"Hey! Human! UnCall me right now!"
The pink ball of fur was already pacing across the desk. Small hooves clicking against the wood. Bow tie still somehow perfectly centered.
"Uh." Arthur looked at it. "I don't think that's how it works."
"I don't care how it works! You called me here, you should know how to unsummon me!"
"Yeah about that." Arthur scratched the back of his head. "I don't actually know how."
'See.' Vexis floated above him, arms crossed. 'This is exactly why I hate these things.'
The bellus stopped pacing and stared up at Arthur with those deep red eyes. The kind of stare that had opinions behind it.
"You called me," it said slowly, like it was explaining something to someone very small, "without knowing how to uncall me."
"Correct."
"You are an idiot."
"Also correct."
Arthur looked down at his wrist. A mark had appeared there during the summoning, faint at first and now fully set into the skin. He turned his hand over and looked at it properly.
An X.
He frowned.
Every bonded bellus left a mark on its caller. He knew that from the novel. The mark corresponded to the grade of the bellus. Common grades left simple shapes. Rare left geometric patterns. Xavier's mark was an M, mythic, which had been one of the more obvious signs early in the story that the author intended him to be absurdly powerful.
An X he had never seen before.
"Hey." He held his wrist up toward the bellus. "Why does my mark say X?"
The bellus drew itself up to its full height which was not impressive but it tried.
"BECAUSE I AM EX GRADE. I AM RETIRED. I have not been on active bond in over two hundred years and I was in the middle of very important work and you had the audacity to—"
"Wait." Arthur squinted. "If you're retired, how did I even call you?"
The bellus opened its mouth. Closed it. Looked away.
"That," it said stiffly, "is an excellent question that I am choosing not to answer right now."
Arthur raised his hand.
"Professor Lydia."
Lydia looked up from her bread. She had moved to the far side of the room and was watching the class with the relaxed energy of someone who had done this many times and found it consistently entertaining.
"Can a bonded bellus be unsummoned?"
"No." She said it immediately. No hesitation. "Your bellus is yours. The bond is permanent unless one of you dies." She looked at the pink fur ball on his desk and tilted her head. "He's cute though. Bit pink."
The bellus was now jumping on the spot.
"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck." Each word landed on a different hop. "Curse this. Curse all of this."
To Lydia it sounded like a series of small cheerful sounds. She smiled and moved on.
Arthur watched the bellus pace and jump and mutter under its breath and felt something close to sympathy for the first time.
"Hey," he said quietly. "I'm sorry. I didn't know you were retired."
The bellus stopped.
It looked at him sideways. Like it was checking whether the apology was real or tactical.
"You should have known," it said, but the volume had come down slightly.
"Yeah. I should have." Arthur leaned his elbow on the desk and rested his chin on his hand. "So. What's your name? Do you even have one?"
"Of course I have a name." The ears went flat again. "I am not some unnamed common familiar. My name is Roz."
"Roz."
"Yes."
"Is your whole species this rude or is that personal?"
Roz looked at him flatly. "Yes."
Arthur almost smiled.
A breeze came through the window and moved across the desk, lifting Vexis's blonde hair off his forehead. Arthur still wasn't used to it. The color of it, the weight of it, the way it caught the light different from anything he'd grown up seeing in a mirror. Even the hands on the desk in front of him still occasionally felt like someone else's.
'I'm telling you.' Vexis had drifted down beside the desk and was staring at Roz with open dislike. 'Tiny furry disasters. Every single one of them.'
Roz's red eyes slid toward the space where Vexis was hovering.
Arthur noticed that.
"Can you see him?" he said.
Roz's gaze came back to him. "See who."
"Never mind."
He looked back at the bellus. Roz had settled down slightly, no longer pacing, sitting on the desk with its legs tucked under its body and its bow tie still perfectly straight. It had the posture of something that was deeply unhappy about its situation and had decided to be unhappy with dignity.
"You said you were retired," Arthur said. "Does that mean you had a bonded human before?"
"Obviously." Roz's voice went somewhere flatter. "A long time ago."
"How long?"
"Long."
"How old are you?"
A pause.
"Five hundred and ninety nine."
Arthur stared at the small pink creature sitting on his desk in a bow tie.
Five hundred and ninety nine years old.
He thought about what that meant in this world. About what a bellus that old had seen. What it had been through. What kind of bond it had made and lost and what two hundred years of retirement actually looked like for something that didn't die easily.
He thought about Roz watching him fail to produce a marble-sized water ball and saying nothing about it.
He pushed back from the desk slowly. Stepped around to the front of it. And went down on both knees on the classroom floor.
He lowered his head.
"I humbly greet the great Bellus Roz."
'HEY.' Vexis appeared directly above him, furious. 'What are you doing! Get up! You are a Lestilaut! You do not kneel for a BELLUS—'
Vexis swung both fists down at Arthur's head. They went straight through.
"I'm sorry for the arrogance," Arthur said to the floor. "I am simply an uneducated piece of shit."
'I WILL END YOU—'
Silence from the desk.
Then, slowly, a sound.
Something between a hum and a laugh. Low and almost smug.
"Oho." Roz's voice had changed. Still sharp, but warmer underneath it, the way old things sometimes are when something finally meets them at the right level. "It is about time you showed some respect, brat."
Arthur looked up.
Roz had turned its head slightly to the left and was staring at the middle distance with its eyes half closed and its chin marginally elevated.
Arthur looked at it for a second.
Then back at Alfia in his memory, walking away through a relic stone without explaining herself.
He thought: this world has a tsundere problem.
He kept that one to himself.
"So." Arthur got back to his feet and dusted off his knees. "Since we're stuck with each other. And since you are apparently several centuries older than everything in this building. Would you be willing to teach me?"
Roz said nothing.
"I'm behind. I know I'm behind. I'm not going to pretend otherwise." Arthur sat back down and looked at the bellus directly. "But I learn fast and I don't waste time."
Roz's ear twitched.
One small movement. Almost nothing.
"I haven't decided," Roz said.
"That's fine."
"Don't push it, brat."
"Wasn't going to."
Roz turned its head away again and went back to staring at the middle distance. Dignified. Unbothered. Bow tie straight.
Arthur looked at the X mark on his wrist.
He didn't know what that meant yet.
But it felt like something.