The silence inside the headmaster's office at Greenhill High school was not the comfortable kind. Instead, it was a heavy silence, only broken by the precise tick of a grandfather clock. Niles sat on the leather chair, back straight, facing a man whose eyes held a mixture of disappointment and weary resignation.
“The official reason for your expulsion, Niles, is a malicious breach of the school’s network security,” Headmaster Smith said, leaning back to his luxurious chair, “But we both know that... is due to a mind that cannot tolerate being… bored.”
Niles didn't flinch, the reason for his expulsion was that he had rewritten the school’s entire bell schedule to play a complex Baroque fugue. He believed this was a piece of artwork, a logical proof of how vulnerable the school system was. He hadn't primarily meant for all the chaos he had caused - the seniors trapped in the cafeteria during their free period, the junior varsity soccer team showered during fifth-period chemistry, though a part of him had acknowledged this as an inevitable problem in his social experiment.
In Niles' eyes, he had simply seen a flawed system and couldn’t resist his impulse to demonstrate how to make it better.
“Your intellect is a rare gift, Niles,” Smith continued, sliding a crisp, cream-coloured envelope across the polished mahogany. “But in here, it has become a weapon, a nuisance. There is a school, built for students like you, with particular… proclivities. They have agreed to take you.”
The envelope felt heavy in Niles’s hands. The return address was embossed in a stark, elegant font: Blackwood Academy.
He got off the bus, The world here was completely different, it was where trees grew dense and twisted. Blackwood Academy looked less like a school but more like a collection of ancient manors that had decided to huddle together. Its spires were claws scraping a perpetually grey sky, and its windows were watchful, dark eyes.
For a few weeks, Niles settled into a rhythm. The classes were challenging, the students were intriguingly eccentric. He almost felt he belonged.
Yet, he noticed the things that didn't fit.
Blackwood itself was whispering to him.
It was a low, resonant hum, a frequency just below hearing. The portraits in the east wing didn't just watch Niles; their eyes seemed to track him. And the whispers… they were the clearest of all. They had led him, inevitably, to the heart of the courtyard, to a patch of worn stone etched with geometric scars.
The Weeping Stone.
He knelt and placed his palm on it. The stone was unnaturally warm, pulsing with a slow, steady rhythm. In that moment, a chilling, perfect clarity seized him.
This was no ordinary school. The whispers weren't a flaw in the building; they had called him here.
Greenhill High school had expelled him for being too smart, too intelligent. Yet, as he pulled his hand from the stone, Niles understood with cold, terrifying certainty that Blackwood Academy hadn’t taken him due to his incredible intelligence. It had sought him out because of it. 10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwnvzNaPpVm
And it had been waiting for him to finally listen. Niles was here now, the academy was done waiting.
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and then Add to home screen.