THE SILENCE BETWEEN LATIN VERSES

Blackthorn University did not rise from the earth so much as loom over it. Its spires pierced the fog like accusations, its stone corridors soaked in centuries of whispered ambition. Founded in 1649, Blackthorn prided itself on tradition, rigor, and an unspoken belief that mediocrity was a moral failure. The walls were lined with oil portraits of scholars whose eyes followed you as you passed, their painted gazes heavy with judgment. Students learned quickly that this was not a place to find yourself—it was a place to be reshaped. Knowledge here was not neutral; it was sharp, elitist, and alive. And like anything alive, it demanded something in return.

I arrived in autumn, when the ivy bled crimson down the library walls and the air smelled of damp books and dying leaves. My name is Elias Morven, scholarship student, first-generation academic, outsider by every unspoken metric. While others arrived in tailored coats and inherited confidence, I came with secondhand tweed and a hunger that felt almost shameful. I believed brilliance could protect me. I believed intellect was enough. Blackthorn would teach me otherwise.

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The invitation came handwritten, slipped beneath my dormitory door on the third week of term. Thick cream paper. Black ink. One sentence in Latin: Veritas amat silentium—Truth loves silence. Below it, a time and place. No signature. No explanation. I learned quickly that questions marked you as unworthy at Blackthorn, so I said nothing and went.

The seminar room was hidden behind the restricted stacks of the Old Library, a place most students never accessed. Candlelight replaced electricity, shadows crawling across vaulted ceilings etched with dead languages. Six students sat around a long oak table, each radiating the kind of confidence that came from being chosen repeatedly in life. At the head sat Professor Aldric Hale—mythologist, philosopher, rumored academic executioner. His reputation preceded him like a storm.

“This is not a class,” Hale said calmly, his voice smooth and lethal. “This is a privilege. You will read what others are forbidden to touch. You will ask questions that have ended careers. And if you fail me—Blackthorn will forget you ever existed.”

No one spoke.

That silence was our first vow.

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We called ourselves The Liminal Circle, though never aloud. We met twice a week, always after midnight. Our syllabus included untranslated manuscripts, banned philosophers, and marginalia written in blood-brown ink centuries ago. Knowledge ceased to be academic—it became ritualistic. We memorized texts not to understand them, but to become them.

Among us was Lyra Ashcombe, whose beauty felt architectural rather than delicate—sharp cheekbones, severe black hair, eyes like ink pooling on parchment. She quoted Greek as if it were her native tongue and moved through the world with an unsettling calm. There was Julian Frost, heir to an old publishing empire, brilliant and cruel in equal measure. And Miriam Locke, quiet, precise, who never spoke unless she was certain she would devastate the conversation.

I studied harder than I ever had. Slept less. Ate less. The world narrowed to candlelight, Latin verses, and the desperate need to belong. Blackthorn rewarded obsession. It punished balance.

And somewhere between translating heretical texts and debating the morality of forbidden knowledge, I fell in love with Lyra—not romantically, but intellectually, which was far more dangerous.

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Miriam disappeared in winter.

No announcement was made. Her dorm room was cleared within days. Her name vanished from seminar rosters. When asked, administrators offered polite confusion. “Perhaps she transferred,” they said. At Blackthorn, disappearance was administrative, not emotional.

But we knew better.

The night before she vanished, Miriam had challenged Professor Hale. She questioned the authorship of a manuscript we studied—suggested it wasn’t metaphorical, but instructional. That the rituals described weren’t philosophical allegory, but practice.

“You misunderstand danger,” Hale told her coldly. “Some truths are safer untested.”

The next week, her chair was empty.

Lyra’s hands trembled for the first time. Julian laughed too loudly. I felt something cold settle behind my ribs. Knowledge, I realized, had teeth.

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We found it by accident—or perhaps the manuscript wanted to be found.

Hidden behind a false shelf was a codex bound in something unmistakably organic. The text inside was written in shifting ink, letters that seemed to rearrange themselves when read aloud. It described a society within Blackthorn’s founding scholars—a secret order that believed intellect could transcend mortality if preserved correctly.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

They believed that by erasing an individual from historical record—memory, writing, acknowledgment—their intellectual essence could be absorbed by the collective. Knowledge gained through sacrifice. Immortality through anonymity.

Miriam hadn’t transferred.

She had been consumed.

Lyra closed the book with shaking hands. “We have to destroy this.”

Julian smiled. “Or finish what they started.”

Professor Hale entered then, as if summoned by our fear.

“You’ve always been my most promising student, Elias,” he said softly. “You understand what’s at stake.”

And I did.

At Blackthorn, brilliance survived. Everything else was negotiable.

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The final ritual required a willing subject.

Someone forgotten.

Someone erased.

The Circle turned inward like a collapsing star.

Julian volunteered immediately—too immediately. “Legacy matters,” he said. “Mine is secure.” He believed sacrifice would elevate him beyond consequence.

Lyra looked at me, eyes bright with terror and awe. “You could stop this,” she whispered. “Or you could belong.”

Belonging had been my hunger since the beginning. To be seen. To matter.

I thought of Miriam. Of her careful speech. Of how quietly she vanished.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

Silence swallowed the room.

Not Julian.

Me.

The outsider.

The expendable.

Hale studied me, then nodded. “An elegant solution.”

Lyra cried out, but it was too late.

________________________________________

They didn’t kill me.

They unwrote me.

My name was scratched from records. My essays removed from archives. Memories blurred. I felt myself thinning, dissolving into thought without flesh. Pain wasn’t sharp—it was diffuse, like being spread too thin across time.

But erasure, I learned, was imperfect.

I hid pieces of myself in margins, in footnotes, in half-remembered quotations. I embedded my voice into the manuscripts they worshipped. I became a ghost in the system that devoured me.

Blackthorn gained knowledge that night.

But it also gained a witness.

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Years later, students still walk Blackthorn’s halls, unaware of what the stones remember. Lyra teaches now, elegant and distant, eyes haunted. Professor Hale’s portrait hangs in the main hall, his legacy intact.

Sometimes, late at night, a student will pause mid-sentence while reading a Latin verse, struck by a sudden sadness they cannot explain. Sometimes, ink will bleed where it shouldn’t.

That is me.

Not forgotten.

Not silent.

Because truth may love silence—

But memory is stubborn.

And Blackthorn never truly lets go.