The water in the academy pond lay unnaturally still.
Not frozen—no—but attentive, as if it had decided to listen rather than move.
Kael crouched at the edge, one knee bent, sleeves rolled just enough for the cool air to brush his wrists. Elior sat beside him, close but not touching, their shoulders separated by a careful, unconscious distance—one that had always existed, and yet had always felt temporary.
The reflection in the water did not ripple when Kael spoke.
"Tell me something," he said quietly, eyes on the surface."If a river forgets where it came from… does it still remember where it's meant to go?"
Elior blinked, caught off guard.
"That's… unfair," he said after a moment. "You're asking like there's a right answer."
Kael hummed, almost smiling. "Isn't that what all important questions pretend to be?"
Elior leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. His reflection bent with him—soft, familiar, unchanged.
"If the river is still flowing," Elior said slowly, "then it's already answering. Even if it doesn't know the words."
Kael's fingers tightened against the stone.
"And if the river is forced to choose," he asked, voice lower now, "between drowning a village or drying itself into nothing?"
Elior's breath caught.
"That's not a river anymore," he said. "That's… someone making it carry a burden it shouldn't."
Kael finally turned to look at him.
"And if the river chooses anyway?"
Silence stretched—not uncomfortable, but heavy. The kind that demanded honesty rather than speed.
Elior met Kael's gaze. His eyes were clear, earnest, unguarded in the way Kael both loved and feared.
"Then," Elior said, "I think the choice says more about who's watching the river… than the river itself."
The water stirred.
Just once.
Kael exhaled, slow and shaky, like someone setting something down after carrying it too long.
"You always answer like that," he murmured.
"Like what?"
"Like you don't realize you're holding the center of the question."
Elior laughed softly, embarrassed. "You make it sound deeper than it is."
Kael didn't respond.
Because it was deep.
Because the mirror had shown him something cruel and simple all at once: that Elior didn't need answers.
He was one.
Kael stood, brushing stone dust from his palms. "We should go. It's getting cold."
Elior nodded and rose with him. For a moment, their reflections stood side by side in the water—two figures, close, aligned.
Then a ripple passed through the pond.
And the image broke.
"..."
He was not alone in understanding that answer.
High above, where shadows folded into one another between old stone pillars, Aevrin watched the pond with a stillness that bordered on reverence.
He had heard every word.
Not because he was close.
But because riddles, when spoken honestly, traveled farther than sound.
Aevrin rested his chin lightly against his gloved knuckles, eyes half-lidded, lips curved in something that was not quite a smile.
"So that's how you speak to him," he murmured."Like you're afraid of breaking what you already hold."
Kael led with protection.Elior led with instinct.
Neither of them realized what they were offering.
Aevrin did.
"..."
Later—much later, when the lamps had been lit and the corridors thinned into echo and shadow—Aevrin walked alone through the east gallery.
The place smelled of old paper, cold stone, and memory.
He liked it here.
This wing had been sealed once, long ago, after a Mirror Rite gone wrong. Most students avoided it. Said it made their skin itch. Said it felt watched.
Aevrin had never minded being watched.
He stopped before a narrow window, moonlight painting his face in silver and blue.
"They're still asking questions," he said softly, to no one."As if questions ever stopped the answer from arriving."
The glass did not reflect him correctly.
It never did.
Behind the surface, his image leaned closer than he stood—eyes darker, sharper, alive with hunger.
"You felt it too, didn't you?" Aevrin asked his reflection."The way the magic responded to him."
Not Kael.
Elior.
Kael was the blade.
Elior was the reason blades were forged.
Aevrin closed his eyes.
And memory unfolded.
"..."
He had been five the first time he saw Elior.
Too young to understand devotion. Old enough to recognize significance.
The summer festival had flooded the lower city with color—ribbons, firelight, laughter. Aevrin had slipped away from his attendants, bored, restless, already tired of people who wanted him for what he was rather than what he could become.
That was when he saw him.
A boy standing alone near a shrine fountain, hands cupped carefully around a wounded bird.
Blood stained his fingers. He didn't notice.
Aevrin had stopped walking.
The world had narrowed to that small, ridiculous scene.
"Don't panic," the boy whispered to the bird, voice trembling. "I won't drop you. I promise."
Promise.
Such a dangerous word.
Aevrin had approached without thinking.
"You'll kill it if you hold it like that," he'd said.
The boy looked up—startled, eyes wide.
"I—I'm sorry, I just—"
"You're squeezing," Aevrin interrupted, kneeling without permission. "Fear does that."
He reached out and adjusted the boy's grip with careful precision. The bird stilled.
The boy stared at him like he was magic.
"Oh," he breathed. "It stopped shaking."
Aevrin smiled.
Not because he'd helped.
Because the boy hadn't flinched when he touched him.
"What's your name?" the boy asked.
"Aevrin."
"I'm Elior."
Of course you are, Aevrin had thought.
Elior.
Light-bearer.
Later, when attendants finally dragged him away, Aevrin had looked back once.
Elior was still there.
Watching.
As if something had already been promised.
"..."
Devotion did not strike Aevrin like lightning.
It settled.
It rooted.
It waited.
Years passed. Elior grew gentler instead of sharper. Kinder instead of cautious. The world did not harden him.
Aevrin watched this with increasing intensity.
Because the world would harden him.
Unless someone claimed that right first.
Back in the present, Aevrin opened his eyes.
"So you don't remember me," he whispered."But you remember the feeling."
That was enough.
He began planning—not in steps, but in certainties.
Kael would hesitate because he feared the past.
Elior would hesitate because he feared harm.
Aevrin would not hesitate at all.
He would become the place where Elior never had to choose.
"..."
Aevrin's mansion did not feel lived in.
It felt prepared.
The gates closed behind him without a sound, iron swallowing moonlight as if it had been waiting all day to do so. The estate stood just beyond the academy's perimeter—close enough to watch, far enough to pretend it was coincidence.
He removed his gloves at the entrance.
Not because they were dirty.
Because he never touched Elior's things with anything between them.
The corridors were dim, lined with dark stone and pale tapestries that depicted nothing memorable—on purpose. No family crests. No history. No inheritance. This place had not been bought to honor the past.
It had been bought to contain the present.
Aevrin ascended the stairs alone.
His footsteps were unhurried.
Anticipatory.
At the end of the eastern wing, behind a door warded with layered sigils and sound-sealing enchantments, lay the only room that mattered.
He opened it.
The scent inside was faint—old parchment, oil paint, dried flowers pressed too long between pages.
Memory.
The room was large, but it did not feel empty. Every wall was filled.
Paintings.
Sketches.
Charcoal studies.
Watercolor attempts that bled where the brush had hesitated.
All of them were of Elior.
Not posed. Not aware.
Elior asleep by a window, sunlight tangling in his hair.
Elior reading on the academy steps, brow furrowed in concentration.
Elior at thirteen, hands stained with ink, laughing at something unseen.
Elior now—older, softer, carrying that same quiet gravity that made people orbit him without knowing why.
Aevrin stood in the doorway and let his gaze travel slowly, reverently.
He had never rushed this part.
Some paintings were framed.
Others were pinned gently, edges weighted so they wouldn't curl.
The earliest ones were crude—copied from memory when Aevrin had been too young to understand proportion but old enough to understand importance.
He crossed the room and stopped before a narrow cabinet of glass and silver.
Inside it were objects.
Small things.
Meaningless to anyone else.
A ribbon—faded blue—once used to tie Elior's hair back when it grew too long in summer.
A broken quill, snapped at the nib. Elior had complained about it for an entire afternoon before forgetting it existed.
A chipped teacup with a hairline crack along the rim. Elior had stopped using it after burning his tongue once.
Aevrin remembered the exact day he took each one.
Not stolen.
Rescued.
He opened the cabinet and removed a folded scrap of fabric.
A sleeve.
The cuff was frayed, mended once with clumsy stitching. Elior had worn it for years, even after it no longer fit properly, until it disappeared.
Elior had frowned that day.
"I must've lost it," he'd said, apologetic to no one in particular. "I lose things a lot."
Aevrin had been standing three steps away.
Watching.
He brushed his thumb over the fabric now, slow and deliberate.
"You don't," he murmured to the empty room. "You let go."
He replaced the sleeve carefully.
The room was not chaotic.
It was curated.
Each item catalogued by emotion, not chronology.
Joy in one corner.
Carelessness in another.
The things Elior touched most often were placed closest to the center of the room, as if gravity itself bent toward them.
Aevrin moved to the desk.
On it lay a sketchbook—not Elior's, but his own.
He opened it.
Page after page contained writing instead of drawings.
Observations.
— He hums when nervous, but only when alone.— He doesn't look at mirrors unless necessary.— He always chooses the seat with his back protected.
A pause.
Then, written more recently:
— He stands closer to Kael than anyone else.
The ink pressed deeper there.
Not anger.
Assessment.
Aevrin closed the book and leaned back in the chair, fingers steepled, eyes lifting toward the largest painting on the far wall.
Elior at five.
Sitting beside a broken shrine basin.
Holding a bird.
The first image.
The only one Aevrin had never altered, refined, or redrawn.
Because memory did not need improvement.
"I told you," Aevrin said softly, as if Elior could hear him across stone and distance and ignorance. "I wouldn't let you fall."
He did not believe Elior belonged to him.
That was too crude.
Too loud.
Elior was not an object.
He was a constant.
Aevrin had simply aligned himself accordingly.
People misunderstood obsession. They thought it was hunger.
It wasn't.
Hunger consumed.
Aevrin preserved.
The academy would change Elior.
Magic always did.
Kael had already begun to orbit too closely, his presence sharp with something old and dangerous.
Aevrin smiled faintly.
"Careful," he murmured—not as warning, but as courtesy. "I've been watching longer."
He stood and crossed to the window.
From here, the academy lights glimmered faintly in the distance, like a constellation mapped for him alone.
He did not need mirror magic to see patterns.
He had always known where Elior would stand.
Where he would drift.
Who would reach for him.
Aevrin's devotion was not loud.
It did not beg.
It did not demand.
It waited.
And when the world inevitably disappointed Elior—when magic asked its price, when Kael faltered, when fate revealed its teeth—
Aevrin would already be there.
With proof.
With memory.
With a room that had never forgotten him.
He extinguished the lights one by one, leaving only the painting of the shrine illuminated.
In the darkness, Aevrin whispered the only prayer he had ever needed:
"Let the world burn slowly."
Not in anger.
In patience.
— by Aurea;"What was never given can still be kept—if one is patient enough."