A sharp laugh disturbed the quiet tennis courts. Tiffany straddled Eydis, pinning her wrists to the blue concrete. Sickly violet sparks danced in Tiffany’s eyes, sweat beaded along her brow. Hungry mist coiled around them both.

  Eydis stopped laughing, licked her split lip, and smiled. She didn’t fight back, struggle, or beg like Jillian.

  “You crazy bitch." Tiffany squeezed harder, nails digging into Eydis's wrists. “What’s so damn funny?”

  Eydis exhaled the way Tiffany's father did when he tasted a fine vintage. “This whole ordeal… it brings back memories. Thrilling ones.”

  That shook Tiffany. Is this… a screw-up?

  Jillian had begged. Amanda had screamed. Eydis looked entertained.

  “You! You’re a freak,” she hissed.

  “You don’t understand power at all, do you?” Eydis replied, voice even while the mist pinched her throat. “…Let alone the whispers of darkness.”

  The mist squeezed just enough to make her gasp, but she was still smiling.

  “You know jack shit!” Tiffany growled, though uncertainty had already sprouted inside her. “Nothing about my power, or who I am!”

  The fog’s grip loosened a bit as their connection cracked.

  “Na?ve girl. You call it power. It calls you dinner," Eydis purred.

  Tiffany caught the look in those amber eyes. Mockery, maybe pity. Pity made her furious.

  How dare she?

  “And when it’s over…” Eydis’s words wound around Tiffany’s thoughts like thorny vines, tightening, tightening, until her mind bled. “… there will be nothing left of you.”

  “Shut UP!” Tiffany screamed. The mist trembled, thin in places.

  Don’t listen! the smoke howled. Don’t listen! Lies!

  A lie. Yes. Has to be.

  Or is the smoke lying?

  Or am I lying?

  The thought spread like poison through her mind. The mist tried to speak, to seduce, to convince her again. Heart pounding, she heard only one question:

  Is this mind even mine anymore?

  Eydis watched her. “What good is power when you’re too dead to use it?”

  The mist shrieked louder. Tiffany’s nails carved lines in her scalp.

  "It’s a leech. It sucks on every fear, every twisted desire,” Eydis pressed on.

  Tiffany tried to shut it out, but the crack kept widening, widening—

  "Admit it. You’re not calling the shots anymore and you know it,” Eydis added.

  —Until it shattered.

  The mist’s seductive voice soured into a feral roar, a voice Tiffany had never heard until now.

  “Doubt makes you weak! Lies. Nothing but lies! This is your power, Tiffany! Seize it!”

  The words felt like sticky spiderwebs, patching her fractured mind together—ugly and sloppy and broken, but enough. She threw back her head and laughed.

  “Mine… You are right.”

  Eydis looked amused, even at this stage.

  Tiffany scoffed. "God, you’re so full of it. You actually thought I’d buy that? All talk, just like always. Almost got me.” She leaned in closer. “But I have the power while you’re just a pest. A fly.”

  She threw a wild hit, but Eydis stopped her, fingers locking hard around her wrist.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Why is she so strong?

  The mist crashed into Eydis next, only to rebound off an invisible violet wall. On impact, a bright flash burst outward, hurling Tiffany across the court.

  She smacked the ground, head spinning. In the blur, she saw Eydis inside a glowing bubble. The shadows battered it again and again, but nothing happened.

  Impossible.

  Eydis’s lips curved into a cruel smile.

  “Took you long enough to speak.”

  She slapped her palms to the concrete and chanted softly. Tiffany could make out only a jumble of foreign words and some numbers.

  The earth trembled.

  A complex pattern of green light came alive beneath them. Strange symbols glowed faintly, then blazed bright. Something unseen clicked into gear.

  Tiffany glanced down and spotted the faint chalk circle. A sigil. Ice ran through her veins.

  It was a setup from the start.

  Eydis wasn’t stalling, wasn’t waiting for Astra or anyone else to help her. She targeted Tiffany, like a spider waiting for the fly to come to her. And just like that, Tiffany realised…

  She was the fly.

  No!

  Seeing the mist thrashed desperately, Tiffany finally understood. It felt what she felt.

  The same, inescapable, fear.

  Had she been playing with something she didn’t understand?

  Eydis’s irises burned like molten gold. “You actually think this power is yours, Tiffany?” She let the silence stretch just to tease. “It never was.”

  “W-What do you mean…?”

  Eydis smirked, remembering the day she first realised magic existed here. The one-Gift-per-person rule still applied, but there were ways to tap into the world’s magical languages. Her body might not have the raw power of the Gifted students here—she wasn’t born with their innate arcane structure—but that didn’t matter. She had other means.

  She could use an external source of power.

  Sigils.

  Endless potential. Unlike spells that tapped personal energy, runes pulled from the environment, bypassing limits. But they required precise commands.

  A fusion of magic’s tongue and math’s logic. Bend reality if you find the right lever.

  Math was constant across worlds. That left the arcane dialect as the only variable. And so, she had rewritten it. Weeks of translation, refining, testing, until the sigils listened.

  Her first success had been a simple protection sigil, helping her to enhance her physical strength. But the strongest sigil wasn’t one of mana, nor protection, nor destruction.

  A binding sigil. That was power.

  Few mastered it. Even fewer summoned primal evils. No one bound them all at once.

  But Eydis wasn’t most people, now, was she?

  Her eyes snapped back to the smoke, writhing inside the half-formed circle. The trap was threaded through every line of earth beneath them, but it wasn’t finished.

  It needed a name.

  Eydis’s voice dipped low. “You’ve been quite naughty, haven’t you?”

  "W-What are you talking about?" Tiffany whimpered.

  Eydis’s golden eyes were locked on the seething dark. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  Her fingers cut elegant strokes through the air, finalising the sigil.

  “Rise,” she ordered. “And bind yourself to me. Remember your master. Thy name I call forth. Show yourself!”

  The viscous tension saturated the ether. The sigil throbbed with a baleful jade light as Eydis voiced a single final word.

  A name.

  "Envy!"

  The violet, misty shadows collapsed into itself, shaping, refining, until obsidian scales gleamed, luminous violet light slithering along its long form.

  Elegant, sinuous, precisely as she had pictured. Her first Sin.

  The serpent stirred groggily, then its gold eyes met hers. Memories flooded back, carving away at the primal fog of hunger.

  “Y-Your Majesty? The Queen of Shadows?"

  “Forgotten me so soon?”

  The serpent writhed pathetically at her feet. "Forgive me, Your Majesty! I couldn't remember you. Our binding broke when we… Without guidance, without recall, I… I only knew hunger.”

  "Are you sure?" Eydis's grabbed its throat. "Do you recognise me now? Slow suffocation... you did seem to enjoy it so much before."

  The fear in the serpent’s eyes drained away, replaced by a warped devotion. It slipped free, coiling around Eydis’s arm.

  “It is you! But your grip’s a bit soft.”

  The nerve almost got it crushed, but Tiffany interrupted.

  "Hunger?!" she shrieked. "I'm your MASTER!"

  "Master?" The serpent’s forked tongue flickered in contempt. “You are a puppet tangled in your own strings. Bow before Her Majesty, insect, or I’ll end your babble.”

  Eydis gripped its neck. “Touching, Envy. Loyalty looks good on you, considering you were strangling me a moment ago.”

  “On waking, Your Majesty, everything felt... strange. Blank and starving, I latched onto her—sour, jealous, brimming with want. Easy meal.”

  “Liar!” Tiffany pounded the ground until her hand bled. “You chose me because I am special!”

  “You were special, Tiffany, but only as food.” Eydis indicated the glowing sigil. “I prepared for two possibilities. Envy or Pride. Though I always suspected it was Envy. Pride is… well, Pride.”

  Tiffany stiffened.

  “But the moment Envy opened its mouth,” she said, “there was no room for doubt.”

  Envy twitched in embarrassment.

  “Well, this has been entertaining. But we seem to have gotten sidetracked.” Eydis lifted her hand. The last of the stolen power in Tiffany’s mind flowed back to its rightful owner.

  Violet sparks flared faintly at her fingertips. Power, finally hers again.

  Tiffany clawed at Eydis’s leg. “No! It is mine! Give it back! I need it!”

  “Entrust my power to you? Might as well give a toddler the launch codes.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m learning. Is the metaphor not apt?” Eydis kicked free and walked off. Mentally, she commanded the snake to scrub the runes.

  “Farewell, Tiffany. May you find peace in the emptiness you’ve created.”

  Invisible now, the serpent whispered, “A masterpiece of a sigil, as always. I almost pity whatever is trapped inside.”

  Eydis’s lips twitched.

  “This vessel, though,” Envy continued, “its aura does not match yours.”

  “Because it isn’t mine.”

  Retrieving all of her power would be… difficult.

  “If you’re here, Envy, then the rest of my power is scattered across this world? We have work to do. And if we fail…”

  Envy hissed, “Then the Pandora’s Box will crack open… and what follows—”

  “—would be catastrophic,” she finished.

  The night swallowed her footsteps whole.