The flicker of gratitude in Lady Lyra’s eyes was a carefully constructed artifice. It held the fragile sheen of a moth's wing, utterly transparent. Yet, as I provided the requested transcription of the ancient Eldorian decree, her lips, painted a subtle rose, curled into a gesture that mimicked a casual dismissal, a wave of the hand that managed to convey both thanks and indifference. I merely tore at a stale ration bar, watching her. A peculiar tremor seized my leg, a nervous echo of the adolescent uncertainty that gnawed at me. What words could I possibly offer this woman?
My ration bar lay forgotten on the cold, polished stone of my writing slope. I sucked absently on a sugared crystallite, the sweet, cooling sensation a faint balm against the lingering discomfort of my encounter with Lady Lyra. The unease was a bitter aftertaste I understood too well, though I refused to acknowledge its source. It clung to me, a clammy mist, elusive yet palpable.
I twirled the crystallite slowly on my tongue.
Was she truly aligned with Lady Maeve? Lady Maeve, whose reputation for indolent study and frequent forays into the Eldorian capital’s forbidden districts was as widely known as her impeccable lineage. A scion of leisure, much like Lord Cassian and Master Theron, their lives unwound in a similar pattern of entitled indulgence. The thought was disquieting in its predictability.
“Whoever pilfered my preserved fruits will answer for it!” Master Theron’s shout sliced through the hushed reverence of the junior scriptorium. His voice, unmindful of the diligent apprentices still bent over their scrolls, bounced off the arched ceilings. Nearby, Lord Cassian, always ready for confrontation, slammed his fist on Theron’s workstation. “You owe me more than a hundred of those paltry confectionaries, you knave!”
“My fruits!”
The far corner of the scriptorium devolved into a chaotic tangle of shouts and shoves as Lord Cassian and Master Theron grappled. Their squabble was a brazen disregard for the solemnity of the Grand Athenaeum, eliciting sharp, disapproving glances from those near the front, immersed in their studies.
“That oaf grows increasingly tiresome.”
The murmur, carried on a stray draft, came from Lady Lyra. My gaze drifted to meet hers across the room. She was seated, observing the fracas with an expression of detached amusement. Our eyes held for a brief, charged moment.
Without preamble, Lady Lyra extended a languid hand towards me. My focus fixated on the pristine, elegantly manicured nails of her long fingers. A stiff quietude overtook me as her digits, like pale, sinuous vines, delicately enclosed the stick of the crystallite between my lips.
She withdrew it with a slow, deliberate motion. The sticky, half-melted sweet scraped against my tongue, a soft, sensual brush against my lips, then abruptly, it slipped free. Its sugary weight was gone.
“A delightful trifle. I shall enjoy this.”
The crystallite, bearing the faint imprint of my mouth, vanished between her lips, which curved into a sly, knowing smile. She licked her lips, a feline gesture of consumption, then chuckled, a low, melodic sound that held no genuine mirth. “Why the startled expression?”
Lady Lyra often laughed. But her laughter rarely held the pleasantness of genuine humor.
“It… it is unhygienic, Lady Lyra.” My voice was barely a whisper.
“Do you not know, Elias? The sharing of a trivial confection can forge an unexpected familiarity.”
“That is… truly unsettling.” I pressed my lips together, a parched, cracked line in my pale face. Lady Lyra then rested a hand on her thigh, her back arching slightly, a picture of casual dominance. I curled my fingers into my palms, concealing the tremor that still ran through them.
I was a fool. I knew it.
With her hand still resting on her knee, poised at an angle, Lady Lyra popped the crystallite into her mouth and shrugged, a gesture of dismissive elegance. “You claim a distaste for citrus?” she inquired, her voice lilting. She sucked on the elongated sweet, a soft whistle of air between her lips. A remarkably ordinary sound, issuing from Lady Lyra’s lips, in this most extraordinary of places.
“That is lime essence, Lady Lyra.”
“Then it is quite acceptable. I find lime to my liking.”
And with an infuriating nonchalance, Lady Lyra savored the sweet, a confection that had been in my mouth moments before. Another day bled into evening.
As the cool breath of autumn began to whisper through the Athenaeum’s high arches, presaging the biting chill of the coming winter, the crisp, cloudless sky above the peaks seemed to grow sharper, heavier. The senior scribes carried a weighty responsibility for the institution’s fate. The students, in turn, sensed a solemn duty to carve their mark upon its ancient stones. Yet, there were always exceptions.
Kaelen Croft, Lord Cassian, Master Theron, and others, ostracized from the square of exemplary scholars, were seen as little more than discardable pawns, whose very failures served to illuminate the path to success for the majority. As the seasons turned, the consequences for their wanderings softened, and interest in their misdeeds waned. The only distinction was Kaelen Croft’s well-connected family, which rendered him a persistent nuisance.
The truly pitiable one was Young Master Rhys. Had he not become entangled with Kaelen, he might have ascended to a respectable guild, found a position he could speak of with pride. Or had his grandmother not been afflicted by the blight of the pancreatic fever. Still, I chose to avert my gaze from the dramas unfolding beyond my immediate sphere of duty. It was the wisest course for my own precarious life.
And so I continued, until the inevitable arrived.
Every event, no matter how remote, carries the seed of its own potential. Kaelen Croft, ever the headstrong fool, had accelerated his way towards that potential, seemingly without any plan.
Kaelen Croft returned to the junior scriptorium.
---
I clicked my tongue softly. Through the partially open archway that led to the senior apprentice chambers, I glimpsed Kaelen sprawled across an unoccupied workstation, near the raised lectern. His father, Archivist Valerius, had finally located him. I had overheard the murmurs from the senior scribes. It was an awkward return, nearly twenty days after his sudden disappearance. If one was to flee the Athenaeum, surely they would seek refuge in the remote crags, not loiter in the peripheral districts as if inviting discovery. I pondered his motives, finding no logical answer.
My fingers tapped a restless rhythm on the cold stone frame of the archway. Entering felt like stepping into an unknown draft, unsettling and unwelcome. As I hesitated, my gaze fell upon the back of Kaelen Croft’s head. A few strands of his thick, stiff dark hair stood rebelliously upright. There had been a time when, under the guise of a casual gesture, I might have smoothed them down. That memory now felt distant, faded like an old cipher. I decided to release the phantom attachment and turned to descend the winding staircase. Encountering Kaelen, especially with few witnesses, promised nothing but trouble.
The Athenaeum was a place of watchful eyes. Even a simple exchange of words with Kaelen would undoubtedly spark whispers of 'Elias Thorne seen consorting with the wayward Kaelen Croft.' These would inevitably be inflated, twisted into accusations. The worst scenario? Kaelen’s volatile temper flaring once more, leading to a physical altercation. The humiliation of being struck by Kaelen, in these hallowed halls, was a prospect I could not bear.
The best possible outcome would be Kaelen ignoring my presence, but I was not so naive as to gamble on such a slim chance. The most sensible path was to circumvent the entire unpleasant situation, ensuring no one observed my retreat. So, I returned to the ground floor, lingering near the shelves of discarded personal effects, until ten minutes before the great gates closed, I merged into the hurried throng of apprentices making their way to the evening meal. Only then did I find my way back to my assigned workstation, where I should have been solving complex logical problems.
I strove to project an air of disinterest in the drama surrounding Kaelen, or rather, I labored to ensure no one perceived the significant interest I actually harbored. My consistent efforts, I hoped, were yielding their desired effect. Yet, Kaelen remained my most unpredictable variable. A wave of frustration, tinged with a familiar disgust, washed over me. By the Founder’s will. This discomfort, this pervasive anxiety, had only intensified since Lady Lyra’s recent promotion within the Guild of Scribes.
Lady Lyra approached Kaelen as if his prolonged absence was nothing out of the ordinary, offering a casual greeting. “It has been some time, Kaelen Croft?” Her friendly tone was so utterly absurd, it momentarily stunned me. My anxiety gave way to a fleeting curiosity. I glanced up, observing Lady Lyra standing by his workstation, her leather satchel slung casually over her shoulder. Her lips were pulled into a wide, disarming smile. Kaelen merely grunted, offering no verbal reply.
“Such a frigid reception. No warmth at all.” She nudged Kaelen’s workstation with her foot. The gesture felt incongruous, given that it was widely believed Lady Lyra herself had engineered Kaelen’s downfall within the complex hierarchy of the junior scriptorium. Not wishing to dwell on such petty calculations, I attempted to refocus on the ‘real’ problems laid out on my parchment. This effort, however, was disrupted by the entrance of Master Elara, the senior scribe, for the morning roll call.
Master Elara seemed genuinely pleased by Kaelen’s return, though a clear sense of guilt lingered in her voice as she noted Young Master Rhys’s continued absence. What a timid and fragile soul she was. “Rhys is not with us today either,” she murmured to herself, her words heavy with unspoken implications. She concluded by tapping the attendance ledger lightly on her desk.
The incident unfolded more swiftly than anticipated. As Kaelen Croft rummaged through his workstation’s drawer for a reference scroll, grimacing at its neglected state, a pair of apprentices who had left their texts in the communal lockers raised their hands and departed. Kaelen’s expression darkened further as they left. Given his general disdain for study, the presence or absence of a particular scroll likely held little import for him. The true affront, for Kaelen, was the disappearance of something marked with his name, an item of his perceived possession.
Everyone in the scriptorium understood the unspoken truth. Yet, as if by silent accord, not a single soul uttered a word. Not about who had discarded Kaelen’s reference scrolls, nor about who had instigated the act. “Who was it?”
As soon as Master Elara dismissed the morning session, the moment everyone had unconsciously braced for began. “I asked, who was it?” Kaelen, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his fine tunic, his chin lifted defiantly, demanded answers. Those who abhorred conflict slipped quietly from the scriptorium, while those intrigued exchanged furtive glances. In that tense atmosphere, Lady Lyra, holding a well-worn stylus, almost unrecognizable under a patina of finger marks, scribbled nonchalantly in a bound treatise. She spoke, her voice utterly devoid of concern. “What precisely are you referring to, Kaelen?”
“Who?”
“To what end? You must articulate your grievances if you wish for understanding.”
The audacity was breathtaking. Truly brazen. “The knave who discarded all my reference scrolls.” It was evident to Kaelen that his scrolls had not simply vanished by chance. For someone as acutely sensitive to hierarchy and slights as he, akin to a territorial beast, this was an undeniable provocation. Moreover, Lady Lyra’s evasion of the ‘who’ merely confirmed her complicity in acknowledging the truth. Even the dullest apprentice would grasp this. Yet, Lady Lyra continued to jest, as if oblivious to the gravity of the situation.
“Did you possess such texts? I recall you perpetually slumped over your slope, lost to slumber.”
There she was again, laughing needlessly. There was no way Kaelen Croft would let that pass. “Enough. Was it you, Elias Thorne?” And naturally, the accusation, like a poisoned dart, found its way to me. It was utterly predictable. Any fool could have foreseen it. “No… it was not.”
Within this scriptorium, no one was more untamed or less civilized than Kaelen Croft, who stumbled from one foolish mistake to the next. He must have felt the sting of his decline acutely, as every glance, every empty space in the room, seemed to hold the weight of his past follies. Yet, those of us who shared this space pretended as if nothing untoward had occurred.
“Come now, would our esteemed junior scribe, Elias, truly mistreat his beloved texts in such a fashion?” Lady Lyra interjected, her voice dripping with mock sincerity.
“Lady Lyra—by the Void, why do you constantly interfere?” Kaelen’s voice rose, edged with raw fury.
“Interfere? If a colleague faces an injustice, it is only proper to offer assistance.”
“What utter nonsense are you spouting, you witless scion?”
“Witless? That is rather impolite.”
“Cease your tiresome rhetoric. Who else here could have so thoroughly disturbed the sacred quiet of these halls in my absence, if not the two of you?” Kaelen scoffed. Only then did Lady Lyra set down her stylus. Her lips retained their slight, sardonic smirk. Kaelen’s face twisted with fresh displeasure. Unable to contain his rage, Kaelen hurled a nearby leather satchel. Unfortunately, it struck me squarely in the chest.
“Ah!” It was not particularly painful, as it was mostly empty, but the sudden impact jolted me. I frowned, watching the satchel fall to my knees. “This madman simply throws objects now.” Before I could compose myself, Lady Lyra’s voice cut through the air. Her tone was already laced with a sharp annoyance. At that moment, Kaelen Croft slowly lifted the corners of his mouth. “Ah, I see.” It was the look of someone who believed they had unearthed a grand truth, a victory. What did he imagine he understood? My furrowed brow refused to relax.
“Lady Lyra. Elias Thorne. Are you two… conspiring?”
“What?” I was utterly speechless. Lady Lyra’s playful smirk vanished instantly, replaced by a momentary, genuine bewilderment. I was more astonished than Kaelen, who had lost his texts. Lady Lyra, it seemed, felt the same. “Kaelen Croft, forgive me, but your words are so hopelessly twisted, I struggle to comprehend them.” Despite clearly hearing every syllable, Lady Lyra placed her palm near her ear, a blatant gesture of mocking disbelief. From what I had observed, Lady Lyra never stopped at a single jest. This was merely the overture to her provocation. Sensing the uneasy air, I rose from my workstation. Meanwhile, Lady Lyra extended her little finger, beckoning me closer.