She smiled. And something ancient forgot how to sleep.
The sky above the Academy turned an odd shade not twilight, not dawn.
Something between bruised silk and bone.
And in that light, she smiled.
Not wide. Not cruel.
Just enough.
Enough for gods to look away.
Enough for men to lose their reason.
Kairon Vel Serak saw it first.
From a balcony choked with thorns, wine spilling from his untouched glass.
He didn't blink. He didn't breathe. He didn't feel the blood trickling from his palm where the stem snapped.
That smile…
"That's not the girl I knew."
"That's the ghost she left behind."
But his heart that traitor did not recoil.
It roared.
It howled her name in silence.
He remembered her younger, trembling, weeping into his shoulder after the kingdom branded her a heretic.
He remembered the time he told her,
"You'll always belong to me."
Now he realized how wrong he was.
She didn't belong to anyone.
"She's the fire we all tried to leash," he muttered.
"And now we're going to burn."
He didn't leave the balcony for hours.
Just stood there, watching the ghost of her smile hang in the air like an executioner's shadow.
Eren Lys Valtair watched her through the garden's shattered archway.
He hadn't meant to follow.
His legs simply moved.
Her smile just a flicker had cracked something beneath his ribs.
Not pain. Not nostalgia.
Something worse.
Hope.
He remembered her voice, years ago, whispering, "Don't let them make me a monster, Eren."
He had promised.
And failed.
"She smiled like spring once," he whispered to the thorns.
"Now it's frostbite, blooming across my lungs."
He clutched the ribbon she used to wear in her hair. Faded blue.
He kept it buried in a book he never finished reading.
She had smiled today.
But not at him.
Not at anyone.
It wasn't affection. It wasn't triumph.
It was detachment.
The kind of smile worn by something already gone.
"If I love her again," he asked the wind, "does it still count as betrayal?"
Sol Mavren didn't follow her.
He waited.
Then scribbled something in his notebook.
Not words.
Not really.
Just patterns.
Curves. Spirals.
A face repeated again and again.
"Her expression doesn't match the known variables," he whispered.
"It wasn't a smile. It was a pattern failure."
He flipped back through pages older calculations, sketches of faces.
Before-death.
Post-death.
Current.
Something had changed.
"She's collapsed the timeline," he murmured, eyes gleaming.
"She smiled… outside causality."
Where the others saw love, regret, fury
Sol saw mathematics breaking.
The universe folding to accommodate her return.
And he was enchanted.
"They're watching a woman."
"I'm watching a singularity."
And in her chamber, behind the locked door, Elariax stood alone.
No mirrors worked in her presence anymore.
The glass blurred, cracked, refused to reflect.
But she stared anyway.
Not at her face.
At her mouth.
"That smile," she said to no one, "wasn't mine."
It had belonged to someone else.
Someone before.
A flash.
A red room.
A girl in a white dress screaming into a gilded mirror:
"If I die and come back, am I still allowed to feel?"
The mirror had bled.
And the girl had disappeared.