Villainous Instructor at the Academy
Chapter 201: Echoes of hollow

Chapter 201: Echoes of hollow

I stared at the tooth in Cassandra’s palm for a long time.

It wasn’t human. Too long. Too curved. But it wasn’t beast either. The texture reminded me of old ivory soaked in blood for centuries, with faint glyphs forming naturally along the enamel—sigils older than runes.

"You’re sure it wasn’t just a dream?" I asked.

Cassandra looked up, and for a moment, the shadows around her face didn’t match the lantern light. They curled against the flame.

"I don’t dream," she said softly. "I remember."

She slid the tooth back into her coat and took a step closer.

"I was in a hall made of roots. And the man with the broken crown was standing beside a throne made of mouths."

"Mouths," I repeated.

"They whispered my name," she said. "But not the one I go by here. They whispered the other one. The one I buried."

I didn’t press further.

Some truths shouldn’t be unearthed until you’re ready to bleed for them.

Later That Night

After she left, I sat alone at my desk, maps of ancient ley fractures scattered before me. One matched her description exactly—an old site deep in the Veyra Mangroves known only in fractured texts as Oathless Maw.

It was supposedly the grave of a forgotten god.

Or its tongue.

I traced the arcane resonance of the tooth again. It pulsed. Alive. Not cursed, not blessed—primordial. Like the land before it learned how to die.

Something was changing in Cassandra. And it wasn’t a Phobia. It was older than fear.

She wasn’t haunted.

She was becoming something.

Meanwhile, Felix had woken.

His eyes no longer held the glazed haze of a noble burden. He looked at me the way a man looks at an old chain and realizes he no longer hears it rattling.

"How do you feel?" I asked.

He flexed his hand. The veins glowed faintly.

"I feel like I was never meant to belong."

"That’s not a curse."

He nodded, then glanced at the window. "I dreamed of water," he said. "Black water. I could breathe in it. But something was waiting at the bottom."

"What did it want?"

He met my eyes.

"My name."

Deep in a chamber beneath the northern glacier, a choir of faceless priests knelt around a brazier of frozen blood. One raised its head and spoke in tongues that hadn’t been heard since the fall of the Akaran Dynasty.

"Three awakenings. One sacrifice. The Fourth Voice must not bloom."

Another priest opened a scroll. It was empty. Until it began writing itself.

A name appeared.

Written in red, as if slashed into the parchment.

Felix of No Name.

The priest wept.

Morning at the Academy

Breakfast was quieter than usual. Even Julien refrained from loud complaints. The others had sensed something had changed in Felix, even if they couldn’t name it.

Cassandra didn’t speak much. She kept fingering the inside of her coat, where the tooth now hung on a string. Mira gave her side-eyes every few minutes, but said nothing.

I watched them all, piecing together threads.

Each student—each of these misfits—was starting to act like a fulcrum of something much bigger.

A Severance.

A Name Devourer.

A Crownless King.

What kind of class was I really teaching?

That night, just before sleep took me, I felt a presence watching.

Not hostile. Not familiar.

Just... waiting.

When I looked at the rune mirror by my bed, there was a message carved into the condensation.

"Do not let her remember the name."

Below it, scratched into the wood in a different hand:

"Too late. She already has."

I had faced monsters before. The kind with scales, claws, and cursed steel in their bellies. I’d faced tyrants in the old wars, noble-born and divine-marked. But nothing prepared me for watching my student turn into a myth.

Cassandra stood before the old forest path, her shadow stretching farther than the sun allowed. The tooth around her neck pulsed like a heartbeat—hers, or the thing inside it, I couldn’t tell anymore.

We were miles from the academy, somewhere between the Dorne wetlands and the Veyra borderlands. Felix and Mira were with me, though I hadn’t asked them to come. They just showed up, as if instinct told them they needed to.

The trees here grew in circles. Bark peeled like old skin. No birds, no insects. Just wind that carried voices.

"She said this was the place," Mira muttered. "Are we sure following the girl with haunted jewelry into a cursed mangrove isn’t the worst idea we’ve had?"

"Absolutely," I replied. "But when has that stopped us?"

Felix didn’t speak. He was staring at the swamp water like it might whisper his name again.

We followed Cassandra.

The forest shifted after the third mile. Trees stopped making sense—roots floated in the air, and the mud glittered with flecks of silver. Then, we found the first altar.

It wasn’t built. It had grown—a fan of bone, moss, and something like feathers but far too long. The tooth in Cassandra’s hand pulled her toward it like a lodestone.

"I remember this," she whispered.

"How?" I asked.

"I don’t know. But it’s mine."

She pressed the tooth into the altar.

The swamp breathed.

Water rippled outward in concentric rings, and the world sank.

We fell through.

The Chamber Beneath

I hit solid stone. No splash. Just a sudden shift from open air to a cold obsidian floor etched with names.

Thousands of names.

Most were scratched out.

We were in a cavern—not natural, not built. Formed. Like the earth had bent inward and swallowed a thought it couldn’t bear to keep.

At the center stood a statue.

No eyes. No face. Just a jagged maw from chin to chest.

And a crown—broken—resting above.

Cassandra walked toward it without hesitation.

"Stop," I said. "This thing eats identity."

"That’s the point," she said, turning. "Don’t you see? I’m not afraid of forgetting who I am. I’m afraid of remembering."

And then she placed her hand on the statue.

The mouths on the wall began to open.

Suddenly I wasn’t standing—I was remembering things I never lived. I saw Cassandra at age five, hands red with blood that wasn’t hers, whispering to an empty space beneath her bed.

I saw a man with golden eyes teaching her to lie with her voice and kill with her silence.

I saw her bury a name, deeper than bones, and whisper a vow into the throat of something sleeping beneath the world.

She had never been just a student.

She was a vessel.

No—she was the seal.

And now it was cracking.

When I came to, she stood in front of us, eyes glowing with pale, sea-glass light. The tooth was gone. In its place was a scar down her collarbone, glowing faintly with runic characters I didn’t recognize.

"Is it done?" Felix asked.

Cassandra nodded. "The Maw has accepted my offering."

"And what did it take?"

She looked at me.

"My birth name. You won’t remember it. No one will. Not even me."

"What do you remember?" I asked.

She gave a faint smile.

"That the King of Mouths is awake. And he’s hungry."

A throne room made of shifting teeth.

A man—tall, robed in stitched flesh and silence—watched a map of Sūyara burning from the edges inward. One region after another turning black.

He touched a pin over Noctis Ardentis.

"Soon," he said. "My name will return to the tongues of men. And the child who sealed me will guide me back."

Behind him, the choir of faceless priests sang a single phrase:

"We are what the world forgets."

The walk back from the Maw felt longer than the descent. Not because of distance—but because of weight.

Cassandra didn’t speak. Neither did Felix. Mira kept throwing glances like she wanted to say something sarcastic, but couldn’t find the will to laugh at anything anymore.

I understood the silence. The kind that settled after a new truth was born into the world—a truth too large, too ancient, too... hungry to ignore.

We camped just before dusk. A clearing shaped like a circle, with trees standing too still—like guards watching a funeral.

I brewed tea. Old habit. It didn’t help.

"So," Mira finally said, "how long before your creepy rune senses tell you we’re all cursed?"

I stared into the fire. "Since we entered the forest."

"Great. Awesome. Ten out of ten vacation."

Felix shifted beside her. His shoulders twitched like something kept brushing against them. "I’ve been hearing things," he whispered. "Since we left the Maw."

Cassandra looked up. "Whispers?"

He nodded. "Voices in the trees. Saying things in a language I don’t understand. But one word keeps coming through."

He looked at me.

"Bloodbound."

I didn’t breathe. That word... it hadn’t been spoken aloud in a century.

Once, before I became Lucian Drelmont, I’d stumbled across a forbidden scroll buried in the Severance Armory vaults. A treaty, scrawled in ink and blood, between the Drelmont ancestors and the Hollow Kings—beings who lived beneath Sūyara’s crust, trading power for memory, name for dominion.

The pact was simple: when one bore the mark of Severance, they would never bow to the Hollow. If they did... they would be devoured from the inside.

"Bloodbound," the scroll read, "is the curse placed upon any heir who breaks the vow."

Felix wasn’t a Drelmont.

But he was close enough to carry the echo.

His family—House Dorne—was one of the last branches that had once served as vassals to Severance. Their blood carried the residue.

I turned to Cassandra. "What did you wake up?"

She looked at Felix. "Something old. Something hungry. But it’s not after me anymore."

Midnight

I sat alone by the dying fire.

Something moved just beyond the light. Not footsteps—absence. A hollowing of space, a silence too perfect.

I didn’t need to turn to know who it was.

"You followed us," I said.

The voice that replied was ragged, layered—like it was being dragged across stone.

"You left without permission."

Instructor Roderick Vaughn stepped into the firelight.

But it wasn’t him anymore.

His eyes were black pits, ringed with blood. His aura flared with a corruption I hadn’t sensed before—a subtle, elegant infection, like the kind you don’t notice until it has your heart.

"Lucian," he rasped. "You’ve led your students into the Hollow."

I stood. Slowly. "They followed me."

"And now they’re bound. All of them. The Maw marked them."

"What do you want?"

He smiled—a mouth too wide, too knowing.

"To warn you. Before the others come."

"Others?"

"Eclipsed Instructors. Bloodwoken. Every academy in Sūyara has sleepers."

He stepped closer.

"The gods we buried beneath this continent are stirring, Lucian. You taught your class how to fight monsters. But did you teach them how to fight history?"

When I woke, Vaughn was gone.

So was Cassandra.

She left behind the tooth.

But it was no longer bone.

It had changed—glassy, black, and humming with runes that pulsed in time with my own heartbeat.

I picked it up.

A voice echoed through my skull.

"Lucian Drelmont. We remember you. We remember the war you lost. Will you lose again?"

I closed my hand around the shard.

"I don’t lose twice."

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