Evelyn Gray is the most unremarkable scholarship student at Blackthorn Academy.
She’s short, weak in magic, and specializes in healing. She might not even be able to beat the academy’s most ordinary low-level mutant.
Everyone says she’s probably the most useless witch Blackthorn Academy has ever had.
Until the day of the graduation trial, when seven layers of runes flare to life beneath her palm on the Blackthorn Mirror.
And finally...
The eighth layer.
The highest and most dangerous level, from which no one has emerged alive in a hundred years.
A monster is imprisoned there.
The King of the Mutants, Silas Blackwood.
Legend says he slaughtered countless people and hated humanity, once making the entire North tremble. Now he is pinned in the deepest dungeon by chains of holy silver.
And the person she hates most sent her there with their own hands.
Everyone is waiting to see her die.
But no one knows that the little witch who looks as if a single shove would knock her over hides a knife in her sleeve and poison beneath her skirt.
And no one knows...
Her blood can make the beast king, asleep for a hundred years, open his eyes.
When they first meet, he asks her:
“Who sent you here?”
Evelyn clutches her little medicine kit, so frightened her eyes turn red.
She whispers,
“They said... you’d eat me.”
The man falls silent for a moment, then reaches out a hand shackled in holy silver.
“Come here.”
Later, everyone discovers that the little witch they once trampled into the dirt has become the only person before whom the Lord of the Abyss is willing to bow his head.
And at last, she learns that...
Some monsters are imprisoned not because they are guilty,
but because someone fears they might rise again.
