“Namu, what’s wrong?”

He couldn’t tell Lily. He could never tell them.

His world, his brain, was spiraling. His mind was breaking.

He couldn’t tell them this secret. He had decided this ages ago. He needed to protect Lily. He needed to keep them from looking further into it. Keep them from going into that place, from turning into something like him, keep them from dying.

But why? Why was that place, that world, here? Why was it in his room? Why was it taking over? When he had come upstairs to his room after lunch, with Lily following close behind, he had never expected to find it like this!

This was worse than his worst nightmare. What would happen to the students in the school?

He had to figure out how to stop it.

“Nothing,” Namu stammered, brushing off the dust-like sparkles appearing on his bed. He hoped that Lily didn’t see them or that they thought that they were just dust particles, not the strange magick no one knew except for him.

The lamp was bruising into an unnatural shade of purple. A small circle deforming itself until it began to grow, taking up the whole lamp.

Smiling nervously at Lily, Namu walked backward away from the lamp that was on the other side of the room while keeping his eyes on his friend’s coffee-colored eyes full of questions. His butt pushed against the wood of his desk. With one fake sneeze and a twitch, he brushed the papers on the desk all over the floor and then looked at them in false distress and horror.

Or maybe it wasn’t false, because he felt like his world would end soon if he didn’t stop what was happening and if he was caught.

When Lily went over and bent down to help him with the papers, Namu darted to the other side of the room and switched off the lamp.

Bad idea.

Now he was seeing more than just sparkles of the magick-haunting dust floating in the air around them. He was seeing the true horrors of the place he was trying to keep locked away. Right over the bed was a starlit night against his wall. A hellish night that was expanding, the magick unable to be contained to one place.

But Lily’s eyes must still be adjusting to the lack of light. They wouldn’t believe what they were seeing. Or would they? They were smart.

“What the heck, Namu! What did you do? What’s going on?” Lily demanded.

Namu could see Lily standing, abandoning their mission to collect the papers that lay across the now too-dark floor.

The night sky painted itself further across the wall over to his desk. Lily gasped, finally noticing it just as it touched the wood on the desk, burnishing it before turning that part into metal—a black metal that might have disappeared in the darkness if not for the sparkle of stars lighting its way above it.

“Don’t let it touch you!” Namu begged as Lily took a few steps away from the scene. The night started eating away at the desk before spitting it back out and transforming it entirely to that metal. The same metal that he had deep in his veins.

“What is it? What’s going on? I’ve never seen magick like this before. How can it change the physical elements of things like this? How are you doing this?”

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Those were the same questions that were once on Namu’s mind, but the answers to those questions were ones he knew they would not like. No one would. He needed to understand why this was happening. Why and how this magick had gotten loose when he had never had an issue like this before.

“Something I’m working on. I want to blow the teachers away when the exam comes,” Namu spouted out with a nervous laugh. Maybe too nervous.

He couldn’t see Lily’s face, but could hear their disbelief. “This is stupid, Namu. Can you even control it?”

This time he would not lie. Not if it could get Lily out of here. “Not always. Now is one of those times. So maybe you should leave.”

He made his way to the door.

“If you can’t control it, why are you messing around with something like this, Namu! You could destroy the whole school or severely hurt someone.”

That he knew.

“If it did that to the desk, what would happen if it touches someone?”

That Lily didn’t want to know. That was what he was trying to prevent.

“It’s okay. For now, it’s contained to this room, and it has touched me before, and see—I’m fine.” He was not. “I just don’t want you to get the magickal residue on you and spread it throughout the school. I can’t have anyone knowing about it until the exam.”

He was expecting Lily to move, to make their way to the door, but they didn’t. He could see the outline of them just staring in his direction as the night grew closer to Lily, making the blood in Namu’s veins constrict and the muscles in his jaw spasm. He needed to get Lily out. He needed them not to call his bluff. If they did, it might cost him their life.

“PLEASE, Lily! You may not know this, but this is important to me. I want to finally surprise my parents. My dad! I could…could change the industry! That’s right! I want to prove myself. This is my only chance! You have to understand!”

He knew Lily did. That was why he played this card. Lily was always seeking their parents’ approval or finding ways to surpass their father’s accomplishments. Lily might know where his true dreams lay, but with how different he had been acting this last year, maybe they would believe what he was doing was connected to something deeper.

Lily sighed. Namu waited a beat longer. If one more second went by and they didn’t move, he was going to grab Lily and drag them out. But right as the sky from hell was about to touch their still frozen form, they moved away from it and walked to the door that Namu opened for them to get out.

They stopped for a moment, holding it open and holding Namu’s panicked gaze. “I request to be in the room when you take the exam. I want to see this. I want it explained to me.”

Namu forced a swallow down his dry throat, then nodded once and went to close the door in Lily’s face, but they blocked it with their hand for a moment longer to stare deep into Namu’s eyes. “I’m only leaving so you can clean up this mess. My guess is that you will not do that unless I leave. I don’t want it hurting anyone in the school. Fix it now.”

Namu nodded and closed the door in their face the second Lily moved an inch. Then he turned the lock.

This was bad. Really bad. The dust was thicker now, threatening to turn his room into a night of fog that would make its way out and down the hall if he couldn’t stop this.

Namu ran to the dresser that was now a burning black metal. He hissed, his palms blistering as he shoved it aside and stared at the square outline on the wall. He whispered the incantation to open it and pushed his bloody hand to the spot where there should have been a handle. The square fell apart as it turned to sand. The sand tried to force its way under his knees as he bent down and looked inside.

It was worse than he had thought.

A few feet in, deep in a room that he could stand in, was the door. The petrified wooden door with the loose golden handle that shifted between black and gold every couple of seconds. It stood only half his height, begging to be fully opened to free whatever was behind it.

A world of hissing dreams and long-forgotten nightmares.

The door was ajar.

Someone had found this place. Someone had opened the door.

There was a bracelet propping the door open. He recognized it instantly. It made his insides grow cold.

Someone must have gone inside and left the bracelet there to avoid being trapped.

A sickening feeling wormed its way from his stomach to his throat. If he closed the door, that person would be lost forever. But if he didn’t, there was a chance they would all be doomed.

For the nightmarish night from the world beyond was leaking and seeping through the door, threatening to change everything in its path as it had changed him.

Forcing the bile back down his throat, he hit the door to slam it shut.

Trapping whoever it was inside.

Then he picked up the bracelet.

The bracelet that he knew.

Who had been sent in there? Whose death had he just guaranteed?