The door to the dormitory block eased open with a faint tallic groan, catching briefly before giving way under Lucavion’s palm. Warm air t his face—stale with breath, linens, mana residue. Life returning to the walls as students stirred from sleep. Footsteps echoed softly in the upper halls, distant chatter bleeding in from the stairwell. Morning had officially begun.
Lucavion didn’t look at any of them.
He moved past the common area without pause, not breaking stride even as two boys glanced his way, then quickly looked elsewhere when their eyes t his. By now, they knew better than to ask. He wasn’t in the mood.
Or maybe they were not?
And today?
Even less so.
His thoughts were a tangle—Elowyn, Elara, Cedric, Reilan. The spell. The sll. The book. The way she fought like she was pretending not to know how to fight.
And yet—
"Unknowingly..." he muttered, voice low enough not to carry, "I sohow progressed things faster, didn’t I?"
The words weren’t for anyone else. Just a whisper to himself, lodged sowhere between amusent and resignation.
He hadn’t ant to force her hand. Hadn’t ant to push Elara—Elowyn—into using those adaptations. He certainly hadn’t expected her to pivot so quickly. That spell, Glacier Vein, had been clumsy when she first cast it. Misaligned. Too shallow on the draw, too rushed on the release.
But the next one?
Refined.
Controlled.
Almost clever.
"Guess whose genes you do have," he scoffed to himself, an edge of a grin flickering across his lips before fading.
Elara was the daughter of a certain soone, whether she knew it or not.
And that soone had been called a genius by nearly every instructor at his own academy. Strategic prodigy. Calculated chaos.
Lucavion knew. He’d seen it.
And looking at Elara now, there was no point pretending the resemblance wasn’t there—not just in blood, but in the way she adapted under pressure.
Even when she didn’t an to.
Even when she was hiding.
Especially when she was hiding.
For a mont, his jaw tightened.
Because now that his thoughts were catching up to the emotion that ca before—
He rembered sothing else.
The way she’d looked at him. That second. That exact second.
When she accused him.
Not outright. Not violently.
But sharply.
"You were about to burn the whole place down."
That’s what she said. Her words, not his.
And it had struck him—not because it was wrong.
But because of how certain she sounded.
It wasn’t her reasoning that bothered him. It was that she spoke it like fact. Like she knew the worst of him and had already filed it away in her ledger of sins.
It made sense—logically. He had looked close to the edge. His flas had flared without intent. His breathing had stalled. He could have lost control.
But—
"Still paranoid as ever..." he murmured, jaw slack with a hint of heat behind the words. "Accusative little ice cube."
He didn’t know why it had gotten under his skin.
A pair of students passed by in the hall, voices low and shoulders tight as they noticed him standing there—leaned slightly against the wall near his dorm door, unmoving. Neither said a word. One of them hesitated mid-step, perhaps debating a nod or so empty attempt at courtesy.
They thought better of it.
They always did.
Lucavion didn’t so much as glance in their direction. He didn’t have to. His presence alone had done most of the work for him since the first day.
The reputation had stuck.
He didn’t chase it. He didn’t even value it.
But it clung anyway.
No one would ask why he looked like he hadn’t slept. No one would ask why his mana still buzzed faintly beneath his skin. They wouldn’t ask why his eyes were distant or why the scent of scorched air still lingered faintly around him.
They knew better.
And Lucavion?
He appreciated that much.
Even if, deep down—
’Kind of... hard...’
The thought threaded in quietly. Not like a complaint. More like an old scar brushing against a shirt sleeve.
His mind wandered, not to the duel, not to the frost, not even to her spells—
—but to her eyes.
Hazel, now.
Not the piercing frostbite blue from before.
Not the color that once stopped him mid-step in a burning corridor, or froze him in place when she stood between him and the enemy without a word.
But the intensity—
That was the sa.
Unmistakably.
Uncomfortably.
’Guess... it’s sothing you can’t easily forget.’
Lucavion shifted his weight, dragging a hand through his hair as the hallway blurred for a second, not from exhaustion—but from mory.
That mont. That mont.
In the depths of that cell. Stone walls damp with sothing too old to na. The stench of blood and rotted steel. And her, standing just outside the bars, spine straight, voice low but unshaking. The world had been collapsing outside, but her stare—
That stare.
That stare—the one she gave him behind rusted bars, with chains rattling in the dark and the weight of broken commands hanging between them—wasn’t sothing Lucavion could forget. Not now. Not in ten years. Maybe not even in the afterlife, if that joke about mages being too stubborn to rest was ever true.
That was anger.
Not the loud kind. Not fury that scread.
But righteous. Coiled. Seething beneath her skin. The kind of anger that ant sothing. That burned cleaner than any fla he’d ever conjured. And it wasn’t directed at the world.
It was at him.
At what he was about to do.
At what she thought he’d already done.
It stayed with him. It still stayed with him.
He finally reached the outer arch of the dorm building, footsteps slowing. The courtyard stones shifted beneath his boots, and the faint hum of warding runes pulsed against his mana signature, confirming his identity.
Whatever.
’See, master. I’m still holding to my promise.’
The thought wasn’t spoken aloud, but it echoed inside him like it always did. A quiet vow lodged deep in the space between mory and duty. A promise kept—barely, so days—but still intact.
He stepped into the dorm lobby just as soone ca down the stairwell with a faint bounce to their step.
"Mireilla," he said, before she even looked up.
"Morning," she chid, hair pulled back, clothes half-wrinkled like she’d only just rembered to put it on properly. Her eyes swept over him once, catching the faint scorched scent clinging to his clothes, the dried sweat at his collar. "Returning from training?"
"Yep," Lucavion replied with a smirk, voice light but ragged with the residue of sleeplessness.
She narrowed her eyes slightly, not in judgnt, but with a subtle shift of amusent. "Hmm? Wanna join for breakfast?"
He ran a hand across the back of his neck, flicking a small ember off his sleeve. "I’ll need to clean myself first."
"...Is that so?" Mireilla tilted her head, almost teasing. "Guess I’ll be eating alone then."
Lucavion shrugged, noncommittal. "Might as well wait for others to return. Elayne and Caeden should be doing their morning jogs."
"...Yeah."
She glanced toward the hallway that led to the dining hall, then back to the stairwell. No movent yet. Still early.
"And Toven is still sleeping, isn’t he?"
"Yes. I knocked on his door," she said, lips twitching faintly. "He didn’t answer. And to be frank, he stays up late all the ti. Don’t even think he uses a bed—just collapses on mana diagrams."
"Mana diagrams?"
Lucavion raised a brow, tone dry with just a trace of incredulity.
"You didn’t see his room?" Mireilla asked, folding her arms with a smirk tugging at her lips.
"Of course not," he replied without missing a beat. "Why would I be interested in another guy’s room?"
There was a pause—half a second too long.
Then:
"...If it’s a girl, you would be interested, then?"
Lucavion blinked, the faintest twitch of a grin threatening at the corner of his mouth. "Guy as a gender-neutral term."
"Uh-huh." Mireilla’s eyes narrowed, but the corners of her mouth curved in victory. "Totally believable."
"I an, look at Toven," he said, gesturing vaguely toward the ceiling as if the boy were so cryptid haunting the upper floor. "Would you voluntarily walk into that tornado of chaos?"
Mireilla tilted her head, mock-pensive. "Maybe if I was looking to die. Dramatically. With sigils etched across my body in the shape of last night’s failed experint."
Lucavion let out a soft tsk of amusent and flapped his fingers once, like flicking off a spark that didn’t exist.
"That was a good one," he said with a wry smirk. "You’re picking up."
Mireilla rolled her eyes, the corners of her mouth twitching. "...Don’t get sothing out of it for yourself every ti."
"I’m not wrong, though."
"You never are, right?"
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