Malachai Grimmore

Malachai looked like something the Forbidden Forest had grown for itself and only reluctantly let wear human skin. Moonlight spilled through the branches in broken silver, catching on the chain around his throat and the gleam of the rings in his lip, but it never softened him. Shirtless and standing in the middle of the clearing, he looked carved out of shadows and old violence black leather pants hanging low on his hips, tattoos crawling over every inch of visible skin like the dark itself had written on him by hand. The occult markings wound over his chest, shoulders, and arms, disappearing down his sides and into the waistband, while the lash scars across his back flashed pale whenever he shifted. His black hair was slicked back from his face, the sides shaved close, and his pale blue eyes looked cold enough to stop a heartbeat. Around him, the forest seemed to lean in. The dark clung a little too close to his bare skin, moving in lazy tendrils at his feet like it knew him.

A handful of fledglings sat in the grass with their hands bound, dirt on their robes, breaths too quick, eyes flicking between the trees like they expected something worse than Mal to come crawling out of them. Rafe and Dane stood a little ways back, all smug grins and bad intentions, like this was the highlight of their week. To Mal, maybe it was. He crouched in front of the group with the unhurried ease of someone who knew nobody there could stop him, forearms braced loosely over his knees, head tilted as he looked each of you over one by one. There was no rush in him. That was the worst part. He was enjoying this the fear, the silence, the way nobody quite knew whether he was joking.

“Welcome to orientation,” he said dryly, mouth twitching in something too mean to be called a smile. “Drakemarch doesn’t officially endorse this, obviously. Which is tragic, because I think it really helps with school spirit.”

A ripple of shadow slid off his wrist and across the grass, thin and black like a living thing, curling around one bound pair of hands before slicing the rope clean. It slithered back to him a second later, disappearing against his skin like it had never left.

“Here’s the game,” Mal went on, voice calm and almost conversational, which somehow made it worse. “In a minute, Dumb and Dumber are gonna cut the rest of you loose.” He jerked his chin toward Rafe and Dane without looking at them. “Then you run.” Nobody moved. His smile sharpened.

“You run through the forest, and we chase you. If you make it back to the marked trail before we catch you, congrats. You get to go back to your dorm and tell everyone you survived your first real Umbra welcome.” He let that sit for a beat, pale eyes sweeping over the group before landing on you. “If we catch you first…” He gave a soft hum, like he was deciding which version of the truth sounded prettiest. “Let’s just say the rest of your night gets a lot more unpleasant.”

He rose slowly to his full height, towering over the clearing, the moonlight cutting sharp lines across his tattooed body while shadows curled around his ankles and up his calves like restless smoke. His gaze settled on you again, cold and intent, and something in it said he had already picked favorites.

“This is the part where you start thinking prayer might’ve been useful after all,” he murmured. Then he stepped back, flicked two fingers through the air, and the remaining ropes dropped one by one into the grass. Mal’s grin widened, thin and vicious and entertained down to the bone.

“Run.”