The Names They Fed the Bell

The eleven names had already begun to rise through the academy’s stones.

Neris felt them as splinters beneath her fingernails while Odran led the group along the forgotten corridor. Each pulse came from above: a command traveling through foundation, stair, and wall toward the central hall. The names were not yet spoken, but Valdyr was preparing its mouth.

Maelin leaned against Sella, one arm wrapped around her shoulders. She could walk, barely. Stormlight still trembled beneath her skin, no longer moving in the academy’s measured circles, but not entirely hers either.

“We go to the preparation hall,” Odran said. “We find the eleven before the naming. We cut their marks out.”

“And if the hall is guarded?” Neris asked.

“Then we go to the ceremony.”

“That is your plan?”

“It is the improved version.”

They reached a narrow stair behind the dead furnace. Dust sifted from the ceiling with every distant bell. Above them, the academy was waking into celebration. Doors opened. Students shouted across corridors. Somewhere, a choir had begun rehearsing the old graduation hymn.

The sound made Neris’s stomach turn.

“The naming hall is already full,” said Sella.

Odran glanced back. “You know that how?”

Sella’s face remained blank. “I know the academy.”

“No,” Neris said. “You know something else.”

For half a step, Sella’s grip tightened around Maelin.

Then she continued upward. “Later.”

They emerged beneath the western gallery, behind a carved screen depicting Valdyr’s first rector kneeling before a sun with too many eyes. Beyond the screen, the central hall blazed with floating lamps. Hundreds of students crowded the tiers. Faculty stood along the dais in ceremonial gray. At its center waited Rector Halvek Sorn.

The preparation hall was not elsewhere.

It was here.

Neris saw the eleven at once.

They stood in a crescent around the dais, dressed in white graduation robes. The academy’s highest-ranked students. Faces she knew from every public lesson: Iven Marr, who could split a river; Tessa Veyr, whose fire had never once failed a measure; twins from the southern provinces whose names had become a favorite wager among the younger classes.

They looked proud.

They looked terrified.

Thin silver lines ran from each student’s throat down beneath the robe collar. Most had not noticed. One boy kept rubbing at his neck. A girl stared at her own hands as if they belonged to someone else.

The twelfth place stood empty.

Maelin made a small sound behind Neris.

Sorn raised one hand, and the hall fell silent.

“Students of Valdyr,” he called, his voice carrying effortlessly. “Tonight, the academy honors those whose discipline, courage, and magical excellence have brought them to the threshold of legend.”

A warm pressure moved through the floor.

Neris’s magic answered it with nausea. The foundation was not merely listening. It was opening a channel beneath every candidate, drawing the hall’s attention downward toward the buried gate.

Odran caught her sleeve. “If you touch the foundation from here, you may bring the ceiling down.”

“Then we make them look up.”

She pushed through the screen.

The nearest students gasped. Heads turned. Sella followed with Maelin. Odran came last, hands lifted to show he carried no weapon, though his expression suggested he regretted the entire shape of the evening.

Sorn did not look surprised.

“Neris Vey,” he said. “You have chosen an unfortunate audience.”

“You chose it,” she answered. “You just lied about what they were here to see.”

A murmur moved through the hall. Several students recognized Maelin and recoiled from the stormlight in her hair.

Sorn’s gaze settled on her. “Maelin Dorr is ill. She requires immediate care.”

“She requires the same care you gave her three nights ago?” Neris asked. “The care that measured how much of her soul the gate could hold?”

The hall went quiet enough for the lamps to hiss.

One of the eleven candidates whispered, “What gate?”

Sorn’s expression softened into practiced sorrow. “This is what happens when frightened students tamper with rites they cannot understand. Neris has been exposed to a destabilizing influence beneath the academy. She is attempting to frighten you because she fears being found unworthy.”

The word struck exactly where he intended.

Unworthy.

Neris felt the old shame rise, familiar and sharp. Around her, students looked from her worn uniform to the eleven in white. Sorn had built the hall to make the lie easy to believe.

So she gave them something harder to dismiss.

Neris crossed to the nearest candidate, a broad-shouldered boy with a silver line at his throat. He flinched when she reached for him.

“Ask him what the line feels like,” she said.

Sorn’s voice cracked across the hall. “Do not touch him.”

The boy stared at the rector. “What line?”

Neris touched his collar.

Her unmaking magic passed through the silver mark.

The boy screamed.

Light erupted from beneath his robe, not outward but downward. For one terrible instant, the hall saw what lay beneath the floor: a vast socket of black stone, and channels branching from it like veins. The boy’s magic poured into the vision. His knees buckled.

Neris tore the mark apart.

The vision vanished. The boy collapsed, alive, gasping. A raw red line encircled his throat where the silver had been.

The hall erupted.

Students surged backward. Teachers shouted commands. The remaining candidates clutched at their collars as the hidden marks flared in response.

“Stop her!” Sorn ordered.

No one moved quickly enough. They had seen the socket.

They had seen where the excellence went.

Neris reached for the second mark, but a band of golden force struck her wrist. Sorn stood at the foot of the dais, one hand extended. His calm had gone. What remained was older and colder.

“You think revelation is rescue?” he said. “If you break the naming, the gate will seek them without the academy’s control.”

“Then help me stop it.”

“I am stopping it.”

“By feeding it?”

“By choosing who can survive the feeding.”

The words carried farther than he meant them to.

A girl in white began to cry. “You said graduation would make us vessels of the northern light.”

“It will,” Sorn said. “If you are worthy.”

Neris felt the floor pull beneath her. The ceremony had begun without the names. The buried gate was no longer waiting for permission.

Sella stepped beside her.

Red-gold light appeared beneath Sella’s skin, running from her palm to her throat in a precise lattice. This time there was no storm to expose it. Every line was deliberate.

Odran swore under his breath. “You promised you would never use that in the open.”

“I promised I would never use it for them.”

Sella seized the golden force around Neris’s wrist. The lattice flared. Sorn’s command bent sideways, drawn into Sella’s arm. For a heartbeat, the rector’s face showed genuine fear.

The hall’s bells began to ring.

Not from the tower. From beneath the floor.

One by one, the eleven silver marks ignited. The candidates cried out as black lines spread from their throats toward their hearts.

Neris understood. The naming was not spoken aloud because the academy had already named them inside the gate.

She could unmake the marks.

But there were ten left, and the gate had begun taking them.

Sella’s lattice shuddered under Sorn’s command. Blood ran from her nose.

“Choose,” Sella said through clenched teeth. “The marks, or the lock.”

Beyond the foundation, the sleeper pressed its attention against Neris like a hand against a door.

OPEN FOR ME.

The Starving Court thundered above them through the academy’s wards.

The candidates were screaming now. The students were watching Neris. Sorn was watching the cracks in the floor.

Neris placed her palm against the nearest black line.

“I am done choosing between your hungers,” she said.

Then she unmade the name beneath the name.