Lucavion’s voice faded into the air, soft as dust falling from old bookshelves.
"What a strange woman... yet sohow familiar..."
The words hung, suspended. More for himself than anyone else.
Then—
[Indeed... she feels familiar...]
Vitaliara’s voice shimred in the air beside him, low and steady. She hadn’t moved from his shoulder, but her eyes—those glimring slits of verdant gold—were fixed on the corridor where Elowyn had disappeared.
Lucavion didn’t respond right away. He simply tilted his head the other way, thoughtful.
’Well, I don’t make mistakes when it cos to things like this,’ he thought, more defensive than he liked.
[Really? Your gut does never lapse or what?]
He blinked once.
’....’
No answer. Because that smirk, that certainty he wore like silk—it didn’t feel quite so smooth now. The sensation was faint, but distinct. Like catching a glimpse of sothing in a mirror that shouldn’t be there. Too fast. Too precise. Too heavy.
Vitaliara’s tail flicked once, then coiled again gently behind his neck. Her tone softened—still curious, but laced with sothing more serious beneath.
[But I couldn’t see through her.]
Lucavion’s gaze flicked toward her, brows twitching just slightly.
Lucavion’s brow furrowed—not sharply, but with the slow weight of thoughts pressing against the edge of certainty.
He didn’t need Vitaliara’s senses to tell him what he already knew.
He’d felt it too.
That mont in the garden... when he looked at her—tried to look through her—sothing pushed back. Not with hostility, but with... depth. Like trying to peer through a lake that mirrored the sky too perfectly. There was reflection. Stillness. Precision.
But no bottom.
No origin.
He exhaled, quietly.
"...You’re right," he murmured, the words for Vitaliara, but more for himself. "I couldn’t see her either."
Not her mana. Not her center. Nothing to track. Nothing to grasp.
And it wasn’t the first ti.
Rare, yes. But he’d felt it before—once during a desert raid, another ti in the northern courts. People whose presence was curiously absent. There were always reasons. Either—
They were absurdly powerful, their Vitality wrapped so tightly it didn’t leak.
Or—
They bore a condition, a shattered core, a fractured binding that muddied all sensory readings.
Or...
They had sothing.
An artifact. A relic old enough or precise enough to bury the truth of them under layers of silence.
He ran a hand through his hair, gaze distant now.
’Is it her?’
He didn’t an it as a dramatic question. Just a possibility that had lived at the back of his thoughts for weeks now—quiet, patient, waiting for the world to catch up.
Elara.
He had already considered it.
The na had haunted the narrative of Shattered Innocence, that bastard of a novel he’d been dumped into—its plot as fragnted as its title, full of ruined paths and rewritten identities.
And Elara... she was ant to co here. That much, he was sure of. Whether by the commoner exam, or so other ans—she would attend the Academy. She had to. It was too central. Too linked to everything she wanted.
Revenge didn’t wait on logic. It waited on opportunity.
And Isolde—that woman—was here.
Elara would not miss this.
Which ant if she wasn’t attending as the commoner he’d expected—then she was hiding in plain sight.
Under a different na.
Under a different face.
He narrowed his eyes.
"...Elowyn Caerlin."
And frowned.
That wasn’t a na he recognized from the novel.
Not a single ntion. Not even as a footnote. Not among the list of nobles, side characters, or political pieces used to bolster the setting. He had read everything the Author had allowed him access to before his sudden transposition—everything before the blackout hit the middle acts.
This girl? She didn’t exist in those pages.
Not as Elowyn.
Not as anything he could place.
’Which ans... either she’s new, or she’s soone old with a new face.’
His gaze returned to the dark corridor, though it gave him nothing now—just smooth walls and the gentle flicker of lanterns dancing like breathless stars.
He rubbed the back of his neck slowly.
’It could be nothing.’
But even he didn’t believe that.
Too many variables. Too many coincidences. And this academy—this ss of court politics and bloodlines and half-buried vendettas—it was a magnet for hidden identities.
The Author had confird it once.
A casual note in the margins of a serialized update: "Several students in the Academy arc are not who they appear to be. So are hiding lineage. So, intent. Others, far more dangerous secrets."
Lucavion never got far enough to read the reveals.
But he hadn’t forgotten that line.
Which ant... he couldn’t rule this girl out. Not yet.
Even if it felt unlikely.
He exhaled softly.
’Unlikely... but not impossible.’
Because that look she gave him in the garden—cold, but restrained. Personal, but asured. It wasn’t just unfamiliarity.
It was tension.
Recognition. Suppressed recognition.
And then there was her energy. No, he couldn’t see her origin—no color, no signature, nothing that rooted her Vitality to a clear source. But that didn’t an she was opaque.
In hindsight... it was like staring at liquid through frosted glass.
He couldn’t identify what was inside—but he could see the movent. The shape. The flow.
And that mattered more.
Because while he couldn’t directly compare her to past encounters... he could watch how that vitality behaved.
And when soone lies, when soone pretends—their vitality stutters. Warps. Breaks rhythm.
It was an ability that he had recently acquired.
Hers?
When she first looked at him, her vitality imdiately moved quite a lot.
It gave a reaction, a reaction that is so violent that he didn’t expect sothing like that at all.
Lucavion’s fingers stilled against the edge of the marble, his eyes distant—but not unfocused.
He was rembering.
Not in idle recollection, but in reverse dissection. A sequence played backward in his mind, not just of what was said, but what moved beneath the surface.
That mont.
When she first looked at him.
There was no mistaking it now. Not with the lens he’d refined over the past year. Not with the cursed clarity his attunent to Vitality had sharpened into sothing far more precise than most would ever be allowed to touch.
The way Elowyn Caerlin—if that was even her na—glared at him.
She hadn’t just looked. She stabbed with her eyes. Like she’d already decided he was sothing she couldn’t forgive. Like standing in his presence was a punishnt unto itself.
And he’d felt it.
Her Vitality, usually unreadable, moved all at once—chaotic, thrashing, thrumming through every inch of her body. No color. No origin. But unmistakable motion. Like blood surging beneath a too-still surface. Like rage trapped in a glass cage.
Unstable.
Uncontrolled.
On the brink of eruption.
’I thought she was about to collapse,’ he admitted silently. ’Or snap.’
And so—he stepped in. No grand gesture. Just contact.
A hand on her shoulder.
A tether to pull her back from whatever hell her mind had slipped into.
But what ca next...
The slap.
It hadn’t surprised him because of the force.
It surprised him because of the Vitality spike that ca with it.
Sharp. Focused. Imdiate.
Not instinctive.
Intentional.
And that made all the difference.
Even before her hand t his wrist, her body had already decided to strike. No hesitation. No stutter. As if the action was waiting for an excuse to escape.
And then ca the lie.
"Ah... sorry. I didn’t an to react like that."
He didn’t need to interrogate the words.
Her Vitality had already told the truth.
She ant every fraction of that slap. Not as an accident. Not as panic.
As judgnt.
As sothing she had held back, and let slip for just a heartbeat too long.
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