretending they weren't checking to see if their door was locked.
Zayan didn't care about the silence or the sirens or the locked doors. He stood outside the dorms, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jacket, collar turned up against the wind. He was vibrating with a low-level hum of restless energy that had been building since the moment he entered the gates, an itch under his skin that he couldn't scratch. He needed to see it. He needed to verify everything they said about Vethrow.
He lit a cigarette, the flare of the lighter illuminating the sharp angles of his face for a brief second before plunging him back into shadow. He looked up at the window on the third floor. Room 314. It was dark. He wasn't ready for bed yet not now when all the fun stuff happened at night so he decided to go for a walk around the campus to see what he could find.
The path wound around the back of the library, where the manicured lawns gave way to unruly hedges and the heavy, sweet smell of decay. Zayan walked with his head down, the smoke from his cigarette trailing behind him like a phantom. He passed a couple huddled under the awning of the science building, their whispers frantic and tight, and he felt nothing but a distant, cold superiority. They were afraid of getting caught, afraid of the dark; Zayan was afraid of the silence, of the empty spaces. He needed the noise. He needed the chaos. He flicked the cigarette butt into a bed of hydrangeas, watching the small orange ember die in the damp earth, a miniature star extinguished by the weight of the world.
He found himself near a church. He had noticed it earlier, a looming gothic structure of stone and stained glass that looked more like a tomb than a place of worship. But tonight, the heavy oak doors were slightly ajar, and a soft, amber light spilled out onto the wet pavement, cutting through the gloom like a knife. Zayan hesitated for a fraction of a second, the ingrained wariness of a stray animal approaching a trap, before curiosity—and the unbearable urge to escape the vast, empty dark—pushed him forward.
The church was empty, save for the rows of flickering candles and the smell of incense that hung heavy in the air, thick enough to taste. It was warmer inside, the silence different here—less like a vacuum and more like a held breath. Zayan walked down the center aisle, his boots echoing loudly against the stone floor, the sound intrusive and violent in the sacred hush. He stopped at the altar rail, leaning against it, staring up at the crucifix hanging above the pulpit, the painted eyes of the statue seeming to look right through him.
"God," he said aloud, the word tasting foreign on his tongue. "You must be bored."
He laughed, a short, sharp sound that bounced off the vaulted ceiling and came back to him sounding like a judgment. He didn't know why he was talking to a piece of carved wood; he supposed it was the same impulse that made people scream into canyons, just to see if anything screamed back. But the church just stared back, stony and silent, its stained-glass eyes judging the cigarette smoke clinging to his clothes and the blood drying rust-brown on the undershirt he wore beneath his jacket. He felt like an intruder in a museum of peace, a violent object placed carefully on a velvet shelf where he didn't belong, disrupting the curated quiet with the jagged rhythm of his pulse.
His eyes darted to the the large stone sculptures near the side wall.
Saint somebody. Robes and an expression of patient suffering and arms slightly raised like an invitation or a surrender. The sculpture was mounted on a stone base that brought the total height to maybe eight feet. Wide shoulders. Good solid architecture.
Zayan approached the statue with a predatory slowness, circling it like he was sizing up an opponent in a ring. He reached out, trailing his fingers over the cold, rough stone of the saint's robe, feeling the centuries of dust and prayer that coated the surface. The silence of the church felt less like peace now and more like a provocation, a heavy weight that pressed against his eardrums, demanding to be broken. He looked up into the statue's face, that serene, unyielding patience that had survived wars and plagues and fires, and he felt a sudden, vicious urge to shatter it. He wanted to be the thing that this place remembered, the chaotic variable in a history of static obedience.
He grabbed the edge of the stone base, his fingers digging into the rough grooves, and hauled himself up with a grunt of exertion. The height gave him a new perspective on the nave, the long shadows stretching out toward the entrance like dark fingers. He sat on the saint's shoulder, swinging one leg over the cold stone, dangling his boot just inches above the altar rail. From up here, he was taller than the pews, taller than the candles, looking down on the empty space with a sense of detached ownership. He lit another cigarette, shielding the flame with his hand, and watched the smoke spiral up toward the vaulted ceiling, a gray offering to a God who wasn't watching.
"You see this?" he whispered, exhaling a plume of smoke that drifted across the saint's stony eyes. "I'm sitting on your shoulder." He leaned back, bracing his weight against the cold stone of the neck, feeling the vibration of his own heartbeat through the contact. It was a comfortable seat, solid and unmoving, a stark contrast to the slippery, shifting loyalties of the living world. He felt untouchable in the dark, suspended above the holy ground, a dark angel perched on the architecture of the damned, waiting for the sun to rise or the world to burn—whichever came first.
He watched the embers of his cigarette break away and drift upward, tiny fireflies defying the gravity of the sanctified air. The stillness was beginning to grate on him, a quiet that felt too much like the pause before a verdict, and he found himself tapping a restless rhythm against the saint's stone ear. He wondered if the statue minded the intrusion, or if centuries of listening to the desperate whispers of sinners had inured it to the weight of a boy with blood on his shirt and chaos in his heart. Zayan tilted his head back, blowing a stream of smoke directly into the face of the carved martyr, waiting for a lightning bolt, for a crack of thunder, for anything to prove that the silence was actually listening.
But there was nothing. Just the hollow echo of his own breathing and the distant, rhythmic dripping of rainwater somewhere in the eaves. The lack of response felt less like mercy and more like indifference, a realization that settled cold and heavy in his gut. He wasn't a tragedy to them; he wasn't even a villain. He was just another speck of dust floating through the light of the stained glass, insignificant and temporary. The thought made him laugh, a dry, rasping sound that seemed sacrilegious in the vastness of the nave, because it was the only true thing he had heard all night. He didn't matter here. The rules of the Scottish, the wealth—none of it existed within these stone walls.
He crushed the half-finished cigarette against the stone shoulder, grinding it into the rough surface until it was nothing but a smudge of ash and gray. The thrill of the vandalism was fleeting, leaving him feeling hollowed out and exhausted, the adrenaline finally leaking out of his system. And then he looked down.
There was a man standing at the far end of the aisle.
Still. Completely still . He wore a long coat, the color of the stone, blending so perfectly into the shadows that Zayan had almost missed him. He was looking up, his face obscured by the distance and the gloom, but Zayan could feel the weight of his gaze, heavy and judgmental, fixing him to the spot. It wasn't a priest; priests moved, they shuffled and breathed and radiated a soft, ineffective warmth. This man was a statue himself, carved from something colder and harder than rock, a presence that felt like it had been waiting in the dark for a long time.
Zayan froze, his breath catching in his throat, the sudden shock of not being alone slamming into him with the force of a physical blow. He stayed perched on the saint's shoulder, legs dangling, heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs, but he forced his face into a mask of indifference. He didn't scramble down; he didn't apologize. He simply looked back, meeting the gaze of the stranger in the dark, challenging the silence to break. "Can I help you?" he called out, his voice echoing slightly, sounding brittle in the vastness of the church.
The man didn't speak. He just took a step forward, his shoes making no sound on the stone floor, gliding over the consecrated ground like a ghost. As he moved out of the shadows, Zayan saw the glint of red at his temples and the sharp, angular line of his jaw. He was older, maybe three years older, with the kind of hardened stillness that spoke of a life spent in the trenches of other people's mistakes. He stopped at the altar rail, resting his hands on the wood, looking up at Zayan with an expression that wasn't anger, but something far more dangerous. Curiosity. Or something more.
"Nice church, huh" he finally said.