The Darker the Flames Burn

Everyone had guessed that Cordelia killed her best friend last summer, but no one in the academy knew that she was a monster walking among them. Our world is not real. The real world is a realm filled with monsters—creatures of aberration that embodied the evil of the world. They preyed on humans and consumed their fear, drinking in their weakness to feed themselves. They trekked in woods and villages, seas and mountains, and as the civilization grew, cities and empires. Their existence was more primal than any creature alive on earth today, but they were also incredibly cunning and intelligent. They were behind every rise and fall of kingdoms, every war humans waged against one another. And so a new order was formed by the descendants of the ancient knights, sworn to eradicate these new creatures and keeping humans safe from them. The order is named Knights of Roland. Sometimes they were also called paladin. When Cordelia entered the academy, her recruiter told her that she would be trained as a future Knight with a sacred duty to protect humanity. Four years later, her best friend was dead and the only other person she had left in the world had also left her. She hated herself. She hated having to fight against the beast inside herself every second she was awake. She was a monster walking among hunters unnoticed. But perhaps she wasn't the only one. Warning: extreme violence, self harm