Page 103 of Shadowed Whispers

None of us know why.

As I push open the heavy door to my office, the sight that greets me causes the taut strings of tension in my chest to loosen and then tighten all over again. Frankie is here, standing by the window, her silhouette framed by the gray light filtering through the pane. She turns as the door creaks, and her face pulls at something deep within me.

My firefly.

“Hey, Bishop,” she says, her voice a gentle interruption to the unrequited feelings brewing deep inside me. She offers a small, tentative smile, but her eyes are full of excitement over the cipher. She adores puzzles.

She just has no idea she’s working on deciphering ancient texts about shadow shifters we have been trying to decode for centuries. She has no clue that she’s helping our kind live to see another day.

“Frankie,” I reply, my voice steadier than I feel. I close the door behind me with a soft click, the finality of the sound echoing in the quiet room. Taking a moment to observe her, I notice the way the light dances in her eyes and the slight tension in her shoulders as if she’s bracing against the weight of her discoveries. She’s an enigma, but she’s so blatantly transparent to me in this moment, a paradox that both confounds and attracts me.

I walk past her to my desk, feeling the intensity of her gaze as it follows every step I take. “Did you find anything new?” I ask, trying to anchor myself to the reality of our work, anything to distract me from the way my heart skips when she’s near.

She nods, approaching the desk with a stack of papers. Her movement is graceful, almost careful, as if she’s walking through a minefield of data and theories. “A few patterns I think we missed before. Here.” She hands them to me, her fingers brushing mine, sending a jolt of electricity through me. The touch is brief but potent, a fleeting connection that seems to draw us closer than mere physical proximity. I almost pull back, but I don’t. Instead, I focus on the papers, on the ancient symbols and coded lines.

As I look over her notes, I’m acutely aware of her watching me, her analytical mind likely running through scenarios, but all I can think about is how much she has come to mean to me. It’s a terrifying thing, to feel so deeply about someone who is still, in many ways, a mystery. Frankie, with her strength and vulnerability, her brilliance and hidden scars, is a mosaic of contradictions and truths.

“You’re brilliant, you know that?” I say without looking up, my voice laced with an admiration I no longer bother to hide. She chuckles softly, a sound that stirs warmth in my chest, a contrast to the cool academic air that surrounds us.

“I just see things differently, I guess,” she replies, her modesty as genuine as everything else about her. That’s just it. She sees the world differently, sees through the facades and masks, but she doesn’t see how she’s transformed my world and become the axis on which it turns. Her resilience and determination challenge me to be more than I thought I could be.

Once again, a trickle of fear worms its way into my chest. What if she runs when she realizes what surrounds her? It’s one of the reasons I didn’t push her to see.

“We should probably get started,” she suggests, pulling a chair up next to me. As she settles in, I catch her scent—something floral mixed with the crispness of autumn air. It’s grounding and disarming all at once. I don’t want the semester to end, and yet we only have a week left in the semester. Not enough time.

We lean over the documents, our heads close, our shoulders occasionally brushing. Each touch is a spark, each glance a story. I want to tell her everything, how she’s changed me, but the words lodge in my throat, unspoken because now isn’t the time for such revelations. Now, we have a puzzle to solve.

The hour slips by as we delve into the cipher, decoding, theorizing, and arguing softly over meanings and interpretations. The world narrows down to this room, the two of us cocooned in our quest for answers. Beneath the surface of our focus, though, there’s an undercurrent of something more, a connection that weaves through every look and word.

I know I should keep my feelings locked away, keep the professional distance that my role demands, but with Frankie here, so close and integral to every part of this life I’m navigating, it’s becoming the hardest thing I’ve ever done. As our time fades, I realize that my own secrets—my feelings for her—are becoming harder to guard.

I swallow them down.

I vow not to touch her until she knows.

“Wait,” she says almost too quietly for me to hear, then louder, she adds, “I have it.”

Frankie’s hand hovers above the paper, her fingers trembling ever so slightly as if the very act of touching the symbols could burn her.

“Wait,” she whispers again, her voice steadier now, but layered with a tremor of something unspoken. She straightens the document, her eyes scanning the lines until they pause. Her breath catches. I watch her closely, the subtle shift in her demeanor like a cloud passing over the sun.

“I have it,” she declares, but the triumph that should lace her words is absent. Instead, there’s a hint of dread, a flicker of fear that she quickly masks behind a clinical expression.

“What is it?” I ask, leaning closer. The air between us crackles, thick with the weight of impending revelations.

She points to a sigil, its lines harsh and angular, depicting a creature with eyes that are unmistakably red. “This,” she says quietly, “is ancient, older than any text we’ve studied before.”

I study the sigil, recognizing the depiction of a beast from the lore of our kind—a creature of so much power and ferocity, that it was said to be the guardian of the shadow realm, its eyes capable of piercing through the veil that separates our worlds. The tales are old, often dismissed as myths even among our kind, but seeing it here, detailed with such precision, sends a chill down my spine.

“It’s Eredar,” I murmur, the name tasting like dust on my tongue, a relic of stories my mother whispered to me as warnings. The dim light of the room casts long shadows that seem to flicker at the mention of the name, as if stirred by the power it holds.

Frankie doesn’t respond immediately. She just nods, her focus still on the sigil. I watch her, noting the pallor of her skin and the way her hands now lie flat against the desk, pressing down as if to steady herself against the room’s swirling energies. Her fingers tremble slightly, betraying the calm she attempts to project.

“This beast,” she starts, her voice faltering for a moment as she gathers her thoughts. “It says it’s linked to shadows. To their protection?” Her eyes are wide, reflecting the flicker of the overhead lights.

“Yes,” I confirm, my voice a strained whisper. “It was believed to be a protector, a sentinel, until it turned on the shifters. No one knows why, but why is it in this text?” My voice trails off, the implication hanging between us like a thick fog that muddles thoughts and cloaks the dark corners of possibility.

That’s it, firefly, keep going.

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