The old, south-facing fencing salle was a perfect place of retreat for Alice. Most students at Blackwood Academy would avoid it, but Niles knew to look for Alice there. The air was thick with the scent of old wood, sweat, and metal polish. Through the wire-mesh of the viewing window, he watched her.
The girl inside, was the same Alice from the library—the one with the fierce, intelligent eyes and the steady, if shaking, flashlight. However here, she moved with a liquid grace, her body a taut spring, her foil an extension of her will. Advance, lunge, parry, riposte. The moves were crisp, efficient, and brutally beautiful. She was practicing against her own reflection in a tarnished mirror, but she fought as if her life depended on it.
Niles pushed the door open, entering the salle. The fencer didn't startle and continued her practice. She completed her lunge, held the pose for a breath, and then lowered her foil, turning to face him. Her expression was neither hesitant nor wary, but appraising.
“Niles,” she called him calmly.
“Your form is impeccable,” he stated, leaning against the doorframe. “Biomechanical precision. A margin of error in your footwork of less than two inches.”
Alice almost smiled, “Is this your way of saying I'm good?”
“It’s my way of stating a fact. Mastery.”
She gave a small, acknowledging nod, then began to wipe down her foil with a cloth. “Did you hear it again last night? The whisper?”
“I did and the whisper is constant,” Niles confirmed, remembering the incident occurred last night.
“You know, you are not the only one who can hear the whisper,” Alice finished wiping her foil. ”I also hear the whisper, and it's gotten louder since you arrived.”
Niles paused and he met Alice's gaze.
“Maybe you are the key it was waiting for,” Alice smiled, she no longer talked just about the whisper, but the very nature of the school.
She slid her foil back into her gear bag, the simple action at the end of her sentence. With a final, shared look—an unspoken agreement that they were now collaborators in this mystery—she walked towards the door.
“Be cleverly quiet, Niles,” she said before leaving the salle.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡI0Tgxucmw2
Over the next few days, Niles observed more than just her training. He saw the subtle aggressions she endured: an “accidental” push in the hallway to send her books and notes scattering on the ground; the seat her “friends” saved for her during lunch was the nearest to the rubbish bin; the way a senior prefect with a cruel smile would call out in a mockingly formal tone, “En garde, Mademoiselle Solace!” as she passed by.
In Niles’ mind, he saw a flawed system, under unnecessary strain. His elegant, systematic solution was not out of chivalry, but his practical response.
He didn’t confront the bullies, and he couldn’t, unless he wanted bruises all over his face. Instead, he anonymously forwarded a curated list of the prefect’s less-than-stellar exam results to the entire school. Later, Alice’s “friends” had found their essay submissions corrupted by a bizarre code error that specifically targeted plagiarised content. Now they were too busy panicking about their grades to bother anyone.
The bullying didn't stop. It stuttered and it lost its confidence.
A few days later, Alice found him sitting on a stone bench in the courtyard after class, his finger tracing the warm, geometric scars on The Weeping Stone.
She sat down beside him, the silence was comfortable between them.
“Thank you,” she smiled, not looking at him.
Niles didn't insult her intelligence by pretending ignorance. “It was inefficient. It was degrading both of our operational capacity.”
She grinned. “You’re different.”
“So I’ve been told.” He paused, his finger still on the warm stone. “This school… the anomalies are interconnected. The whisper, the stone, the portraits.”
Alice followed his gaze to the dark, watching windows of the east wing. “You’ve seen the eyes that tracked you.”
“It’s hard not to if he continues keeping his stares on me.”
“The man in the portrait,” Alice spoke softly. “He was once a principal of this school. Rumour says that his soul is still trapped inside the portrait.”
Niles felt a thrill that was part dread, part intellectual rapture. “Is that in the official school history?”
Alice let out a short laugh. “There is no official school history. The library has nothing. It’s like the school just appeared one day. You won't find the answers in a book, Niles. Not in any they’ll let you check out.”
Niles logged the anomaly in his mind: Lack of historical data. Possible explanation: intentional obfuscation.
“And the stones?” he asked, tapping the ground.
Alice’s face grew more serious. “No one talks about that. I know a boy, his name's Leon Collingwood. He may know more... but he gets nervous if you ask too many questions about the foundations. He says some traditions are best left unexamined.”
She looked directly at Niles, and he saw the same sharp intuition that had warned him in the library. “They brought you here for a reason. They don’t usually take transfers.”
She stood up, the moment of confidence solidifying into a new, steady resolve between them.
“Be careful where you look,” she said, a genuine partner now in her warning. “Not all the prefects just make fun of people. And not all the teachers are just teaching.”
Alice walked away, leaving Niles alone on the bench. The stone beneath him felt hotter than ever, as if their conversation had stirred something deep below.
The puzzle of Blackwood Academy, a puzzle he was no longer solving alone, had just begun its next, more dangerous phase.
ns216.73.216.13da2
and then Add to home screen.