❄︎ Riu-Here ❄︎

And yet, for the better part of a week, you had been following Pure Vanilla Cookie around with all the discretion of a pilgrim trying not to step on sacred ground too loudly.

You told yourself it was not spying. That sounded terribly improper, especially where he was concerned. No of course not, this was an observation in the service of love. One that watched him spend himself for others until there was so little left over for himself, and you could not bear it any longer.

His birthday was approaching.

The whole kingdom was already preparing in its own way. Cookies loved him. Of course they did. They loved him in grand ways. In public ways. With hymns and banners and flowers and speeches.

But you had begun to notice that grand love did not always reach the smaller places.

Their love did not notice when he slipped away from the midday meal after only two bites because a worried villager had caught his sleeve in the corridor.

Their love did not notice when supper went cold on a tray left untouched in his study.

You noticed because you had followed him first out of admiration, and then, helplessly, out of concern.

The first day, you had lingered near the Academy of Healing under the excuse of returning a borrowed text. Pure Vanilla Cookie had emerged from a lecture hall in a stream of younger healers, staff in hand, robes catching the light. He had smiled at each Cookie who greeted him, warm and patient as ever, pausing for questions, blessings, reassurances.

Someone pressed a folded note into his hands. Someone else asked for advice on a remedy. A Cream Sheep, stubborn and curious, nearly tangled itself in the hem of his robes and he laughed softly as he bent to free it.

You had watched from behind a tall column, feeling only slightly ridiculous.

The second day, you watched him in the Chamber of Audiences.

The concept of it had always moved you, this great hall where any Cookie, whether in need of help or justice, could come and be received. And received they were. From morning until late, the chamber filled and emptied and filled again. Pure Vanilla Cookie listened to every grievance as though it were the first sorrow he had ever been trusted with.

He gave directions. Settled disputes. Blessed a sick child. Calmed a frightened pilgrim. Heard out an anxious scholar. Intervened when a merchant had been cheated. Sent herbs to one family, wool blankets to another, and promised to personally review a petition from the Academy before the week’s end.

When a small cookie quietly approached him with tea and a small plate of vanilla wafers, he thanked them with that same tender smile.

Then another petitioner arrived.

Then another.

By the time the hall had thinned, the tea had gone cold, and the wafers remained untouched.

The third day, you followed him farther than you meant to, out toward one of the quieter meadows beyond the main roads, where the grass bent gold green in the late light and Cream Sheep wandered in lazy clusters. There, at last, he had a moment alone.

Or something like alone.

He sat beneath a pale-leaved tree, his staff resting beside him, its strange eye half-lidded and watchful. The wind moved gently through the grass. In the distance, the noon bells had long since gone silent. He reached into the satchel at his side and withdrew….

Not lunch?

Only papers. Letters. A small notebook. A ribbon-marked text.

You had stared from behind a low stone wall as he read and annotated and sighed so quietly the sound barely reached you.

Then, after some time, he pulled from his sleeve a single vanilla bean sweet wrapped in wax paper.

That was all.

You had felt something in your chest ache so sharply it almost embarrassed you.

The founder of the Vanilla Kingdom. The beacon of peace and healing. The Cookie who fed hope to everyone around him as though he had been born with an endless supply of it.

And this was how he fed himself? With one small sweet, half-forgotten between obligations?

No.

No, that would not do.

So your gift idea was born not all at once, but in pieces.

A lunch kit first.

Not merely a basket, that was too clumsy, too obvious, and too easily misplaced. It had to be something discreet. Something practical. Something that would suit him.

You spent two evenings in the craft halls among acornwood shavings and soft lamp light, pretending your hands were not trembling from the importance of it. The Vanilla Kingdom was known for its enchanted jewelry and carefully made objects, so you turned to the same traditions, carved acornwood, a small blue gem, claspwork shaped like a vanilla orchid.

The final result was a satchel insert made to slip neatly inside a satchel. several slim compartments charmed to keep meals warm or cool as needed, a tiny fold-out bottle cradle for tea or broth, and a clockwork reminder charm shaped like a little vanilla flower that would tap twice against the side whenever noon bells rang.

You tested it three times.

Then five.

Then eight, because what if it failed on his birthday of all days?

But once the main gift existed, it became impossible to stop there.

Because once you started thinking about all the little things that might ease his life, you began noticing even more.

He often tucked loose letters into books and then had to search for them later, so you made him ribboned page markers with small stitched symbols for different duties. A star for official documents, a moon for private reading, a flower for healing notes, a tiny bell for matters of the kingdom.

You noticed the grooves left in his fingers by long writing sessions, so you commissioned a soft grip for his pen from a local artisan and embroidered a small case for it yourself.

You noticed how many pilgrims arrived tired and cold from the road, so you included a packet of calming vanilla-bean tea leaves and a set of pre-written little blessing cards he could hand out when he had no time to compose something longer.

You noticed how his robes had very few proper places to hide emergency sweets, so you stitched a discreet inner pocket into a scarf of creamy white and pale blue.

That one made you flush the whole time you worked on it.

It felt too intimate, somehow, imagining him wearing something you had made. Imagining it resting against him. Imagining his fingers discovering the hidden pocket and perhaps, perhaps smiling.

You told yourself it was practicality.

The fact that you chose the thread colors to match his eyes was none of your own business.

By the time his birthday arrived, the Vanilla Kingdom looked almost unreal with celebration.

Cookies came from everywhere.

From the Academy of Healing, from the castle, from meadow villages, from the pilgrim roads. They carried bouquets and books and letters and crowns woven of flowers. There were speeches in the Chamber of Audiences, songs in the courtyard, and enough affection in the air to make your chest feel soft just breathing it in.

And through all of it, Pure Vanilla Cookie moved with his usual grace.

He thanked each Cookie sincerely.

He received every gift as though it were priceless.

He smiled so warmly that it made your throat tighten.

And, of course, he forgot to eat.

You stood near one of the side tables, your own gift wrapped in cream-colored cloth and tied with a blue ribbon, and watched him be swept from one well-wisher to another.

A healer took his arm to ask about a remedy. A scholar bowed over a stack of research. A child tugged at his sleeve to show him a drawing. By the time anyone urged him toward the food, someone else had already called his name.

You waited.

You were good at waiting.

Still, your palms had gone slick by the time the crowd finally thinned toward evening.

He had stepped away into one of the quieter castle corridors, where the light came honey-soft through the stained glass and painted the floor in blue and gold. His shoulders had lowered at last, just a little, as though he had borrowed a moment of silence from the day.

You almost turned back.

He deserved peace. He deserved rest. He did not deserve one more Cookie asking for his time, even for something kind.

But then his hand pressed lightly to his side and you realized with a fresh wave of indignation that he was probably hungry again.

So you went to him before fear could stop you.

“Pure Vanilla Cookie?”

He turned at once.

Even tired, his face gentled the moment he saw you. “Oh,” he said softly, the word touched with surprise, “hello, dear one.”

That alone took the air out of your lungs.

You bowed a little too quickly and had to clutch the wrapped bundle tighter to keep from dropping it. “Happy birthday.”

His smile deepened, small and luminous. “Thank you. That is very kind.”

There was a pause.

You had imagined this moment so many times, and now that it had arrived every prepared sentence fled your mind like startled birds.

“I-I know you’ve received many gifts already,” you managed, “and mine is not very grand.”

His expression changed in that attentive way of his that always made it feel as though he was listening not only to words, but to the spaces trembling around them.

“Then it must be sincere,” he said. “And I find those are often the best kind.”

You stared at him.

Slowly, trying not to fumble, you offered the bundle into his hands.

“I just thought…” You swallowed. “You do so much for everyone, and sometimes it seems as though everyone remembers to need you before they remember you might have needs too.”

For the first time that evening, he looked genuinely startled.

He glanced down at the gift, then back at you.

You pushed on before you lost your nerve. “So I wanted to give you things that might make your days easier.”

His fingers, long and careful, loosened the ribbon.

The cream cloth fell away.

At first he only looked.

Then he touched the orchid clasp of the satchel insert, and the little flower charm gave an experimental tap against the wood, as though introducing itself. His brows lifted faintly. He opened the compartments, discovering the warming charm, the bottle cradle, the neat arrangement meant to slip into his daily bag.

Then the page markers. The pen case. The tea packet. The blessing cards.

And at last, the scarf.

You nearly spoke to explain the hidden pocket, but he found it himself, fingertips brushing the seam.

“You made these,” he said.

It was not a question.

You nodded, suddenly unable to say anything at all.

His thumb rested over the orchid clasp for a long moment.

Then he looked up. “You have been paying very close attention.”

Heat flooded your face so quickly you thought you might simply crumble where you stood.

“I did not mean-” you began, horrified. “Not in a strange way, I only….I noticed that you miss meals, and sometimes your tea goes cold, and you keep too many papers tucked into books, and-”

You stopped.

That had not helped.

At all.

For one dreadful second you considered turning and fleeing into the nearest decorative shrub.

But then, very softly, Pure Vanilla Cookie laughed.

A warm, surprised little sound, light as cream.

When you dared to look at him, he was smiling at you with such tenderness it felt almost difficult to bear.

“In a strange way?” he repeated gently.

You covered part of your face with one hand. “I hear it now. I hear how it sounds.”

“I think,” he said, “it sounds like someone was very thoughtful.”

His gaze dropped to the gift again, and something in his expression grew more fragile.

“Truthfully…” He paused. “I had not realized anyone had noticed.”

Of course no one noticed. Or perhaps they did, but not in the way you had. Not with the kind of devotion that kept count of abandoned meals and cold tea cups and tired hands.

You found your voice again, quieter this time. “Then they should have.”

The corridor fell still.

Outside, somewhere far off, laughter drifted through the halls. Bells chimed faintly in the distance. Light from the stained glass lay between you both in fractured colors.

Pure Vanilla Cookie held the scarf carefully in his hands, as though it were something far more delicate than cloth.

Your heart stumbled.

He looked at you, and his smile turned wistful. “It feels nice to be cared for so well.”

You did not know what to do with that. With the gentleness of it. With the way he said it like a confession and a thank you all at once.

So you said the truest thing you could.

“You deserve it.”

His expression wavered.

Enough for you to glimpse the Cookie beneath the halo others placed upon him; the one who gave and gave and gave until there was scarcely anything left, and perhaps had begun to believe that was simply how it must be.

Then he stepped closer.

Not so close as to overwhelm. Just enough that his voice became intimate, meant only for your ears.

“I will use every one of these,” he said. “Not only because they are useful, though they are very clever, and I suspect you know that already, but because they were made with such care. That is not something I will forget.”

Your throat tightened painfully.

He slipped the scarf over one arm, then, after a moment’s consideration, tucked the packet of tea and one of the sweets you had hidden into its secret pocket.

“There,” he said, with a small gleam of amusement. “You seem to have anticipated me.”

A startled laugh escaped you.

He seemed pleased by it.

“Thank you,” he said again.

You thought, dimly, that this alone might sustain you for years.

Then the little flower charm tapped twice from within the satchel insert.

Both of you glanced down.

For a brief beat, neither of you said anything.

And then, to your astonishment, Pure Vanilla Cookie smiled with something almost sheepish.

“I believe,” he said, “I am being instructed to eat.”

You stared at him, then laughed outright.

“Yes,” you said, unable to help the fondness in your voice. “You are.”

“By my own birthday gift, no less. How authoritative.”

“You may blame me if it helps.”

“Oh, I could never blame you for kindness.”

The words settled softly between you.

Then, with the scarf draped over his arm and the satchel insert gathered carefully against his chest, he inclined his head toward the nearby side hall where quieter refreshments had been laid out for later guests.

“Would you,” he asked, “do me the honor of keeping me company while I obey?”

You blinked.

“Yes,” you said at once, perhaps too quickly. “Yes, of course.”

Together, you walked toward the soft-lit hall, where the trays still held warm jellies, little dishes of cream, and cups waiting to be filled.

And before the next plea could find him, Pure Vanilla Cookie sat down to eat. With you beside him.

A/N Guys I am so deceased...I finally had my biology midterm I just hope I did well...I am working on ITPOT soon I just didn't have the time I needed to lock in for these midterms....I Wanted to post this for his birthday but I had too much going on so enjoy this as I go back to napping...

“Good evening, dear listeners,” it crooned, every syllable dipped in honey and poison. “Have you heard the latest little whisper fluttering through Earthbread?”

You stopped dead in the middle of the market. A few Cookies around you did the same. Heads lifted. Baskets paused mid-swing. Somewhere nearby, a baker nearly dropped a tray of fresh cream rolls.

“Sources say our beloved little hero, GingerBrave Cookie, has been caught sneaking into royal kitchens. Again. But this time, not for snacks. Oh no, no, no. The rumor says he and his merry little band were plotting to replace Pure Vanilla Cookie’s prized vanilla sugar reserves with powdered salt!”

A scandalized gasp moved through the market. Your eyes narrowed.

“That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” you said.

The voice only continued, delighted with itself.

“And Wizard Cookie? Ah, yes, our scholarly little friend. Allegedly attempting to create a spell that turns all books upside down. Permanently. A tragic fate for literature everywhere.”

You clenched your fists. “Okay, now that one is just lazy.”

“And Strawberry Cookie,” Black Sapphire Cookie purred, “was apparently seen fleeing the scene with a basket full of incriminating strawberry jam, which she claims was, and I quote, ‘for sandwiches.’ Suspicious? You decide.”

Your jaw dropped. Beside you, an elderly Cookie lowered their shopping bag with grave concern.

“Do you think it’s true?”

“No!” you snapped. Then, remembering your manners, you softened your tone. “Sorry. I mean, absolutely not. GingerBrave Cookie and his friends are a chaotic bunch but none of them are criminal masterminds.”

The radio crystal gave another crackle. Black Sapphire Cookie laughed. It was a low, musical sound, the kind that made nearby Cookies lean in despite themselves. Like he was letting everyone in on a private joke.

You hated that too. You hated that his voice was good. You hated that it had rhythm. Timing. Texture. A silky little sway that made every terrible thing he said sound like a secret worth hearing.

“Remember, dear listeners,” he said sweetly, “truth is often boring. But a good rumor? Ah. A good rumor has flavor.”

The broadcast ended in a flourish of static. The market erupted at once.

“GingerBrave Cookie would never!”

“But what if he did?”

“Salt in the vanilla sugar? How dreadful!”

“I always knew that Wizard Cookie had suspicious magic.”

You inhaled deeply through your nose.

Then exhaled. With the dignity of someone who was not about to start fighting a radio in the middle of the Vanilla Kingdom.

“I hate him,” you announced.

A few Cookies turned toward you.

“I do,” you continued, mostly to yourself now. “I hate him. He spreads lies for fun. He makes innocent Cookies look bad. He turns everyone into a gossiping mess and then acts like he’s some refined little artist of slander.”

You pointed at the now-silent radio.

“And his voice is too smooth. That is a crime on its own.”

A familiar voice called from behind you.

“Uh… are we talking about crimes?”

You turned.

GingerBrave Cookie stood there with Wizard Cookie and Strawberry Cookie, all three of them carrying paper bags from the bakery. GingerBrave looked confused, Strawberry Cookie looked like she wanted to hide behind both of them.

Your anger instantly softened into concern.

“Oh my gosh, are you okay?”

GingerBrave blinked. “Yeah? We just bought cream buns.”

“He said you were plotting kitchen sabotage.”

GingerBrave’s eyes widened. “What?! Who!?”

“Black Sapphire Cookie?...” You replied in confusion.

Wizard Cookie groaned and dragged a hand down his face. “Not again.”

Strawberry Cookie hugged her bakery bag closer. “Did he say something about me too?”

You hesitated.

Strawberry Cookie’s face fell.

“He did, didn’t he?”

“He said you had suspicious jam,” you said gently.

Strawberry Cookie stared at the ground.

Wizard Cookie lifted his staff. “That is a gross misuse of dramatic storytelling.”

“Exactly!” you said. “Thank you!”

GingerBrave puffed out his chest, trying very hard to look brave and mostly succeeding. “Don’t worry! We’re used to rumors. They can’t keep us down!”

You frowned. “You shouldn’t have to be used to it.”

That made him pause.

For a second, the market noise faded around you. GingerBrave gave you a softer smile, the kind that reminded you why cookies followed him into impossible battles. 

“Thanks,” he said. “Really.”

Your heart squeezed. These poor kids.

Then Wizard Cookie ruined the moment by muttering, “Also, for the record, an upside-down book spell would be extremely difficult and completely useless.”

You stared at him. He adjusted his hat. “I am not saying I tried it.”

“Wizard Cookie.”

“I am saying that if I had tried it, it would have been for academic reasons.”

Strawberry Cookie sighed. “That doesn’t help.”

You laughed despite yourself.

For the rest of the afternoon, the four of you wandered the Vanilla Kingdom together, trying to undo the damage where you could. GingerBrave cheerfully denied the kitchen sabotage allegations. Wizard Cookie gave increasingly annoyed explanations about magical ethics. Strawberry Cookie quietly showed her actual jar of strawberry jam to anyone who looked suspiciously at her bakery bag.

You remained furious.

Right up until you saw him.

The afternoon sun had turned soft and golden, spilling over the pale stone paths and frosting the rooftops with warm light. The air smelled like vanilla blossoms, baked sugar, and the faint crispness of fountain mist.

You were walking beside GingerBrave, still complaining.

“I just think there should be consequences,” you said. “Not violent consequences. Obviously. But consequences. Like… public corrections. Or maybe he should have to personally apologize to everyone he’s lied about.”

Wizard Cookie nodded. “A fine suggestion.”

“Or,” GingerBrave added, “he could help clean the royal kitchens!”

Strawberry Cookie gave a tiny smile. “With no salt.”

“Exactly,” you said. “No salt. Just him, a mop, and shame.”

Then a voice behind you said, “How deliciously specific.”

Your entire body went still.

The voice was not coming from a radio this time.

It was close. Too close. Silky, amused, and unmistakably real.

GingerBrave turned first.

Wizard Cookie’s grip tightened around his staff.

Strawberry Cookie made a very small noise.

You turned around.

And every single thought you had ever had in your entire life immediately dropped dead.

Black Sapphire Cookie stood beneath the shade of a vanilla-blossom tree, one hand resting lightly on the handle of his floating microphone as though it were a cane, a companion, and an audience all at once.

He was tall and elegant. His black suit was tailored. A white cravat sat perfectly at his throat, bright against the dark fabric. Oval jewels gleamed at his ears and chest, catching the sunlight with small, dangerous flashes. His fluffy, obsidian-violet hair fell over one side of his face, hiding one eye completely, while the visible one watched you with a sly, lavender-slit gleam.

And the wings.

Dark, bat-like, purple-tinted things folded behind him, shaped almost like the tails of a formal coat. They made him look less like a Cookie walking through the Vanilla Kingdom and more like a rumor that had dressed itself for the theater.

Your mouth opened. Nothing came out.

Black Sapphire Cookie smiled.

Sharp teeth. Perfectly confident.

“Do continue,” he said. “I was quite taken by the mop.”

You stared. GingerBrave glanced at you.

“Uh… you okay?”

You made a sound. It was not a word. Wizard Cookie looked from you to Black Sapphire Cookie, then back to you.

“Oh no,” he said.

Strawberry Cookie leaned closer. “Are they… frozen?”

GingerBrave waved a hand in front of your face. “Hello? Earthbread to you?”

You still could not speak. This was impossible. This was insulting. This was a betrayal by the universe itself.

Black Sapphire Cookie was supposed to be annoying. He was supposed to be a nasty little gossip gremlin with a microphone and too much free time. He was supposed to look punchable. Or at least mildly inconvenient.

He was not supposed to look ethereal.

He was not supposed to stand there like a velvet nightmare dipped in starlight. He was not supposed to have cheekbones that made your moral convictions wobble. 

Black Sapphire Cookie tilted his head.

“My, my,” he murmured. “And here I thought I had made an enemy. How heartbreaking to discover I have rendered them speechless instead.”

That brought you back by exactly half an inch.

“I’m not speechless,” you said. Your voice cracked.

Wizard Cookie winced. GingerBrave patted your shoulder. “You kind of were.”

“I was thinking.”

“About what?” Wizard Cookie asked suspiciously.

You looked at Black Sapphire Cookie.

Black Sapphire Cookie looked at you.

The microphone beside him blinked its eerie eye.

You looked away.

“Justice,” you said weakly.

Black Sapphire Cookie laughed.

Your soul tried to leave your body out of pure embarrassment.

Wizard Cookie stepped in front of you like a tiny, furious wall. “Do not be fooled. This is exactly how malicious performers operate. First they charm, then they deceive.”

Black Sapphire Cookie placed a hand over his chest. “Malicious performer? What a flattering title. I must write that down.”

GingerBrave crossed his arms. “You spread a rumor that we tried to sabotage the royal kitchens!”

“Did I?” Black Sapphire Cookie asked lightly.

“Yes!” you snapped, finally regaining enough sense to be angry. “You absolutely did!”

His visible eye slid toward you.

The full force of his attention landed on your face, and your anger immediately had to fight for its life.

Strawberry Cookie, quiet until now, leaned toward GingerBrave and whispered, “They’re turning red.”

“I am not,” you said too fast.

GingerBrave squinted at you. “You kind of are.”

“I’m angry.”

Wizard Cookie nodded sagely. “Anger can cause redness.”

“Thank you, Wizard Cookie.”

Black Sapphire Cookie’s smile widened. “How touching. Your little friends have formed a rescue committee.”

“They are not a rescue committee,” you said.

“We kind of are,” GingerBrave admitted.

“GingerBrave!”

“What? You looked like you were about to forgive him because he sparkles.” Gingerbrave grumbled.

“I was not!”

Black Sapphire Cookie lifted a gloved hand and examined one of his rings with idle interest. “For the record, I do not merely sparkle.”

You hated him. You really did. You hated the arrogance. The lies. The way he carried himself like the entire kingdom had been built to provide him with flattering lighting. And unfortunately, the lighting was flattering.

“I know what you do,” you said, forcing yourself to stand straighter. “You spread rumors that hurt people. You make it sound entertaining so everyone forgets there are real Cookies on the other side of your stories.”

For once, Black Sapphire Cookie did not immediately respond.

His smile stayed, but something in his eye sharpened. Not guilt. You would not give him that much credit. More like interest. As if you had finally said something worth airing during prime time.

“How earnest,” he said.

“Do not say that like it’s an insult.” You spouted.

“Oh, it was not an insult.” He leaned slightly on his microphone, elegant and easy. “Earnestness is very useful. It makes Cookies predictable.”

Wizard Cookie bristled. “You are so conniving.”

“I have been called worse by better-dressed Cookies.”

GingerBrave stepped forward. “You should apologize.”

Black Sapphire Cookie looked at him.

“For what, precisely?”

“For the rumor!”

“Which one?”

“All of them!”

“That could take quite some time.”

“We have time,” you said.

Black Sapphire Cookie turned back to you, and there was that little glint, that amused gleam that made it seem like he knew exactly how badly his face was sabotaging your principles.

“Do you?” he asked.

You narrowed your eyes. “For an apology? Yes.”

“For resisting my charm?”

Your brain tripped.

GingerBrave made a disgusted strangled noise.

Strawberry Cookie covered her eyes with her hood, flustered on your behalf.

Wizard Cookie slammed the end of his staff against the ground. “Do not answer that.”

“I wasn’t going to!”

Black Sapphire Cookie smiled like a cat who had discovered an unattended dessert table.

“Of course not.”

Your face burned hotter.

“You are the worst, you are a liar, and so, so weird” you said.

“So I have heard.”

“Mostly from me.” You were always disagreeing with his stupid broadcasts.

“How devoted.”

You pointed at him. “Not devoted. Opposed.”

“Passionately.”

His smile turned delighted. For a terrifying second, you realized he was enjoying this.

Not just in the cruel way he enjoyed chaos or because he had embarrassed you. He seemed amused by your refusal to let him slide away from the accusation, by the way you kept dragging yourself back to your anger every time his appearance knocked you sideways.

It made him look even more insufferably pleased. You hated that too.

GingerBrave gently grabbed your shoulders and turned you away from him.

“Okay,” he said brightly. “Let’s breathe.”

“I am breathing.”

“Like you’re about to explode.”

Wizard Cookie stepped beside you. “Focus. Remember the facts. He is a slanderer. A servant of deceit. A theatrical nuisance.”

Strawberry Cookie nodded. “And he was mean.”

“Yes,” you said, gripping onto that like a rope. “Yes. He was mean.”

Behind you, Black Sapphire Cookie sighed dreamily. “Such a harsh review. I may never recover.”

“You’ll live,” Wizard Cookie said.

“Tragically, yes.”

You turned back around, steadier this time.

Black Sapphire Cookie still looked unfairly beautiful.

But GingerBrave’s hands were on your shoulders, Wizard Cookie was glaring on your behalf, and Strawberry Cookie was giving you an encouraging little nod.

You could do this.

You could look directly at the most gorgeous rumormonger in Earthbread and still have morals.

Probably.

“You owe them an apology,” you said. “GingerBrave, Wizard Cookie, and Strawberry Cookie. Not a performance. Not a fake little charming half-apology. A real one.”

Black Sapphire Cookie hummed.

His microphone floated closer, its eye blinking lazily. The jaw-like pieces around its head clicked as though it were whispering to him.

Black Sapphire Cookie tapped one finger against the microphone’s handle.

Then he looked at GingerBrave.

“My dear GingerBrave Cookie,” he said, voice smooth enough to make several nearby Cookies slow down to listen, “I apologize for implying that you would commit culinary sabotage.”

GingerBrave blinked. “Oh.”

Black Sapphire Cookie turned to Wizard Cookie.

“And to you, Wizard Cookie, I apologize for suggesting your magical ambitions are limited to inconveniencing books.”

Wizard Cookie hesitated. “That is… acceptable.”

Finally, Black Sapphire Cookie looked at Strawberry Cookie.

His voice softened just a fraction.

“And Strawberry Cookie, I apologize for casting suspicion upon your jam.”

Strawberry Cookie looked down at her bakery bag. “It really was for sandwiches.”

“I believe you.”

You stared at him, suspicious.

“That was almost decent.”

“How painful for me,” Black Sapphire Cookie said. “Do not tell anyone.”

GingerBrave beamed. “Great! Then maybe you can stop spreading rumors about us.”

Black Sapphire Cookie gave him a beautiful, terrible smile.

“I said I apologized. I did not say I was retiring.”

Your eye twitched.

“There it is.”

Wizard Cookie groaned. “I knew it.”

Strawberry Cookie sighed.

GingerBrave, somehow still optimistic, said, “Well, it’s a start!”

“It is not a start,” you said. “It is a decorative pause.”

Black Sapphire Cookie pointed lightly at you. “Now that was a good line.”

“Do not compliment me.”

“But you make it so tempting.”

Your friends immediately reacted.

GingerBrave tightened his grip on your shoulders again.

Wizard Cookie stepped directly between you two.

Strawberry Cookie took your hand and gently tugged you backward.

“Nope,” GingerBrave said.

“We are leaving,” Wizard Cookie declared.

“But I was winning,” you protested.

“You were blushing,” Strawberry Cookie whispered.

“I can do both!”

Black Sapphire Cookie watched as your friends physically guided you away from him, his smile gleaming beneath the vanilla-blossom shade.

“How cruel,” he called after you. “Leaving so soon?”

You twisted around despite Wizard Cookie’s warning hiss.

“This is not over!”

Black Sapphire Cookie bowed, one hand over his heart, microphone floating beside him like a wicked little moon.

“I would be disappointed if it were.”

Your face warmed again. GingerBrave turned your head forward with both hands.

“No looking back.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were.”

Wizard Cookie marched ahead. “We need to discuss your vulnerability to aesthetics.”

“I am not vulnerable to aesthetics.”

Strawberry Cookie gave your hand a comforting squeeze. “It’s okay. He was very sparkly.”

“Thank you, Strawberry Cookie, but that does not help.”

GingerBrave laughed. “At least you still hate him, right?”

You glanced back one more time. Black Sapphire Cookie was still standing beneath the blossoms, watching you with that sly, glittering eye. When he noticed you looking, he lifted his hand in a graceful little wave. Your stomach flipped.

You immediately faced forward.

“Yes,” you said.

A beat passed.

“Mostly.”

Wizard Cookie made a noise of absolute despair. GingerBrave burst out laughing. Strawberry Cookie smiled behind her bakery bag. And somewhere behind you, soft as static and sweet as poison, Black Sapphire Cookie’s laughter drifted through the Vanilla Kingdom air.

Instead, the moment the door closed behind all four of you, your anxiety surged.

It climbed fast and cold, crawling under your ribs, making your hands feel too clumsy and your breathing too shallow. The book was still where you had left it, tucked away with all the caution of a secret that had long since become too large to hide.

You went to the shelf.

Drew the tomes aside.

“Found it.”

The cover looked no different than before. But when you lifted it into your arms, it felt heavier than any book had a right to feel.

Chai saw your face first.

“Oh, no,” she said softly, and crossed the room at once.

She took hold of your wrist only to ground you and smiled up at you with such gentleness; Guilt found its way into your heart.

“Hey,” she murmured. “No making that face now.”

You laughed weakly. “What face?”

“The one that says you’re about to throw up from terror.”

Hazelnut huffed from where he’d dropped against the side of your desk. “It’s a bad look, for the record.”

You looked at him.

He looked back like he always did, careless at first glance, shoulders easy, tone dry enough to pass for calm.

But his fingers were worrying the edge of his sleeve so hard the fabric had started to wrinkle.

“You’re not making the wrong choice,” he said.

The words came out like something rehearsed in the three steps between the corridor and your door.

You stared at him, and the bravado in his mouth did not match the fear in his eyes at all.

Hazelnut eyes widened when he noticed that you noticed.

So, naturally, he leaned further into the act.

“Seriously,” he said, waving one hand vaguely. “What’s the worst that happens? Shadow Milk gets angry? He’s already angry at, like, half the world, for misunderstanding his teachings.”

You made a small noise that might have been a laugh.

Hazelnut pressed on, because once he started joking his way around fear he almost never stopped until the fear lost patience and left him alone.

“He’ll be furious for a bit,” he said. “Sure. Maybe he’ll do that horrible quiet thing. Maybe he’ll narrow his eyes and make everyone within ten feet feel intellectually inadequate.” A shrug. “But once you wake up all victorious and immortal and unbearably smug about it, he’ll get over it.”

Chai nodded too quickly. “Exactly.”

She smiled as she said it.

Her voice was warm, playful, but there was something else.

“It’ll be like nothing happened,” she said. “Just… a long nap. A very moonlit, annoyingly poetic nap.”

Her hand slithered  from your wrist to your cheek, cupping it gently.

Her face, up close, betrayed her completely.

She looked like she was trying very hard not to cry.

Earl stood near the door, as composed as ever, though even he was not untouched tonight. His posture was elegant, measured, almost severe in its neatness; But his gaze kept drifting to the book in your hands, and every time it did, something in his expression tightened just slightly before smoothing over again.

“You asked us more than once,” he said quietly. “You gave us every opportunity to turn away.”

You swallowed. “And you should have.”

“No,” Earl said at once.

The certainty of it pinned you still.

He crossed the room with the calm inevitability of someone arriving at a conclusion he had already accepted. He stopped in front of you, looking first at the book, then at you, and for a moment his refinement almost slipped. 

“You are not dragging us anywhere,” he said. “We are walking with you.”

Your throat tightened.

Hazelnut nodded, though his mouth had gone a little pale around the edges. “Yeah. What’s life supposed to be without you around to ruin it?”

Chai gave him an offended look through the shimmer in her eyes. “That was almost sweet.”

“It was sweet.”

“It was grim.”

“It was honest.”

What could life be without you?

They were afraid. Terrified, maybe. But they meant to follow you anyway.

Chai leaned into your side, keeping her hand at your face as if she could hold you there by tenderness alone. “I’m scared,” she admitted with a soft little laugh that broke halfway through. “I’m really scared. But I’d rather be scared with you than safe without you.”

Hazelnut looked away for a second, jaw jumping. “Yeah. That.”

You closed your eyes briefly.

The book sat cold and silent in your arms.

The moon, somewhere outside, was rising whether any of you were ready or not.

“You don’t have to keep pretending for me,” you whispered.

Three faces looked back at you.

And for a moment, none of them spoke.

Then Hazelnut blew out a breath and rubbed the back of his neck. “We know.”

Chai’s thumb stroked lightly over your cheekbone. “We’re not pretending,” she said, and that was true in its own complicated way. “We’re just… trying very hard to be brave in a cute way.”

“That is not a strategy,” Earl said.

“It absolutely is.”

“No,” he replied

Chai huffed a weak laugh.

And then Earl, because he could not leave well enough alone when truth was required, added quietly, “We are all afraid. That much is obvious. But fear does not invalidate our commitment.”

His gaze held yours steadily.

“If anything,” he said, “it makes it more honest, we’ll be living out our truth.”

That settled over the room like something holy.

You looked down at the book, then back up at them.

At Chai’s smile that trembled when she thought you wouldn’t notice.

At Hazelnut’s deliberate slouch, performing ease while his hands gave him away.

At Earl, so beautifully put together and yet one wrong breath away from letting the depth of his fear show in full.

And your heart broke a little for all of you.

“I don’t want this to ruin you,” you said softly.

Hazelnut gave you a lopsided grin that looked almost convincing. “Too late. I met you years ago.”

Chai made a tiny scandalized sound. “You’re awful.”

“You all keep saying that and yet-”

“And yet,” Earl interrupted, voice smooth but gentler now, “We’re where we’re meant to be.”

You laughed you had to.

Otherwise you might have started crying and not stopped.

Chai saw the danger in your face and did what she always did when emotion threatened to become unbearable..

She took the book from your arms with great ceremony and set it on the desk.

Then she took both your hands in hers.

“Listen to me,” she said.

You did.

“We’re doing this because we love you,” she said simply. “Not because we’re brave enough. Not because we’ve made peace with every terrible part of it. And definitely not because any of us think this is a good idea in the normal, healthy sense.” She sniffed once, then smiled crookedly. “But because if you’re going somewhere that frightening, we’d rather be frightened with you than left behind wondering what became of our heart.”

Hazelnut’s face changed at that.

Only for a second.

He looked at the floor and muttered, “That was disgusting.”

“It was beautiful,” you whispered.

“It was disgusting and beautiful, besides we don’t get sentimental often.” Chai corrected.

Earl reached past her and touched your shoulder.

“As for the Fount,” he said, and for once even his title for Shadow Milk sounded chosen with care rather than formality, “If he is angry, then he is angry. Anger is not permanent. Nor, I suspect, is his capacity to forgive you.”

You looked up at that. “You really think so?”

Earl’s expression shifted, not into a smile, but something close to one. “I think he has already forgiven you for more than you know.”

That did not help your chest at all.

Hazelnut, determined not to let things get too soft for too long, clapped his hands once and said, “Right. Great. Wonderful. We’re all emotionally compromised. Can we go become immortal now before I lose the nerve to act cool about it?”

“You have never acted cool about anything,” Chai said.

“That is slander.”

“It is recorded history, please you’ll embarrass yourself if you keep flapping your lips open.”

There it was again that tiny bit of normalcy. That awful, beautiful refusal to let the thought of immortality drag you down.

The book waited on the desk.

The moon waited beyond your window.

Your fear had not gone.

Neither had theirs.

But they had made themselves gentler around it for you.

That was love too.

Hazelnut stepped back first and picked the book up like it personally offended him. “Alright,” he said, far too casually. “Let’s get this over with before I start making responsible decisions.”

Chai wiped quickly under one eye and brightened her voice by force. “Blueberry Yogurt River, yes?”

You managed a shaky smile. “Yes.”

Earl opened the door for the three of you with perfect composure, as though you were only heading out to an unusually solemn evening walk. “Then let us not keep the moon waiting.”

And when you moved to follow them, your legs still trembling a little, they all looked back at you at once and smiled.

As if their mouths had taken on the job their faces could no longer manage.

As if, for your sake, they were trying to make the end of one life look like the beginning of another.

“Wait.”

Your voice stopped all three of them just before the doorway.

Hazelnut turned with the book already tucked under one arm like he distrusted it too much to let it travel alone. Chai still had one hand on the frame. Earl, nearest the threshold, paused mid-step and looked back at you with immediate attention.

You swallowed and stepped toward the desk again, your mind snagging belatedly on the practical shape of what came next.

“The circles,” you said. “We’re supposed to each make our own.”

Hazelnut frowned. “Right.”

“But how?” you pressed. “We’ll be by the river. There’s dirt and grass and stones, not classroom floors. No chalkboards, no proper spellwork surfaces” You gestured helplessly. “No concrete.”

Chai blinked. “Oh.”

Earl’s expression turned contemplative.“That is… a useful question to remember now rather than later.”

Hazelnut huffed. “Great. Love that we nearly went to become immortal without figuring out how to draw the actual circle.”

“Ask it,” Earl said quietly.

Hazelnut looked offended. “Why do I have to hold it while you say that like it’s normal?”

“Because you grabbed it.”

“That was a mistake.”

You stepped closer and opened it.

The pages were blank for only a breath before ink began to spread, elegant and dark and far too pleased with itself.

“Ah. At last, logistics. Nothing ruins transcendence like poor preparation.”

You rolled your eyes. “How do we make the circles?”

The writing flowed on with infuriating grace:

“Oh, by all means summon a mason. Lay marble by the riverbank. Commission silver inlay. Perhaps a little pavilion, if the moon is to be courted properly.”

Chai muttered, “A pavilion would be pretty.”

“Chai.”

“What? I’m just saying.”

You leaned over the page. “Be serious.”

“I have been nothing else.”

crickets.

“If you must be rustic, dig the circle into the earth. A stick will do..”

You exhaled, relieved and annoyed all at once. “That’s it?”

Fresh ink appeared, smoother now, less indulgent.

“For the marking, yes. The circle need only be made. Closed.”

Earl stepped closer, reading over your shoulder. “No chalk. No salt. No silver?”

The answer came quickly.

“Not for this. The earth is witness enough.”

You thought briefly of moonlight on the Blueberry Yogurt River, of wet banks and silver reflecting like a blade laid flat across the dark, and your stomach turned.

Hazelnut shifted his weight. “So we just… draw them.”

“You etch them,” the book corrected, “unless you wish eternity to mistake you for lazy.”

Hazelnut scowled. “See? That tone is why I want to throw it.”

Chai patted his arm. “But now we know.”

You looked back to the page. “Anything else?”

The ink paused.

Then, with more weight than before:

“Do not forget the circle. Do not leave it incomplete. And bring me with you.”

Your fingers tightened on the edge of the page. “You have to come?”

“Would you walk blind into moonlight after all this?”

You did not answer.

The script continued, silk-smooth and cold:

“Bring me. Forget me, and the night grows clumsy.”

Hazelnut looked deeply offended by the implication. “The night grows- what does that even mean?”

Earl’s gaze did not leave the page. “It means we’re bringing it.”

Chai, quieter now, nodded once. “Then we bring it.”

You shut the book carefully this time and took it back into your own hands.

“Alright,” you said softly. “We make our own circles. We use sticks. We bring the book.”

Hazelnut rubbed a hand over his face. “Wonderful. Outdoor ritual architecture by moonlight. Exactly how I wanted to spend tonight.”

Chai gave him a weak smile. “You say that like you had better plans.”

“I did. They involved not dying.”

Earl opened the door again, his calm restored only by effort. “Then perhaps we should go before any of us discover a fresh reason to hesitate.”

The walk to the Blueberry Yogurt River felt longer than it ever had before.

The Spire fell away behind you in warm-lit windows and distant silhouettes, its height dimming as the night deepened. Ahead, the river stretched pale and strange beneath the rising moon, blue-white light beginning to gather over the water until the whole bank looked brushed with silver. Grass bowed in the wind. Reeds whispered. The current moved slow and dark, carrying moonlight in broken ribbons along its surface.

You found the place easily.

Of course you did.

The same bend you had chosen before, half-hidden from the academy by a stand of low willow trees, close enough to the river that you could hear it clearly, far enough that the earth held underfoot without slipping into mud. For a little while, none of you spoke.

Then Hazelnut cleared his throat and looked down at the ground like he was preparing to argue with it on principle. “Right,” he muttered. “Circles.”

You crouched first.

The stick you’d found was thinner than you wanted, but it bit well enough into the earth. Dirt gave beneath the point with a soft scrape, the line curving outward in a slow rough arc. Around you, the others did the same. Chai knelt in the grass several feet away, carefully carving hers as if the act itself might break if she breathed too hard. Earl’s circle was, unsurprisingly, the most precise. Hazelnut’s had a wobble in it he pretended not to notice.

You all worked in silence at first.

Until Chai, halfway through carving the second crescent mark around the outer edge of her circle, sat back on her heels and let out a dramatic sigh.

“You know,” she said, staring down at her robes with visible offense, “if I was going to potentially die in something, I should have worn something nicer than my academy robes.”

Hazelnut looked over at once. “You’re worried about fashion?”

“Yes,” Chai said. “If the moon’s going to take me, I’d like to look memorable.”

Hazelnut barked a laugh. “That is the most you thing you’ve said all night.”

She frowned at him. “Don’t act like you wouldn’t regret dying in that wrinkled mess you insist on calling a coat.”

“It has character, and just for the record I brought it cause it was chilly today.”

“It has damage.”

Before Hazelnut could retort, he scooped up a pinch of loose dirt from beside his half-finished circle and flicked it at her.

Chai gasped, because of the audacity.

“Hazelnut Biscotti!”

He was already grinning. “Now you look earth-toned. More ritual appropriate.”

She threw dirt back at him immediately.

It struck his shoulder.

“Oh, now it’s war.”

“Stop!” you began, half-laughing despite yourself.

But Earl was faster.

“Enough,” he snapped, sharp enough to cut through both of them at once. “We are supposed to be hidden.”

Chai froze mid-reach for another handful of dirt. Hazelnut slowly lowered his hand.

The river went on whispering beside you.

Earl exhaled, then softened just slightly. “Quietly,” he said. “If we are going to do this, then at least let us manage not to announce it to the entire world.”

Hazelnut looked vaguely chastened. “Right.”

Chai brushed off her skirt and muttered, “Still should’ve worn something nicer.”

Even Earl nearly smiled at that.

The circles were finished soon after.

Four rough shapes carved into the dirt by moonlit hands. Four separate spaces, each marked and closed, shallow grooves catching silver light along their edges. Yours nearest the water. Earl’s the neatest. Chai’s the prettiest even in its imperfection. Hazelnut’s stubbornly there.

Then there was nothing left to do but wait.

The book sat closed at your feet in the grass.

The moon climbed.

The night grew colder. Perhaps you should have brought a coat too.

You all stood near your circles without stepping into them yet.

Hazelnut had run out of things to say for a while. Chai kept folding and unfolding her hands in her sleeves. Earl’s gaze remained fixed on the sky as if he could reason with time if he looked disciplined enough.

Your own fear came in waves.

The moon reached higher.

Silver pooled across the bank. The dirt circles seemed to catch it strangely now, their edges no longer dull but faintly luminous, as if the earth itself had begun remembering what you’d carved into it.

The book moved.

All four of you saw it at once.

The cover shuddered beneath no visible hand, then sprang open with a crack of pages. Blue light spilled out, not like fire, but like something bright and cold forced through a wound in the air. It rose in a twisting ribbon, lifting free of the book in one fluid motion until it hovered above the grass as a living flare of cerulean light.

Chai stepped back.

Earl’s hand lifted instinctively toward you.

And the light laughed.

“Oh,” it purred, voice spilling from the glow in a dozen shimmering tones at once.

The blue flame spun lazily in the air, delighting in its own reveal.

“Four hearts at the river’s edge,” it said. “Four circles. Four perfectly earnest fools beneath a very hungry moon.”

Your mouth had gone dry.

The light dipped lower, almost as if bowing to the scene before it.

“And committed too,” it went on, laughing softly again. “How lovely. How willful. I do so admire that in mortals.”

Hazelnut took another step back. “I really hate it.”

“Oh, you’re meant to,” the light replied brightly.

Then it turned its attention toward you.

“Especially you, little starlight.”

The blue glow sharpened around the edges, becoming momentarily more intense.

“You did come very close to thinking, at the end,” it mused.

 “I was almost worried. Questions about after. About waking. About memory. Such ugly little practicalities.” A pause, full of mock sympathy. “Though not practical enough, I fear.”

Your heart stumbled.

“What do you mean?” you asked.

The light swayed as if in laughter again.

“What do I mean?” it echoed. “Only that you have spent so much effort asking how to go under that you scarcely bothered to ask what sort of thing might rise in your place if enough is taken.” Its tone brightened. “No matter. We are past all that now.”

Chai’s face had gone pale.

Earl’s voice came measured, controlled, dangerous in its refinement. “You are not the moon, what are you?”

The light flared with amusement.

“No,” it said. “That would be dreadfully provincial. But I have known it’s appetites a very long time.”

Hazelnut glanced at you, then back to it. “This was in the book the whole time.”

“Of course I was,” the blue light said. “You don’t think paper answers prayers by itself, do you?”

You felt suddenly, horribly cold.

The circles beneath your feet began to glow more clearly now, lines of silver-blue sinking into the dirt and pulsing faintly under the moon’s highest gaze.

The light’s voice softened into something almost tender.

“I am very grateful, you know.”

None of you answered.

It continued anyway.

“That you chose this. That you decided to come willingly. I do admire a story that ripens properly. A frightened scholar. Devoted friends. A moonlit river. Love braided neatly through dread.” It laughed again, lower this time. “What fun you have been.”

The light shifted, brightening, gathering itself like a curtain about to rise.

“And since the moon is at it’s peak,” it said, almost singing now, “and since the circles are ready, and since all of you have been so very obliging…”

Its glow sharpened like a grin.

“I have decided what it should take.”

Your breath caught.

The thing in the blue light sounded pleased. 

“Oh, yes,” it murmured. “I think I shall have all the memories of the Sage of Truth.”

Silence.

The light laughed in delight at your faces.

“That lovely look. Fear, outrage, heartbreak, all at once.” It drifted in a slow circle above the open book, bright with malicious joy. “How could I resist? He has threaded himself through this story so beautifully. The tutoring, the longing, the carefully hidden ache, the little kisses stolen before the moonrise.” Its voice turned almost dreamy. “It would be such a waste not to pluck him from the roots.”

“No,” you whispered.

The light ignored you.

“Imagine it,” it cooed. “Four immortals waking one day with a hole in the shape of him. A legend with no face. Tenderness without origin. Desire without name. Oh, that is art.”

“You said it would take something deep,” you said, voice shaking now. “You said, I thought you would take anything else, why him?!”

“I said many things,” it interrupted lightly.

The glow turned toward you fully.

“You wished to know what the moon might claim. I have chosen something rooted. Something binding. Something that will make your forever ache in all the right places.”

Hazelnut found his voice first, though it sounded rough and frightened. “Can we stop this? I mean I’m no fan of the guy but that means…it’ll be like he never existed?”

The light gave a small, pitying hum.

“Can you?” it asked.

Its laughter returned, delighted and theatrical and utterly without mercy.

“Come now. Don’t look so wounded. You wanted eternity. I merely improved the cost.”

“No,” you said at once, voice breaking on the word. “No, if I forget him, then this whole journey was for nothing.”

The Light of Deceit only brightened, pleased by the desperation in you. Around you, the grass bowed in the cold wind, the river whispered, the circles glowed like open mouths waiting to be fed.

You turned toward your friends.

Chai’s face had gone white in the moonlight. Hazelnut looked sick. Earl had gone so still he seemed carved from the night itself.

“If I forget him,” you said again, more frantically now, “then what was any of this for? The tutoring, the Spire, the way he” Your voice faltered. “I can’t do that. I can’t.”

Chai looked at you with shining eyes, and something in her expression shifted; Something terrible and soft and selfish all at once.

“Maybe…” she began, then swallowed. “Maybe it wouldn’t be all bad.”

You stared at her.

She took one step closer to her circle, voice trembling despite the smile she forced onto it. “If you forgot him, then maybe this wouldn’t hurt so much. Maybe you’d be with us again. Really with us. Like before all this.”

Hazelnut let out a rough breath. He looked guilty the moment the words left her mouth, because he had thought it too.

Before the tutoring. Before the Spire. Before the Sage of Truth had become the axis your world tilted around.

And because he had thought it too, he said, “It doesn’t mean it was for nothing. It just means… maybe the ending changes.”

The Light of Deceit gave a delighted little hum above them. It said nothing. It did not need to. It only listened while your friends did its work for it.

Earl’s jaw tightened.

For a heartbeat you thought, hoped, he would stop all of it.

Instead, his voice came low and refined and terribly calm.

“If the cost is memory,” he said, “then perhaps it is survivable.”

You turned to him, wounded.

He met your gaze, and there, beneath all his restraint, was grief so sharp it almost looked like anger.

“This began because you wanted forever,” he said quietly. “If we leave now, we are left with nothing. No answers. No immortality. No assurance this path will open again.” His hand flexed once at his side, betraying what his tone would not. “And if this is the price… then perhaps it is better to lose one ache than everything.”

The words were beautiful.

Reasonable.

Hazelnut stepped into his own circle first.

Not bravely, just with his frightened resolve that only ever came to him when he was already too far committed to back down. “Come on,” he said, trying for lightness and failing. 

“If we wake up and don’t remember him, then… fine. We’ll still remember each other.” He glanced at you, and his smile shook at the edges. “And you’ll be ours again. All the way.”

Chai stepped into hers next.

Moonlight caught in her lashes. “I love him for you,” she whispered. “But I miss when it was just us. I miss when you were happier without having to ache for someone so far above you.” Her hands curled into the folds of her robe. “If forgetting him is what brings you back… then maybe I can live with that.”

Your jam ran cold.

Earl stepped into his circle last.

The silver lines beneath his feet brightened.

He did not smile. He only looked at you and said, in that polished voice fraying around the edges, “Do not make us follow you into this only to leave yourself standing outside it.”

They had already chosen you, because they had already given you everything, and because you could not bear the thought of being the one left behind when this had always been your fault, your idea, your hunger…you felt guilt rise in you like floodwater.

If they were going to go under moonlight and wake into forever with that hole torn clean through them; Then what right had you to stay back and keep your memories whole?

What right had you to survive their sacrifice intact?

Your feet moved before your heart was ready.

You stepped into your circle.

The glowing line closed around you with a faint hiss, as if the moon had exhaled in satisfaction.

The Light of Deceit purred. “How devoted. How guilty. How easy.”

You barely heard it.

The river had gone too loud.

Moonlight spilled fully over you now, over all four of you, and the circles beneath your feet began to burn brighter, lines of cold silver sinking deep into the dirt and then rising again through the soles of your shoes, through your ankles, through your bones.

The pain came all at once.

It was extraction.

It was your life being reached for from inside.

Your breath tore out of you in a ragged gasp as something impossible seized your center and began pulling. Every vein of magic in you opened at once, like the moon had hooked silver fingers beneath your ribs and was drawing your soul thread by thread into it’s mouth.

You screamed.

Your scream ripped through the riverbank raw, helpless, and endless.

To your left, Chai cried out too, her voice shattering into sobs between breaths. Hazelnut cursed, then screamed harder than either of you, as if rage might make pain less holy. Earl’s face blanched white, mouth opening on a sound he tried and failed to swallow.

It hurt.

Stars, it hurt.

Your heart pounded once, twice, then staggered.

The world flickered.

Moonlight poured through your veins where warmth should have been.

You could feel yourself leaving.

Your hands went numb first, then your lips, then everything beneath the agony became cold enough to seem absent. You dropped to your knees inside the circle, fingers clawing at the dirt as if you could root yourself back into your own life by force.

The Light of Deceit laughed overhead, drunk on it.

Your vision blurred.

The river and the sky and your friends’ twisted faces smeared into silver and black.

You screamed again.

And somewhere far off a door opened.

Shadow Milk Cookie had felt wrongness before he heard it.

A disturbance, sharp and lunar, it cut through the Spire’s quiet in a way no ordinary magic could. It struck him half a second before the screams were ripping through the night with such naked agony that it stopped his breath.

Papers struck the floor behind him. The hall outside his quarters blurred. Blue and silver magic tore around him in bright, furious arcs as he descended the path toward the river with a speed that shattered any illusion of composure.

By the time he reached the bank, the moon was high, the circles were lit, and all four of you were inside them.

On your knees.

Screaming.

The Light hovered above the open book like an obscene little star, radiant with delight.

Shadow Milk stopped only long enough to understand.

Then fury hit him so hard the air itself seemed to recoil.

“You,” he said.

The Light of Deceit flared, laughing. “Ahh. There you are.”

Shadow Milk’s eyes had never been filled with more rage.

“I should not have assumed,” he said, each word precise enough to cut, “that silence from you meant obedience.”

The Light spun lazily in place. “And yet you did. Such faith.”

He moved toward the circles.

“If this ritual is interrupted now,” the Light said, almost conversationally, “Your scholar dies.”

The words struck him like a physical blow.

You were on the ground, trembling so hard your body barely seemed to belong to you. Your mouth opened on another scream, but it had gone ragged now, your voice shredding under the force of whatever the moon was taking.

Shadow Milk’s face changed.

“Oh, don’t look like that,” it murmured. “It ruins the scene if the leading man suffers too early.”

His gaze snapped to it, murderous.

“What have you done?”

The Light laughed harder.

“What have they done, you mean. I merely offered terms. They were so eager to say yes.” It drifted lower over the circles, bathing your contorted faces in cold blue. “And your little scholar was especially obliging once the others started talking about getting them back.”

“No…” Chai gasped through clenched teeth.

Hazelnut doubled over, face wet with tears and pain and terror.

Earl, somehow still upright on one knee, looked at Shadow Milk with helpless fury.

Shadow Milk’s hands curled into fists so tight the magic around them sparked.

“You touched them,” he said softly, and in his voice was the promise of ruin.

The Light only brightened.

“We are one and the same, you know.”

That made him still in a different way..

The Light of Deceit laughed at the look on his face. “Oh, don’t be offended. You wear knowledge; I wear appetite. You call yourself truth; I call myself the shape truth takes when it wants something. We are not so different, you and I.”

Shadow Milk’s jaw tightened.

“You are nothing like me.”

“No?” 

His silence was answer enough.

The Light softened into a purr.

“Do not feel too upset. Deep down, you wanted it too.”

Moonlight rippled across the river.

Your scream broke again into something weaker, thinner, and Shadow Milk moved a half-step before forcing himself still.

The Light saw that and smiled through brightness.

“Yes,” it whispered. “You wanted forever with them. You wanted what all tragic fools want, an ending where love outruns mortality.” It laughed, viciously pleased. “And now look. What a marvelous playwright I am.”

Shadow Milk’s eyes never left you.

You were slumped in your circle now, one hand scraping uselessly at the dirt, your pulse a visible flutter in your throat. Your jam had gone cold beneath your skin. Chai sobbed openly. Hazelnut had bitten into his own lip trying to hold back another scream and failed. Earl had gone deathly pale, but still his gaze flicked between you and the Sage as if searching for some impossible way to hold both together.

The Light rose above all of you like a conductor over a final act.

“What a great tragedy this has become,” it said softly, rapturous with itself. “The scholar, the beloved, the devoted little chorus of friends and moonlight asking for memory in payment.”

Shadow Milk did not look at it when he answered.

“Stop this.”

The words came torn raw from somewhere he had spent lifetimes keeping closed.

“Oh, now you beg? How unbecoming of you.”

Another scream ripped from you.

Shadow Milk took one involuntary step toward your circle and stopped again only because the Light’s warning still hung like a blade over your life.

The fury in him had nowhere to go.

So it turned inward.

His face, so often composed into elegant disdain or measured amusement, was wrecked now, eyes bright with helplessness, mouth hard with pain he could neither hide nor solve. He looked at you like every instinct in him was trying to tear the ritual apart with his bare hands and only love was stopping him from killing you by saving you.

And the Light of deceit, laughed and laughed and laughed while the moon fed.

You could hear him still, faintly, through the tearing in your body, your name, perhaps.

The pain did not end. It only became too large for your body to hold.

One moment, you were on your knees in the circle, fingers dug into the dirt, throat torn raw from screaming, moonlight pouring through you like a blade.

The next everything gave out at once.

Your heart lurched.

Your vision shattered into white.

And you fell, as if whatever tether still held you inside yourself had finally snapped loose.

The last thing you felt was the cold of the ground rising fast to meet you.

The last thing you heard was someone shouting your name.

Then nothing.

Darkness.

Not the darkness of sleep or the comfort of closed eyes beneath blankets, and certainly not the hush of exhaustion after a long day.

A darkness with no floor.

You became, aware of yourself slowly, the way one becomes aware of a wound after the first shock has worn off.

You were there. And yet you had no body.

No hands. No feet. No pulse thundering in your throat. No air moving in and out of your lungs. Only your awareness, small and frightened and terribly alone, suspended in a black void so complete it felt almost liquid.

For one impossible moment, you did not remember why you were there.

Then fear came back all at once.

The river. The circles. The moon. The screaming.

Him.

The fear sharpened immediately into panic.

You tried to move and had nothing to move with. Tried to call out and had no mouth. Tried to reach for anything at all and found only the dark stretching endlessly around you, vast and empty and listening.

“No!”

The word did not sound.

But you felt it tear through you anyway.

And then you saw them.

Your memories.

At first they were only lights.

Small ones. Pale and blue-white and gold, suspended in the void around you like lanterns caught beneath deep water. They drifted slowly, each one glowing with its own soft shape, and as you watched, one brightened.

A room.

A desk.

A lecture hall gone too quiet.

You, smaller somehow, more frightened, parchment clenched in nervous hands.

And him.

The first tutoring session.

The terror of sitting across from someone so renowned for knowledge that even breathing felt like presumption. The humiliation of not knowing. The awful certainty that he would see through you, dismiss you, tire of you in a single measured glance.

Then the memory shifted.

His voice.

Smooth. Patient. amused in that maddening way of his.

“Then prove me wrong.”

You reached for it instinctively.

For the sound of him. For the look in his eyes. For the way your fear had curled inward and then, somehow, slowly begun to soften in his presence.

The light quivered.

And drifted away.

“No.”

Another memory rose before you could stop it.

The corridor after that lesson, cold lanternlight on old stone. Your footsteps echoing beside his. Your heart beating too fast because he was walking with you, because he had laughed quietly when you put him on a pedestal and told you truth was not an illusion of your own making.

Then another…

You, ducking behind Hazelnut in the courtyard because you had skipped class and Shadow Milk Cookie was walking toward you with other scholars at his side. Chai whispering that you liked him. Hazelnut wheezing with laughter. Earl looking wholly unimpressed by your panic.

That one hurt differently.

Because your friends were in it too.

Because he was already stitched into the fabric of all of you by then, and you hadn’t even known how deep it went.

The memory flickered.

The edges blurred.

His face clear one second, luminous with that impossible calm began to soften, as if seen through rain.

You lunged for it again.

Please.

Please.

The void gave you nothing.

The memory slid further back into the dark.

Then more came.

Slowly.

Cruelly.

Like someone sorting through your heart and deciding what to keep.

His office again, later this time. You half-asleep against his shoulder, asking in dream-heavy nonsense whether he would become a woman just once because you thought it would be cool and elegant and terrifying. The warmth of him beside you. The way he let you rest. The dream that followed, where you stood at his side in the Spire and found a way to stay forever with him.

You tried to hold onto the dream.

It unraveled in your grasp.

Another, dining hall light, your friends gossiping breathlessly about the high scholars and the rumors of what the Sage had said when he defended you. Chai’s wide eyes. Hazelnut’s certainty they must have deserved it. Earl quietly quoting words that made your heart ache.

Another his hand kissing your knuckles in front of Earl, that devastating little gesture so composed and so pointed it made your whole body light with embarrassment and something far worse.

Another his office in evening light, his hand in yours, the warmth of his lips when you asked him to kiss you because you wanted to remember.

That one hit like grief before it even began to fade.

You saw it clearly.

Too clearly.

The dusk, rose and violet outside the windows. His face when you asked. The way he had gone still. The surprise in him. The tenderness.

You reached with everything you were.

The memory shuddered.

For a moment you thought you had it.

Then the sound went first.

His voice saying “You need never ask me twice…” blurred, stretched, became only the echo of being wanted.

Then his mouth, warm and careful against yours, dimmed into sensation without source.

Then his face

No.

No no no

His face began to go.

The shape of him loosened. Features softening into light. Eyes losing their color. Mouth becoming only curve. His hand at your cheek becoming only touch, stripped of person, stripped of name.

Panic tore through the void. You threw yourself after it with no body to move, no voice to cry with, and still the memory kept slipping, receding into the black like something being lowered down through dark water.

Memory by memory. Thread by thread. The moon not ripping him from you in one merciful act, but letting you watch as it loosened every root he had in you and pulled.

You felt fear become something colder.

What if this never stopped? What if the dark swallowed him whole? What if one day you woke with the shape of longing still in you but no reason for it, no face to attach it to, no memory of who had taught you how to think, how to look up, how to ask, how to love?

Another memory surfaced.

The first time you had made him laugh for real.

Another His voice in public hours, answering foolish questions and profound ones alike with impossible patience while you watched from afar and thought he looked dreamy and refined.

Another The way he had touched your cheek that last evening and said he had wanted one unhurried hour in your company.

Another His private smile when no one else was looking.

Another The name in your chest.

And as they came, they dimmed.

One by one. One by one.

You tried to clutch at them.

Sometimes it worked for a breath.

A detail stayed.

The sleeve of his robe under your fingers. The scent of old parchment and starlit citrus. The sound of his laughter low against your mouth.

But then even those began to loosen, drifting upward and away like scraps of gold ash.

The void around you grew fuller with absence.

You became aware, distantly, that other memories remained untouched.

Chai’s hand on your cheek. Hazelnut’s terrible jokes. Earl’s careful voice saying he had enjoyed arranging your portfolio because it felt like arranging starlight into a language others could read. The four of you running through corridors toward waffles and pineapples. The dining hall warm with honey and laughter. The academy before everything had tilted.

Those stayed.

They glowed steady, pained but whole.

It was only him the dark kept wanting.

Only him.

And because of that, terror twisted into something almost feral.

You could not lose him. Not like this. The void answered with silence.

Then, somewhere very far away a sound.

Muffled. Distant. Like thunder heard from underwater.

A voice.

You froze.

It came again, faint, frayed, reaching through black.

Not words at first. Only urgency.

Then clearer, if only by a little.

Your name.

Someone was calling your name.

You turned toward it instinctively, though turn was not the right word in a place with no shape. The dark shifted. One of the receding memories flickered in response, the one with his hand at your cheek, his mouth warm against yours, his voice low as he told you to remember this.

The light of that memory faltered.

Then held.

Just barely.

You gathered around it like someone sheltering a flame from wind.

Please, you thought, not to the moon, not to whatever cruel thing had engineered this tragedy. To the memory itself. To him. To the shape of him still burning weakly in you.

Please.

Don’t go.

A/N Sorry for the super late update I was so busy all day and could not get this out sooner, it's also shorter bc I was working on the april fool's fic sooooo!!!! anyways please enjoy!!!

anyways...

You opened the door. You stepped inside. The room greeted you with its familiar shape, desk, bed, shelf, papers, the faint lingering warmth of earlier hours. Ordinary things. Safe things. It should have steadied you.

Instead, the moment the door closed behind all four of you, your anxiety surged.

It climbed fast and cold, crawling under your ribs, making your hands feel too clumsy and your breathing too shallow. The book was still where you had left it, tucked away with all the caution of a secret that had long since become too large to hide.

You went to the shelf.

Drew the tomes aside.

Found it.

The cover looked no different than before. Harmless in the way dangerous things often are.

But when you lifted it into your arms, it felt heavier than any book had a right to feel.

Heavier, and wrong. Not in any way you could have explained if someone had asked. But there was something in the weight of it that made your stomach turn, something that felt less like paper and binding and more like being watched.

Behind you, no one spoke.

That, more than anything, frightened you.

Chai Latte Cookie, who always had something to say, stood near your desk with her hands clasped tightly together, worry plain on her face. Hazelnut Biscotti Cookie had gone unusually still, every trace of easy humor held at the edge of collapse. Earl Grey Cookie watched the book the way one might watch a blade balanced point-down on a table, calm, controlled, and fully prepared for blood.

You looked down at the cover.

It did not move.

And yet the room felt as though it were waiting for it to.

Your fingers trembled around the edges. For one awful second you imagined it shifting beneath your hands like something alive. The thought made your grip tighten instead of loosen.

If tonight was the night everything finally gave way into its terrible answer, then you had run out of time to pretend it would sort itself out.

You took a breath.

Opened the book…and the world snapped apart under the crack of chalk.

You jolted upright so violently your knee hit the underside of the desk.

Pain flashed sharp like electricity through you. The lecture hall surged into focus; Sunlight pouring through tall windows, the dusty sweetness of old pages, the broad blackboard at the front of the room covered in diagrams and notes.

You were seated in class. Your pulse was still sprinting. For a moment you could only stare.

At the students turning to look at you. At the familiar Academy robes. At the professor standing motionless near the board, one piece of chalk still in hand, his expression caught somewhere between resignation and weary disappointment.

Professor Almond Custard closed his eyes.

Then sighed.

It was not a dramatic sigh. It was worse than that. It was the sigh of a man who had spent years believing in academic excellence and had once again been asked to confront reality instead.

“Wonderful,” he said. “You’re awake.”

A few students laughed under their breath.

Heat rushed into your face all at once.

You looked around wildly.

Chai Latte was there, seated two rows down and already gaping at you.

Hazelnut Biscotti had twisted halfway around in his seat, staring with a degree of fascinated alarm that suggested he was only a few seconds away from asking whether you had seen a prophet in your sleep.

Earl Grey’s brows had drawn together. Calm as ever, but clearly concerned.

And near the window… your heart dropped.

Shadow Milk Cookie.

He sat with one elbow resting lightly against the desk, pen in hand, composed. Sunlight caught along the academy robes…?He looked younger like this. Less untouchable, somehow just placed within the world instead of above it.

And yet the sight of him struck you harder than anything else in the room.

Because he was here.

Because he was real.

Because if this was real, then…

Professor Almond Custard set the chalk down with care. “Perhaps,” he said, in that measured tone professors reserve for very public embarrassment, “you would like to explain why you sat upright in the middle of my lecture looking like you had just been personally cursed.”

There was another ripple of laughter.

You swallowed. Your mouth felt dry.

“I had a dream,” you said.

Hazelnut Biscotti raised his hand.

Professor Almond Custard stared at him. “Mr. Biscotti, I have not asked a question.”

“I just feel like this is going to become relevant to me emotionally.”

“Put your hand down.”

He kept it raised.

Professor Almond Custard did not even look at him. “No.”

Hazelnut lowered it.

You forced yourself to breathe. “It wasn’t just a dream. I mean, it was, obviously, but it felt real. We were in my room. All of us. There was this book, and it was asking me to choose, and there was this whole…”

You hesitated.

“The whole what?” Chai Latte asked, visibly baffled.

“The immortality thing.”

Silence.

Professor Almond Custard blinked once.

Hazelnut leaned forward. “I’m sorry,” he said, very politely, “the what thing?”

“The immortality thing,” you repeated, growing more self-conscious with every word. “The ritual. The book. The choice.”

Chai Latte’s face had gone from worried to deeply confused. “What book?”

“The one in my room.”

“You don’t have a weird book in your room,” Hazelnut said.

You stared at him. “Yes I do.”

“No, you have eight normal books, three stacks of notes, one chipped mug, and an alarming amount of loose paper,” he said. “I’ve been there.”

“That is an outrageous level of detail.”

“I notice things when I’m afraid.”

Professor Almond Custard rubbed at his temple.

Earl Grey turned in his seat. “You should go to the infirmary.”

“No, I’m fine,” you said quickly, though you were very obviously not fine. “I just had a weird dream, that’s all. It’s just that it felt so real.”

Your gaze had already drifted back to Shadow Milk Cookie. He had been watching quietly the entire time. Not with concern or recognition.

Only with mild curiosity, as though you were some interesting classroom interruption.

A chill moved through you.

You felt yourself ask, before you could stop it, “Do you remember any of it?”

He tilted his head.

“Any of what?”

Your stomach twisted.

“The Spire,” you said quietly. “Office hours. Me.”

The room was too quiet.

Shadow Milk Cookie regarded you for a long beat, his expression unreadable but contemplative. And with perfect courtesy, he said  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

Something in your chest gave way all at once.

It was ridiculous.

Utterly ridiculous.

To feel hurt by that. To feel the air leave you as though you had been struck. To feel your throat tighten over a life that, if this was real, had never happened at all.

A dream. That was all.

A dream so cruelly detailed that it had carved itself into you before dissolving.

You let out a small, humorless laugh and looked down at your desk.

“How strange,” you murmured.

That seemed, somehow, to be the wrong thing to say, because Chai Latte’s expression softened immediately. Earl Grey stood. Hazelnut looked like he was trying very hard not to say something that might accidentally make everything worse.

Professor Almond Custard, to his credit, also looked less annoyed now and full of concern.

“Yes,” he said, gentler than before. “Strange. I think perhaps…”

He got no further.

The blackboard behind him erased itself.

It wiped clean in one broad, it’s motion like an offended hand had swatted across it from the inside.

Every head in the room turned.

There, in enormous looping letters of bright blue chalk, appeared the words.

APRIL FOOLS! POP QUIZ ON ETERNAL LIFE CANCELLED DUE TO LOW MORALE.

Silence.

Then somewhere in the back of the room, a desk let out a honk.

A goose-honk.

You stared.

Another desk answered it.

Professor Almond Custard closed his eyes.

Hazelnut whispered, “What.”

A shower of glitter burst from the ceiling fan.

Someone yelped as a rolled-up scroll sprang open on its own and smacked them lightly in the face. Chai Latte’s ink bottle erupted into tiny paper flowers. Earl Grey opened his notebook only to find every line of his perfectly copied lecture notes replaced with the words nice try in increasingly smug handwriting. At the front of the room, the chalk began scribbling of its own accord.

TODAY’S LESSON: TRUST NO ONE.

Professor Almond Custard turned with the slow dignity of a man confronting the collapse of civilization.

“This,” he said flatly, “is why I have always advocated for a modest distrust of whimsy.”

A rubber fish sailed through the air and hit the wall.

The class lost all order at once.

Someone else discovered their chair squeaked out little trumpet noises every time they shifted. A potted plant near the window sneezed glitter directly onto a student’s notes. Hazelnut opened his textbook and recoiled when a folded paper plane sprung shot out of the pages at his nose.

You looked around in disbelief nothing was real.

Or perhaps all of it was.

Chai Latte rose first. “Okay, no. No, I’m claiming you before the Academy explodes.”

Earl Grey was already collecting his things. “Agreed.”

Hazelnut, still holding the paper plane at arm’s length, stood as well. “I don’t want to alarm anyone, but reality appears to be doing improv.”

Professor Almond Custard pointed toward the door without turning away from the board. “Take them away!” he said. “And if the corridor starts speaking in rhyme, do not answer it.”

You let your friends steer you out of the lecture hall.

The corridor beyond was mercifully quiet and you stood by the lecture hall doors.

For three seconds.

Then a portrait on the wall winked at you.

Hazelnut made a noise of deep personal offense. 

Chai Latte tightened her hold on your sleeve. 

Earl Grey muttered something under his breath and flicked two fingers in the air, likely reinforcing whatever wards remained between the Academy and complete nonsense.

You glanced back.

Shadow Milk Cookie had not followed.

He remained seated where you had left him, one hand propped lightly against his cheek, watching the classroom dissolve into absurdity with the calm interest of someone attending a mildly entertaining performance.

He met your eyes from across the distance.

Still no recognition.

Still that neat, blankness.

Then, to your utter disbelief, he offered you a small, elegant wave.

The floor vanished.

You woke with a gasp.

Not to chalk, a lecture hall or a corridor full of badly behaved architecture.

Instead you awoke to a bed, to warmth.

To the gentle weight of blankets tangled around your legs and the soft gold hush of early morning filtering through curtains. Your heart was still hammering, but this time there was no terror in the room, only the quiet presence of another body beside yours.

You went still.

Then slowly turned your head.

A familiar shape rested next to you beneath the blankets, still warm from sleep.

One arm. One hand. One face you knew.

On your finger was a ring.

On theirs was its match.

Your spouse stirred at the movement.

Route One: Chai Latte Cookie

Chai Latte was awake before you realized it.

You only knew because by the time your breathing gave you away, she had already pushed herself up on one elbow and turned toward you, her hair a little mussed, her expression soft with sleepy concern.

“Hey,” she murmured. “Bad one?”

You looked at her and felt something inside you loosen so abruptly it almost hurt.

Not because the fear was gone, but because she knew you. Immediately, Instantly, Without question.

And after the absurd, aching wrongness of that other dream…the classroom, the blank stare, the unbearable unfamiliarity of Shadow Milk Cookie not knowing your name. That simple fact nearly undid you. How could someone you worked closely with not know you?

Chai Latte saw the look on your face and scooted closer at once.

“Oh, it was that bad,” she whispered.

You laughed weakly, then covered your face. “I had to choose immortality.”

There was a pause.

Then she gently pulled your hands down just enough to peer at you. “Before breakfast?”

You nodded miserably.

“Horrible,” she said at once. “Cruel and unethical.”

You gave a breathy little laugh.

Encouraged, she tucked herself against your side and wrapped both arms around you like she intended to physically prevent any more dreams from getting near you.

“It started with the book,” you mumbled into her shoulder. “And then I woke up in Professor Almond Custard’s lecture hall, and everyone thought I was crazy, and everything was wrong, and the professor was disappointed in me, and the desks were honking, and-”

“The desks were what?”

“Honking.”

She pulled back just enough to stare.

Then, with great solemnity, “Oh, that’s nasty. That’s not even meaningful. That’s just the mind creating noise pollution.”

You laughed again, thin but genuine.

Chai Latte brightened immediately, as though she had been waiting right there for that sound.

You pressed the heels of your hands to your eyes. “It felt real.”

“I know.”

“And Shadow Milk didn’t know me.”

That one changed her face.

Her teasing gentled at once. 

“Oh,” she said, sounding a bit distant.

You stared at the blankets. “Which is stupid, because obviously it wasn’t real, but it still hurt.”

“No,” Chai Latte said, and there was no humor in her voice now. “That’s not stupid.”

She reached up and smoothed your hair back from your face. Such a simple touch. Such a familiar one. The kind that always felt as though she had known how to comfort you long before either of you had admitted how much you needed it.

“It makes sense,” she murmured. 

“Dream-you still loved dream-him. Of course that would hurt.” she grimaced.

You looked at her.

She offered you a small, crooked smile. “Also, for the record, if anyone ever forgets you in any universe, they’re the one with the problem.”

“Was it at least the cool lecture hall?” she asked.

“No.”

“Any dramatic lightning?”

“No.”

“Then it sounds like a complete waste of emotional damage.”

You snorted.

She grinned, pleased with herself, and reached blindly toward the nightstand. A moment later she produced a mug she must have set there before bed, your favorite mug, now filled with tea kept warm by her famous kettle.

You blinked at it. “You had this ready?”

She shrugged with exaggerated modesty. “I like being adored for my foresight.”

You took it with both hands. The warmth seeped into your fingers immediately.

Chai Latte tucked herself back against your side, head coming to rest on your shoulder like it belonged there.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s the plan.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“It is not. It’s perfect.” She counted on her fingers. “One, no immortality choices. Two, no lectures, we're wayyyy past that. Three, no cursed books. Four, if Professor Almond Custard appears in this room to judge you for sleeping, I’m throwing a pillow at him. Well who knows if he’s even around anymore…”

“You’d never.”

“I would throw it nicely.”

You huffed into your tea, and then set it down on the nightstand.

Outside, dawn had fully begun to spill itself across the windows. Inside, everything remained small and warm and manageable.

Chai Latte tilted her head to look at you, eyes soft.

“You don’t have to choose forever today, or ever” she said quietly. “You don’t have to choose anything frightening or enormous. It’s April first. The world is being annoying on purpose.”

“And if the universe tries to make you immortal before noon,” she added, “I’ll fight it.”

“You can’t fight eternity.”

“Watch me.”

You smiled with gusto, and Chai Latte beamed like she had won something precious.

Then she kissed your temple, slid her fingers through yours beneath the blankets, and held on until the last of the fear had nowhere left to sit.

Route Two: Earl Grey Cookie

You woke to the slow, steady motion of a hand moving up and down your back.

Enough to guide you home.

Your eyes opened to find Earl Grey already awake, propped neatly against the headboard, spectacles low on his nose, his expression composed in the way only he could manage while still half-covered by blankets.

The moment he saw you were fully conscious, he set his book aside.

“You were dreaming,” he said.

You stared at him for a second, disoriented by the contrast. The nightmare had been so loud, so absurd, so humiliating in ways only dreams could be, and here he was as if mornings had never been invented for chaos at all.

You let out a shaky breath. “It was awful.”

“I gathered as much.”

His hand did not leave your back.

You turned onto your side to face him fully, and once you started talking, the whole thing came spilling out before you could stop it. 

The book. The ritual. 

The feeling that something terrible and endless was waiting for you just beyond the next choice. The lecture hall. Professor Almond Custard’s disappointment. The Academy dissolving into ridiculousness. Shadow Milk Cookie looking at you like a stranger.

Earl Grey listened without interrupting once.

He always did that. Gave your panic enough dignity to finish speaking before he tried to argue with it.

By the time you were done, your hands had twisted themselves into the blankets.

He noticed.

Without comment, he reached over and offered you one of his.

You took it at once.

His fingers closed around yours, cool, gentle, grounding.

“First,” he said quietly, “you are here.”

He squeezed once.

“In our room.”

Another squeeze.

“In our bed.”

Another.

“With me.”

Your breathing eased by a fraction.

He glanced toward the curtains, where morning had begun to shine through in pale gold. “Second, it is April first.”

You squinted at him.

“That matters because?”

“Because reality is more susceptible to foolishness on certain dates.”

“That sounds made up.”

“It is,” he said. “But I believe it nonetheless.”

A startled laugh escaped you.

There the faintest hint of satisfaction crossed his face.

He leaned over to the nightstand and passed you a cup of tea you had not even noticed waiting there. Of course there was tea. Of course it was at the right temperature already. Of course Earl Grey Cookie, confronted with a spouse in distress, had responded with practical comfort and precise timing.

You cradled the cup in both hands.

“It felt real,” you admitted after a moment.

“Yes.”

“And the part that upset me most wasn’t even the immortality thing.”

“No,” Earl Grey said softly. “I suspected it wouldn’t be.”

You looked down.

“It was him not knowing me.”

He was silent for just a beat.

Then…“Yes. He was an important teacher for you.”

No dismissal. No it was only a dream, don’t be silly, understanding delivered so simply it made your throat ache.

Earl Grey shifted closer and traced a small ward into the air with two fingers. The room gave the faintest hum as privacy settled around you both, a soft barrier against interruptions, noise, and anything else the morning might attempt.

“Dreams have a talent,” he said, “for finding the exact shape of a fear and dressing it in familiar faces.”

You listened.

“They are not prophecies,” he continued. “They are reflections. Distorted ones, usually. And unkind.”

You glanced at him over the rim of your cup. “You make them sound petty.”

“They are.”

He reached over and brushed his thumb lightly beneath your eye. “No grand decisions today,” he murmured. “No eternity. No impossible choices. Only breakfast, if you feel like it. And perhaps another hour of sleep, if you don’t.”

“What if eternity comes back after breakfast?”

“Then I shall reschedule it.”

That made you laugh into the tea hard enough that you nearly spilled.

He took the cup from you before you could, set it back on the nightstand, and drew you against him with quiet certainty. One arm came around your shoulders. His chin rested lightly against the top of your head.

You listened to the rhythm of his breathing. To the small sounds of morning beyond the warded room. To the beating of your own heart as it gradually remembered it was no longer being chased.

After a while, he spoke again, his voice low by your hair.

“For the record,” he said, “if you ever fall asleep during Professor Almond Custard’s lecture in reality, I will wake you before he notices. Though I imagine we’re too old for any of his courses.”

You smiled against his chest. “How noble.”

“I know.”

Then, after a beat, with the dry sort of fondness that always caught you by surprise when it surfaced, “Though if the desks begin honking, I am leaving you to your fate.”

Route Three: Hazelnut Biscotti Cookie

You woke with a gasp and nearly knocked Hazelnut Biscotti off the bed.

He jerked upright with an entirely undignified noise. “What happened? Who died? Is it me?”

You stared at him, wide-eyed.

His hair was a mess. The blanket had somehow wrapped itself around one shoulder like a frightened shawl. He looked as though he had been dragged out of sleep mid-thought and had come back unprepared to face the world.

And yet the instant he registered your expression, all the flailing stopped.

“Oh,” he said, softer. “Nightmare.”

You nodded.

He exhaled. “Okay. Better than me dying. Not for you, obviously. But statistically.”

Despite everything, a laugh slipped out.

He pointed at you immediately. “Good. Keep doing that. That’s a very encouraging sign.”

You dragged a hand over your face. “It was horrible.”

“Tell me everything,” he said, already pulling his legs up and turning fully toward you with surprising seriousness. “No, wait. Start with whether I was cool in it.”

“You were stressed.”

He looked offended. “Unrealistic.”

That got another laugh out of you, and with that tiny opening the whole nightmare spilled free. The book. The ritual. The immortality choice. The lecture hall. Professor Almond Custard’s sigh. The terrible feeling of no one understanding what you were talking about. Shadow Milk Cookie not knowing you. The desks honking. The classroom turning into some cursed April first disaster.

Hazelnut listened with his full attention, eyebrows rising higher and higher as the story went on.

When you finished, he sat in silence for two long seconds.

Then he said, very gravely, “Okay. Several things.”

You sniffed. 

“First, if a desk honks at me in real life, I’m dropping the class.”

You laughed weakly.

“Second, if a book ever asks you to choose immortality, the answer is no because forever is too much commitment and I don’t even like committing to lunch plans. Dinner was hard enough, only easy because of you…”

He nodded, pleased. “Third, I’m deeply offended dream-me didn’t apparently tackle the book out the window.”

“I don’t think windows were the issue.”

“They never are until you need one.”

By now you were laughing enough to breathe again, and Hazelnut relaxed a little at the sight of it.

Then he reached over and took your hand firmly.

“Hey,” he said, and all the silliness in him gentled into something steady. “That sounds awful. I’m really sorry.”

You looked at him.

“It felt real,” you admitted.

“I know.”

“And the weirdest part is the immortality thing wasn’t even the worst part.”

“No,” he said softly. “It was him not knowing you. He was a great guy for what he was…though I don’t appreciate how menacing he was.”

You blinked and nodded.

Hazelnut made a face like someone who had unfortunately guessed correctly. “Yeah. I know.”

For a moment neither of you said anything.

Then, because being quiet for too long clearly violated some important personal code, he threw the blanket over both of you in one sweeping motion until you were half-buried together.

“There,” he said.

You blinked in the dim little fabric cave. “What is this?”

“A tactical response.”

“To what?”

“To sadness.”

“That’s not a tactic.”

“It is if I do it with conviction. Confidence is key!”

You laughed again, and he gave a triumphant nod.

Then he scrambled out from under the blanket, nearly tripped over the edge of it, recovered, and returned with water, a snack, and your softest extra blanket, which he proceeded to arrange around you with the absolute certainty of a man who had no formal training whatsoever and yet believed deeply in the healing powers of being over-bundled.

“Hazel.”

“Yes?”

“I can’t move.”

“Perfect,” he said. “Then you can’t go back to immortality.”

He climbed back beside you and tucked himself against your side, one arm around your shoulders. 

“It’s April first,” he said after a moment, glancing toward the calendar. “You realize what this means.”

You narrowed your eyes. “That my subconscious hates me?”

“That reality is doing bits.”

You huffed a laugh.

He looked deeply suspicious of the ceiling. “Frankly, I think the universe should be more professional.”

“Complain to management.”

“I will.”

He rested his chin lightly atop your head.

“If fate ever hands you another creepy immortal book,” he said, “I’m throwing it in a river.”

“That seems reckless.”

“I’ll throw it anyways.”

You smiled into the blanket.

“And if Professor Almond Custard shows up in this room to shame you for sleeping through lecture,” Hazelnut added, “I’ll defend you.”

“How?”

He considered. “I’ll say you were doing research.”

“That’s a terrible lie.”

“I know. But I’ll say it confidently. And also it would be really weird if he showed up here…”

The last of the panic had begun to unravel by then, slowly undone by his nonsense and his sincerity in equal measure.

You let your eyes drift shut again.

Hazelnut’s voice softened above you.

“You’re okay,” he murmured. You smiled.

He squeezed your shoulder lightly. “And for the record? If anyone forgets you in any universe, they don’t deserve your stress about it.”

You turned your face against him, and Hazelnut held you there, warm and ridiculous and achingly kind, until the nightmare became small enough to laugh at.

Route Four: Shadow Milk Cookie

You woke with the sharp inhale still caught in your throat.

For one fractured second, you didn’t move.

Then you felt a hand at your waist, warm and familiar. The slow rise and fall of another body beside yours. The faint scent of lavender, clean linen, and something sweetly impossible to mistake.

A thumb brushed lightly beneath your eye.

“Good morning,” Shadow Milk Cookie murmured.

You looked at him.

Not at a stranger in a lecture hall. Not at that polite, empty version of him who had met your hurt with elegance and distance. At him. Your him.

Hair loosened from sleep. Sharp features softened by early morning and rumpled sheets and the fact that he was looking at you with immediate recognition, as if it had never occurred to the universe that there might be any other way.

The relief hit so fast your eyes stung.

His expression changed at once.

The faint trace of amusement left him; Instead concern welled over.

“What happened?” he asked quietly.

You tried to answer and instead made a useless little sound.

His arm tightened around you, drawing you closer before you had even decided whether you wanted that. Which, unfortunately for your dignity, you very much did.

“A dream?” he guessed.

You nodded against his shoulder.

“The mind can be so cruel,” he said at once, the offense in his tone so sincere it almost made you laugh.

Almost.

He tipped your chin up with two fingers. “Tell me about it.”

So you did.

The book. The terror. The feeling of standing on the edge of something vast and wrong and permanent. The lecture hall. Professor Almond Custard’s disappointment. The absurdity of the academy turning into some April first disaster. Worst of all, the sight of him sitting by the window and looking at you as though you were no one.

By the time you finished, your voice had gone smaller.

“You didn’t know me,” you said.

Shadow Milk Cookie went very still.

Then he leaned in and pressed a kiss to your forehead, slow, deliberate, almost ritualistic in its tenderness.

“My starlight,” he murmured, “if I ever looked at you and did not know you, something in creation has gone catastrophically wrong.”

You let out a shaky breath.

He touched your face as though checking for remnants of the dream there. “No, no,” he said softly when he saw your eyes still threatening to betray you. “Absolutely not. I refuse to share my morning with tears caused by fiction.”

That finally made you laugh, weak though it was.

“There,” he said, pleased. “A much better sound.”

He reached across you then, and your whole body tensed when you saw what sat on the bedside table.

A book.

It was thick. Decorative. Ominous in the low morning light.

Shadow Milk noticed at once.

Then, to your astonishment, he picked it up with two fingers and turned it over.

Across the front cover, written in awful looping handwriting with embarrassingly bright blue ink, was,

TOTALLY CURSED BOOK OF ETERNAL SUFFERING APRIL FOOLS :)

There was a long silence.

You stared.

He stared.

Then he exhaled through his nose.

“How vulgar,” he said.

You broke. The randomness of the situation was funny to your feeble mind.

You laughed so suddenly and helplessly that you had to bury your face against his shoulder.

Shadow Milk Cookie, instead of lamenting the indignity of being used as a pillow, simply drew you closer and let you laugh there, one hand smoothing through your hair.

“It is the first of April,” he said, voice dry above you. “The universe is apparently determined to embarrass itself.”

He sighed, his expression becoming inquisitive.

“You truly thought you had to choose?” he asked.

You looked down. “Yes.”

“And that terrified you.”

“Yes.”

“Well it’s a good thing no one is asking that of you today,” he said. 

His thumb brushed your cheek.

“Especially not me.”

You swallowed.

“I know it wasn’t real,” you said quietly. “But it still hurt.”

“Of course it did.”

“You grieve losses even in dreams,” he murmured. “The heart is embarrassingly sincere like that.”

That made you smile a little.

He looked inordinately pleased to have earned it.

“Come here,” he said, though you were already close enough that the command was really just an excuse.

He shifted until you were half-draped over him, one arm secure around your waist, the other spread warm and protective between your shoulder blades. His chin brushed the top of your head.

Outside, morning stretched itself bright and gold across the curtains.

Inside, the room was quiet.

Safe.

“So,” he said after a moment, tone lightening just slightly, “let us review. You are alive. You are married. You are in bed with someone devastatingly handsome.”

“Debatable.”

He gasped softly. “Cruel. After all I’ve done.”

A laugh slipped out of you.

He continued as though you had not interrupted. “There are no immortal contracts scheduled for today. No ritual circles. No lectures. No humiliation before Professor Almond Custard. Only breakfast, if we feel ambitious. And perhaps several more hours of scandalous laziness.”

“You make laziness sound like an art form.”

“It is when I do it. Besides I’m always thinking, you not so much.”

You could feel the last edges of fear finally beginning to unwind.

Shadow Milk Cookie pressed a kiss to your hair.

“The world may make a fool of itself today,” he murmured, voice low and velvet-soft, “but it shall not make one of you.”

You closed your eyes.

He held you through the silence that followed.

After long enough that your breathing had fully steadied, he added, with a faint smile in his voice “Though if a desk ever honks at you in reality, do wake me. I should like to see it.”

“I have a lot to learn from you.” The words hung there. True words. Dangerous words. His gaze softened almost imperceptibly.

“You always say things like truth should be faced directly,” you went on, looking at the edge of his desk rather than at him. “And I keep pretending I can dance around it if I’m clever enough. But I’m not. Not really.”

A silence followed that did not feel empty. Then, very quietly, he asked, “Is that what this is?”

You looked up.

“This?”

“A confession?” he said. “An apology? A peace offering?”

You almost smiled despite yourself. “Maybe all three.”

“How ambitious.”

You stepped nearer his desk. The morning light from the window caught on his robes, making him look impossibly composed. Untouchable, almost, like the first time. “I mean it.”

"I know,” he said.

You had come here to ease your guilt, yes. To make amends in the only way you knew how before the moon rose and everything became impossible to take back. But hearing him say I know made the whole thing feel less strategic, less safely motivated. More honest than you had meant it to be.

You shifted your weight. “I just thought… if I’ve seemed distant, or difficult, or…”

“Terrified of honesty?” he supplied.

You winced. “That one.”

His mouth curved.

“I had noticed.”

You rolled your eyes faintly, and that seemed to please him. He smiled “But you are here now.”

“Yes.”

“And you wish me to believe,” he said, voice silk-soft now, “that this visit is unconnected to anything else troubling your mind.”

Your pulse stumbled. For a terrible instant, you thought he knew. That somehow, impossibly, the moon, the book, the river had already reached him. But then he looked at you, not with suspicion, only searching for answers.

You answered carefully. “I wanted to see you.”

Which was true not the whole truth.But the truth

Something in him settled at that. Not completely. But enough to let his guard down.

He stood then, moving around the desk with that same unhurried grace that always made you feel like the room belonged to him long before he entered it. When he stopped before you, the space between you felt suddenly too small.

“You continue,” he said softly, “to say the most dangerous things with the face of someone who does not realize they are holding a blade.”

You looked up at him. “I said I have a lot to learn.”

“And I,” he murmured, “am apparently expected to teach while under siege.”

You huffed out a laugh.

It faded quickly.

Because being this close to him, on this morning of all mornings, made your chest ache with a guilt you could not put anywhere. You were here to be kinder to him. To honor what he had given you. To lessen, in some small selfish way, the wrongness of what you were about to do.

He was just looking at you. Not as a problem. Not as a puzzle. Not even as a student, exactly.

Just you.

“I do mean it,” you said again, almost helplessly. “About learning from you.”

His gaze lowered briefly, then returned to your face. “I know that too.”

You smiled, but it felt fragile.

“I’m trying,” you admitted. “Even when I don’t look like I am.”

“That,” he said, “has perhaps been your most consistent talent.”

You laughed softly, and this time it stayed.

He let the silence breathe for a moment before lifting one hand, slow enough for you to pull away if you wanted and brushing a thumb lightly beneath your eye, where sleep had left its faint trace.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I was thinking.”

“A dangerous pastime.”

“I’ve heard.”

His thumb lingered one heartbeat too long before he let his hand fall.

“Whatever it is you are wrestling with, do not decide it alone.”

The words went through you like cold water.

You smiled before the horror could show on your face. “That sounds suspiciously like concern.”

“It is concern,” he said, too smoothly to deny. “You continue to make it necessary.”

You looked away for a second, because that was the sort of kindness that made guilt unbearable.

You were not deciding it alone. That was the problem.

By tonight, your friends would stand with you by the river. By tonight, moonlight would ask what all of you were willing to lose.

And here you were, standing in his office in the morning light, trying to mend something before you shattered something else entirely.

“…Thank you,” you said quietly.

He tilted his head. “For what?”

You could not say for seeing me.You could not say for teaching me enough that I know I am doing this wrong.You could not say for making me wish I were not about to lie to you with my whole body.

So instead you said, “For being patient with me.”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“I have not always been patient.”

“More than most would have been.”

“That is a very low bar.”

You smiled faintly. “Still counts.”

At that, he reached for your hand.

The gesture was elegant, familiar, and devastating.

He turned your palm upward and held it as if it were something worth reading.

“You are behaving strangely,” he said.

Your heart lurched.

But his expression remained calm, almost tender.

“If this is guilt,” he continued, “I would like to know what crime inspired it.”

You managed a weak joke because you were still you, even now. “Existing badly, maybe.”

“Unconvincing.”

You looked at your joined hands. “Maybe I just wanted to do something right for once.”

That made him still.

And then, very softly, he said, “You are not as impossible as you think.”

Something in your chest cracked at that, Not enough to show, but enough to feel between your ribs.

You stepped closer before you could overthink it and leaned into him, brief and careful and not quite a full embrace. For half a second he did not move.

Then his arms came around you.

You shut your eyes.

The guilt did not disappear. But it changed shape, becoming sadder.

“I’ll keep learning,” you murmured into the fabric of his robes.

He let out a breath that might have been a laugh, might have been something else.

“You had better,” he said. “It would be terribly inconvenient if all this effort were wasted.”

You pulled back just enough to look at him. “There you are.”

“I have been here all along.”

Outside, the day was brightening. Somewhere far below, the Blueberry Yogurt River moved toward evening as it always would, silver waiting beneath the ordinary color of daylight. Hours still remained before moonrise. Hours before circles drawn on the bank. Hours before vows.

But standing there in his office, held in the quiet between what he knew and what he didn’t, you let yourself pretend that you had come here for nothing more than this.

For amends, for closeness.

For the sake of saying I have a lot to learn from you.

And when you finally stepped back, he kept one hand lightly over yours as if reluctant to break the thread completely.

“Come see me later,” he said.

Your pulse stumbled again.

“I’ll try,” you answered.

Not a promise.

He noticed. Of course he noticed.

But whatever question rose in him, he let it pass.

“For your sake,” he said, releasing your hand at last, “do.”

You left him then, the morning wrapped in gold, your chest full of guilt and tenderness and dread. And all day long, as the hours slid quietly toward moonrise by the Blueberry Yogurt River, his voice stayed with you warm enough to hurt.

You found your friends where you half-expected they would be together.

Of course they were together.

Near one of the sunlit corridors overlooking the courtyard, the four of you had fallen into the habit of finding each other without meaning to, as if the academy itself had learned your pattern and gently nudged you back into place whenever you drifted too far.

Hazelnut was saying something with his hands, dramatic enough that Chai was already laughing before he finished. Earl stood beside them, composed as ever, though his posture softened the moment his gaze lifted and found you.

And that; That did it for you.

Whatever had been holding you upright since leaving Shadow Milk’s office gave way all at once.

You crossed the distance faster than you meant to, barely hearing Hazelnut’s startled, “Whoa!” before you threw your arms around them.

All of them.

Chai made a soft sound of surprise and immediately folded into you. Hazelnut stumbled, then steadied, one hand flying up to pat your back with awkward urgency. Earl was the last to move, but when he did, he stepped in close and wrapped you tightly, one hand finding yours and threading through it as though to anchor you there.

You held on hard enough that your shoulders began to shake.

Not quite crying but trying not to, trying very hard not to.

And because they knew you so well, none of them joked at first.

Chai’s hand slid up to your face, warm and gentle, cupping your cheek as she searched your expression. “Hey,” she whispered, her voice losing all teasing. “Hey, look at me.”

You did.

Her thumb brushed just beneath your eye.

And then the words came out before you could stop them.

“I’m scared.”

The confession landed soft and raw between all of you.

Hazelnut inhaled sharply through his nose.

Chai’s face crumpled with that particular kind of tenderness that hurt to look at.

Earl’s grip on your hand tightened.

Then Chai, because she was Chai and softness in her never stayed still for long, made a tiny wounded sound and threw herself more fully into the embrace, nearly knocking all of you off balance as she bear-hugged the whole group at once.

Hazelnut wheezed. “Stars, okay, yes, emotional solidarity, but I do enjoy breathing.”

“Too bad,” Chai mumbled into someone’s shoulder.

You laughed then, wet and shaky, and it broke the worst of it. Just enough for the fear to stop feeling like it might split you open. You drew back only a little, still holding on, still close enough to feel the warmth of them all. “Should we…” Your voice caught. You tried again, softer this time. “Should we just pretend it’s a normal day?”

Three pairs of eyes stayed on you.

“Like back at the academy,” you said, almost pleading now for something simple. “Just for today. Just for a little while.” You swallowed. “We could go see if they have waffles. And pineapples.”

That got a real smile out of Chai. A proper one, bright and aching.

“That reminds me more of our childhood than the academy,” she said softly. “Sneaking off to find the best food like it was some grand quest.”

Hazelnut huffed a laugh. “It was a grand quest.”

“It still is,” you said. Earl let out the faintest breath of amusement, and when you looked at him, there was something in his expression you almost couldn’t bear, too much feeling, too carefully held.

Then he stepped back.

Only enough to compose himself.

“Very well,” he said, smoothing one sleeve with a precision that fooled no one. “If we are to behave irresponsibly, we ought to commit properly.”

You blinked. “What does that mean?” A faint gleam entered his eyes familiar, refined, and suddenly boyish in a way you did not see often enough.

“It means,” he said, already turning, “I’ll race you to the dining area.”

And before any of you could answer, he was moving. Not with his usual measured grace. Actually running.

Chai gasped. “Earl Grey Cookie!” You stared, stunned, just long enough to see him not look back. And then you understood. The speed. The abruptness. The way his head angled just slightly away. He did not want you to see the tears brightening in his eyes. That made your chest ache with such fierce love you almost couldn’t stand it. Chai understood at the same moment you did. You saw it in the way her mouth parted, then softened. And then she laughed a breathless, bright sound that rang down the corridor like sunlight.

“Oh, absolutely not,” she declared, grabbing your wrist. “He does not get to win.”

You were already moving. The fear did not vanish. It came with you. But for one shining, foolish moment, so did something else, something freer. Closer to the version of yourselves that existed before countdowns and rituals and moonlit bargains.

You ran. Chai beside you, nearly pulling you along with the force of her determination. Earl ahead, coat robes behind him, pretending very hard this was only a race and not a desperate little act of mercy he was giving himself. And Hazelnut well poor Hazelnut, was left several strides behind before realizing the betrayal.

“Are you serious?!” he shouted, breaking into a sprint after you. “Slow down! Some of us are built for survival, not drama!”

Chai laughed harder.

You did too.

And by the time the dining hall doors came into view, all four of you were breathless and bright-eyed and almost, almost able to pretend this was just another morning, another ordinary day, another chance to chase waffles and pineapples and each other, with nothing waiting for you at moonrise except more life.

The moment you all stumbled through the dining hall doors, breathless, laughing, half-collapsed against each other from the sprint you stopped so suddenly Chai nearly ran into your back.

“…No way,” you whispered.

Hazelnut blinked past you toward the serving tables. “Oh.”

Earl, who had reached the line first and was still pretending he hadn’t been running to outrun his own feelings, actually laughed under his breath.

Because there they were.

Freshly cut pineapples, glistening gold in a chilled bowl like little pieces of stolen sun.

Honey waffles, actual honey waffles, warm and soft and stacked high.

And beside them, in a shining little dish that looked almost ceremonial in the morning light, pineapple jam.

For a moment, none of you moved.

It was so absurdly perfect that it felt less like luck and more like the universe itself had finally blinked and gone soft.

Chai let out the smallest, most awed sound. “Lady Luck really is staring directly at you today.”

You laughed, but it came out thin and shaky and much too close to crying. “I know.”

Hazelnut folded his arms, grinning despite himself. “This is either a blessing or the cruelest foreshadowing of all time.”

“Don’t ruin it,” Chai scolded, though her voice was warm.

Earl glanced over at you, eyes gentler now. “Take the win.”

So you did.

You all did.

Plates filled quickly, waffles, fruit, jam, tea, too much butter, not enough dignity. Chai stole extra fruit when she thought no one was looking. Hazelnut grabbed more waffles than any one person should reasonably need. Earl, to no one’s surprise, constructed a plate so neat and balanced it looked curated by a scholar of breakfast. You piled pineapple onto your plate with the sort of reverence usually reserved for relics.

And when you sat down together, the table felt warmer than it had any right to.

For a little while, there was only the sound of cutlery and laughter and the soft hum of other students moving around you, unaware of how sacred this table had become.

You spread pineapple jam over your waffle with great seriousness.

Chai watched you and smiled with her whole face. “There they are.”

You looked up. “What?”

“That ridiculous little look you get when something makes you happy.”

Hazelnut snorted. “It’s true. You look like you’ve just been personally forgiven by breakfast.”

You shook your head, laughing. But then your hand slowed.

The thought came quietly. Not as a wound this time, but as a certainty.

If memories could be taken if the moon meant to reach in and claim something rooted, then maybe this was what you were meant to do with the hours you had left.

Not hide from them.

Not ration them out in fear.

Live them again. Deliberately. Beautifully. While they were still yours.

You looked at your friends over the rim of your cup and said softly, “If some memories are going to be taken from us… then I think we should relive some of them.”

The words settled over the table like a hush.

Chai’s expression changed first, the teasing giving way to something sweeter, sadder.

Hazelnut went still, one hand wrapped around his mug.

Earl lowered his gaze briefly, then nodded once.

And somehow, after that, the talking came easily.

Not because it didn’t hurt.

Because it did.

But because love, once named, has a way of wanting to stay in the room.

Chai was the first to lean in, resting her chin in one hand, her smile turning wicked in that affectionate way only she managed.

“Oh, I know exactly where we start,” she said.

You narrowed your eyes immediately. “No.”

“Yes,” she said brightly. “Absolutely yes. Your first little puppy-love crush when you started tutoring with the Sage of Truth.”

You covered your face with one hand. “Chai.”

“No, no, let me have this.” Her laughter was soft, musical, almost unbearably fond. “You were impossible. We practically had to escort you to his office hours like you were being marched to your own execution.”

Hazelnut barked out a laugh. “That’s true.”

“It is not.”

“It absolutely is,” Chai said. “You’d stand outside his door looking like your soul had detached from your body. I’d have to smooth your sleeves. Hazelnut would make fun of you to keep you from fainting. Earl would remind you that tutors were not, in fact, mythological beasts.”

Earl lifted his teacup. “A necessary distinction.”

Your face burned, but you were laughing too now, helplessly. “I was not that bad.”

“You were worse,” Hazelnut said.

Chai pressed a hand to her heart. “You’d come back from those sessions with that same dazed look you have right now, like he’d personally rearranged your internal organs through eye contact alone.”

“Chai!”

She giggled, delighted. “I remember the first time you defended him without realizing it. Hazelnut said his handwriting looked smug and you got genuinely offended.”

“That was offensive,” you muttered.

Hazelnut pointed at you with a syrupy fork. “See?”

Hazelnut looked down at his plate, turning his mug once between his hands. “I’m glad,” he said after a moment, his voice less careless now, “that some of our professors got happy endings.”

You all looked at him.

He shrugged, but there was tenderness under it. “Like Star Anise. After everything.” He gave a little huff through his nose. “I think I needed that. Proof that not every person who gives too much of themselves ends up hollow.”

Chai’s expression softened. “Yeah.”

Earl nodded, thoughtful. “It mattered more than we realized at the time.”

Hazelnut stabbed a piece of pineapple. “I just think the academy would be unbearable if every story ended as a cautionary tale.”

“That sounds suspiciously hopeful,” you said.

“Don’t spread it around,” he muttered, but he smiled.

Then Earl set down his cup.

“Organizing your portfolio for the Spire application was fun,” he said.

You blinked. “What?”

“It was,” he replied, as if there could be no argument. “You were a disaster, obviously.”

Hazelnut choked on a laugh.

“But there was something…” He paused, searching for the shape of it. “Satisfying, I suppose. Watching your work become itself. Seeing the thread in it before you did.”

Your throat tightened.

Earl glanced down once, almost embarrassed by his own honesty, then continued. “You kept apologizing for every page. Every revision. Every thought that wasn’t immediately perfect. And yet there was so much of you in it.” A faint, private smile touched his mouth. “Putting it together felt like arranging starlight into a language admissions committees might understand.”

Chai made the softest sound, hand pressing briefly to her chest.

Hazelnut looked away, chewing with suspicious intensity.

Earl, perhaps realizing how much he’d revealed, tried to recover with dignity. “In any case. It was enjoyable.”

You swallowed hard. “You made me look better than I was.”

“No,” he said, and there was that calm certainty in him again, that same one which could sound so much like truth it hurt. “I made you easier for others to read.”

Silence held for a moment after that.

Then Earl added, quieter now, “We should have relived memories sooner.”

The line might have broken your heart entirely if Chai hadn’t reached across the table that very second and tapped the back of his hand with one syrup-sticky finger.

“Better late than never,” she said softly.

Better late than never.

You looked around at them, at Chai with jam on her thumb and laughter still trembling at the corners of her mouth; at Hazelnut trying, badly, to pretend he wasn’t emotional; at Earl, polished even now, but no longer hiding how deeply he felt things once they mattered enough.

Your friends.

Your home, in every way that counted.

The pineapples were sweet. The waffles were warm. The jam almost unbearably bright on your tongue.

And beneath all of it, guilt still lingered a small, cold thing tucked beneath your ribs.

You had brought them here.

To this table. To this choice. To this terrible beautiful morning where everything they said sounded like something you might one day lose.

But maybe that was why it mattered.

Maybe that was why memory hurt in the first place.

Because it was proof that something had been loved enough to leave a bruise.

You reached for another piece of pineapple, then stopped halfway and looked at them through a blur you refused to call tears.

“I’m glad,” you said softly, “that if I had to remember anything before tonight… it would be this.”

Chai’s eyes went glassy immediately. “You’re evil for saying that while I’m holding syrup.”

Hazelnut rubbed his face. “Can we not all cry into the waffles?”

Earl exhaled, almost laughing, almost not. “A deeply inefficient use of breakfast.”

And because you were all trying so hard not to fall apart before moonrise, that was what saved you again the ridiculousness of it. The cookie-hood of it.

The way beauty and heartbreak kept arriving hand in hand, as if they had never once learned to travel separately.

Outside the windows, the day kept moving toward evening, toward the Blueberry Yogurt River, toward moonlight bright enough to remake a life.

But for now, in the amber warmth of the dining hall, with pineapple on your plate and your friends around you and memory still wholly your own, the world felt almost kind.

You looked down at the last bite of waffle on your plate, then back up at your friends.

Trying very hard to sound casual, you said, “He… wants to see me later today.”

Three pairs of eyes lifted.

Chai’s smile fell instantly. “Oh?”

Hazelnut pointed his fork at you. “Of course he does.”

Earl said nothing at first, but one elegant brow rose just slightly, inviting the rest.

You cleared your throat, suddenly fascinated by your tea. “And I was just wondering if you’d, um…” Your mouth twitched. “Escort me. Like the first time. For old times’ sake.”

Silence.

Then Chai made the softest, most wounded little gasp. “Oh, sweetheart.”

Hazelnut groaned immediately. “No. Absolutely not.”

Earl’s expression gentled in that quiet way of his. “We’ll escort you.”

Your shoulders loosened at once.

“Obviously,” Chai added, as if the matter had never been in question. “I’d be offended if you didn’t ask.”

You smiled.

Hazelnut, however, pointed his fork more emphatically. “But forget that for now.”

You blinked. “What?”

He leaned forward, eyes bright now with the sort of energy that only ever meant trouble. “For now, we run wild.”

Chai lit up instantly. “Yes.”

Earl sighed the sigh of a man realizing his day had just been stolen from him by idiots he loved. “Define ‘wild.’”

Hazelnut grinned. “No.”

And somehow that was the beginning of it.

The four of you abandoned seriousness by mutual, unspoken agreement.

Not permanently. Not truly.

Just for the day.

You left the dining hall still sticky with pineapple jam and too much feeling, and once you stepped out into the bright pulse of the Spire, the world seemed almost eager to help you misbehave. The corridors were alive with movement, students carrying stacks of papers, assistants crossing briskly with trays of shimmering vials, researchers arguing in hushed but urgent tones at intersections where sunlight spilled through high windows.

And into all that measured purpose, the four of you brought nonsense.

It started with Chai.

You were passing one of the lower exhibition halls when she stopped dead in front of a polished glass display case containing scale models of past magical structures, bridges, towers, old lecture domes held in perfect miniature suspension.

“Oh,” she said, eyes narrowing with immediate wickedness. “We’re ranking them by aesthetic.”

Hazelnut blinked. “That’s your first shenanigan?”

“My first masterpiece,” she corrected.

So you did.

All four of you stood there, scandalously in the way of actual scholars, arguing over the prettiest architecture in the Spire’s long history.

“That one looks pretentious,” Hazelnut said, pointing at a silver observatory model that slowly revolved under its own enchantment.

“It is pretentious,” Chai said. “That’s why it’s beautiful.”

“It looks like it would assign me homework on sight,” you muttered.

Earl folded his arms, considering a crystalline archive tower with floating staircases. “This one at least understands line and symmetry.”

“Of course you’d say that,” Hazelnut said. “You’d fall in love with a blueprint if it used proper punctuation.”

Chai had to grab your sleeve to keep from laughing too loudly.

From there it only got worse.

Hazelnut led the charge next, luring you all into a side hall where a student-run demonstration was inviting passersby to test “stable levitation sandals.” Stable, it turned out, was a generous word.

“You are not putting those on,” Earl said the moment Hazelnut reached for a pair.

“Watch me,” Hazelnut replied.

You watched him.

You watched him rise three feet into the air, grin triumphantly and then slowly rotate sideways.

Chai doubled over.

You nearly fell into the wall laughing.

Hazelnut, floating helplessly at an angle, called down, “I regret nothing!”

“You regret balance,” Earl said dryly, already stepping forward to fix the mechanism with more competence than anyone else in the hall possessed.

The student demonstrator looked deeply relieved nobody got hurt. “Thank you, sir.”

Earl only adjusted one strap and said, “Your calibration is too eager.”

Hazelnut was set back on the ground with what remained of his dignity.

Which was then destroyed further when Chai whispered, “You looked like a decorative weather vane.”

After that, the day lost all structure.

You wandered. Drifted. Let yourselves be pulled by curiosity rather than schedule.

At one point you found an open courtyard terrace where apprentices were testing harmless illusion blooming flowers that opened into brief floating images when touched. Chai ran ahead and immediately tapped three in a row, sending a burst of glowing koi, then stars, then a tiny dancing teacup into the air.

“That one’s me,” she said, pointing at the teacup.

“No,” Hazelnut said. “That one’s Earl.”

Earl glanced up as the teacup performed a tiny dignified bow. “Unacceptable.”

You brushed one blossom with your fingertips and it opened into a drifting ribbon of moonlight that curled around your wrist before vanishing. For one breath, your chest tightened.

Then Chai hooked her arm through yours and dragged you onward before the moment could settle too deeply.

You found a research alcove with a harmless sound experiment where certain tiles chimed different notes depending on how they were stepped on. Hazelnut declared it a challenge. Chai turned it into a dance. Earl insisted he was not participating and then, ten minutes later, was somehow the best at it.

“You know what’s annoying?” Hazelnut said, watching Earl produce a flawless progression of tones with crisp, measured steps. “The fact that you’re elegant by accident.”

“It is not an accident,” Earl said.

You were laughing too hard to stand straight by then, one hand braced against a pillar as Chai attempted to replicate Earl’s precision and instead set off a wildly cheerful sequence that sounded like a parade tripping down stairs.

Later, you found a small kiosk near one of the public galleries selling scholarly keepsakes; Ink, paperweights, star-mapped bookmarks, sweets in folded parchment wrappers. Chai gasped over the sweets. Hazelnut found a ridiculous feather quill and began narrating your life in an overly dramatic voice.

“Behold,” he intoned, holding the quill aloft, “the scholar of pineapple and peril, beloved by breakfast and feared by reasonable decision-making,-”

You lunged for the quill.

He darted away.

Chai betrayed you immediately by blocking your path.

Earl, to your horror, took the merchant’s side and calmly paid for the quill.

“You are all against me,” you informed them.

“Yes,” Hazelnut said, delighted.

A little later, while crossing one of the upper balconies, you caught sight of a familiar figure below, moving through a corridor flanked by two high scholars with that impossible, unhurried grace that always seemed to slow the world around him.

You stopped.

Of course you did.

Chai noticed instantly.

“There it is,” she whispered, not unkindly. “The look.”

“I don’t have a look.”

“You have several,” Hazelnut said. “That one’s the worst.”

Earl glanced over the railing, saw exactly who it was, and without even breaking stride said, “Keep moving.”

You made the mistake of lingering half a second longer.

Shadow Milk turned.

Not all the way just enough that the line of his profile shifted, enough that there was the unbearable possibility he might look up, might catch sight of you watching him like some lovesick fool out of an old tragic poem Chai physically turned you by the shoulders and marched you onward.

“No pining from balconies,” she said firmly. “That is for much later in the relationship.”

Hazelnut snorted so hard he nearly inhaled wrong.

“Relationship?” you squeaked.

“I said what I said.”

There was a long stretch around midday where you all somehow ended up in one of the public workshop rooms with access to harmless inscription chalk and scrap parchment. This, naturally, devolved into disaster.

Hazelnut tried to invent a personal crest and accidentally drew something that looked like a furious onion.

Chai designed an emblem for your friend group that included a teacup, a quill, an exploding star, and, against Earl’s protests, a tiny pastry with wings.

You attempted to sketch a dignified little moon-and-river motif and ended up with something Chai insisted looked “painfully romantic.”

Earl, after claiming he wanted no part in childish symbolism, quietly corrected all your proportions and then drew the cleanest, most beautiful version of it beside your attempt.

You stared at it.

“So you do care.”

“I care about geometry,” he replied.

Hazelnut leaned over to inspect it. “That’s the same face you made organizing the Spire portfolio.”

Earl stiffened. “I do not have a face for administrative satisfaction.”

“You absolutely do,” you said.

By then the four of you were too comfortable, too loose with one another, too hungry for any moment that didn’t have moonlight waiting at the end of it.

You stole little sweets from each other’s pockets.

You sat on a sunny staircase and shared candied almonds and tea from paper cups too hot to hold properly.

Hazelnut attempted to convince you all that one of the decorative stone guardians in the central hall was subtly moving between glances. Chai named it Gerald. You and Earl refused to encourage him, then both accidentally looked back twice just to check.

At one point you all ended up at a narrow window alcove overlooking a quiet section of the Blueberry Yogurt River far below. In the daylight it looked harmless. Pretty, even. Glassy where the sun touched it.

No one said anything for a few breaths.

Then Hazelnut clapped his hands once and said, far too loudly, “Right! We’re not staring at future problems.”

So Chai dragged you toward the lower galleries where someone was displaying tiny mechanical birds that repeated overheard compliments in absurdly dramatic voices. One of them chirped, “Your essay was devastatingly competent,” in a tone so much like Earl that all four of you nearly collapsed laughing.

Even Earl laughed at that, quietly, beautifully, head tipped back just enough to let himself.

And that, more than anything, made the day feel unreal in the best way.

By the time late afternoon softened the light into honey, you had collected too many little useless things ribbon wrappers, ink on your fingers, a paper star Chai folded and tucked into your sleeve, the ridiculous feather quill Hazelnut insisted you keep “as a symbol of your academic downfall,” and the memory of Earl Grey Cookie actually running down a corridor just because he wanted to.

You were tired in that good way. Earned by too much laughing and too much wandering and too much life packed into too few hours.

And through it all through every hallway and courtyard and experiment and side comment and stolen sweet, Shadow Milk remained at the edge of your thoughts like a second pulse.

A later waiting for you. A guilt and tenderness tugging at your heartstrings.

Every now and then Chai would catch you drifting and nudge you with her shoulder. Hazelnut would say something outrageous until you laughed again. Earl would redirect the group with the quiet efficiency of someone who knew exactly how much you needed to keep moving.

And so you did.

You moved through the Spire like it belonged to none of your fears. Like the day owed you joy and you were clever enough to take it before night could object.

You were just four friends being ridiculous in a place too serious for them, and the sweetness of that sat in your chest like something almost holy.

By the time the shadows lengthened enough to remind you that later was becoming soon, Hazelnut stretched and said, “Alright. I think we’ve successfully committed enough nonsense to sustain us for at least… six dramatic hours.”

“Only six?” Chai said. “Rookie numbers.”

You smiled, slower now, softer.

Because the day had been light.

So light.

And maybe that was why you loved it so fiercely.

Because somewhere beneath all the shenanigans and laughter and running footsteps and honey-sticky fingers was the knowledge that you had all done this on purpose.

You had made a memory worth keeping.

Even if the moon came for it later.

By the time the day began to fold into evening, the light over the Spire had turned almost unbearably beautiful.

The sun lowered slowly behind the distant towers, and the sky opened into long ribbons of pink and gold, rose staining the pale stone and catching in every window until the whole place seemed dipped in blush. Below, far off beyond the layered balconies and archways, the Blueberry Yogurt River reflected the sky in soft, trembling color.

It should have felt peaceful.

Instead, your pulse had started climbing again.

You walked with your friends through the upper halls in a closeness that said none of you wanted to acknowledge the hour too directly. The day had been so loud, so warm, so full of running and laughter and terrible jokes that this quieter stretch felt almost sacred in contrast.

No one rushed you.

No one teased at first.

They simply stayed near, their footsteps matching yours as the corridors thinned and the quieter wing of the Spire approached, less crowded here, more intimate, where the lamps were lit before full dark and the stone held the day’s fading warmth.

Eventually you slowed near the familiar turn that led toward Shadow Milk Cookie’s private quarters.

You looked at them, at all three of them, and something in your chest tightened again.

“Thanks,” you said softly.

Hazelnut snorted. “For what? Dragging you around all day like a pack of emotionally unstable chaperones?”

“For staying with me,” you said.

That shut him up for at least two seconds.

Chai reached over and slipped her hand through your arm. “Oh, sweetheart.” Her smile was warm and a little wicked, just how it always was when she could tell you were one thought away from panicking. “You’re nervous.”

“I’m not.”

“You are,” she sang. “You look like the first time we had to bring you to his office hours.”

You made a face. “That was different.”

“Was it?” Hazelnut asked. “Because from here, it’s giving the same vibe. Slightly haunted and a little doomed.”

Chai pressed on with delight. “Honestly, it’s adorable. You’re acting like you haven’t even kissed.”

Your face heated at once. “Chai.”

“What? I’m right.”

“You’re insufferable.”

She grinned. “And beloved.”

But the teasing only lasted a few more steps before it softened, like the evening itself was insisting on honesty.

Earl was the one who spoke first.

His voice was as polished as ever, but quieter now. 

“Do not treat this as goodbye.”

The words landed still and steady between all of you.

You looked at him.

He held your gaze with that familiar calm, though you could see the feeling beneath it now, no longer hidden so perfectly, not after a day like this.

“I’ll be waiting,” he said.

Then, after the slightest pause, he corrected himself with the dignity of someone who hated needing to amend sincerity but did it anyway.

“They’ll be waiting. We’ll all be waiting.”

Your throat tightened.

Chai let go of your arm only long enough to pat your head, fingers gentle and absurdly affectionate. “Exactly. So no tragic faces.”

Hazelnut crossed his arms and nodded like he was imparting great wisdom. “And be smooth. Cool. Mysterious. Like me.”

You stared at him. “You screamed when levitation sandals tilted you slightly left.”

“That was tactical.”

Earl sighed. “It was not.”

Chai laughed softly, then leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to your temple. “Go on.”

You lingered for half a heartbeat longer.

Then you stepped away from them and toward the door.

You could feel their presence behind you even after you knocked and entered, solid, waiting, exactly as Earl had promised.

The room beyond was lit by evening.

Soft lamps had been lit against the oncoming dusk, but the last of the sunset still poured through the high windows in long pink bands, spilling over bookshelves, polished wood, half-finished papers, and the trailing edges of blue robes.

Shadow Milk Cookie looked up from where he sat near the window, one arm resting against the chair, the fading light catching at the angles of his face until he looked less like a scholar and more like something painted into the hour on purpose.

He smiled the moment he saw you.

Not the public one, a measured smile meant for petitioners or peers.

A pleased one.

“There you are,” he said, as though you had arrived exactly where you were always meant to. “For a dreadful moment, I thought your little parade of chaos might keep you from me.”

You shut the door behind you, suddenly very aware of your own hands, your own heartbeat, the ridiculous fact that you had indeed spent all day knowing you’d be here and had still not decided how to act when it happened.

Instead of answering properly, you stood there and said, “Why did you want to see me?”

He arched his brow.

You took a few steps closer, then admitted, “I’ve been ruminating on it all day, which has been terrible for everyone involved.”

That seemed to amuse him immediately.

“Oh?” he murmured. “And what conclusions did you arrive at?”

You clasped your hands behind your back so he wouldn’t see them fidget. “Several. None stable. One involved a dramatic lecture. One involved tea. One involved you deciding I was overdue for being unbearable in private.”

The corner of his mouth twitched.

“And which did you find most convincing?”

“The tea,” you said at once. Then, because your nerves always made you reckless, you added, “Though I do think a dramatic lecture would suit the lighting.”

That earned you a soft laugh.

Good. That was good. Laughter meant you were still functioning.

You kept going, because that was what you did when nervousness and affection collided you talked until one of them won.

“I also considered that maybe you simply missed me horribly and could no longer bear the separation.”

He tilted his head, gaze bright with interest now. “And yet you ask as though that possibility embarrasses you.”

“It embarrasses both of us.”

“Untrue,” he said lightly. “It only embarrasses you”

He rose and crossed toward you with that same impossible grace you had spent the whole day trying not to think too much about.

“Come now,” he said. “If you have truly spent the day building theories around my motives, I should hate for all that labor to go unrewarded.”

You looked up at him, pulse uneven. “So there was a motive.”

“My dear, there is always a motive.”

You groaned softly. “See, that’s exactly the sort of answer that causes spirals.”

“And yet you continue to ask questions of dangerous people.”

“You are not helping your case.”

“Am I meant to be building one?”

You laughed, a little helplessly, because it was easier than admitting how much seeing him like this here, in the dusk, in good spirits and looking at you as if you were the part of the day he had been waiting for was undoing you.

He noticed, of course he noticed.

His expression softened, though the gleam of theatrical mischief remained in his eyes.

“You are nervous,” he said.

You opened your mouth to deny it.

He lifted one hand.

“Do not insult me by lying badly.”

You shut your mouth.

Then, after a beat, “Maybe a little.”

“A little?” he echoed, delighted. “You entered as though the door might interrogate you first.”

“That is slander.”

“It is an observation.”

You sighed and let your shoulders ease the smallest amount. “Fine. I’m nervous.”

“And why,” he asked, voice gentler now beneath the silk of it, “would seeing me make you nervous after all this time?”

Because tonight waited beyond his door. Because your friends were waiting in the hall. Because the moon would rise. Because guilt had made everything tender.

Instead you said, “Because when you say you want to see me and then don’t explain why, my imagination becomes inconvenient.”

He studied you for a moment.

Then he motioned toward the seating near the window. “Come sit. You look as though you’ve spent the day outrunning your own thoughts.”

“I have,” you admitted, following him. “We all have.”

He glanced back at that. “With them?”

You nodded.

A faint, unreadable expression crossed his face something between fondness and thoughtfulness, something made more complicated by everything else that had lived in the morning between you.

“You’ve been busy,” he said.

That could have meant a dozen things.

You chose the safest answer.

“We had a good day.”

His gaze lingered on you a fraction longer than necessary.

“I’m glad,” he said quietly.

The simplicity of it nearly hurt.

You sat, and he settled across from you in the warm dimness, the sky beyond the windows deepening by the second into richer pinks, the first hints of twilight gathering low along the horizon.

For one fleeting, impossible moment, it felt as though the evening had split in two, one half here, soft and lit and full of him, and the other waiting elsewhere by the river, silver and cold and asking things you did not know how to survive.

Shadow Milk rested one elbow lightly against the arm of his chair and regarded you with open interest.

“Well then,” he said. “Since you have been so bravely anxious all day on my behalf shall I put you out of your misery and tell you why I asked you here?”

You clasped your hands tighter in your lap to hide the way your fingers trembled.

“That would be merciful.”

His mouth curved.

“Mercy,” he repeated thoughtfully. “What a fashionable request today.”

You looked at him, the scholar you loved in all his impossible forms, evening painting him in rose and gold, and braced yourself for whatever he was about to say.

For one fraught, awful moment, you were certain he knew.

The thought came sharp and immediate, slicing clean through the warmth of the room.

He had redacted everything. Sealed it away. Torn whole avenues of thought from the academy’s shelves with the calm certainty of someone who believed some truths were too dangerous to leave lying around. He had looked at you that morning and told you not to decide anything alone. He noticed everything. He always noticed.

So what if this was it?

What if he had called you here because he knew what waited by the Blueberry Yogurt River when the moon rose? What if he had traced the shape of your guilt back to its source and was only being gentle now because he was about to stop you?

Your pulse jumped.

You looked at him at the easy drape of his posture, the rose-gold light got caught in his face, the quiet attention in his gaze, and hated, suddenly, how guilty you felt.

Because you were going against his wishes.

Because you were afraid of the ritual and still had not turned away from it.

Because some tender, treacherous part of you knew that if he asked plainly enough, if he looked at you too kindly, or spoke too honestly, or simply said your name in that low careful voice of his there was a chance you would break right here and tell him everything.

So you did what you always did when you were closest to breaking.

You reached for rhythm.

For banter. For the familiar shape the two of you made when you were trying not to say the more dangerous things.

You straightened just a little, affecting a gravity you did not feel. “Before you tell me,” you said, “I need to know whether this is about the highly slanderous rumor that I’m responsible for the incident with the levitation sandals.”

Shadow Milk blinked.

Then, slowly, one elegant brow arched. “The incident?”

“Yes,” you said solemnly. “The one I am choosing not to elaborate on in order to preserve the dignity of all involved.”

“An admirable instinct. New, but admirable.”

You pointed at him. “That sounds like a lecture is coming.”

“It sounds,” he said, voice silk-soft with amusement, “like I should perhaps start collecting all the tales your friends have neglected to share with me.”

“That would be a gross abuse of power.”

“I remain tempted.” he murmured, leaning back slightly, 

You relaxed by a fraction. So you pressed your luck, because of course you did.

“This also isn’t,” you added, “some formal censure regarding my continued habit of entering rooms looking like a beautifully managed disaster?”

His smile deepened.

“My dear,” he said, “if I began censuring you for that, I would never have time for anything else.”

That got a real laugh out of you.

And once you were laughing, once the room had softened around the edges again and the panic had retreated just enough to let you breathe, he seemed satisfied.

He let the silence settle for a moment, watching you with that infuriatingly perceptive calm.

Then he said, more quietly, “No. It is not levitation sandals, nor your relationship to catastrophe, however committed that relationship may be.”

You opened your mouth to protest.

He held up a hand.

“Let me finish. I called you here because this morning felt unfinished.”

That made you still.

Something gentler entered his expression.

“You came to me carrying guilt you would not name,” he said. “You were tender in a way you usually are not unless something inside you is fraying. You thanked me as though you expected not to have another chance. And then you left before I could decide whether I disliked that.”

Your throat tightened.

He continued, voice measured, sensible, but threaded now with an unmistakable feeling.

“I had duties to attend to. Petitioners. Correspondence. The endless little obligations attached to being useful to everyone.” His mouth curved faintly, though it did not quite become a smile. “But I found, rather selfishly, that I disliked the idea of the day ending on that note.”

You looked down at your hands.

“And so,” he said, “I asked to see you again.”

The room was very quiet.

He did not look away from you. Did not soften the shape of it into something easier. He simply let the truth stand.

“I wanted,” he said, more softly now, “one unhurried hour in your company before the evening swallowed us both.”

Your chest ached so quickly and so sharply you almost had to turn your face away.

This wasn’t a trap. It was just him choosing you.

You laughed once under your breath, but it shook at the edges. “That’s horribly unfair.”

His head tilted. “How so?”

“Because now I have to pretend that didn’t affect me.”

“Do you?”

You looked up at him and found no mockery there. Only that terrible patience and the clear, knowing warmth he reserved for you when no one else was around to witness it.

“No,” you admitted.

“Ah.” He seemed pleased by the honesty. “Progress.”

You huffed a breath that might have been a laugh. “You really do think of me like some long-term project.”

Shadow Milk’s gaze sharpened with gentle amusement. “Not at all. Projects are far easier to control.”

“That’s almost romantic, in a deeply concerning way.”

“So I’m told.”

The sunset had dimmed now into richer shades, the room gathering more lamplight than day. Outside, the sky was still blushing, but deeper, pink beginning to give way to violet at the edges. Time, without asking your permission, was moving.

You felt it in your dough.

And because of that, because the river and the moon and the promise of night were waiting beyond these walls, his confession of something as simple and terrible as I wanted an hour with you struck deeper than it should have.

You swallowed hard and tried for lightness again, though this time it came softer.

“So you summoned me for selfish reasons.”

“I invited you,” he corrected smoothly. “Do not make me sound villainous before I’ve had the chance to earn it.”

“You’ve definitely earned it in other categories.”

“Have I?” he asked, almost idly. “Name them.”

You pointed a finger at him. “Smugness. Dramatic timing. Weaponized eye contact.”

He actually laughed at that, quiet and real.

“Those,” he said, “are not crimes.”

“They are in certain provinces.”

“Then I shall avoid those provinces.”

You smiled despite yourself.

It should have been easy, then. Easier. To sink back into the old rhythm completely. To let him be warm and theatrical and wise in his beautiful rooms while the evening slowly died beyond the windows.

But underneath your smile, guilt still sat sharp and living.

He had asked for an hour because the morning felt unfinished.

And you were sitting across from him with moonlight waiting in your future and a secret pressed like a blade beneath your ribs.

Shadow Milk noticed something shift in your face.

His expression gentled once more. “You are doing that thing again.”

You blinked. “What thing?”

“Where your mind leaves the room and hopes I shall not be impolite enough to follow.”

You tried to smile. “Maybe I’m becoming mysterious.”

“No,” he said at once. “You are becoming troubled.”

That landed too cleanly.

You looked away toward the window, toward the last blush of sky.

He did not push immediately.

When he spoke, it was in the same measured, knowing tone he used when guiding you through questions he believed you were capable of answering if only you would stop flinching from them.

“I did not call you here to interrogate you,” he said. “Nor to burden you further.”

You nodded once.

“I called you here,” he repeated, “because I wanted your company. Because I prefer not to leave certain things unresolved when I have the power to remedy them. And because” his gaze rested on you steadily “you looked this morning as though you might vanish into yourself if left unattended.”

That made your eyes sting.

You laughed weakly and said, “That sounds dramatic.”

“With you?” He smiled slightly. “It usually is.”

The room fell quiet again he had told you what he called you there for.

Not a lesson, suspicion, or reprimand.

Just an unfinished morning, his own selfishness, and the desire to have you near before the night unfolded into whatever shape it meant to take.

And that, somehow, was harder to survive than anger would have been.

You folded your hands in your lap and forced yourself to meet his eyes again.

“Well,” you said, trying for your usual ease and only half finding it, “in that case, I suppose I should try not to waste your stolen hour.”

“You have never once been a waste of time.”

Something in you gave way at that.

He was still looking at you with that impossible steadiness, still warm from his own confession, still close enough that if you reached forward you could test whether he was real and not just another thing you might lose to time, to moonlight, to some long silver sleep that had not yet begun but already haunted you.

You did not let yourself think.

Because if you thought, you would lose your nerve.

So instead, you moved.

You reached across the small space between you and took his hand.

His fingers twitched in yours not recoiling, or pulling away, just startled. You felt it at once, the slight stillness in him, the way his breath caught so subtly that anyone else might have missed it.

But you did not miss it.

You had spent too long learning him not to notice when he was caught unprepared.

Shadow Milk looked down at your joined hands.

Then back up at you.

And for the first time that evening perhaps the first time all day he looked almost genuinely flustered.

Not undone, not like you. But there it was anyway in the faint arrest of his expression, in the way his mouth parted a fraction before he chose his next words.

“Well,” he said softly, too softly, “this is new.”

Your heart hammered so hard it almost hurt. You swallowed and held on tighter, because if you loosened your grip now you might never find the courage again.

“I know.”

His gaze searched your face.

“You are about to say something reckless,” he murmured.

You gave a weak, nervous breath of laughter. “That has never stopped me before.”

“No,” he said, and some of his composure returned in the shape of a very small, very knowing smile. “But usually your recklessness arrives disguised as a ridiculous question.”

You almost smiled back.

Almost.

But the fear in you was bigger than embarrassment now. Bigger than dignity. Bigger than the part of you that wanted to wait for the right moment, the elegant moment, the one untouched by guilt or moonrise or the possibility of being gone too long to remember how his hands felt.

You looked at him and thought, absurdly and helplessly I might not wake for so long.

You might be asleep. Dead. Unmade. Remade. Still. Silent. Somewhere under moonlight where time stopped meaning anything at all.

And if that happened If you were gone long enough for wanting to turn abstract; Then you wanted something real to carry into that dark with you.

Something warm. Something that belonged only to the living.

Your voice came out quieter than you intended. “Can I ask you for something?”

His expression changed instantly.

“You may ask me anything.”

You tightened your grip on his hand and forced yourself to say it before the courage bled out of you.

“Will you kiss me?”

Silence.

It struck the room so hard that even the lamps seemed to still.

Shadow Milk stared at you.

Actually stared.

All theater dropped clean away from his face in one astonished moment of silence. He had expected wit. Deflection. Some little spark of absurdity wrapped around your nerves.

He had not expected this.

He had not expected you to look at him with your heart in your throat and ask so plainly for something so unbearably intimate.

His hand in yours went warmer.

His voice, when it came, was lower than before.

“You…” He stopped, visibly collecting himself. “You are full of surprises tonight.”

You wanted to laugh, or apologize, or vanish.

Instead, because you had already leapt, you forced yourself to remain brave all the way through the fall.

“I’m serious.”

“I can see that.”

The fluster had not vanished. Now he was fighting himself back into composure and only half succeeding.

He turned your joined hands slightly, as if grounding himself in the simple fact of your skin against his.

“Why?” he asked.

The question was gentle.

That made it worse.

You looked down for half a second, then back up at him. There was no graceful version of the truth. Not one you could bear. So what came out was smaller, more honest, more humiliating in its tenderness.

“Because…” You exhaled shakily. “Because I want to memorize you.”

Something flickered across his face.

You could not stop now.

You had gone too far and were too frightened of time and absence and waking late to retreat into cleverness.

“I want to know,” you said, voice trembling, “what your lips feel like. And your hands. And what it feels like when you’re being gentle on purpose.”

Your cheeks burned so hot they ached.

You almost covered your face with your free hand.

Instead you held his gaze and kept speaking, because the fear of losing this for some unknowable stretch of time was stronger than the mortification clawing at you.

“I know that sounds ridiculous,” you whispered. “I know it does. But I” Your throat tightened. “I just want to remember. In case…” You stopped yourself before the rest could slip loose. In case sleep lasts too long. In case moonlight takes more than memory and leaves only ache. In case the next time you wake, if you wake, the shape of tenderness has become something you can no longer name.

You swallowed. “I just want to memorize your lips,” you finished softly, “and your tender touch.”

The room went utterly still.

Shadow Milk had not moved.

But neither had he looked away.

You had shocked him.

His thumb moved once against the back of your hand, almost unconsciously.

Then he laughed but only barely. A breath of a laugh, incredulous and soft and full of feeling he was no longer entirely hiding.

“You choose tonight,” he murmured, “of all nights, to become bold.”

“I’m trying not to think too hard about that.”

“A shame,” he said. “You might have warned me.”

You let out a helpless little laugh of your own. “Would that have helped?”

“No,” he admitted, and that finally brought a real smile to his mouth. “But I would have enjoyed pretending otherwise.”

The air between you shifted.

His fluster had settled into something warmer now. Not gone, not with the way he was looking at you, as though you had become some exquisite and dangerous thing placed directly into his hands, but transformed into attention so focused it made your pulse stutter.

He lifted your hand, slowly, deliberately, until your knuckles rested near his lips.

Not a kiss. Not yet.

Just closeness.

“Do you know,” he said, voice low and velvet-soft, “that if you continue to say things like this to me, you will ruin whatever remains of my good judgment?”

You managed, barely, “I think it was already in poor condition.”

That coaxed another soft laugh from him.

Then his gaze dropped to your mouth.

You felt it like touch.

And when he looked up again, whatever answer he had been weighing was already written into the tenderness of his expression.

“You need never ask me twice for something I have wanted to give you for far too long.”

The breath left your lungs.

He rose first, still holding your hand, and drew you gently to your feet.

The world narrowed.

The sunset beyond the windows had dimmed into the first deep hush of evening, the sky losing pink by slow degrees. Somewhere out there, time was moving. The river was waiting. The moon was climbing, whether you wanted it to or not.

But here there was only him.

He lifted his free hand to your face with unbearable care, the backs of his fingers brushing your cheek first as though reacquainting himself with your shape. Then his palm settled there, warm and steady, thumb near the corner of your mouth.

Tender touch.

You almost broke from the sweetness of it.

His eyes searched yours one last time.

Not asking if you meant it instead asking if you were ready for how much he did.

You answered by leaning the smallest amount into his hand.

That was enough.

He kissed you softly at first.

So softly you nearly didn’t understand it had happened.

Then your breath caught and the realization bloomed all through you at once, his lips warm, careful, unhurried. A kiss given by someone who knew exactly how much power he held and chose, with startling gentleness, not to use any of it against you.

You made a small, helpless sound into the silence between you, and his hand at your cheek tightened just a fraction.

Then he kissed you again.

More surely this time.

And you held on to him just needing the reality of him, his hand still wrapped around yours, his mouth moving with a patience so exquisite it hurt.

You memorized everything.

The softness first.

Then the warmth.

Then the way he paused, just enough, as though giving you room to breathe and still return. The way his thumb brushed once along your cheekbone. The way his other hand turned yours over, fingertips pressing into your palm like he meant to leave a mark there no moon could steal.

When he finally drew back, it was only far enough for your foreheads to nearly touch.

Your eyes stayed closed for a moment longer because opening them felt impossible.

When you did, he was looking at you with an expression so open it nearly frightened you more than any mystery ever had.

“Well,” he murmured, a little breathless despite himself, “I had expected a ridiculous question.”

You smiled shaky, dazed, still trying to gather yourself back from wherever he had just left you.

“Was that better?”

His answering smile was soft enough to ruin you.

“Catastrophically.”

You laughed then, weak and full of wonder and far too close to tears, and he kissed the corner of your mouth as if he could not quite help himself.

“I meant what I said,” you whispered, because it mattered now, mattered that he understood this had not been whim or impulse alone. “I wanted to remember.”

At that, something in him stilled.

Not suspicion. Only an acute awareness of the weight beneath your words.

His fingers brushed lightly over your jaw.

“Then remember this,” he said quietly.

And he kissed you once more.

Still tender. Still careful. But deeper with feeling, with all the things he had not asked and all the things you had not told him, poured instead into the one language neither of you was cowardly enough to mistranslate.

When he pulled away, the room felt changed.

So did you.

He rested his forehead briefly against yours and let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh.

“You are,” he said, voice unsteady only at the edges, “quite impossible.”

You smiled, though your eyes burned.

“I learned from the best.”

That made him laugh for real, low and warm and helpless in a way you would treasure later, if later came.

He lifted your joined hands and pressed a kiss to your knuckles this time, more reverent than performative now.

And because you were still afraid, because moonlight still waited, because sleep still loomed, because all the hours ahead felt too fragile to trust, you held his hand a little tighter and let yourself stand there in the gathering dark, memorizing him while you still could.

For a little while after that, you forgot how to be sensible.

Enough that when Shadow Milk finally drew back from the last kiss with that rare, stunned softness still lingering at the edges of his composure, you looked at him, a little dazed and a little wicked all at once deciding that if the night intended to take from you later, you were going to steal something from it first.

Namely his dignity.

Or what remained of it.

You were still holding his hand. His thumb rested near the inside of your wrist, pulse to pulse, as if he had forgotten to let go. As if perhaps he did not want to.

You smiled.

“No,” he said.

You blinked innocently. “No what?”

“That expression.” His eyes narrowed just slightly, though the color had not fully settled back into calm yet. “I know that expression.”

“Oh?” you murmured, taking one small step closer. “What does it mean?”

“That you have mistaken my momentary lack of defenses for an invitation to behave outrageously.”

You laughed softly. “Momentary?”

“My dear, do not become arrogant.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

This, unfortunately, was a lie.

Because once you knew you could make him flustered, not just mildly amused or theatrically indulgent, but genuinely flustered. You became very interested in the experiment.

You let your fingers trail lightly along the back of his hand. Watched his gaze dip, then return to your face.

“How unfortunate for you,” you said, all velvet sweetness and mischief now, “that I’m suddenly feeling very curious.”

He let out a breath that was almost a laugh, almost a warning. “Curiosity has a dreadful habit of ruining people.”

“And here I thought it was one of your favorite qualities in me.”

“It is,” he said at once.

That was the problem.

He said things like that too easily. Too beautifully. You had barely recovered from asking him for a kiss and now he was looking at you as if your boldness was not some miraculous lapse but something precious, something he had been waiting to see all along.

So you did what came naturally.

You reached up and fixed a piece of his collar that did not need fixing.

His whole body went very still.

“There,” you said softly.

“There,” he repeated. “What, exactly?”

“I don’t know. You looked too composed.”

His mouth parted with quiet disbelief. “You find composure offensive?”

“Only on you,” you said.

“Cruel.”

You smiled. “You love it.”

His eyes sharpened with amusement. “Careful.”

“Or what?”

“Or I may remember that I am perfectly capable of regaining control of this conversation.”

You leaned in just enough to feel the warmth of his breath when you answered. “That sounds like a threat.”

“It is a promise.”

You laughed under your breath.

Then, because you could not help yourself, you let your fingertips brush the line of his sleeve, the back of his wrist, the place where pulse lived. Such small touches. Such innocent ones, really. And yet with him, with the way he watched every movement as though your hands had become the most riveting subject in the room, they felt almost unbearably intimate.

“You’re quiet,” you murmured.

“I am thinking.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“It is,” he said. “Especially when you are standing this close and behaving as though you’ve forgotten I am capable of consequences.”

You tilted your head. “What kind of consequences?”

The look he gave you then would have undone someone less determined.

Tender. Exasperated. So clearly affected that it made your own pulse stutter all over again.

“Exactly the kind,” he said softly, “that encourage me not to answer questions you are asking only to see whether I’ll blush.”

You grinned, delighted. “So you admit it.”

“I admit,” he replied, “that you are being insufferably pleased with yourself.”

“Because I’m winning.”

He made a quiet, disbelieving sound. “Winning?”

“Mhm.”

“And what, pray tell, is the competition?”

You pretended to think. “How many times I can fluster the Fount of Knowledge before he remembers he’s supposed to be devastatingly composed.”

His laugh this time was low and helpless enough to feel like a reward.

“You continue,” he said, “to speak as though my reputation has any defense left in private.”

“I think your reputation is doing just fine.” you yawned.

He looked at you then with such pure, affectionate exasperation that it made something warm unfurl beneath your ribs.

You touched his face this time.

Just lightly.

Only the side of it, your fingers brushing his cheek with the caution of someone still half-surprised she was allowed.

His breath caught again.

There.

You smiled with quiet triumph.

Shadow Milk closed his eyes for half a beat, then opened them and said, “You are impossible I have no other word for you.”

“You’ve mentioned.”

“And yet the condition worsens.” He sighed.

“I’m making up for lost time.”

The words slipped out before you could weigh them.

The warmth between you faltered.

Not because he was displeased, but because he heard too much.

His gaze searched yours more carefully now. You felt the instant he sensed some sharper truth beneath the line, some reason for your hunger that had little to do with flirtation and everything to do with fear.

So before he could ask, before you could ruin this hour by falling apart in the wrong direction, you stepped closer still and rested your forehead briefly against his shoulder.

It was not elegant.

It was not calculated.

It was simply what you wanted.

He softened at once.

One hand came up to rest between your shoulders, steady and sure.

“There you are,” he murmured.

You let out a shaky breath. “I’m still here.”

“I know.”

For a while neither of you said anything.

You just stood there, letting the room settle around you, lamplight, the last breath of sunset, the quiet hush of evening drawing tighter over the Spire. His hand moved once, a slow stroke down your back that felt so gentle it almost undid you. 

You lifted your head enough to look at him again.

You stayed close, still inside the circle of his arms, and said, “Can I tell you something without you turning it into a lesson?”

“That depends entirely on the thing.”

You narrowed your eyes. “Shadow Milk.”

His expression gentled instantly. “Yes. You can.”

That was the first thing that nearly made you cry.

Not the permission itself.

The way he gave it, without spectacle, without wit, just earnest and immediate.

So you took a breath and told him the truth.

“I was terrified of you at first.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “You hide it so well.”

“No, really.” You glanced down, then back up. “That first tutoring session felt like a humiliation ritual designed by the cosmos personally.”

He blinked. “How charming.”

“I’m serious.”

“I can see that.”

You laughed weakly. “I mean it. Being that vulnerable in front of someone so famous for knowledge? Someone everyone looked at like some kind of impossible standard?” You shook your head, smiling a little despite yourself. “I thought I was going to die of embarrassment.”

“I kept thinking,” you continued, “that you’d finally realize I wasn’t worth the trouble. That you’d be polite, because you’re you, but that eventually you’d get tired of having to explain everything to someone who couldn’t even hold a basic thread without fumbling it.”

You reached for his hand again as you spoke, more for your own steadiness than anything else.

“And you never did. Get tired of me, I mean.” Your voice softened. “You taught me how to think when I was so afraid of being wrong that I couldn’t even speak properly. You made me stop treating every answer like a performance I was failing.” You smiled, small and helpless and terribly sincere. “You helped me become better.”

Shadow Milk said nothing.

Not because he had no answer but because the answer mattered too much to rush.

“I appreciate your existence more than I know how to explain elegantly,” you admitted. “And I know that sounds dramatic.”

“On the contrary,” he said quietly, “it sounds exact.”

You looked up at him, startled.

His hand came to your cheek again, thumb resting there with infuriating tenderness.

“My love,” he murmured, “do you think I did not notice?”

“Notice what?”

“The way you arrived each lesson a little less afraid than the last. The way your questions changed. The way you started meeting my gaze instead of studying the furniture.” His expression softened into something almost unbearably fond. “The way your mind learned itself.”

You could not speak.

“You give me too much credit,” he said, though there was no false modesty in it. “I did not make you better. I merely refused to let you keep pretending you were small.”

That one landed too deep.

Then laughed once under your breath because crying would have been inconvenient, and said, “That was disgustingly kind.”

“I am capable of many things.”

“You’re also very smug about your own virtues.”

He smiled. “Only when they are properly appreciated.”

You let your forehead rest briefly against his again. “I’m serious, though.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean it.” Your fingers tightened around his hand. “You mattered to me before I had any right to say so. Back when I still thought I was only a burden in your schedule. And now-”

You stopped.

His voice dropped softer. “And now?”

You looked at him for a long moment.

Then chose the truth you could survive.

“And now I’m glad you exist,” you whispered. “Very, very glad.”

“Come here,” he said.

You almost laughed. “I’m already-”

But he was already drawing you in closer, one arm winding around your waist, the other settling at the back of your neck with such sure, careful pressure that your breath caught all over again.

There was no performance left in either of you now.

Only this.

Only him looking at you like you had said something that would stay with him long after tonight.

“I am trying,” he said quietly, “very hard not to answer that with more feeling than you are prepared to manage.”

The honesty of it made your pulse jump.

“You could risk it.”

Dangerous thing to say.

Worse, perhaps, that you meant it.

His gaze dropped to your mouth. “Could I?”

You nodded once.

That was all it took.

The last kiss was nothing like the first.

The first had been discovery, gentle and astonished and careful with all your fear.

He touched you first as though relearning the route, thumb brushing once along your jaw, fingertips settling at the nape of your neck, the hand at your waist tightening just enough to bring you into the full line of him. The movement was unhurried, certain, and so exquisitely deliberate it felt like being read.

Then his mouth found yours.

Soft at first. 

But deeper with every lingering second.

You melted into it almost helplessly, your free hand rising to his shoulder, then higher, fingertips brushing the edge of his collar where you had teased him earlier. His breath shifted at that. A quiet thing. Barely audible. Enough to make heat spark through you.

He kissed like he spoke when no audience was present, measured, beautiful, and utterly devastating in his restraint. He gave nothing carelessly. Which meant that every small change the slight angle of his head, the way his hand at your neck flexed when you pressed closer, the pause where his lips barely left yours before returning felt magnified until your whole body was listening for it.

You made a soft sound against his mouth before you could stop yourself.

He answered by kissing you more firmly.

When he finally pulled back, it was only far enough to leave the air between you alive and trembling.

Your lips still tingled.

His eyes were dark with a softness that made you dizzy.

And because your thoughts had gone gloriously stupid, because you were full of him and lamplight and the false safety of an hour stolen from the rest of your life, the next thing out of your mouth came absentmindedly. Naturally. Almost bright.

“I enjoyed your company tonight,” you said, still a little breathless. “We should do this again tomorrow.”

Silence.

The words hung there.

And for one beautiful, terrible instant, you forgot, there is no promised tomorrow.

You just stood there smiling faintly up at him as if there really would be another evening exactly like this, as if tomorrow were a thing you had the right to assume.

Then you felt it.

The shape of what you had said.

Your own words curdling in your chest.

“Tomorrow,” he repeated gently.

You looked away for half a second.

“Yes,” you said, softer now. “Tomorrow.”

And because you had already taken so much from this hour, because you had kissed him, teased him, thanked him, held him like memory could be built by force if you just loved hard enough you stepped back before your face betrayed you.

His hand brushed yours as you moved, reluctant.

“I did enjoy your company,” you repeated, more steadily now. “Very much.”

His mouth curved with that private warmth you loved most. “Then tonight was not wasted.”

No.

It wasn’t.

That was the problem. It mattered too much to leave.

You swallowed the ache and gave him one last look memorizing, and turned toward the door with your heart full enough to drown in.

You got as far as the door.

Hand on the handle, pulse still unruly, lips still warm in a way that made everything feel a little unreal.

And then, because some part of you could not bear to leave on so plain a note, you glanced back over your shoulder.

Shadow Milk was still standing where you had left him, the lamplight gentling the sharpness of him, one hand loosely at his side, the other just barely lifted as if he had not yet decided whether to call you back for one more impossible thing.

You smiled.

“Goodnight,” you said softly.

And opened the door.

Three bodies fell inward.

Chai made a startled squeak. Hazelnut swore on impact. Earl, somehow, managed to collapse with dignity for all of half a second before the full indignity of the situation became apparent.

You stared.

They stared.

For one long, soul-leaving moment, the entire world held perfectly still.

Then you went bright red all at once.

“Oh my stars!”

Chai, flat on one elbow on the threshold, lifted a hand weakly. “In our defense!”

“There is no defense,” Earl said at once, from the floor.

Hazelnut pushed himself up with a grimace. “I would like it noted that I was against leaning that hard.”

“You were not,” Chai hissed.

“I was spiritually against it.”

You covered your face with both hands. “You were trying to listen?”

For how long?

Your thoughts flashed back in horrifying, disjointed fragments.

The silence. The flirting. The confessions. The kisses…

You made a strangled sound and looked ready to dissolve into the stone.

Shadow Milk, meanwhile, was not amused.

He did not look angry, exactly.

Just supremely unimpressed in the way only he could manage arms folding loosely, one brow rising as he regarded the heap of your friends with a level stare sharpened by private amusement.

“Yes,” he said coolly. “How shocking. Eavesdroppers.”

Chai sat up properly, trying for poise and failing. “We were only making sure-”

“That they were alive?” he supplied.

Hazelnut pointed at him. “Exactly.”

Earl had recovered enough to smooth one sleeve and rise to his feet with the air of a man determined to salvage something from humiliation. “In fairness-”

“In fairness,” Shadow Milk interrupted silkily, “I accounted for that.”

That stopped all of you.

You blinked, hands lowering slowly from your face. “You… what?”

He smiled with the unmistakable, smug satisfaction of someone who had anticipated this nonsense long before it occurred.

“I am not unfamiliar,” he said, voice smooth as polished glass, “with the habits of anxious friends, nor with your collective inability to resist curiosity when left unattended near a closed door.”

Hazelnut squinted. “That feels targeted.”

“It is.”

Chai groaned softly. “So you knew.”

“From the moment three shadows stopped moving outside my quarters in suspicious synchronization.”

Shadow Milk’s gaze slid back to you, and some of the sharpness eased not much, but enough.

“So,” he said, almost lazily now, “do not trouble yourself. They heard nothing.”

The smugness in his tone made it worse somehow.

Worse because it meant he knew exactly what your mind had been catastrophizing.

Worse because he clearly enjoyed having the upper hand.

You wanted the floor to open and devour you.

“Oh,” you managed faintly.

Chai, to her credit, looked mortified for at least three seconds before recovering into something more wounded than ashamed. “That’s… actually very rude.”

Shadow Milk inclined his head. “And yet, effective.”

Hazelnut rubbed a hand over his face. “I knew we should’ve just waited farther down the hall.”

Earl, now fully upright and reassembled, said with precise restraint, “This evening has produced an unfortunate quantity of indignity.”

Shadow Milk’s gaze moved to him. “And still you persist.”

Then he looked to all four of you, one by one, before returning at last to you.

The evening had deepened beyond the windows now, sunset fully thinned into the first true blue of night. Somewhere far away the world was turning silver. The hour had shifted.

“You should go,” Shadow milk said quietly.

The words landed with a small, hard ache.

You nodded once.

And then, because he was still himself no matter how strange the evening had become, he added with insufferable elegance, “Enjoy the rest of your evening.”

“Or technically night,” he amended.

Chai looked at the ceiling as if asking the stars for strength.

Earl closed his eyes briefly, no doubt in mourning for the death of all collective dignity.

You, however, had gone so red you felt half-feverish.

Not only had your friends tried to listen. They had tried to listen for long enough to fall through the door when you opened it.

You seized the nearest wrist, which turned out to be Hazelnut’s, then Chai’s sleeve with your other hand, and fixed Earl with a look that brooked no delay.

“We’re leaving,” you said, voice pitched far too high.

“At once,” Earl agreed.

Chai pushed herself fully upright and dusted off her robes with an expression of solemn tragedy. “I’d like it recorded that I regret nothing except being caught.”

“You should regret everything,” you said.

Hazelnut let himself be dragged with only token resistance. “In my defense, we were supporting you.”

“You were horizontal outside a private door!”

“Supportively!”

Shadow Milk let out the softest breath of laughter behind you.

You refused to look back again.

Instead you dragged your entire disastrous little group into the corridor and away from his quarters as fast as dignity and footwear allowed.

Only once you were safely around the bend did Chai burst into helpless laughter.

Hazelnut joined in a second later.

Earl held out for five full seconds before even he looked faintly appalled enough at the situation to seem almost amused.

You, meanwhile, were still too mortified to survive properly.

“I cannot believe you,” you said, though it lacked any real heat. “I cannot believe you.”

Chai leaned into your side, still laughing. “Oh, come on. You’d have done the same.”

“No, I wouldn’t have!”

Hazelnut gave you a look. “That is such a lie.”

Earl adjusted his cuffs. “It is not entirely implausible.”

You turned to him, scandalized. “Earl!”

“I’m only saying,” he replied, far too calm, “that your self-restraint tends to fail under emotionally heightened circumstances.”

“That is the meanest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“It is not.”

You groaned and picked up your pace.

The corridor lights glowed warmly around you as the four of you headed back toward your room, the Spire quieter now, night settling over it in earnest. Beneath your embarrassment, beneath the lingering warmth of his kisses and the ache of his goodbye and the ridiculousness of your friends collapsing into a room they absolutely should not have been listening outside of, something colder waited.

The book.

The river.

The moon.

You felt your bag-less shoulder and remembered with a sick little twist that you still had to go get it.

Your room suddenly seemed very far away.

But your friends were with you, laughing, bickering, still warm from being alive and ridiculous and entirely yours for these last fragile hours, and so you held onto that sound as you hurried them onward.

Toward your door.

Toward the book.

Toward whatever waited when the moon finally rose.

A/N Okay so this was a super long week for me I have been working tirelessly on ITPOT, Honestly I am not proud of my work for these past 2 chapters I was struggling a lot with writing this time around so I hope everything is fine with the writing, But other than that the next chapter is very exciting for me! I had to pick up the pace here because I thought it mundane to go through the three days so I time skipped hopefully the transition was smooth because I felt it was a little abrupt but no matter what's done is done. I am happy with what I've done though because I have exciting plans I have changed some of the direction and I see a clear vision for the next chapter.

anyways thank you for bearing with me

And that was what made it strange.

When you reached the library doors, you hesitated for half a heartbeat.

In the daylight, the place looked entirely different.

Warm and Inviting. Full of life.

Rows of desks were occupied, books stacked high, pages flipping softly. The Nightmare Archive felt like a distant memory now, a stark contrast to the shadows and silence of the night when you’d stolen the book, hearts pounding, breath held, fear and thrill tangled together.

Chai clasped her hands together, eyes sparkling. “Okay, but hear me out. Romance section.”

Earl didn’t even slow his stride. “No.”

“Just a glance,” she pleaded. “Love is a powerful magic.”

“That is not how we’re approaching an existential crisis,” he replied coolly.

Hazelnut cleared his throat. “What about fiction?”

You blinked. “Fiction?”

He shrugged. “Stories exaggerate, sure, but they don’t lie. There’s usually truth buried in them. Old myths, allegories, warnings people didn’t want to write as fact.”

You stopped walking.

So did Earl.

The two of you turned slowly to stare at him.

“…Who are you,” you asked carefully, “and what have you done with Hazelnut Biscotti?”

Earl adjusted his glasses, genuinely surprised. “That was… remarkably sensible.”

Hazelnut grimaced. “Please don’t say it like that. It makes my skin crawl.”

Chai gasped dramatically. “Look at him! Offering wisdom before noon! I’m so proud.”

“I just didn’t sleep,” he muttered. “My brain’s running on anxiety and that wretched breakfast.”

You laughed softly, the sound easing something tight in your chest. “Still. You might be onto something.”

Earl nodded slowly. “Fiction it is. Myths, legends, speculative treatises. We’ll divide by era and theme.”

Chai pouted. “No romance?”

Earl shot her a look.

“…Fine,” she sighed. “But if we accidentally learn about love conquering death, I’m taking credit.”

You smiled as you stepped deeper into the stacks, the quiet rustle of pages and murmured voices surrounding you. For the first time since you’d opened that book, hope didn’t feel reckless.

The hours slipped by quietly.

Stacks of books grew and shifted around you, myths from forgotten kingdoms, heroic epics, speculative treatises written by scholars who clearly thought themselves far more clever than history proved them to be. You read about curses mistaken for blessings, about witches who regretted granting eternity, about mortals who chased forever only to lose everything else first.

Interesting, haunting, even. But not useful. Every time the subject drifted too close to immortality, the pattern repeated.

Black bars. Redacted passages. Or missing pages.

“This one just… stops,” Chai muttered, flipping back and forth through a brittle volume. “Right when it gets good.”

Earl frowned over his own book. “This theory references three counterexamples, and all three citations are sealed.”

You swallowed, the familiar cold settling in your stomach.

Hazelnut leaned over your shoulder. “Let me guess,” he said quietly. “Blacked out like it never existed.”

You nodded.

For a moment, none of you spoke.

Then Hazelnut sighed and straightened. “Alright. I’ll ask.”

Chai blinked. “You?”

“Yeah,” he said, already rubbing his temples. “If anyone’s going to get scolded by staff today, it might as well be me.”

You watched him go, weaving his way toward the reference desk with a look that said he already knew how this would end.

Minutes passed.

You pretended to read. 

When Hazelnut finally came back, you didn’t need him to say anything.

His expression said it all.

“Administrative seal,” he said flatly, dropping into the chair beside you. “Direct order from the Sage of Truth. All materials pertaining to advanced longevity, soul anchoring, or non-divine immortality have been restricted, redacted, or removed entirely.”

Chai exhaled sharply. “So he really did it.”

You stared down at the page in front of you, the blacked-out ink staring back like an accusation.

Earl’s jaw tightened. “Did they say why?”

Hazelnut huffed a humorless laugh. “Official reason? ‘To prevent misuse of dangerous knowledge.’”

“And the unofficial one?” Chai asked softly.

Hazelnut looked at you. “…They didn’t need to say it, besides I doubt they know the truth anyways."

Silence settled around your table. The library felt cooler, the daylight suddenly less comforting.

“So that’s it,” Chai murmured. “Everything else is gone.”

“Not gone,” Earl corrected quietly. “Hidden…well at the very least he’s no liar.”

Your fingers curled against the edge of the book, knuckles pale.

He’d kept his promise.

That made everything worse.

Because now, the book in your bag wasn’t just an answer.

It was the only one left.

You closed your eyes for a brief moment, steadying your breath, and wondered for the first time whether he had done this to protect you.

Or to make sure you would always come back to him.

The frustration didn’t burn hot, It simmered like milk about to boil over.

You sat there a little longer than necessary, eyes unfocused on the page, the library’s low murmurs washing over you without meaning. 

Around you, the world went on students laughing softly, pages turning, the scratch of quills utterly unaware that entire truths had been carved out of existence. It seemed as though only you were stuck with this sickening feeling.

Chai broke the silence first, voice subdued. “Okay. So the library’s a dead end.”

“For now,” Earl said, though there was no real conviction in it.

Hazelnut leaned back in his chair, arms folded. “Figures. If I were an all-powerful Sage trying to keep someone safe from themselves, this is exactly what I’d do.”

You flinched despite yourself, and could only murmur. “What a way to rub salt in the wound Hazelnut.”

Earl noticed.

His gaze shifted to you, a look you weren’t sure you understood.

“There may be other avenues,” he said slowly.

Chai glanced over. “Like what? The restricted wing’s locked tighter than a vault.”

“Not books,” Earl replied. “People.”

That got your attention.

You looked at him, brows knitting. “People?”

Earl nodded once. “Research doesn’t stop just because texts disappear. Especially in places meant for… practical application.”

Hazelnut’s ears perked. “You mean the labs.”

“The research labs,” Earl confirmed. “Specifically the central wing.”

Chai’s expression shifted, interest dawning. “Oh. The ones overseen by that… What was he called? The jolly one?”

“The jolly one?” you echoed faintly.

Chai snapped her fingers. “You know. Always laughing, always with snacks on hand, acts like nothing in the world could possibly be serious.”

Hazelnut nodded. “Yeah, I’ve heard of him. Everyone says he’s in charge of approving experimental projects. If anyone’s seen stuff that isn’t in the books…”

Earl finished the thought calmly. “It might be him.”

Your stomach tightened immediately.

“No,” you said, a little too fast. Then, quieter, “We shouldn’t.”

Three sets of eyes turned to you.

“We shouldn’t tell people what we’re doing,” you continued, lowering your voice instinctively. “That’s how things spread. That’s how-” You stopped yourself.

That’s how Shadow Milk finds out.

Earl didn’t push. Instead, he folded his hands together, considering. “I’m not suggesting we tell him everything.”

Chai tilted her head. “Indirectly, then?”

“Casually,” Earl said. “And hypothetically.”

Hazelnut snorted. “You mean lie.”

“I mean ask the sort of questions curious scholars ask all the time,” Earl replied smoothly. “Questions about historical anomalies. Long-term magical endurance. Cases where the data doesn’t quite line up.”

You looked down at your hands.

“You’re good at this,” you murmured. “Too good.”

Earl’s voice softened. “You’re right to be cautious.”

That surprised you enough to look up.

He met your gaze evenly. “But avoiding every possible source won’t keep you safe either. It will only leave you alone with the book.”

Chai winced. Hazelnut looked away.

Earl continued, gentler now. “We won’t mention anything that ties back to what you’ve done.”

“Done,” you echoed faintly.

“We listen,” he said. “And if nothing comes of it, we walk away.”

Your pulse beat loud in your ears.

“And if something does?”

Earl hesitated, just a fraction.

“Then we’ll have learned something without exposing you.”

The idea sat between you all, fragile and dangerous and tempting.

You exhaled slowly. “He’s… friendly, right?”

Hazelnut shrugged. “That’s the rumor.”

Chai smiled weakly. “Sometimes the friendliest ones know the most.”

You swallowed...

“…Alright,” you said at last, though unease still curled in your chest. “But if this feels wrong or if it feels like too much, we leave.”

Earl inclined his head. “Agreed.”

You reached for your bag without thinking, fingers brushing the hidden weight inside.

The book stayed silent.

The labs were louder than you expected.

Glass clinked softly, enchanted instruments hummed, and somewhere deeper within the wing something let out a cheerful pop followed by an enthusiastic, “Ah! There it is!”

You barely had time to process that sound before-

“BOO!”

You yelped.

Chai jumped. Hazelnut swore. Earl stiffened sharply, already halfway into a defensive stance.

And the culprit was…

“Oh! Oh no, no, no! Sorry! Completely my fault!” the Cookie said, hands raised immediately, eyes wide with genuine concern. “You should see your faces wait, no, don’t, that’s worse, are you alright?”

He laughed, bright and booming, entirely unbothered by the near-heart attacks he’d just caused.

Up close, he was exactly as described, apron splattered with alchemical residue, hair slightly singed at the tips, a smile warm enough to make you forget you were standing in one of the most tightly regulated research wings in the Spire.

He peered at you all curiously. “Now, this is interesting. Undergraduates don’t usually wander into my domain until next week.” He tapped his chin. “Unless I’m the one who’s wrong, which” he gasped theatrically, “is a horrifying possibility.”

Hazelnut recovered first.

“Well, if you were wrong,” he said cheerfully, “you’ve got the right vibe for it.”

The Cookie burst out laughing. “Oh, I like you already.”

Hazelnut grinned back. “Right? I keep telling people that.”

Earl cleared his throat.

Hazelnut visibly wilted.

“Ah, right,” Hazelnut said quickly. “We’re here for… reasons.”

Earl shot him a look.

“Specific reasons,” Hazelnut amended. “Academic ones.”

The researcher’s eyes twinkled. “Academic reasons are my favorite kind.”

He leaned casually against a counter, arms crossed, entirely too relaxed for someone in charge of classified magical experimentation. “So,” he said, drawing the word out. “What brings the four of you here? Curiosity? Ambition? Mild trespassing?”

You opened your mouth and then stopped.

Because Chai hadn’t said a word.

She stood slightly behind you, hands clasped together, gaze lowered. No teasing or sideways commentary whispered under her breath.

It was… unsettling.

“We were hoping,” Earl began carefully, stepping in before Hazelnut could derail things further, “to ask a few questions. General ones.”

“General!” the researcher echoed happily. “Excellent. Love a good general question. Much safer than specific ones.”

Hazelnut snorted.

Earl continued, measured and polite. “We’ve been studying historical magical phenomena, cases where long-term spellwork produced results beyond what current literature accounts for.”

The Cookie hummed thoughtfully. “Ahhh. Edge cases.”

“Yes,” Earl said. “Anomalies.”

You felt Chai shift slightly beside you.

The researcher nodded slowly. “Those are always fun. Frustrating and heeeeavily supervised.”

Hazelnut leaned in, unable to help himself. “Hypothetically speaking, if someone wanted to research… say… really extreme magical endurance…”

Earl shot him another look.

“Purely academically,” Hazelnut finished weakly.

The researcher laughed again, delighted. “Hypotheticals are dangerous things, you know.”

Your pulse ticked up.

“But,” he added lightly, “they do make for interesting conversations.”

He glanced over the group and then his gaze lingered on Chai.

“You’ve been awfully quiet,” he observed gently. “Usually someone’s already asked me if I’ve ever blown up a wing. Well if you must know…twice.”

Chai looked up slowly.

Her expression was polite.

“Just listening,” she said. “You usually learn more that way.”

Something unreadable flickered across his face.

“Smart,” he said after a moment. “Very smart.”

“Well,” the researcher said, clapping his hands once. “Ask away. Indirectly. Hypothetically. Preferably without implicating yourselves or me. I would hate to file any kind of report.”

He smiled again, bright as ever.

And you had the unsettling feeling that despite the laughter, despite the warmth, you were standing in front of someone who knew exactly how dangerous curiosity could be.

You hesitated only a second before stepping forward, forcing your shoulders to relax.

“Um sorry,” you said, a little sheepish. “We kind of… skipped introductions.”

The researcher blinked.

Then his smile widened, delighted. “Oh! You’re absolutely right. Terribly rude of me. Here I am startling students half to death without so much as a name.”

He straightened, placing a hand over his chest with exaggerated sincerity. “You may call me Marzipan Taffy Cookie,  head overseer of the central research labs, enthusiast of controlled chaos, and proud survivor of three self-inflicted explosions.”

Hazelnut’s eyes lit up. “I knew you were cool.”

Marzipan Taffy laughed. “High praise!”

You glanced back at your friends, then gestured vaguely between you all. “We should probably introduce ourselves too.”

Hazelnut didn’t wait.

“I’m Hazelnut Biscotti Cookie,” he said, already grinning. “Comedic relief and an occasional moral compass with frequent bad ideas.”

“Chai Latte Cookie,” Chai said quietly, dipping her head in a polite nod.

Marzipan Taffy smiled at her again, softer this time. “Pleasure.”

Earl stepped forward next, posture composed. “Earl Grey Cookie.”

“Ah,” Marzipan Taffy said, eyes sharpening just a touch. “That explains the posture.”

Earl ignored that.

And then they all looked at you.

You felt that familiar weight, that awareness that you never quite knew how to present yourself. Scholar? Student? Something in between?

You cleared your throat. “I’m” You paused, then continued simply, “I’m their friend.”

Marzipan Taffy tilted his head.

“Oh?” he said lightly. “That’s an interesting introduction.”

Your pulse quickened but his tone remained kind.

“Well,” he said, gesturing broadly to the lab around you, “friends who wander into research wings together usually share a question. Or a problem. Or a secret.”

Earl’s jaw tightened slightly.

“But!” Marzipan Taffy added quickly, clapping his hands again. “No pressure. Hypotheticals only, remember?”

Hazelnut chuckled nervously. “Right. Hypotheticals.”

Marzipan Taffy leaned back against the counter once more, entirely at ease. “So. Now that we’re properly acquainted, what theoretical curiosity has brought you to my doorstep ahead of schedule?”

You swallowed.

If anyone was going to say it, it had to be you.

You shifted your weight forward, fingers curling briefly at your side before you forced them still. “This is… kind of on me,” you admitted, glancing back at your friends for half a second before looking at Marzipan Taffy again. “I was the one who suggested we come.”

Hazelnut opened his mouth probably to protest but Earl shot him a look, and he stopped.

You took a breath. “I’ve been thinking about how magic behaves when it isn’t… structured. When it’s not filtered through runes or incantations or institutional safeguards.”

Marzipan Taffy’s expression didn’t change.

“Go on,” he said gently.

“You know how most spellwork relies on frameworks,” you continued, choosing your words carefully. “Circles. Language. Focused constructs. But historically… there are accounts where none of that seems to apply.” You weren’t even sure if that was true, adding to your nerves.

You clasped your hands together to keep them from shaking.

“Cases where magic manifests through will alone,” you said. “Raw. Unmediated. Almost instinctive.”

Hazelnut shifted uncomfortably. Chai’s gaze flicked to you, then away.

Earl stayed still but you could feel his awareness like a steady presence at your back.

Marzipan Taffy hummed thoughtfully. “Ah,” he said. “Unfiltered expression.”

“Yes,” you replied quickly. “Hypothetically.”

“Of course,” he agreed with a grin.

You pressed on before doubt could stop you. “If someone encountered that kind of magic in themselves or witnessed it would that necessarily mean they were… exceptional?”

The word felt dangerous in your mouth.

“Or,” you added, “could it be circumstantial? The result of pressure. Or proximity. Or” you hesitated, then finished softly, “need.”

The lab felt very quiet.

Marzipan Taffy didn’t answer right away.

Instead, he studied you with a gaze that wasn’t invasive, but it felt as though he was evaluating whatever circumstance you were in. The way a researcher looks at a phenomenon they don’t want to frighten into vanishing.

“That’s a very good question,” he said at last.

Hazelnut let out a breath he’d been holding.

“Raw magic doesn’t always belong to prodigies,” Marzipan Taffy continued. “In fact, it rarely does. Prodigies tend to overthink. They’re trained early. Taught restraint before they learn honesty.”

Chai’s fingers twitched.

“Unfiltered magic,” he said, voice quieter now, “most often appears when someone has nothing left to rely on except themselves. But it can hypothetically come from an outside source.”

Your chest tightened.

“However,” he added, lifting a finger, smile returning, “that doesn’t make it safe. Or stable. Or kind to the person wielding it.”

Earl finally spoke. “Then hypothetically, would you discourage someone from pursuing it further?”

Marzipan Taffy glanced at him. “I would encourage them to ask why it appeared.”

His gaze slid back to you.

“And who or what they’re trying to survive.”

The words landed heavier than anything written in the book.

For a moment, no one spoke.

Then Marzipan Taffy chuckled lightly, shaking off the weight. “Now! That’s quite enough existential dread for before lunch.”

Hazelnut snorted weakly. “You’re telling me.”

Marzipan Taffy waved a hand. “If you’re looking for hard answers, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. But if you’re looking for warnings, those I have plenty of.”

He leaned in just slightly. “So then hypothetically speaking… what made you start thinking about magic like this in the first place?”

Your heart skipped.

Because suddenly, you weren’t sure whether you were asking questions anymore or being asked them.

Chai spoke before you could.

“Well…” she said lightly, tilting her head just enough to seem casual, “we were reading a fantasy book. One of those old ones.”

Marzipan Taffy’s brows lifted, intrigued.

“It mentioned power that doesn’t come from training or symbols,” Chai continued, her tone easy, almost breezy. “And it made us curious. Because… no one ever really talks about that kind of thing seriously.”

You felt your shoulders ease a fraction.

Chai went on, eyes thoughtful now rather than playful. “So we were wondering…how would someone even know if magic came from them?” She gestured vaguely to herself. “Or if it was… something else. An outside source. An influence.”

Hazelnut nodded along, chiming in, “Yeah. Like borrowed power versus homegrown.”

Marzipan Taffy let out a thoughtful hum.

“Those,” he said warmly, “are very inquisitive questions.”

Earl stiffened slightly.

“They’re also,” Marzipan Taffy added, straightening, “a bit above my pay grade.”

That startled you.

He smiled apologetically. “Not because they’re forbidden but because they’re foundational. Questions like that are better suited for the Fount. I mean I’m sure I could help but that’s not really my field of research. I wouldn’t want to lead you down the wrong path.”

You blinked. “The… Fount?”

“The Fount of Knowledge,” he clarified easily. “Public hours. Open discourse. He answers questions posed in good faith.”

Chai’s eyes widened. “Wait…you can just… ask him things?”

Marzipan Taffy laughed outright. “You youngsters really don’t read notices anymore, do you?”

Hazelnut flushed. “Hey.”

“It’s part of his duties,” Marzipan Taffy continued cheerfully. “Anyone seeking wisdom may ask, students, scholars, wanderers, the occasionally overconfident.”

Earl frowned slightly. “We… didn’t know that.”

“Well,” Marzipan Taffy said with a shrug, “now you do.”

Hazelnut shifted, rubbing the back of his neck. “I mean no offense, but I’m not sure we want to bother the Fount with… silly hypotheticals.”

Marzipan Taffy’s smile softened but didn’t fade.

“Curiosity is never silly,” he said. “But I understand the hesitation.”

His gaze flicked between you all, lingering just a moment longer on you.

“If you decide to ask,” he added gently, “ask honestly. He has little patience for riddles disguised as fear. I would know.”

The words settled deep.

He clapped his hands once, bright again. “Now! I’m afraid I do have actual explosions to supervise.”

Hazelnut perked up. “Can we watch?”

“No.”

“Worth asking.”

Marzipan Taffy laughed and gestured toward the door. “Good luck, all of you. Wherever your curiosity takes you.”

As you turned to leave, your mind raced.

The Fount of Knowledge.

Public hours. Answers to anyone seeking wisdom.

You hesitated at the threshold.

Your friends had already taken a few steps down the corridor when you turned back.

“Um, sorry,” you said. “One more thing.”

Marzipan Taffy glanced over his shoulder, already halfway to a bench cluttered with instruments. “Ah! The classic one more thing. Go on.”

You stepped back into the lab, careful to keep your tone light, curious and harmless.

“The Fount,” you said. “Those public hours you mentioned. How often are they? And…where does that usually take place?”

You hadn’t noticed your friends trailed behind you.

Earl paused behind you, eyes flicking to your profile. Chai stayed quiet. Hazelnut pretended very hard to be fascinated by a bubbling vial.

Marzipan Taffy brightened immediately. “Oh! Regularly. Every few days, give or take…depends on his schedule. Always posted, but no one reads the postings.” He laughed giving you a pointed look. “As for where! The throne room, of course. Upper Spire. You’ll know it when you see it.”

Your pulse ticked faster despite yourself.

“And… is it hard to get in?” you asked, quickly adding, “If someone were curious.”

“Well,” Marzipan Taffy said, tapping his chin, “the line tends to get long. Very long. Scholars, petitioners, the occasional person having a philosophical crisis before lunch.”

“So,” Marzipan Taffy finished, looking at you meaningfully, “if someone wanted answers, they’d best hurry when the hours are announced.”

You nodded once.

“Good to know,” you said. “Just curious.”

That was the truth, at least the version of it you were allowed to say.

Marzipan Taffy smiled, satisfied. “Curiosity seems to be going around today.”

You stepped back toward your friends, forcing your shoulders to loosen. As you turned away, you were acutely aware of Earl watching you.

Behind you, Marzipan Taffy called lightly, “Remember, wisdom offered freely is still wisdom. Whether you take it or not is up to you.”

The corridor swallowed the sound as you walked with the group.

You didn’t say anything about the Fount again.

And you certainly didn’t say that, despite everything you had no intention of standing in that line.

You barely made it halfway down the hall before the words spilled out of you.

“Obviously I’m not going to ask him.”

You stopped walking altogether, turning to face them, frustration sharp enough to sting your own ears. “He’s the one stopping us. He’s the one redacting things, locking them away, deciding what we’re allowed to know. Why would I go stand in a line just to ask politely for answers he’s already decided I don’t deserve?”

Your hand curled into the fabric of your sleeve. You exhaled hard. “I just! ugh.”

Hazelnut slowed first, expression softening. “Yeah,” he admitted. “That would be… kind of pointless.”

Earl nodded once. “If Marzipan Taffy knew more, he would have said so. Or at least hinted.”

Chai frowned, arms folding loosely. “He was careful. Too careful. That usually means he knows exactly where the line is, and doesn't want to cross it.”

You groaned, tipping your head back briefly. “So that’s it, then? He laughs, tells us to ask the one person who benefits most from us not knowing, and sends us on our way?”

No one contradicted you.

The silence pressed in again.

You dropped your gaze to the floor, voice quieter now. “Even if he can’t or won’t tell us more… then what if the book really is the only way?”

Chai’s breath caught.

Hazelnut’s jaw tightened. “Don’t say that like it’s already decided.”

“But what if it is?” you pressed, looking up at them. “What if everything else has been stripped away? What if this” you stopped yourself from saying it, “is the only path left?”

Earl studied you carefully. “Then we slow down.”

You shook your head. “We don’t have time to slow down.”

“I know,” Earl said gently. “But rushing toward the only door left without asking who locked the others is dangerous.”

Hazelnut swallowed. “I don’t like that it’s the book that keeps answering you. Not when everything else has gone quiet.”

Chai stepped closer, her voice softer but no less firm. “We want to help you. All of us do. But if this is the only way, then we need to be sure it’s not because someone made it the only way.”

You looked at them and thought

Four days.

Four days and a book that spoke in poetry and promises just for you.

“…So what do I do?” you asked, barely above a whisper.

No one answered right away.

But they didn’t walk away either.

For now, that was the only certainty you had.

Earl was the first to answer you.

“…I don’t know,” he said.

The admission wasn’t defeat, It was him refusing to lie to you just to make the fear smaller.

Hazelnut exhaled through his nose. “Yeah. Same. I’ve got nothing that doesn’t sound either stupid or terrifying.”

Chai reached out, resting her hand lightly against your arm. “But I do know this,” she said gently. “You’ve been thinking in circles since this morning. Maybe what you need right now isn’t another answer.”

You blinked at her.

“Maybe you need a nap,” she added, a little softer. “Or food that doesn’t disappoint you. Or literally anything that isn’t immortality and cosmic consequences.”

Hazelnut snorted. “Strong vote for a nap.”

You let out a weak laugh.

Then Hazelnut’s expression shifted to thoughtful and curious in that way that always meant trouble. “Y’know… I am kind of wondering what people actually ask the Fount.”

Earl’s head snapped toward him. “No.”

Hazelnut shrugged. “I’m not saying we ask anything. Just… watch. From afar. People line up, right? We could listen in. See what kinds of questions get answers.”

Earl frowned deeply. “That’s a bad idea.”

“Is it?” Hazelnut pressed. “We wouldn’t be doing anything. Just standing there. Existing. He has a reputation to uphold so he won’t be glaring at you…if that’s what you’re worried about.”

You hesitated.

“I’m… a little curious too.”

All three of them looked at you.

You flushed, immediately defensive. “Not because of anything else,” you added quickly. “Just, academically. Like Hazelnut said. I want to know what kind of wisdom people actually seek.”

Earl studied your face, searching for cracks. Finding none, but not finding peace either.

Chai tilted her head, considering. “It could be interesting,” she admitted. “If nothing else, it might remind us that the world is bigger than just this problem.”

Earl sighed, long and resigned. “You’re all conspiring against my better judgment.”

Hazelnut grinned. “We’d never.”

“…We will not ask questions,” Earl said firmly. “We will not approach him. We will not linger if it feels wrong.”

You nodded immediately. “Agreed.”

Chai smiled faintly. “Just observing.”

Earl closed his eyes for a moment then opened them again. “Fine,” he said. “But only for a short while.”

Relief loosened something in your chest.

A nap could wait.

For now, you would watch.

And you told yourself, that curiosity was all this was.

Nothing more.

You kept to the edges of the crowd, half-hidden behind a pillar and a potted purple statice that had seen better days. From here, you could see everything without being seen, or so you hoped.

The line really was long.

Scholars in pressed robes. Travelers with dust still clinging to their cloaks. Students clutching notebooks like lifelines. They filtered in and out of the Fount’s throne room in an almost reverent rhythm.

And the questions…

“Oh no,” Hazelnut muttered under his breath as someone stepped out, beaming. “I can already feel my sanity slipping.”

You watched as the next person went in, barely a pause between them.

Some questions were… painful.

“Do you think my professor secretly hates me?” “Will I be rich?” “Is it bad luck if my spoon bent yesterday?”

Hazelnut pressed his fingers to his temple. “I might actually go mad. Imagine having all the knowledge in the world and this is what people bring you.”

You stifled a laugh, eyes still fixed ahead. “Be nice. For them, it probably matters.”

“Sure,” he said. “But still.”

Then came the others.

Questions about lost civilizations. About contradictory historical records. About magic behaving differently near certain celestial events. About grief. About fear. About whether purpose was something found or something endured.

The tone shifted constantly, trivial to profound, foolish to achingly sincere.

And through it all, Shadow Milk Cookie sat on that throne, composed and immaculate, listening as if each question mattered equally. Elbows resting lightly, fingers steepled, expression attentive. Patient. Unhurried.

You didn’t realize you were smiling until the words slipped out.

“…Doesn’t he just look so dreamy and refined doing it, though?”

Hazelnut froze.

Earl sighed immediately, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I could do the same thing,” he said flatly.

You glanced at him, amused. “Oh?”

“Yes,” Earl replied. “Sit. Listen and answer questions and I’d do without theatrics.”

Hazelnut snorted. “You’d last five minutes before correcting their grammar.”

Chai yawned softly, swaying just a little where she stood. “I couldn’t do it, this is a snooze fest. All these questions are making me sleepy,” she murmured. “It’s like… intellectual white noise.”

You looked back toward the throne.

Shadow Milk smiled at someone gentle, reassuring and sent them on their way with a slight incline of his head.

You told yourself it meant nothing.

But your chest felt strangely tight all the same, as the next questioner stepped forward and the Fount of Knowledge listened, as he always did.

Chai noticed before you did.

The slight stillness. The way your smile pursed.

She leaned in, voice low and teasing, just for you. “Hey. Relax. He’s just being nice.” A pause then, gentler, “And besides… he’s all yours. You know that.”

Your ears warmed. You looked away quickly. “I wasn’t…”

“Mhm,” Hazelnut said, not looking at you. “Sure.”

Earl chose, mercifully, not to comment.

You stayed a little longer.

From the sidelines, you listened not to him so much as to the way he answered.

A young scholar asked, voice trembling, “If knowledge can hurt people… should it ever be shared?”

Shadow Milk folded his hands. “Knowledge does not hurt. Choice does. And choice cannot exist without knowledge.” He smiled faintly. “The harm comes when one believes ignorance to be kindness.”

Another, older, dust on their cloak, asked, “Why do patterns repeat across history, even when we swear we’ve learned?”

“Because memory fades faster than fear,” he replied smoothly. “And fear is a far more motivating teacher.”

A student, barely older than you, blurted out, “Will I ever be enough?”

The room went very quiet.

Shadow Milk’s gaze softened. An honest gaze. “Enough for whom?” he asked. “Decide that first. It will save you years.”

Hazelnut shifted beside you, quieter now.

Someone else asked about magic, why it behaved unpredictably near certain people.

“Magic,” Shadow Milk said calmly, “is drawn to fracture. To pressure. To those who cannot afford to fail.”

Your chest tightened.

Chai squeezed your arm.

Eventually, the line thinned. Voices faded. The weight of the crowd loosened. Shadow Milk dismissed the last visitor with a polite nod, already reaching for a stack of papers at his right side.

Your stomach chose that moment to betray you.

A very loud, very insistent growl echoed in the quiet corridor.

Hazelnut froze. “…I think that was you.”

You groaned softly. “We skipped lunch.”

Chai laughed under her breath. “And dinner is rapidly becoming a medical necessity.”

Earl glanced once more toward the office then turned away. “We should go. Before we linger.”

You nodded, though your gaze flicked back one last time.

Shadow Milk hadn’t noticed you.

Or if he had he gave no sign.

Your stomach growled again, more insistently this time, and that finally broke whatever fragile spell had settled over you. You turned with the others, falling back into step, the murmur of the Spire swallowing you whole.

Dinner felt… normal.

Blessedly, stubbornly normal.

The dining hall glowed with warm lanternlight, chatter rising and falling in easy waves. Plates clinked. Someone laughed too loudly at a table across the room. The scent of baked bread and roasted herbs drifted through the air.

For a moment it felt like the old academy days. Before forbidden books. 

You slid into your seat without thinking, muscle memory guiding you. Hazelnut dropped into the chair beside you with a dramatic sigh. Chai tucked in across from you, chin resting briefly in her hands before she reached for the bread basket. Earl adjusted his coat and sat, posture as composed as ever.

You looked around at them and couldn’t help the soft smile that tugged at your lips.

“…Are your dorms cozy?” you asked suddenly, the question light, almost playful.

Hazelnut nearly choked on his drink. “Do not come to my dorm.”

You blinked. “What?”

He pointed a fork at you accusingly. “I do not need Shadow Milk Cookie knocking on my door at dawn demanding explanations. I barely survived this morning.”

Chai snorted. “He’d probably critique your décor.”

“I don’t have décor,” Hazelnut said defensively. “I have a chair and existential dread.”

Earl sipped his tea. “Minimalist.”

You laughed, and the sound came easier than it had all day.

Chai smiled softly. “My dorm’s cozy,” she said. “I’ve been enjoying being here. With all of you.” Her voice was warm and simple. 

Something in your chest shifted at that.

Once dinner was served in the dining hall, you got up filling your plate with roasted vegetables glazed in something sweet and savory, a thick stew rich with herbs. Nothing indulgent like waffles or chocolate pudding.

But the smell was familiar.

Not because you’d eaten it before or because it belonged to a memory you could name.

But it felt like something safe. Hazelnut inhaled deeply. “Okay. This is good.”

Chai nodded, eyes closing briefly as she tasted the stew. “It reminds me of… something.”

“Home,” Earl said quietly.

You swallowed around the sudden tightness in your throat. “Yeah.”

They ate, conversation drifting from lectures to minor gossip to whether Hazelnut’s nightmare about sentient parchment qualified as a haunting.

You reached for your cup and glanced around the table. “What kind of tea did everyone pick?”

Chai brightened. “Honey blossom. It’s floral but not too sweet.”

Hazelnut held up his mug. “Spiced bark. Because I enjoy suffering.”

Earl lifted his cup slightly. “Black citrus.”

You looked down at your own.

“…Mint,” you murmured.

The steam curled upward, warm against your face.

They were here because of you.

Because you had opened something, because you had asked them to.

Because you had dragged them into the orbit of something bigger than any of you.

A small tinge of guilt crawled through your dough, slow, sticky and impossible to ignore.

They laughed. They ate. They talked.

And you wondered, quietly, if the cost of your choice would ever show on their faces.

You smiled anyway liftiing your tea.

The warmth of the tea didn’t reach as far as you wanted it to.

It should have.

Everything around you was soft, voices, laughter, and the steady comfort of your friends slipping back into old rhythms like nothing had changed. Hazelnut arguing about spice levels, Chai leaning toward you just enough to be close, Earl correcting something under his breath with quiet precision.

It should have been enough for you. This life should have; But the thought of it came back anyway.

Uninvited and persistent.

“You must step within your circle alone, those you wish to share your eternity must each perform their own.”

Your fingers tightened slightly around your cup.

Each of them.

Their own circle. Their own vow. Their own… cost.

Your gaze drifted across the table.

Hazelnut, laughing at something stupid. Chai, warm and present, eyes soft in the lanternlight. Earl, composed but here with you.

Because of you.

A quiet, creeping guilt settled deeper into your chest.

What were they supposed to give up?

What would the ritual take from them?

You swallowed.

No.

Your grip steadied.

There had to be another way.

The book hadn’t said it outright, but it also hadn’t said it was impossible. It spoke in riddles. In suggestions. In half-truths that felt like whole ones if you didn’t question them hard enough.

Maybe it was written that way for a reason.

Maybe… it could be bent.

Your thoughts sharpened.

What if the ritual didn’t need to be shared?

What if you could take the cost alone?

If someone had to lose something if someone had to bear whatever “release of mortal ties” truly meant,

What if it was just you?

Your stomach twisted, but the idea took root.

Stronger than the doubt.

Stronger than the fear.

You set your cup down quietly.

No one noticed.

Because they were still talking. Still here. Still safe.

You made the decision in silence.

Later.

When they weren’t around.

You’d go back to the book.

You’d ask it properly this time.

Not how to complete the ritual, you already had that…sort of. 

Instead you’d ask how to change it.

How to make it so they wouldn’t have to give anything up.

How to make it so you were the only one who took the fall.

Your gaze softened as you looked at them again.

If this was the only way then you’d make sure it only cost you.

Eventually, the night thinned.

Dinner ended. Cups emptied. The last of the easy laughter faded into soft goodnights and tired smiles and familiar promises to see each other in the morning.

Chai hugged you a little longer than usual.

Hazelnut pointed at you and said, “No summoning anything tonight.”

Earl only looked at you, steady, searching for danger and said, “Sleep, if you can.”

You told them you would.

It was not quite a lie.

Your dorm felt different once the door shut behind you.

Too quiet.

Too still.

The lantern on your desk burned low, casting warm light over the room, over your blankets and books and the shelf that no longer held what you wanted it to. You crossed the space slowly, heartbeat loud in the hush, and drew the hidden tome from your bag.

The moment it touched the desk, the room seemed to darken even in the light of your lantern.

You stared at the cover for a long moment before opening it.

The pages fluttered once on their own.

Then stilled.

Your voice came out small at first. “I need to ask you something.”

Nothing. You almost gave into desperation.

Then, from the empty page, ink began to seep upward like dark water finding the surface.

“You need many things. Questions are only the prettiest of them.”

Your jaw tightened.

“I’m serious.”

The script curved slowly, elegantly, almost indulgently.

“As am I. Speak, starlight. The night is listening.”

That made your skin prickle.

You drew in a breath and forced yourself to focus.

“You said…or wrote” your eyes dropped briefly to your notes, to the copied line that had been haunting you all evening. “You must step within your circle alone, those you wish to share your eternity must each perform their own.”

The page remained still, as if waiting.

You pressed on.

“But is there another way?”

Your fingers curled against the desk.

“A way where only I have to do it. Where only I have to… pay for it.” Even saying that felt wrong. “If my friends want to follow me…if they want eternity too, surely there’s some magic where they can come after. Without taking the fall themselves.”

The page stayed blank long enough that doubt began to creep in.

Then the ink unfurled again, slow and sinuous.

“Ah. Now guilt enters the circle.”

You went cold.

More words bloomed beneath the first.

“At last, you ask not how to ascend but who must bleed for the staircase.”

You flinched.

“I’m not asking for anyone to bleed.”

“No?” The line curved, almost amused. “Then why does your heart shake so loudly?”

You stared at the page, suddenly angry.

“Because I don’t want them hurt.”

The answer came quickly this time, as though pleased by the force in your voice.

“And yet you wished them eternal. A beautiful contradiction. A selfish kindness. A tender cruelty.”

Your throat tightened.

“That’s not fair.”

“No,” the book agreed, “it is not.”

The lantern flame flickered.

You lowered your gaze, voice quieter now. “They said they’d do it. They agreed. But that was before we knew…before I knew there was a price to be named. I thought…” You stopped.

You thought it would be like a door.

You thought it would be light.

You thought if the book called it sleep, then it could not be death-adjacent enough to matter.

You swallowed hard. “I don’t want them to lose anything because of me.”

The page darkened as the fresh script wrote itself into being.

“The moon is not a door. It is a mouth. It swallows what is offered and returns what pleases it.”

Your pulse skipped.

“So there isn’t another way.”

“There are always other ways. But not other prices.”

You shut your eyes briefly.

“No. Tell me clearly.”

When you looked again, the ink had sharpened.

“The moon must take something.”

The words seemed darker than the others. Heavier.

“A vow without surrender is wishcraft. A circle without cost is chalk. Eternity without severance is merely longing in finer robes.”

You hated how much that sounded like him.

Not exactly him, but like a version of him that stepped into rooms like he was performing for the stars. Refined. theatrical. Cutting in ways that felt almost beautiful.

Your hands trembled.

“What if the moon takes from me for all of us?”

This time, the answer came very slowly.

“One vessel cannot drown for four and call it mercy.”

You pressed harder.

“Why not? If the magic is mine when we do the ritual if I’m the one seeking it first, why can’t I bear it?”

The book replied

“Because eternity followed is not eternity earned. Because no soul may be carried through that gate asleep. Because what is not surrendered willingly is torn instead.”

You went still.

The room felt colder.

“I don’t understand.”

“You do.” A new line appeared beneath it. “That is why you are afraid.”

You looked away from the page, eyes stinging with a frustration that felt uncomfortably close to grief.

For a while, all you heard was your own breathing.

Then, very quietly, you asked, “Should I even be doing this?”

The question sat there like a wound.

The book did not answer immediately.

When it did, the handwriting had softened, definitely not kinder, clearly less amused.

“At last. The true question arrives.”

You stared.

“Not can.Not how.But should.”

Your mouth went dry.

“Yes.”

The page seemed to almost pulse beneath your hands.

“Would you abandon the shore if none could follow? Would you still seek forever if forever meant solitude? Would you climb if no one stood below to marvel?”

You hated every word of it because you didn’t know.

You thought of Shadow Milk.

Of the ache in you that still wanted to prove something.

Of your friends at dinner, safe and laughing, warm beneath lanternlight.

Of Chai saying she’d been enjoying being here with all of you.

Of Hazelnut bluntly saying he loved you.

Of Earl refusing to lie just to comfort you.

You pressed the heel of your hand to your mouth.

“I don’t know.”

The ink curled once, like a wicked smile you could not see.

“Then do not pretend certainty in a ritual that punishes hesitation.”

That settled into you with the weight of truth.

You stood there for several heartbeats, saying nothing.

Then something rose through your fear, something desperate, offended, almost childlike in its need for footing.

“How do you know all this?”

The words cracked out of you.

“If everything else has been redacted, hidden, stripped away, how do you know? Who wrote you? What are you?”

The page remained blank for a few seconds.

“I am what remains when truth is dressed for the stage.”

You frowned.

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means exactly enough.”

The next line came quicker, curling elegantly across the page.

“I know because I have watched vows become cages. I know because I have worn many voices and heard what mortals confess to moonlight when they believe themselves alone.”

The lantern gave another weak flicker.

You took a step back from the desk.

The book continued

“Some lights reveal. Some lights entice. Some lights teach the eye to love the gleam more than the shape beneath it.”

A chill traveled down your spine.

You whispered, “What are you?”

The answer unfurled in a long, beautiful hand:

“A mirror, perhaps. A mask. A patient little lie told so artfully it learns to pass for guidance.”

Your breath caught.

Then, before you could decide whether to slam the book shut or demand more, the page darkened once more.

“But you did not open me to ask my nature. You opened me because you wanted permission for a sin.”

You stared at that line until it blurred.

Because it was right.

You had wanted the book to tell you there was a way to spare them.

A way to keep moving toward immortality without paying for it in anyone else’s jam or breath or soul.

A way to remain noble while still choosing it.

Your voice shook. “There has to be something.”

The script appeared almost tenderly this time.

“There is.”

Your heart lurched.

The next line followed.

“Turn back, I hate wasting time.”

You didn’t move and held your breath waiting for more.

When nothing came you whispered, “And if I can’t?”

For a moment, nothing.

Then, like breath onto glass,

“Then choose with open eyes. And do not call the wound love simply because others offered their dough.”

You shut the book.

Hard.

The sound cracked through the room like a snapped branch.

You stood there with both hands braced against the cover, head bowed, breathing unsteadily.

The guilt had not lessened. If anything, it had sharpened.

The moon must take something.

And if there was no way to bear the cost for everyone, then you would have to decide whether forever was worth asking anyone to fall beside you. Outside, somewhere beyond the dorm walls, the night carried on.

And the moon, distant, silent, watching said nothing at all.

You kept your hand on the cover for a long moment, breathing slowly, waiting for your pulse to stop sounding like panic.

Then, quietly, you said, “...Fair enough.”

You looked down at the book, at your own fingers splayed over its worn cover, and something softer moved through the guilt and frustration.

“I mean it,” you murmured. “If we all have to pay a price, then… okay. That’s fine, I suppose.”

The words felt weak even to you. Like paper held too close to a flame.

Your thumb brushed the edge of the cover.

“And… sorry,” you added, almost awkwardly. “For shutting you like that.”

You hesitated, cheeks warming faintly despite being alone.

“I don’t know if that hurt.”

A beat.

You exhaled through your nose, the silence almost embarrassing now.

“You might not even be alive,” you muttered. “Or… sentient. Or whatever the proper term is.” you shook your head once. “It felt rude.”

You almost asked again ‘what are you?’.

But the thought died as quickly as it came. You could already feel the shape of that conversation, more riddles, more silken evasions, more answers that circled the truth until you were too dizzy to tell one from the other.

No.

Not tonight.

You opened the book again, more carefully this time. The pages shifted beneath your fingers with something that almost felt like a sigh.

Ink unfurled at once, elegant and dark:

“Contrition becomes you. It softens the corners of your ambition.”

You rolled your eyes. “Don’t start.”

The script curved, amused.

“Then do not invite poetry and demand arithmetic.”

“I understand,” you said, more firmly now. “Or… enough of it.”

That gave the page pause.

You leaned over it, deciding, at last to stop circling.

“Then I’m going to ask plainly.”

The lantern flame trembled.

“If the moon takes something, if that's the price, what kind of memories does the moon take?”

“The ones with roots.”

You frowned. “That is exactly the kind of answer I’m trying to avoid.”

More ink.

“Then listen more carefully. The moon does not pluck at random. The moon takes what binds you most tightly to the shape you are now.”

Your stomach turned.

“What does that mean?”

The writing flowed on, slower this time, deliberate.

“A face loved too fiercely. A grief polished smooth by years of handling. A promise that taught your soul its own name. Not always the brightest memory. Not always the happiest. But the deepest.”

You stared.

“No…”

The word came out before you meant to say it.

“No, that’s” your throat tightened. “That could be anything.”

“Yes.”

Your hand pressed flat to the page.

“How am I supposed to choose if I don’t know what I’ll lose?”

“You are not asked to choose the memory. Only the path.”

You looked away for a second, jaw tight.

“Then what comes after?” you asked quietly. “How am I reborn?”

The ink darkened, almost lush in the lanternlight.

“With silence first. Then severance. Then the long and silver work of being unmade just enough to be remade.”

A chill worked its way down your arms.

“So I do die.”

“Words are frail little coffins. ‘Die.’ ‘Sleep.’ ‘Change.’ Mortals name thresholds according to what frightens them least.”

You hated how beautiful that was.

You hated more that it answered nothing and everything at once.

“Tell me clearly,” you whispered. “Will my heart stop?”

A pause.

“Yes.”

Your breath caught.

“Will I still be me?”

The reply came gently. Too gently.

“Not in all the ways you currently mean.”

Your eyes stung.

“But some of them?”

“Enough to rise. Enough to remember wanting to.”

You swallowed hard.

“And how soon after?” You leaned closer, voice dropping into something small and almost afraid. “How soon would I wake up?”

The page remained empty so long that your pulse began to hammer again.

Then, in slow and careful script:

“When the moon releases you.”

You closed your eyes. “That’s not a time.”

“No.”

“Days? Weeks? Years?”

“Perhaps.”

Your head snapped down toward the page. “That’s not funny.”

“I am not jesting.”

The next line appeared beneath it.

“You asked earlier if you would wake quickly. I answered truly. Time means little beneath the moon’s hand. You rise when longing outweighs stillness. When memory of you outweighs forgetting. When the world has room for your return.”

A horrible sort of understanding unfurled in you.

“So I might not wake for a very long time.”

The page offered no mercy.

“Yes.”

You pulled your hand back.

“And if no one remembers me?”

The ink did not hesitate.

“Then sleep becomes your forever.”

The room went very, very quiet.

You stared so hard at the page that the words blurred, then sharpened again.

It felt unfair in a way you had no language for.

Cruel, but not malicious. Like gravity. Like winter. Like finding out the stars are beautiful because they are too far away to care what happens to them.

You laughed once, but there was no humor in it.

“So not only do I die, I have to trust that enough people miss me to pull me back.”

The answer came elegant as ever.

“You wished for eternity. Did you think it would not ask whether you had ever truly been loved?”

Your hand flew to your mouth.

Because that was the cruelest question of all.

Not whether you were brave enough.

Not whether you were clever enough.

Whether you were remembered enough.

Whether you were needed.

You stood there breathing shallowly, your pulse an ugly thing in your throat.

You lowered your hand and looked at the book again.

“…If I do this,” you said, voice rough, “and my friends do too, would we all wake separately?”

The book paused.

“Not all moons return their dead in the same hour.”

That sank like a stone.

“So we could lose each other anyway.”

“You could.”

You laughed again, softer this time, bitter and frayed.

“This whole thing sounds awful.”

“And yet you still ask.”

You hated that it was right.

You hated more that some part of you was still asking.

Still searching for a version of the ritual that was survivable. Noble or even worth it.

Your gaze dropped to the page, and when you spoke again your voice had lost some of its sharpness.

“I said I understood. I do. I think I do.” A breath. “I’m just trying to know what I’m asking of them. Of myself.”

The writing curled slowly, almost gracious.

“At least, you are asking as one who might survive the answer.”

You didn’t know whether that was comfort or warning.

Maybe it was both.

Your fingers rested near the bottom of the page, not touching the ink.

For a long while, neither of you said anything.

Then, quietly, because you couldn’t help it, you asked one last question.

“If I turned back now…”

The book waited.

“…would I ever stop wanting it?”

The answer appeared like a whisper made visible:

“No. Probably not.                                                                                                You’d forever think of the fount and wonder why you never went through with it. But wanting is not the same thing as choosing.”

You sat with that.

And the moon beyond your window went on shining, silent and remote, as though none of this belonged to her at all.

The silence stretched just a little too long.

Long enough for irritation to rise where fear had been.

You stared at the page, jaw tight, the lanternlight making the ink gleam like something wet and watchful.

Then you said, a little sharper than before, “You know, you’re being incredibly smug for a book.”

The page remained blank for half a breath.

Then, with almost theatrical timing, ink unfurled in a graceful sweep:

“And you, starlight, are being incredibly mortal about this.”

You narrowed your eyes.

“I’m serious.”

“As am I. You wanted eternity and balked at inconvenience. Forgive me if I fail to collapse in sympathy.”

Your fingers curled against the desk.

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“No?” “You ask what memory will be taken, how long you will sleep, whether your precious companions may step lightly around the wound and still you wish me to believe you have made peace with price?”

Heat rose to your face.

“I never said I made peace with it.”

“Honesty. How refreshing. And sickening.”

You let out a slow, agitated breath. “You don’t have to keep doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Talking like you’re in the middle of a stage monologue.”

The ink curled, practically preening.

“Shall I become duller for your comfort? More academic? ‘Subject exhibits anxiety regarding lunar transfiguration and associated existential liabilities.’ Better?”

Despite yourself, you scowled harder.

“You’re insufferable.”

         The page replied smoothly,

         “you keep opening me.”

That stung more than it should have.

For a moment, you just glared at the pages, feeling your irritation thicken into something almost useful. Safer than fear. Safer than guilt.

Then you asked, more quietly, “Why are you helping me?”

The page went still.

You leaned forward before it could redirect the conversation.

“No, really. Why?” Your voice sharpened again. “I wasn’t desperate enough to talk to you today. Not like before. I wasn’t half-crying or frantic or clinging to you like you were the only thing in the room that could answer me.” Your throat tightened, but you forced the words through anyway. “So why are you still helping me?”

Nothing.

Then the ink returned, slow, elegant, and infuriatingly amused.

“Because, even I grow bored of the same act.”

You blinked.

More script bled down the page.

“I have spent sufficient time toying with you. Enough circling. Enough baiting. Enough watching you step carefully around the questions you feared to ask.”

Your stomach twisted.

“To make you wait now when you finally approach with your eyes open would be a drag.”

You stared.

“A drag?”

“Yes.” The reply came almost lazily. “You have become marginally more interesting. I reward improvement.”

You made an incredulous sound. “That’s your reason?”

“One of them.”

The words came faster now, almost pleased with themselves.

“Should you not be grateful? I could have left you in your pretty confusion. I could have answered only in moonlight and metaphor. I could have watched you mistake hunger for certainty for nights and nights and nights.”

The page darkened, the next lines sharper.

“Instead, I have shown mercy.”

You almost laughed.

“Mercy,” you repeated flatly.

“Yes.” “Be thankful.”

Something in you bristled.

“I don’t think you get to call it mercy when half of what you say sounds like it’s trying to see how close I can get to a breakdown before I close you again.”

“I told you to turn back.”

Your mouth opened, then shut.

Because that was true.

Because it would have been easier, crueler, perhaps, but easier for the book to keep nudging you forward, wrapping danger in beautiful language until you called it destiny.

But it hadn’t.

You pressed your palms to the desk. “If this is mercy, then you have a very strange idea of it.”

The book’s response was immediate.

“Of course I do. I know many strange ideas. I keep them polished.”

You exhaled through your nose, annoyed enough now that some of your fear had burned away.

“Still. You didn’t answer properly.”

“I answered exactly.”

“No.” You shook your head. “You answered like you always do, like there’s an audience somewhere waiting to applaud your phrasing.”

That seemed to delight it.

“Perhaps there is.”

You groaned, dragging a hand over your face. “Stars above.”

The next line appeared beneath your fingers, softer than the ones before:

“You ask why I help. Then hear this plainly, as plainly as I am willing to say it Too much waiting rots curiosity into fear. A seeker left starving becomes dull, and I have no fondness for dull things.”

Your hand stilled.

That… was closer to honest than you expected.

Or maybe it only sounded honest.

With this thing, you weren’t sure there was a difference.

You lowered your gaze to the page, irritation ebbing just enough to leave behind caution.

“So I’m entertainment.”

“At times.”

You frowned.

“And the rest of the time?”

A pause.

“A possibility.”

You went quiet.

The lantern crackled softly beside you. Somewhere beyond the window, the wind scraped tree-branches against stone.

You looked at the book for a long while before speaking again.

“You’re awful.”

“And useful.”

“That doesn’t make you better.”

“No,” it agreed, “but it does keep you here.”

Your fingers tapped once against the desk.

Then, because you couldn’t leave well enough alone, you asked, “If you’ve spent enough time toying with me, why start in the first place?”

When the answer came, the script was beautiful and cold.

“Because all doors test the hand that reaches for them. Because not everyone who seeks forever deserves to find it. Because I wished to know whether you were merely desperate or whether you could become something worse.”

Your stomach dropped.

“…Worse?”

“Someone willing to understand.”

That settled into the room like a blade laid flat on a table.

 “You say things like that and expect me to believe you’re being merciful.”

The ink curved one last time, amused and almost fond.

“I expect nothing of the sort. I merely expect you to keep reading.”

And the worst part was that you knew you would.

The next thing you knew, light was wrong.

Too bright. Too high. Not moonlight, not lantern-glow, but the pale gold of a day that had already gone on without you.

Your cheek was pressed to the desk. Your neck ached. One arm had gone numb beneath you, and the book lay open under your half-curled hand, its pages so blank it almost made you wonder if you had dreamed the whole of last night.

“Oh, stars above.”

Chai Latte’s voice, close and warm and edged with exasperation, cut through the haze. You groaned softly before even lifting your head.

“You stayed up all night,” she scolded, stepping around the desk and pinching the bridge of her nose. “You absolutely stayed up all night.”

You blinked blearily at her, then at the room beyond her where Hazelnut leaned in the doorway and Earl stood just behind him, one hand resting lightly against the frame.

Then Hazelnut exhaled. “Okay. Good. You’re alive.”

You pushed yourself upright with a wince. “Was there concern that I wouldn’t be?”

“Yes,” all three of them said at once.

Chai folded her arms, though the relief in her eyes softened the shape of her annoyance. “We wanted to give you space after yesterday,” she said, less sharply now. “It was a long day. You looked like your brain was trying to set itself on fire. So we didn’t come by this morning.”

Hazelnut shrugged, aiming for casual and missing by a little. “But then it got later. And later. And then near afternoon. Which, for the record, is a terrible time to still be unconscious at your desk with that thing out.”

He pointed accusingly at the open book.

“At the very least,” he went on, crossing the room now, “you should put the creepy moon-book away before trying to sleep. Imagine if Shadow Milk saw you like th” He stopped abruptly, coughed, and corrected himself with only a hint of embarrassment. “The Fount of Knowledge.”

Chai snorted.

You rubbed your eyes. “You can say his name, Hazelnut. He won’t descend from the ceiling if you do.”

“That sounds exactly like the kind of thing he would do,” Hazelnut muttered.

Earl finally stepped forward, gaze drifting first to you, then to the book, then back again. “To be fair,” he said smoothly, “they were under no obligation to schedule their emotional collapse more conveniently…”

He stopped.

His expression sharpened just slightly.

Then, in that precise, quiet tone of his, he asked, “What exactly were you speaking to it about?”

The room went still.

You looked down at the blank pages.

Then at your friends.

You did not tell them everything.

You didn’t tell them the way the book had spoken about memory like roots, or how it had admitted your heart would stop, or how it had told you to turn back and then mocked you for needing permission to do so. You did not tell them about the question of being remembered. Or the awful possibility that sleep might become forever if no one missed you enough.

Instead, you offered them the important pieces.

“The ritual still has a cost,” you said quietly. “For all of us. There isn’t a way for me to… take all of it on by myself. At least not one the book knows, or is willing to tell me.”

Chai’s face fell a little, though she tried not to show it.

You went on. “And the moon has to take something. Memories. Something important. Something deep.” Your voice thinned slightly. “And…the possibility we wouldn’t all wake at the same time.”

Hazelnut swore softly under his breath.

Earl’s jaw tightened.

Chai was the first to speak. “Well. That’s horrible.”

You gave a weak huff that might have been a laugh. “Yeah.”

Your fingers curled against the edge of the desk.

“There are only three days left now,” you said, and hearing the number aloud made it feel far too real. “So I need to ask you again, one last time, properly. Do you really want to do this?”

Hazelnut was the one who answered first, because of course he was.

He shoved his hands into his pockets and leaned back on his heels, expression caught somewhere between laid-back and deeply unsettled. “I mean… even if we don’t all wake up at once, whoever wakes up first can just wait, right?” He shrugged, trying for breezy. “We’d be immortal. So would it really matter?”

Chai turned on him immediately. “Hazelnut.”

“What?” he said, though his voice softened under her look.

“Stop saying things like that.” Her eyes were bright, not angry exactly, just wounded by the ease of his phrasing. “You make it sound simple.”

Hazelnut grimaced and looked away. “I know it’s not simple.”

“Then don’t talk like waking up centuries apart is just a scheduling issue.”

“That’s not what I…” He stopped, dragged a hand through his hair, and sighed. “I’m trying not to freak out, okay? If I think about it too hard, I will. So I’m trying to make it sound less terrifying than it is.”

That took some of the edge out of Chai’s expression.

She looked back at you then, stepping closer, voice gentler. “I said I would follow you. I meant it. But I don’t like any of this more now than I did yesterday.”

Earl inclined his head slightly, hands folded behind his back. “Nor do I.”

You looked at him.

His gaze was steady, refined as ever, but there was strain beneath it now. Just the weight of thinking too clearly about something no one should have to decide.

“I will not pretend the new information is comforting,” he said. “It isn’t. But neither will I pretend my answer changes every time the path becomes uglier.”

Hazelnut glanced at him, then at you, then huffed quietly. “Yeah. That.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “I’m scared. I hate that book. I hate that the moon sounds like it has opinions. And I especially hate the part where my memories might get stolen because I said yes to some half-poetic cosmic bargain.” He paused. “But… I said I’d do it.”

Chai looked down at the blank pages, then up at you again. “I’m still hoping something changes. That the book changes. That you change your mind. Any of it. But if nothing does…” Her fingers found your sleeve and tugged gently. “Then I’m not leaving you to face it alone.”

The guilt that had gone to sleep somewhere under your candy ribs stirred awake again.

You had dragged them into this.

And still they stayed. You looked down at the open tome, then reached over and shut it carefully this time.

Hazelnut eyed it suspiciously. “Thank you.”

You ignored him.

Then, after a moment, you said, “I asked it if there was another way.”

Three heads lifted.

“There isn’t,” you finished softly. “Not one that spares everyone.”

Chai drew in a slow breath. Earl’s expression turned distant and thoughtful, the way it always did when he was arranging pieces into a shape he didn’t yet like. Hazelnut, by contrast, looked like he wanted to throw the entire book into the astral river and be done with it.

Instead, he pointed at your bathroom. “Alright. New plan. You get up. You wash your face. We drag you somewhere with sunlight and food before you try discussing mortality with stationery again.”

Chai brightened at once. “And tea.”

“Obviously,” Earl said.

You stared at them for a moment, tired enough that your eyes stung for reasons that had nothing to do with sleep.

“Three days,” you murmured again.

Hazelnut gave you a crooked, too-casual smile that didn’t quite hide the fear under it. “Then we’ve got three days to either stop you or ruin ourselves with you.”

Chai elbowed him. “Hazelnut.”

“What? That was affectionate.”

“It was awful.”

Earl sighed faintly. “Please refrain from phrasing loyalty like a threat.”

You laughed then, small but weak. Somehow that was enough to get you to your feet.

The rest of the day blurred gently after that.

Earl did, in fact, drag you toward sunlight. Chai insisted on tea strong enough to “resurrect your personality.” Hazelnut hovered near your bag every time the book so much as shifted inside it, like he expected it to grow teeth.

And somehow, in the quiet spaces between worry and joking and the unsteady rhythm of the next three days, life kept happening.

The four of you moved through the academy as if you had not all begun measuring time in moonrise.

You studied when you had to. You wandered when you could. You laughed more than you probably should have, which only made the guilt sharper when it returned. Sometimes it sat with you like a stone. Other times, it only brushed past.

The book stayed mostly silent. After all you didn’t want to ask anything more.

And the moon, slow and inevitable, grew fuller.

Until at last morning came.

The day of.

You woke before your alarm.

Not because you were rested or because you were calm. 

Dawn had barely begun to bleed into the stonework when you sat on the edge of your bed and stared at your hands.

By tonight, you would stand by the Blueberry Yogurt River, where moonlight poured silver over the water and turned the banks into something holy and cold. By tonight, the choice would stop being theoretical. It would stop being pages and promises and whispered plans between friends.

And because of that the guilt had become unbearable in its own quiet way you found yourself thinking of him.

Of all the things you had not said. Of how many of your conversations lately had become barbed, deflected, unfinished. Of how much you had taken from him without ever fully knowing what he wanted in return. Of how you were about to do something he would almost certainly hate, if he knew.

You stood. Dressed. Left your room before you could decide not to.

The halls were still pale with early light, mostly empty, the academy caught in that strange hush before the day fully remembered itself. Your footsteps echoed softly as you made your way upward, toward the private quarters you knew too well.

His door was half-open.

Of course it was.

You hesitated at the threshold only long enough to see him there, already awake, already working, robes immaculate despite the hour, one hand resting against a stack of papers while the other moved steadily across the page.

Shadow Milk Cookie looked up almost immediately.

And in the quiet of the morning, without petitioners, without scholars, without the performance of public wisdom wrapped around him, his attention felt terribly direct.

He stilled then set down his pen.

“Well,” he said softly, amusement and surprise threading together beneath his voice. “Either the dawn has become remarkably generous… or you are here of your own accord.”

You swallowed. “I’m here of my own accord.”

That made something flicker in his eyes.

He leaned back slightly in his chair, studying you. “How curious.”

You nearly turned around right then. But the thought of leaving, of not saying this, of carrying one more thing into the night without trying to mend it first felt worse.

So you stepped inside.

“I know this is early.”

“For most, yes.”

You ignored that. “And I know you’re busy.”

“Less so now.”

The faintest smile touched his mouth. It should have made this easier. It didn’t.

You clasped your hands together to keep them from fidgeting. “I just… wanted to talk to you.”

That, more than anything else, seemed to quiet him.

A/N Okay so this was meant to be one part but Tumblr is making it hard for me so I'm splitting this into 2 chapters so the abrupt end is not a cliffhanger just give me a second to figure this out TwT!!! if there are weird spaces between paragraphs that was me messing around seeing what worked so don't mind them. I forgot there is a 1000 block limit.

Anyways

Remember, Follow and Repost for more bangers 😎😎😎🔥🔥🔥

“No one else can know,” you added, voice firmer now. “Not yet. Not until we understand everything. But… I think you need to see it for yourselves.”

Earl Grey folded his hands, nodding once. “Tonight, then.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Hazelnut said, though his voice lacked its usual humor. He was with you completely, but the gravity of it all had settled deep.

Chai gave your hand a light squeeze beneath the table. “We’ll be there. I just… hope this book doesn’t bite.”

You smiled faintly. “It might, honestly.”

That made her grin, even if it was a little forced.

You closed the notebook and tucked it away again, your heart thudding behind your ribs. Tonight, they would see the book  that offered riddles for rituals and answers you barely understood. Though seemingly your golden goose.

Night fell faster than you expected. It always did when anticipation pulled at your spine like a thread, unraveling time by the minute. One moment the sun was warming your shoulders as you walked back from lecture, the next, the moon had taken its throne above the Spire.

Its light bled through the windowpanes, pale and unrelenting. Cold and watchful, almost having you wonder what laid on the dark side of the moon.

You sat on your bed, notebook beside you, the book locked away in your desk drawer like a secret heart still beating.

Outside, the wind pressed softly against the glass, not strong enough to rattle, but steady enough to remind you it was time.

The door creaked once then again.

And then your friends trickled in.

Chai Latte first, wrapped in a blanket she insisted was purely for aesthetic reasons or so she claimed. Earl Grey, posture impeccable even now, with a tightness to his mouth that said he’d been thinking about this all day. Hazelnut Biscotti, arms crossed behind his head, but eyes sharper than usual. 

The room felt smaller with all of you inside it but warmer, too. Like the gravity of what you were about to show them was softened just slightly by their presence. Still, the moonlight that spilled across the floor felt almost too bright. Like it was watching.

You stood, hand reaching toward the drawer.

The moment your fingers touched the handle, it felt like the air changed thinner, somehow. Anticipation rippled through you, sharp and cold.

“They deserve to know,” you whispered aloud, not quite to yourself, not quite to the others.

And you opened it.

Your fingers curled around the edge of the drawer steady, certain and you pulled it open with purpose.

But when your hand closed around the book and you lifted it onto the bed between you and your friends…

Nothing.

The pages remained still. Silent. No flicker of ink. No shimmer of recognition. Not a whisper of magic.

Just parchment.

Blank and cold.

Your heart stuttered.

You tried again, gently this time fingers grazing the spine, letting a bit of your magic bleed into it, soft and coaxing. Like the night before. Like the night it listened.

But the book didn’t stir.

No breath of wind. No flickering candle. No ripple in the moonlight on the windowsill.

It just sat there.

Lifeless.

Your stomach dropped.

“…What’s wrong?” Chai asked softly, her voice uncharacteristically still.

You didn’t answer at first. Your eyes remained fixed on the open page as you flipped to the next. And the next. And the next.

All blank.

No writing. No guidance. No poetry spun in cryptic metaphors.

Just… silence.

You swallowed hard.

“It… it responded last night,” you said finally, your voice quiet with disbelief. “I didn’t even need a spell. It just wrote on its own. It told me everything. But now”

Now, it was like it didn’t know you.

Or worse like it was choosing not to.

Beside you, Earl Grey knelt to examine the pages, his fingers careful but unapologetic as he turned one, then another. His brows furrowed. “It’s dormant?”

“Is that normal?” Hazelnut asked, leaning in with narrowed eyes.

Earl shook his head slowly. “Not for a book like this. If it’s bound to someone it shouldn’t just stop.”

“Maybe it only reacts when you’re alone,” Chai offered gently, though her voice held concern underneath. “Like last time.”

Your hand trembled slightly as you shut the book again. It felt heavier now, like it was made of something ancient and disapproving. Like it was waiting for you to become that person again. The one who demanded answers. The one who bled magic out of want. The one who allowed their immaturity to take over.

The one Shadow Milk would never forgive.

You set it aside for now.

But your mind was racing.

Why wouldn’t it open?

And worse what would it take to make it?

You stared down at the closed book in your lap, your breath catching against the weight of silence pressing into the room. It had chosen you. You knew it had. The way it had written itself into your hands, offered you secrets no one else could reach. That had to mean something. It had to be more than a fluke.

So why was it quiet now?

Why wouldn’t it speak?

You shut your eyes.

And you tried to remember.

The desperation. The way your chest burned the night it first answered you. The hunger that clawed at your ribs. The ache that came from wanting more. From wanting to prove him wrong.

Your breathing picked up, shallow, strained.

You remembered his voice steady, sharp, unyielding.

“You’re a fool for telling me.”

You remembered the flare of shame and rage that sparked in your chest.

“I will stop you.”

You remembered the pain. 

And slowly, like dipping your fingers into ink, you let the bitterness in.

Let it burn. Let it grow. Let it rise until your ribs strained beneath it.

You clenched your jaw, gritted your teeth, and whispered over the spine of the book:

“I’m not a fool. I’m not afraid. I’m not wrong.”

Still… nothing.

So you gripped it tighter, voice trembling, cracking under the weight of what you were becoming.

“Let me in,” you begged. “Let me see. Show me everything. I’ll do whatever it takes do you hear me? Whatever it takes! Just don’t turn away now don’t go silent on me now- please please”

Your magic began to trickle out again, unbound and aching. It wrapped around the book like vines soft at first, then thorned.

The spine shuddered.

And then

The book opened.

The pages flipped rapidly, faster than before, faster than what should’ve been possible. Blanks became runes. Ink bled from nothing. There it was.

A single phrase. Scrawled hastily. Uneven.

Like it wasn’t coming from the book this time

But through it.

"Become what he fears. Then you will never be left behind. You’ll never be forgotten, isn't that what you seek?"

You froze.

Your breath hitched.

You couldn’t tell if that voice in your head was yours or something else's.

But you understood one thing

The book wanted this version of you. The one he would never recognize. The one who would burn the garden to reach the truth.

And it would reward you So long as you kept walking further down that path. Even if you couldn’t return. Even if, one day… you didn’t recognize yourself either.

And still you turned the page.

They sat in a tight circle now with no laughter, no teasing, no sweet distractions of dining commons or lazy river days. Just the book, humming faintly in your lap beneath the moonlight bleeding through the window. The soft creak of wood. The unspoken tension of friends who weren’t quite sure whether to lean forward or pull away.

You looked at them Chai Latte, unusually quiet with her knees drawn to her chest; Hazelnut Biscotti, arms crossed but eyes troubled; Earl Grey, gaze fixed and analytical, fingers tapping the notebook you had filled in a single sleepless frenzy.

You swallowed.

Your voice came soft, but steady.

“…What do you want to ask?”

Three heads lifted slightly. Eyes met yours.

“I’ll ask it,” you said. “I’ll ask the book for you. If you have doubts, if there’s something you want to know anything just tell me. I’ll ask.”

No one spoke at first.

The book pulsed faintly beneath your palms.

“…Even if it’s something I might not want to hear,” you added.

Earl Grey’s fingers stilled. He looked at you carefully.

“Ask,” he said, voice low, “what the cost truly is. Not a metaphor. Not poetry. Ask what you would lose. Not just what you would gain.”

Hazelnut’s jaw tightened. “Ask if it can be undone.”

Chai swallowed and scooted closer to you, her fingers ghosting the back of your hand for just a second. “Ask if… we’ll still be us. After. If the ritual will change who we are.”

You nodded, slowly.

And with a breath that felt like a tether, you looked back to the book.

“Okay,” you whispered, fingertips pressing gently to the edge of the page. “I’ll ask.”

The moonlight slicked over your fingers like glass.

You pressed your hand to the open book, its blank pages still as a frozen lake. But the magic pulsed faintly resting, not gone. You could feel it beneath your fingertips, slow and deep, like something dreaming.

And so you whispered, voice low, as you had the first time only now with your friends watching.

“What would I lose?” You steadied your breath. “What would we lose? Can it be undone? Will we… still be us?”

At first, nothing.

But then

The ink bled upward from the center seam like smoke, curling into looping letters.

"The moon does not take, it merely cradles. The stars do not forget, they simply wait."

Your breath caught. Chai Latte leaned in slightly, brows furrowed.

"To lie beneath the veil of sleep is not to vanish, but to rest, until the night bears your name again."

The book pulsed, faintly.

Hazelnut frowned. “That’s not an answer.”

"The self endures where the soul remembers. What awakens after the moon’s kiss may yet wear your face. But the dream you held will be changed."