The inn was exactly as they'd left it.
Quiet. Still. The walls breathing their slow crystal pulse like nothing outside had changed at all.
Noir and Rias hadn't moved. They lay on the couches where the golden-haired man had placed them, suspended in that faint flickering aura, steady, patient, unbothered by the world continuing without them.
Dawn dropped into a chair across from them and stared at the ceiling.
The Guild. The records. Dagger's eyes cutting through the room like she was measuring everyone for a coffin. The administrator's smirk vanishing for just a fraction of a second.
Another thought surfaced quietly alongside the rest.
In what way had the golden-haired man kept these two safe, like he'd said?
Dawn turned it over once, then let it go. He had enough to think about without adding that to the pile. Instead his mind kept drifting back to the same two words.
Two weeks.
He closed his eyes. "Two weeks," he muttered under his breath, as if saying it again would make it feel shorter.
It didn't.
Elara came in a few minutes after him, still glancing back over her shoulder the way she'd been doing since they left the Guild corridor. She pulled the chair beside him and sat, tucking one leg beneath her.
For a while neither of them said anything.
"That girl," Elara said eventually. "Dagger."
"Yeah."
"She's dangerous."
Dawn opened one eye. "Obviously."
Elara's lips pressed together faintly, not quite a smile. "I'm just saying."
"I know." He closed his eye again. "The woman too. Definitely far more."
Elara didn't argue with that.
The golden-haired man hadn't followed them back up. Dawn had noticed him pause at the bottom of the stairs, glance briefly toward the city outside, then step back out without a word. He hadn't come back yet.
Dawn didn't ask. He was learning not to.
The silence stretched out between them, comfortable enough. The kind that forms between people who've almost died together a few times and run out of small talk.
Eventually Elara leaned forward, resting her chin in her hand, eyes drifting toward Noir and Rias. "Do you think they'll wake up soon?"
Dawn shrugged. "Why the hell are you asking me? Ask goldy."
"You know he won't answer."
"Yeah." A pause. "That's why I said ask him."
Elara let out a quiet laugh, a real one this time, short and soft. It was the first one Dawn had heard from her that didn't have anything behind it.
He didn't say anything about it. Just stared at the ceiling.
Outside, Crysallis hummed along without them. The ring above the city had shifted to a pale amber, somewhere between afternoon and evening by its own strange reckoning. Voices drifted up faintly from the streets below, languages Dawn didn't recognize, the occasional burst of laughter, the distant chime of crystal against crystal.
It was peaceful.
Dawn hated how peaceful it was.
He had things to get back to. People who were probably already looking for him. A world that wasn't this one, familiar and messy and his, and every hour he spent sitting in a glowing inn in an underground city was another hour further from it.
He exhaled slowly.
Two weeks.
The silence had settled back in when the door opened.
The golden-haired man stepped inside, his coat carrying the faint chill of the city air. He didn't say where he'd been. He never did. He simply glanced at Noir and Rias, satisfied himself that nothing had changed, and moved to stand by the window.
Dawn watched him from the corner of his eye.
Even just standing there doing nothing, the man's presence filled the room differently than other people's did. Like the air around him had slightly different rules.
Dawn had met strong people before. His teacher Kain was no joke. Rain could level a small district if she felt like it. The Jester was something Dawn preferred not to think about on an empty stomach.
But this was different.
When the golden-haired man had said those four words back on the floating island, let there be light, Dawn's instincts hadn't screamed danger. They'd gone completely quiet. The kind of quiet that only happens when something is so far beyond the scale of threat that the body doesn't know how to respond to it.
He'd thought about it since. Kept turning it over.
Dawn's ability was light. He'd known that since the day his inner world cracked open, thirteen years old, backed into a corner, stars burning to life one after another until the darkness around him simply ceased to exist. He understood light. He understood what it meant to carry it, shape it, push it to its limits.
What the golden-haired man had done was something else entirely.
Not different in the way two people's abilities are always different, unique constellations, unique stars, no two ever the same. This was different the way a candle is different from the sun. Same concept. Completely different existence.
Dawn exhaled quietly and looked back at the ceiling.
Three stars. That's what he had. Three lit up in his constellation, three abilities he'd carved out through years of training and a few near-death experiences he'd rather not revisit. His teacher had called him a prodigy for reaching three before eighteen. Most people spent a lifetime chasing two.
He looked at Noir and Rias again.
Their auras were still, but not empty. Even unconscious there was something emanating from both of them, not arcana. He was certain of that much. Whatever it was sat differently in the air, denser, older, like pressure building behind a closed door.
It reminded him of something he couldn't quite place at first.
Then it hit him.
The war criminals. The ones from the old records his teacher had made him study — figures who had torn through entire provinces not through stars alone but through the selling of their own stars. Whatever came after that transaction was something the scholars who witnessed it could never quite put into words. Their descriptions always fell short, like language itself refused to cooperate.
Dawn's eyes settled on Rias.
That crimson aura of hers. Even dormant it carried a heat that the others didn't. The golden-haired man's presence was vast and cold. Noir's was silent, like a shadow that had learned to think. But Rias,
Rias felt like something that had been barely contained.
He didn't know what she was. He didn't know what any of them were. But whatever that energy was, whatever Elara had called it back at the lake, that word he hadn't recognised — if it was anywhere close to what those war criminals had carried then the moment Rias woke up was going to require a very careful hand.
He filed it away. Uneasily this time.
"You should rest."
Dawn blinked. The golden-haired man was still looking out the window, but the words had clearly been directed at him.
"I'm fine," Dawn said.
"You've been awake for over a day."
"So have you."
"I told you. I don't need it."
Dawn opened his mouth, closed it again, then just sighed and sank lower in the chair.
Elara was already half asleep beside him, her breathing slow and even, head tilted back. She'd gone quiet about twenty minutes ago and simply never came back from it.
Dawn watched the amber glow of the ring pulse faintly through the window.
Two weeks in Crysallis. A restless king somewhere in the depths of the city. An administrator who was far more awake than she looked. A girl called Dagger who'd stared at the golden-haired man like she was trying to find a crack in something that didn't have any.
Dawn closed his eyes.
Rain was probably already tearing Rinzard apart looking for him. That thought alone was exhausting. She had a particular way of expressing concern that involved property damage and a complete disregard for whoever happened to be nearby. He could picture it clearly — that red hair, that look on her face, that specific vein in her forehead that only appeared when she was trying not to kill something.
He almost smiled.
Almost.
The Jester was harder to think about. Not because of fear exactly — though anyone who wasn't at least a little afraid of the Jester wasn't paying attention, but because the Jester's movements were never random. If the Jester had been heading toward Lake Dawn when Dawn left, there was a reason for it. There was always a reason. And reasons that involved the Jester had a tendency to leave craters.
He hoped Rain had the sense to stay out of it.
He knew she didn't.
Then there were his parents.
That thought he let himself sit with for only a second before pushing it down — deep and quiet, the way he always did. They'd be worried. That was certain. But worry from them carried a different weight than worry from Rain, heavier somehow, the kind that settled in the chest and didn't shift.
He wondered briefly if they'd ever imagine he'd end up here. Underground city. Crystal walls. Four strangers who weren't quite human sleeping a few feet away from him.
Probably not.
He almost laughed at that.
There was also something else sitting at the edge of his thoughts, something he kept almost reaching for and then pulling back from. A feeling more than a thought. Like a word on the tip of your tongue that refuses to come.
It had something to do with the Voice. The way it had spoken to him at the lake. The way it had been silent since.
The Voice of the world was supposed to be inactive in this era. Everyone knew that. So why had it spoken to him?
And why did it feel like it wasn't finished?
He cut the thought off there.
One day at a time, he told himself. Just one day at a time.
For once, sleep came a little easier than usual.