Autumn Blackwell

They told us it was for the greater good. That we were regulating the world to give it balance and serenity. That the power they had given us was always within us, just hidden because letting it free would leave the mortal world in chaos.

The Academia Arcanum Obscura sits somewhere between Oxford and oblivion. No map shows its true location. To get there, you don’t apply. You’re chosen, or rather, selected.

When they came for me, I was halfway through an espresso during my shift at a dead-end cafe in East London, my apron smelling like burnt milk and broken promises. The letter arrived after two ethereal-looking women ordered sugary lattes and placed a fifty in the tips jar.

I pried the money out in shock, wondering who they were. Then I saw the letter. The wax seal hissed when I touched it. Inside: an invitation with my name on it, an address I couldn’t find on Google maps, and a train ticket with no time stamped on it.

I packed nothing but books, two spare shirts and my journal. I left a sticky note on the fridge for my flatmate: Gone to become someone else. Don’t wait up. I didn’t know how true that would be.

The Academia buildings, constructed from obsidian and iron, have no windows or softness; they only carry the hum of magic beneath every floorboard. The halls smell of old parchment, red wax, and ancient stone. The uniforms are grey wool and silver thread. The students look like ghosts who dressed themselves in discipline and doubt.

Then there is the Obscura Council. They are gods masquerading as faculty. Cruel, beautiful, fearful gods that radiate power like dying stars. They don’t teach; they judge.

There are no written syllabi here. Magic isn’t taught, it’s awakened, but not all awaken the same way. Some students sleep for weeks and wake fluent in dead languages. Others scream blood through their pores until the sigils bloom on their skin. A few never awaken at all. They vanish in the middle of the night, their rooms sealed behind black glass. The rest of us pretend not to notice. The Council decides what power the world needs and which of us is best to wield it.

My name is Autumn Blackwell, and I was not born for this place. I came from cracked pavements and discount groceries. My parents died before I could resent them properly. I was raised by strangers and spit out by the system. I had nothing but wit, will, and a memory of a woman who once told me my words could bend the air if I let them.

At the Academia, I am bottom tier. A “worm,” as they call us. Low-blood, uninitiated, no legacy. The Obscura Council barely looks at me. Dean Carmichel referred to me once as “the stray” when he remembered my name at all.

Yet, I watched, and I listened. Most of all, I learned. Magic here is subtle, insidious, and political. Students don’t throw fireballs. They write persuasive headlines. They whisper sigils into legal documents and sway elections. They brew cowardice into water systems and watch as revolutions fail to gather voice. Every small spell changes something you might read about in the news and never realise. They call it soft manipulation. I call it coercion with good branding.

The Council guards the art of spell work jealously. Only those with “purity of purpose” are allowed to ascend beyond Level IV. I was stuck at Level II for seven months. Until the incident, until something broke… and I rewrote everything.

It started with Theodore Lysander…

Silver-eyed as if thunderstorms had opinions. Second-tier heir to the Morelli bloodline. Breathtaking in the way old poetry is beautiful, if you know how to read it. He was cruel in public, kind in private. He was smarter than everyone at the Academia, but he had a sadness in him. A pressure to be the best.

We were assigned to the same spell-crafting chamber for a collaborative exercise: destabilise a small corporate board without touching any member directly.

He was a Morelli. I was no one. The way he crossed his arms and muttered under his breath told me he was disgruntled about being paired with me. But when I started drawing sigils in the air, Theo stopped talking. His gaze sharpened.

“You learned that where?”

“I didn’t. I just… felt it.”

“Felt it? That’s forbidden syntax.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Good.” He smiled like we shared a secret. We didn’t, not yet, at least.

Within weeks, we were inseparable. We walked the halls like shadows with the same heartbeat. He taught me the sigil-forms none of the professors would show me. I showed him what it meant to create magic out of need, not legacy.

When he kissed me, it felt like biting into lightning. A raw, electric shock that sparked across my skin, leaving me breathless and buzzing long after his lips left mine. It was too good to be true. I knew everything at the Academia comes at a price, and I didn’t yet know what mine would be.

It was a bitterly cold Monday afternoon when they found my journal with all my notes. The unfiltered sigils, the spoken spells, the “unsanctioned” scripts I copied from whispers of stone and blood. It wasn’t that that got their attention. It was what I did with the spells I wasn’t meant to know.

The assignment Theo and I had was simple. We had been working on it for months, and it had finally come to exam time. Destabilise a corporate board subtly, invisibly. Implant a suggestion or alter a vote. Tip the balance in favour of the Council’s chosen entity.

I picked the wrong target, or rather, I picked too well. A private biotech firm called Luxallotile—the kind that manufactured anaesthetics no one could afford and owned patents on pain relief formulas for children. I knew what they did. I knew the kind of votes they were pushing through.

So, I didn’t just alter a signature. I collapsed the board. Every one of them suddenly quit. Very publicly and simultaneously. The news went global in minutes. Stocks crashed. Lawsuits erupted. The market spiralled. The public cheered. People finally saw behind the curtain.

The Council was furious. They knew it was me after they trashed my chamber looking for my journal. I was dragged before them not as a student, but as a criminal.

“You interfered with stabilised structures,” Dean Carmichel spat. “You exposed the network. You let the world see.”

“Good,” I said.

One of the Nine Council members stepped forward, her face masked in shadow.

“Do you understand what you’ve done?” She hissed. “Your ripple has become a tidal wave. Hospitals are closing. Pharmacies are bare. Families will die.”

I shook my head. “They were already dying. You were just helping them do it quietly.”

The silence that followed was dangerous.

“You are hereby sentenced to the Netherhold. Until the world forgets your name.”

The Netherhold is beneath the secret city of Noctidia, a short distance from the Academia. Few return, none come back whole. My cell smells of rusted iron and grief. The walls are carved with screaming glyphs, sigils that sap your will, your identity, your sense of time. Days passed, or was it weeks or hours? I forgot.

My magic dimmed out. My mind blurred, but I still had something to hold on to … My rage.

Then, one night, through the cell door carved in bone, he came. Theo. His eyes were like whispers of thunder. His clothes were torn. His face was bloodied. He’d been through a lot to get here.

“They lied,” he whispered, breaking the wards with a spell I didn’t recognise. “About everything, what they do, what they’re using us for. Everything.”

He pulled me up, barely breathing. “We have to go. Now.”

“Where?”

“To the Heart Vault. The real centre of the Academia. Where they keep the world tied together.”

I was so weak, but we ran. Through tunnels lined with whispering glyphs. Past the catacombs of students who never made it out. Finally, through a wall of living magic, we found it. The Heart Vault.

It was a spherical room suspended in air, lit by a floating lattice of runes. In its centre was the Core. The thing that granted all power in the world. A globe of raw spell-matter. Pulsing, breathing and alive.

Theo stared at it, voice hollow. “They’re using it to rewrite reality. Not just influence things. Not just to give mortals power. It’s controlling everything. They manipulate every conflict, every famine, every collapse. It’s all fed through this engine. They create suffering to justify their spell craft. Then they ‘fix’ it with small spells to stay needed.”

“They’re not preserving balance,” I said, stepping closer. “They’re manufacturing it. Like gods playing with puppets.”

Theo turned to me. “They’ve been doing it for centuries. Every student is a gear in the machine.”

I reached out. The Core pulsed, then… it spoke.

Not in sound, in knowing. I didn’t just feel the spell-matter. I merged with it. For a moment, I saw everything: the glyphs in the weather. The sigils in public policy. The runes buried beneath bank codes and medical reports. Entire populations tuned like instruments. Then I saw something else.

My name was written across the bones of the Core. I was not a student, not a prisoner, not even a vessel; I was the Keystone. The fail-safe. The one meant to unravel it all.

Theo stumbled back, eyes wide. “Autumn, your skin…”

I looked down. Light poured from my hands. It wasn’t golden or divine. It was ancient, black, silver, and infinite. The spell branding on my hands melted away. Every limit they placed on me suddenly dissolved. The Core had been waiting for me to come here, and now it was me.

“I can end this,” I said.

Theo nodded once. “Then do it.”

I raised my hands. The Vault shook. Every spell in the world, the entire system of magical governance, trembled. The Council burst into the chamber moments too late.

“Stop her!” one shouted.

“She doesn’t know what she’s doing!”

“She’ll break the Core; she’ll kill us all!”

I turned. “No, I’ll free us all.”

They raised their hands full of power, but it was too late. I spoke the unbinding words. The room shattered. The Core exploded into shadow and starlight, the world… stopped. Time itself fractured.

All at once, I felt a thousand timelines flicker. A thousand possible worlds spin into chaos. I saw cities vanish, and new worlds bloom. I saw lives saved and wars begun. I saw a version of me on fire. A version of me, crowned. Then, in the centre of all of it, something opened its eyes.

Not a person or a god. It was something older, something waiting, something hungry. It was me transformed into the Core, ready to change the wrongs and make them right. Ready to burn the Council to the ground and make the world a better place.