Chapter 12: No Hope
Aiane Vox stood on stage with her head down. Her eyes looked empty, like someone had sucked her spirit out of them. Her hair was disheveled and her clothes in tater. The wounds on her legs were healed but what was left on her body were a lot of red brushes. They were all over her body and indicated she was beaten badly. Below the stage stood hundreds of students standing in rows with no expression on their faces; they stared at Aiane with dead eyes. At both sides of the stage stood fifteen teachers, who looked at Aiane with hungry eyes filled with hostility and ridicule.
It was evening, and the sun was already set. In the Ravenwood Magic Arts Academy, it was the time of night assembly. All the students were gathered in the school assembly hall. Standing below with their emotionless eyes, they stared at a student who attempted to escape.
The Ravenwood was a private boarding school located in Dark Wood Valley. On the surface, the school looked like any normal boarding school where parents would send their children to study, but this school was not that normal. In Ravenwood Magic Art school, students had to follow strict rules. They were assigned specific times to finish their tasks like what time to wake up in the morning, fixed time to take a bath, a limited amount of time to eat breakfast, no talking when outside of class and their room, to mandatory regular prayer in morning and evening at a specific time. If any student misses something or does something wrong, they will be punished heavily, sometimes even dragged into the hallway in front of everyone and beaten, not by a teacher but by students themselves.
When students enter Ravenwood after finishing their early studies, they will live here for the next five years of their lives. While studying here, the only way to connect to the outside world was through letters, which would be checked before sending outside, and parents were also rarely allowed to visit their children. The school was like a living hell, and the teacher's lack of empathy toward students and living things was like a cherry on top. The new students here were regularly brainwashed and threatened to follow the rules and everything they told them. In normal human eyes, Ravenwood Academy felt more like a cult that followed demons than a school. But all this was not known to parents or the outside world. This was all inside information, which never left the school premises.
Aiane was a single child of her single parent. Her mother died in an unknown accident when she was five years old. She finished her normal studies at seventeen years old, and her mother, a witch, also wanted to let her daughter study witchcraft, which led her father to send her to a Boarding School of Magic. Aiane's childhood was not very happy or filled with good memories loss of her mother at an early age left a deep hole in her heart, which caused her to develop a rebellious nature in the early year of her teenage years. She caused multiple problems for her father from time to time in the hope of receiving the attention and love she wanted, but that only hardened her father's mind to send her into Boarding school after early studies.
Aiane also had little interest in going to Magic boarding school because of the weird dreams she would have about magic at a younger age. But her world was turned upside down when she entered the school. It was not like what she had read in stories the strict rules and regulations, the student evaluation based on how brainwashed one was, and the quality of education. For the first two years, only magic theories were taught to children, which gave the school enough time to brainwash students before teaching them magic.
Aiane started making her escape plan after finishing her first year. She had heard many stories of students trying to escape school but never succeeding. But last year, she heard someone successfully escape, which gave her enough courage to make her escape plan. But Aiane was too naïve to think she could escape the eyes of the school staff. Riverwood school was surrounded by grassland and forest from all directions. Even if she could escape from school premises, she only had a few places where she could try to hide, but chances were likely negligible because Academy had those places monitored.
Standing on stage, Milan's head remained low. She did not have any thoughts in her head. She wanted to cry, but she couldn't. The fear she felt looking at these emotionless faces of students and teachers was enough for her to collapse. She stood in the center of the stage like a rabbit whose neck was caught by a dog.
"This student here" A teacher walked on stage and pointed at Aiane. Who stood on stage "Tried to run last week" he paused for a second,
"She thought she could escape from here," Aiane quivered when she heard the teacher's voice filled with scorn.
"Now, what she deserves for breaking the academy rules?" The teacher's voice became loud. Raising his head, he looked at the students standing in the hall and slowly moved around Aiane in circles.
"Punishment!"
"What? I did not hear" his voice sounded cold as ice as he glared at students standing down.
"Punishment! Punishment! Punishment!" loud voices resounded in the hall from faces filled with fears. Even though most of the students were brainwashed, the terror they had gone through was still inside their heads. All this caused a cold smile to appear on the teacher's face, which made him look like a devil from hell.
Aiane's body went cold as she heard the loud voices. She felt invisible faces in the air, hungry to eat her soul.
The teacher raised his hand and motioned to stop.
"Send her to the darkroom for two months and give her food once every two days, let her wash all the toilets every day with a toothbrush and let the students drag her to the dark room, let her become the role model for many upcoming students" his voice became colder more he talked.
The teacher gave his verdict. After saying that, he walked down the stage and saw the chaos rising. Half of the students who heard the last lines seemed to go crazy as they came running toward Aiane like dogs. Ten or so students climbed on stage and grabbed Aiane by her hair, others grabbed her hand, and some left behind grabbed her legs and started to drag her down the stage toward the hall.
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" Aiane yelled at the top of her lungs. She twisted her body and tried to break free from the shackles. She just wanted to escape, escape from this reality, escape from this world, but her howled had no effect on the students. She screamed until there was no longer any voice coming out of her mouth.
"Crack! Crack! Crack!" slowly, cracks appeared in the world, and it started to break like glasses. The shattered glass pieces fell on students and teachers, removing them from reality. The entire world shattered, leaving Aiane's frail body lying on a small piece of a shard of reality. Tears fell from her eyes as she cried loudly.
"Aaaaaaa...." Her cries cause caused the last shard to break, and everything in the world went dark.
A thin and frail-looking girl sat in the corner of a dark room, sobbing silently. There was not even a ray of light in the room. The room was completely dark. The room represented her current life, which was the same without a ray of hope. She had a lot of suicidal thoughts every minute, but school teachers had taken that possibility into their minds and did not leave any pointy, sharp object in the room. There was no bed or anything in the room for her to sleep on. Just a floor made from bricks and a dirty toilet in another room.
From time to time few rats that looked big as cats could be seen walking around the room, and they walked around Aiane in the hope of biting her. On the floor nearby Aiane's feet was a small d20 Die with odd numbers engraved. The Die glowed with a mysterious red light. If any mouse came in the vicinity of a few meters, it exploded with blood and gore before completely dissolving into the water and being absorbed by the floor.
This Die was the same Die Aiane picked up at the last minute while hiding; unconsciously, she swallowed the Die before she fainted. Aiane was able to retrieve it from the toilet later when she was sent to the darkroom using some nasty means, which she did not want to remember. The Die was mysterious. When Aiane looked at it, she found from time to time that the red numbers written on it in the weird language would twist and wriggle like worms, and except for killing the mice who came near the Die, they did nothing. She found the killing mouses and number wriggling part extremely mysterious, but except that she could not figure out anything, so she left it on the ground.
Aiane had already spent one month in the darkroom, at starting she felt afraid of everything. She would sit in a dark corner and sob silently every day. What even scared her the most was the bugs and mouses trying to bite her, but with the safety provided by the Die, she felt somewhat safe. After a month, her personality had gone through a whole new change. Now, she did not fear the darkness anymore, but she had become much more timid and quiet. The incident on stage left a deep mark on her mind, which caused her to have the same horrible dream every night, making her even scared to fall asleep.
Note: - The time difference between this character story and the rest is 2-3 months.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
SpiritOfDreams
SpiritOfDreams I hope you enjoyed it.
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