After Alea had abruptly left, Lymur had gotten about fifteen steps away from the courtyard when he heard a sound of crackling. Not something burning on its own, but fire being made. It was controlled, repeated, and sounded like someone practicing.
Lymur stopped walking.
Ugh, I have things to do, he thought.
He stood there.
Reports to write, council to update, a facility's worth of documents to sort through and —
The crackling came again, from somewhere across the courtyard. He turned his head toward it despite himself.
I also have an office, he thought. With Gerald in it. Gerald needs water.
But he was already looking.
It turned out, apparently, that Lymur was a strong practitioner of the art of procrastination.
···---⚜---···
A girl was on the far side of the courtyard — half a football field away, give or take — in the open space near the eastern garden wall where the stones were oldest and most worn.
Her long scarlet red hair was tied back in a ponytail that reached the base of her spine. A sword was in her hand as she moved through drills. She looked like she'd done it enough times that her body moved on its own, while her mind stayed a step ahead, already thinking about the next move.
The sword was familiar, Lymur thought. Not the sword itself but the style of it, including the grip and the way she held the crossguard. He knew that school of swordsmanship. He'd seen it across an arena years back, on the fateful day he'd cut Kaspian Bladeheart's blade into pieces and then beaten him anyway with a borrowed replacement.
Interesting.
I'll just watch for a moment, he thought. One moment, and then the office.
Flash was a technique he'd been working on for two weeks.
The concept was simple enough: use Confluence's attractive spectrum to generate a pulling force between himself and a target location, then release it. It wasn't exactly teleportation, which implied passing through the space between.
Flash was more like being fired at a destination, the universal force of space used as a slingshot, Ruler's Authority wrapped around his body at the same time to keep him oriented and balanced through the recoil of what was essentially an instantaneous spatial fling.
From his perspective it felt like the world stretching. Everything around him elongating toward the target point, the distance compressing into a single elastic moment, and then arrival — with a scatter of spatial disturbance radiating outward from the landing point in the form of light. Blue and gold and red sparks, he'd noticed last time, which he thought was a good side-effect aesthetically.
He had not, in two weeks of working on this technique, given much of a thought to what it looked like from someone else's perspective.
He thought about it for half a second as he activated it.
The world stretched and he arrived.
The sparks scattered outward in their blue-gold-red cascade and the air displaced with a crack that was not quite a thunderclap, and the girl, who had been mid-swing with her back partially to him, screamed with all her femininity, before falling to the ground.
Lymur stood in the settling sparks and looked at her.
Oops.
She was staring up at him — with fear first, which was the honest immediate response to something arriving out of nowhere with that kind of noise and light. Then recognition. Then something like relief, but not quite, because the fear hadn't fully gone. After that, something harder to read, especially when she turned her face slightly away.
The curse she uttered under her breath was not loud but Lymur's hearing caught it anyway.
"Professor," she said, to the courtyard stones, and then looked up at him with a forced smile.
Lymur felt bad. It was genuine and he expressed it the way he expressed things — directly. He was already crouching slightly to offer her a hand up.
"Sorry," he said. "I didn't think about doing that nearly as much as I should've." He kept his hand extended. "I promise I'm learning."
She looked at his hand.
Then she got up on her own, pushing off the ground without taking his hand. He pulled it back, a bit awkwardly — like someone who tried to help, got turned down, and didn't really know what to do next.
She looked at him for a moment. Her face softened, like she was trying not to smile but losing the effort. Then she laughed.
"The mightiest fighter in Dicathen," she said, "is standing in front of me with a very troubled and guilty face, apologizing." She shook her head. "Who would have thought."
"...I really am sorry."
"I know." She seemed to decide this was enough and extended her hand with a directness that reminded him of someone, though he couldn't immediately place who. "Claire Bladeheart. Sixth year battle mage. It's a pity you came to teach when I've already long passed your course. But it's a pleasure, Arbiter Lymur."
He took her hand. Then he narrowed his eyes and looked away, crossing his arms a bit too tightly to pass as casual.
"You're a bit too cheeky for a student," he said. "That's new."
"Hahaha, I've been told."
He turned back. "...Your earlier swing was off."
She blinked. "...Which part?"
"The follow-through on the rotation. You're correcting before the extension completes. It's cutting your range by about fifteen percent and you don't need to do it — your grip is stable enough."
She looked at him for a few seconds, then she loosened up for more focus.
"Show me."
......
An hour went the way hours went when both people involved had stopped paying attention to time.
Claire took training seriously — he could tell within the first two minutes, and he liked that. The playfulness from earlier was gone. When she worked, she worked — taking corrections, applying them right away, and asking questions that showed she actually understood, not just listened. She pushed back when she thought he was wrong — twice. She was right once, wrong once, and handled both the same way.
He didn't go easy on the feedback, which she clearly much preferred.
By the time the first bell rang, she was sitting on a bench near the garden wall with her towel around her neck. Her breathing was steady and heavy — the kind that came from being pushed past what felt comfortable for a full hour.
Lymur was sitting beside her.
He had, at some point, took out a grape juice box. He sipped it.
"I'm not giving you one," he said when he sensed Claire looking at him.
"I didn't ask!"
He gave her a sideways look — clearly not buying it — and slid the juice box a little farther away from her.
The thought did occur to me, Claire thought privately. But I absolutely was not going to — I wasn't going to do anything. That would be — no.
She put the towel over her face instead.
A small group of younger female students came through the courtyard — three of them, hair still damp from morning showers, books already in hand. They waved at Claire, who waved back. Then they saw Lymur and waved again, with more brightness, and bowed, and then hurried off in a cluster of giggling.
Lymur watched them go.
"Really makes me wonder," he said.
He kept looking in the direction they'd gone. Five seconds. Ten. Twenty. The sentence was unfinished in the morning air.
A vein made itself known at Claire's temple.
"Wonder," she said, with great patience. "Wonder what!?"
"Oh, sorry — " He looked back at her. "I forgot to follow up."
Seriously?
"What I mean is — I've noticed it myself, and the Lances have mentioned it, so it's not just me — there's a difference in how this campus treats them versus how it treats me."
Claire tilted her head. Lymur seemed genuinely in thought, which made her wonder briefly if this was going somewhere serious. Like Arbiter serious.
"Whenever a Lance visits the academy," Lymur continued, "the whole campus talks about it for days. I've been told this by reliable sources."
Ah, nevermind. No. This is just him.
"And then the students see me and they look at me like I'm an unusual new addition to a zoo. How does that work?"
"You've got to be kidding me," Claire muttered.
"Oh, don't worry. I for sure am not kidding."
She looked at him. She looked at the direction the students had gone. She looked back at him.
Tactless, she thought. But also somehow — selectively oblivious to things in a way that shouldn't be possible for someone who notices everything else.
She ran a hand through her hair and put the towel on her shoulders.
"It's a matter of exposure, I think," she said.
"Oh?"
"The Lances are figures of might to most of the students here. They're immensely powerful, they're rarely seen, and when they do appear it's usually for something important. That distance maintains the image." She looked at him. "You, on the other hand, have been here for quite a while. You're in the faculty lounge. You have a plant. Students see you correcting essays and eating lunch and apparently," she glanced at the juice box, "drinking grape juice at seven in the morning after coming back from — " she looked at the dried blood on his sleeve and decided not to finish that sentence. "Excitement fades when something stops being distant."
He was quiet for a moment, genuinely processing this.
"That makes sense," he said.
"I know."
"It never bothered me, though."
"I know, I know," Claire sighed in exasperation. "I sure do."
The sun had fully cleared the buildings now, coming in warm across the courtyard stones. Somewhere in the garden, the bird from earlier was still doing what it had been doing.
He really doesn't care, Claire thought, watching him from the corner of her eye. About the attention, about what people think of him, about the —
She'd grown up knowing Kaspian Bladeheart's name was said alongside very specific others. She'd grown up understanding, at least in theory, what it meant to be at the pinnacle. She'd understood it the way you understood things you learned rather than things you felt.
She stood up.
"I didn't hinder any of your duties, did I?" she asked.
"Oh, you surely did," he said, taking a final sip of the juice box. "No problems though. I just used you as an excuse to slack off."
Freaking — She stopped the curse firmly and smiled. It was a slightly strained smile. "I see. Well." She tucked the towel on her underarm. "If you happen to have any free time — I have Team Fighting Mechanics fourth period. It'd be fun. More so if you came to watch."
"You do realize I'm only below the council in terms of authority, right?" He chuckled and waved a hand. "But don't worry. I'll be there if I can make time."
"I'll hold you to that."
···---⚜---···
The office bathroom was small but at least it worked, which was all he needed it to be.
He stayed under the water for longer than necessary. The heat was good and the sound of it was good and there was nothing in here that needed anything from him, which he realized was something he'd taken for granted in the last few years. He let it run until the water started cooling, then turned it off and stood in the quiet.
His uniform's top was hanging on the back of the door. He thought he'd have it cleaned properly later. The blood had dried completely by now, which made it a different problem from what it had been an hour ago, but a solvable one.
But at least he had a spare shirt on the shelf where he'd left it weeks ago — a button-up, long-sleeved, the color of shallow ocean water. Cyan, technically, though it looked different depending on the light. He put it on over the uniform trousers and the shoes from before and stood in front of the small mirror above the sink.
Better, he thought. He looked like a dashing young man who had slept and eaten breakfast and had a normal morning. That was the goal.
He sat at his desk and started writing the report.
It took an hour and a half, which was longer than it should have been and shorter than it felt. He was thorough with it. He included the document with the blank pages. He flagged it without speculating too far about what it meant. He described the facility's size, its design, its equipment, its personnel count.
He finished it, read it back once, and then thought about the mode of delivery. He was supposed to go in person. The protocol for Arbiter reports was direct council presentation where there was opportunity for questions. That was the consensus. It was reasonable and he'd agreed to it.
But he thought about sitting in the council chamber with Blaine Glayder and Dawsid Greysunder's irritation and whatever Alduin Eralith was doing with his face at any given moment, and all three of them asking questions about a bunker full of dead bodies that he'd left behind.
Pesky old men, he thought, shivering as he slumped to his chair. Gotta be careful. I'd never wanna be like them.
He sent the report by courier instead. He'd deal with the consequences of that later. They'd probably make a farce about it. That was fine, it was their own business.
He watered Gerald then.
Gerald was doing well. He'd moved him closer to the window two months ago and the difference had been noticeable — the leaves were properly green now, which was a color Gerald had apparently been working toward for some time. He watered him with the small ceramic vessel he kept on the second shelf, just enough, and then stood there for a moment looking at the plant.
"Hey," he said. "I was in a forest yesterday. You'd have found it interesting, probably."
Gerald did not respond, which was consistent.
"There was a concealment working in the root system. Someone spent real time on it." He set the vessel back on the shelf. "Anyway."
He straightened his shirt, picked up his keys, put on some glasses for aesthetics, and left.
The faculty cafeteria was empty.
Not entirely — there were three staff members behind the counter, moving through the pre-service routine of a space that expected people to arrive soon. But the tables were unoccupied, which he hadn't anticipated. He'd been looking forward, in a way, to the usual faculty morning with Aldric and Sera.
But it was still a fresh semester. Everyone was busy.
Right. Of course.
He ordered anyway. One of the staff — a woman in her forties who'd been working here since before he arrived and who had, over the past year and a half, begun treating him like a regular human person, which he appreciated enormously — took his order with a nod.
"Pleasant morning, isn't it, Professor?"
"It sure is."
She smiled and went to the kitchen.
He sat by the window.
Not long after, the food arrived and he looked at it.
It was good food. The cafeteria's kitchen was run by someone good, and the evidence of that was on the plate in front of him. Properly seasoned, properly plated, it was a meal that on any other morning he would have started eating before he'd fully sat down.
He picked up his fork... then put it back down.
He picked it up again and moved something around the plate and ate a small amount of it, and then sat looking at the window.
Outside, the academy was still just beginning its day. The sun was fully up now and the floating city was doing its ordinary mid-morning thing.
He moved something else around the plate, though not taking his eyes off of the scenery provided by the window.
You haven't been around lately, he thought. It was directed to his golden-eyed ghost. Well, you are a ghost. That's more or less your whole thing. But I've always felt like you're also me, somehow. So is it strange for me — for us — to have no appetite?
He looked at the plate. He'd eaten maybe a quarter of it. He'd been sitting here for half an hour.
No answer as expected.
He set the fork down properly this time.
He looked around the cafeteria. The staff moved behind the counter with the ease of a routine, talking quietly to each other about things that had nothing to do with him. None of them looked his way. They'd take his plate when he left. They'd note, perhaps, that he'd barely touched it, and that would be the extent of their involvement with his morning.
What do they think when they look at me?
Not with fear — he'd have felt that. Also not with the attention that strangers gave him on the street. Something more neutral than either. He ran back through the last hour and a half on this campus.
Eccentric. Unpredictable. Incomprehensibly powerful. A bit too reckless.
He understood them, individually. Each one was accurate. But together, in aggregate, they created something he was only now sitting with clearly — a picture of a person that other people found difficult to be around.
Other people alienated him.
The Arbiter. The Special Grade. Brightburn. He'd always carried those labels at a distance from his actual experience of being himself, which was just a person who liked food and had a plant named Gerald and had never quite figured out what he'd said wrong to Alea this morning.
But the labels were real. And the weight behind them was real as well. And the people in this room were not afraid of him exactly, but they were aware of him in a way that had a cost, and they were paying that cost quietly every time he was in the room.
He stood up.
The staff watched him go. Their eyes were neither warm nor cold, neither concerned nor indifferent.
He walked out.
......
The venue Claire had mentioned was one of the larger halls on the eastern side of campus, with tiered observation benches along one wall and enough floor space for a full team engagement.
He found it easily and arrived slightly early, which gave him time to take one of the upper bench positions before anyone noticed him — which lasted about thirty seconds before a second-year near the door elbowed her friend and the news began spreading through the room.
He ignored this and propped one arm on the bench behind him.
By the time Claire walked in with her team and found him in the seats, he'd fixed his face into something that was mostly unreadable and slightly smug.