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Deuce thinks you have a plain face.
He’s bad with names, so maybe that’s why his head hurts when he tries to remember what you look like. Probably. You don’t stand out from the crowd, so it’s hard for him to find you sometimes.
Grim is always the one leading the way. Ace snickers and says it’s by smell. Deuce muffles his laughter behind his fist, but he agrees.
Grim huffs and weaves through the feet of students getting their meals. The three of them find you sitting alone, like always. There’s a singular apple on your tray, like always.
You angle your head towards them before they call your name. Ace sighs at another failed attempt to sneak up on you.
You all sit and chat aimlessly, complaining about classes and assignments that you could have done better with if you had just tried harder. You don’t talk, but they hear your voice, know what it sounds like in their heads. Soft and slow, languid and comforting.
Have they ever seen your lips do anything but smile?
Deuce had tried, just once, to force you to eat more than an apple for lunch. His mom always said kids should eat lots to grow strong. And you were smaller than him. Or… bigger? In any case, you should eat more.
He’s heard Trey and Riddle whispering in the longue about how they want to do more for you after everything you’ve done for them. Food was heavily considered due to the state of your dorm.
He pried your lips open with his thumb, a spoonful of omurice in his other hand. Ace and Grim cheered him on from the other side of the table while you shook your head.
Deuce paused at the rows and rows of teeth in your mouth, so similar to a shark, before he blinked and human teeth were pressed tightly together.
He woke up with his head face down on the table. He rubs bleary eyes and finds you shaking Grim and Ace awake too.
You give him a close-lipped smile, like always, when Ace mentions partnering up for history.
The apple disappears without you reaching for it.
Deuce tidies his tray and wonders how well he’ll do on the next assignment.
Ashton isn’t proud to admit he’s more lenient with you during class.
Your physical ability shouldn’t be any different than the rest of the students, but he takes it easy on you anyway.
The only thing you can’t do is fly on brooms like everyone else. At least, you shouldn’t.
Ashton looks up to the sky when he hears a whizzing sound, he expects to see some daredevil trying to do a diving trick on their broom. His eyes go wide when you’re freefalling instead, too far for him to catch, your classmates too untrained to reach you.
He lifts an arm to shield himself from the dust cloud, wincing when he hears a sick crack. He just hoped there was enough of you left to salvage.
The dirt cloud clears and he rushes over to the crater in the field, along with the rest of the class. He calls for you, peering in over the edge.
You stand in the center, lifting your head and smiling wide. Your fingers, because you’re human, waggle at him in greeting. Surely he imagined the writhing tentacles on your palms.
He gags at the scent of ozone and the squirming black mass at your feet. Your arm is lower than it should be, but when he looks again, you appear fine. Normal.
He makes you run laps as punishment for such a stunt when you climb out uninjured. You cross the line over and over, but he never sees your legs shift.
Ashton receives an apology letter and a crate of eggs for a hole in the field the next day. Unsigned and written in a way that makes his brain protest.
He blames the throbbing in his skull on the report he’ll have to write to the headmaster and the squawking lecture he’ll receive from the man afterward.
He sighs and goes out to assess the damage. His brows furrow when he sees the field exactly as it should be, exactly as it was when the first years were flying on brooms just yesterday.
Ashton’s vision blurs and he clutches his chest, hearing something crumple.
He looks down at his hand. Empty.
He doesn’t know why he expected something to be there.
Ashton stumbles back into the school, forgetting why he came outside in the first place.
Ace knows it’s not your fault that almost everyone has an issue with you.
Someone stole your textbooks, taking them from your desk while you’re not there. It was typical behaviour for the ones who can’t stand your presence in Night Raven as a magicless.
You had just laughed it off, but he and the others couldn’t let it go.
They show up at Ramshackle littered in bruises and cuts, but smile as they present your recovered items in their hands. The doorknob is dented where your fingers were.
Grim digs his paws into the dirt, stretching your uniform while he pulls, fruitlessly trying to stop you.
The two who took your things sneer when they see you approach.
It happens suddenly. Ace and Deuce don’t know how to describe what happened to the bullies.
You don’t touch them. You don’t even say anything to them.
You just stand across the hall from them, staring dispassionately while they writhe on the ground, screaming in pain.
Ace notes, distantly, that this is the first time he’s ever seen you frown. At least, he thinks it’s a frown. He can’t see your face clearly, a buzzing ringing in his ears when he squints.
Cater would tell him to record this, take a picture or video, anything to prove that this moment really happened.
Even during the overblots, you smiled like a lunatic, though the expressions were soft and kind, endlessly amused. He’s ashamed to admit that you unnerve him. Did that make him a bad friend?
Grim scampers up your body until he’s sitting on your shoulder. He rapidly thumps a paw against your face, hoping to distract you.
The desperate attempts of the monster snap the two Heartslabyul first years out of their daze. They hurry to your side, not daring to touch you as they force laughter from their throats and smile placatingly.
You twitch and jerk, bones snapping in ways that they shouldn’t under your skin as agonized screams heighten in the background. They redouble their efforts, trying everything and anything to get you to stop.
Your shoulders shake. Deuce is sweating, but he can see his breath mist in front of him. Ace rubs away goosebumps as hairs stick to his forehead.
Grim presses his paw to your cheek again and whines at the burning sensation that makes his fur bristle. You pause then, tilting your head at the distressed sound of your partner.
Ace and Deuce rush him to keep talking. Grim stammers and complains that he’s hungry, and as his henchman, you should feed him already.
Your head snaps to the side and they all jump at the abrupt silence. You smile again. Do you ever stop? Grim purrs when you pat his head and lead them back to your dorm.
Ace glares from the setting sun, thinking of a bright beach in a dream.
He tenses when he hears groaning behind him, but when he turns, there’s nothing there.
It’s odd, he thinks, before Deuce nudges him to keep moving. He retaliates with a shove and it turns into a pushing contest.
Ace laughs and wonders what you’ll make for dinner.
Mozius likes giving out creative writing assignments.
He enjoys reading how the youth interpret their history lessons, enjoys becoming part of their literary world, though he knows his classes hate his assignments. He has a passion for teaching, despite what his coworkers might say.
He sits at his desk, marking essays about the Dwarf’s Mines, a subject from earlier in the year, but an interesting one nonetheless. Lucius curls up around the lamp, soft snores punctuating the silence along with the scratch of his pen.
He picks up the final stapled bunch of papers. The name in the corner is yours. Mozius likes your works, more than the others, despite the way Lucius hisses whenever you pass. He saves the best for last.
You’re a good student. You pay attention in class, unlike the two who sit by your side, unlike the one who sits in your lap during lessons.
Your assignments are just as wonderful as you are; they’re beautifully written and, dare he say, enchanting. Like everyone else, he knows you have no magic. Like the staff of the school, he knows you come from a world far from here.
He knows all this, yet when he reads the carefully scrawled-out words, it’s as though he’s been transported by the Dark Mirror itself, taken to the Dwarf’s Mines to experience the bustling activity it once held.
Mozius watches the miners strike into stone until the scene fades with the times, steadily showing the decline. It’s enough to make his old heart beat again.
He smells the copper, tastes it even. He wipes his nose on the back of his hand when something drips from it. It’s dark, whatever the mysterious liquid is, but surely it must be sweat from the heated air.
He only releases your work when his daughters peek into his study and usher him to bed. The girls frown at the paper and move it to the completed stack for their father, locking the study door behind them silently.
Mozius gives back the assignments the next day.
You come up to receive your mark and he apologizes for the red-brown stain. You tip your head and turn your sheets to show pristine papers.
Mozius blinks, wondering why he apologized at all when the only red on your assignment is the perfect grade he gave you in the corner.
Floyd hadn’t meant to squeeze so hard.
You were a weird little shrimp who didn’t know its place.
You didn’t blink as his hands wrapped around your neck until his fingers touched. You didn’t twitch when he felt your buzzing pulse under his palm. Wasn’t it supposed to be beating?
It made his skin crawl.
He just needed to see you gasp for air, claw at him, cry, anything to show that you were alive.
Instead, you continued to stare at him with a soft smile until your neck snapped and your head lolled to the side.
Floyd dropped you and you collapsed in a heap on the floor. Azul was going to be pissed at him.
He sighed irately, blowing up his bangs with his breath as he peeked through the doorway, shouting for his dorm leader.
Quiet rustling drew his attention back into the room. A polite smile was on your face, so relaxed leaning against Azul’s desk, the golden contracts he was supposed to hide inches away from your fingers.
You brushed past Azul when he came into the VIP room, scrunching your fingers in a wave. Azul returned it with a hesitant nod before turning his attention to Floyd.
Floyd doesn’t know how to answer when asked why he called Azul over. He scratched his head, shrugged, and walked off. Behind him, Azul muttered under his breath about his flippant temperament.
Later, he’ll hear Jade chuckling over Azul’s distress from a missing contract. Jade thinks Azul miscounted. He snickers too, but something niggles in his mind.
Floyd shivers when your group sits in a booth at Monstro Lounge, then he grins wide and drapes his arms over you, calling you a silly little shrimp.
Leona can’t sleep when you’re around.
It’s not until later that he realizes it’s your fault. He thought it was because Ruggie was nagging his ear off just as he was waking up, but then a revolting stench hit his nose.
He doesn’t know how the beast sitting on your shoulder doesn’t smell it, doesn’t know how Ruggie and Jack don't smell it either. He doesn’t know why he seems to be the only one, but he hates it.
He stayed awake through the night when you asked for refuge after some deal with the octo-punk. His hair stood on end every time you came into radius. His eyes shot open immediately when he sensed you near. He doesn’t know how the frosh can stand to hang around you.
He doesn’t even feel this way with the lizard.
The first time you meet, his irritation over his tail being stepped on overruled his rational thinking. He calmed down, if only marginally, to snarl in your face and demand to know what a magicless like you was doing at Night Raven.
The way you smiled at him was perfectly innocent, yet it made his ears flatten and he couldn’t help but to bare his teeth.
He doesn’t remember what happened after that.
Leona does his best to stay away from you. It was harder when you and your group started snooping when Ruggie was getting rid of the competition.
He gagged when you bumped into him, swallowing bile to not make a display of himself.
You had retreated immediately and dropped into an apologetic bow. Quiet, polite, unassuming. To anyone else, that is. But you reek and he knows better.
He had continued to glare even after you straightened up. You stared back with eyes a colour he couldn’t name and he turned sharply to hide the goosebumps on his arms. It was like they shifted every other second, indecisive about what shade they wanted to be.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, looking up at darkening clouds to stave off a pounding headache. He hated looking at you.
The wind blew through the field, carrying sand and a whisper he knew was yours. He whipped around, only to see you consoling your friends after losing to his dorm.
Somehow, you met his gaze with your back towards him. The nausea returned and a growl built in his throat. You inclined your head slightly and he knows your lips are lifted in that thing most would call a smile.
Leona wrinkles his nose in the sunny spot in the botanical gardens and he knows sleep will be elusive here when he hears the annoying voice of your beast accompanying slow footsteps.
Rook finds himself spacing out as of late.
There’s no apparent reason. It’s unusual for him, someone who has to be so meticulously aware of the state of his body. After all, his body was the most vital tool for hunting.
His internal clock tells him there has barely been a change, but something else tells him everything is different. His eyes aren’t opened from a closed state, his position hasn’t changed from what he last recalls, only the atmosphere hints at something being amiss.
His gloved hands drag against dark shingles of his perch, overlooking the first-year hall. He came here with a purpose. It was the day he was taking notes on the first years, or at least, the interesting ones.
And none were more interesting than you, the anomaly at this quaint academy.
It feels rude to label you as such, but there’s no other suitable title. You didn’t belong in this school with your lack of magic, yet you fit in seamlessly at the lunch table where he sees you sitting with Epel.
It was a moving sight, seeing his junior carefully carve out the singular apple you get at every break. Rook wanted to preserve the careful creations, and from the soft look on your face, you carried the same sentiment.
He wonders where you put the apple because he can’t recall seeing you eating it.
He focuses back on his task, the feather of his hat swaying as he shakes his head. There it was again; that odd feeling of discontinuance whenever his mind wanders to you or centers his vision on your figure.
It was improper for a hunt, but he couldn’t help the thrilled shiver down his spine.
The first years file through the hall, moving to their next classes. You’re surrounded by the same three as always, one in your arms and the other two by your side.
Rook squints at your mouth, your lips in that infallible line. He remembers hearing about your kind image, and how unsuited it was for this school. He wanted to know what expression would marr your face when you learned Vil had seized control of your dorm. It was a pleasant surprise to see you still smiling and willing to train with everyone.
He knows he’s heard you speak, but he’s never seen you do it. Never seen you eat, either. It makes him wonder.
He takes his camera from his pocket and sets it down on a timer, his other hand fishing for his notebook. Even something as mundane as walking can tell a lot about a person.
His breath catches as his pen touches the paper, his head jerking up to meet the gaze of the predator with its eyes on him. It happened rarely, but the few times it did, it was ingrained in his memory; he was being hunted.
Your neck bends at an unnatural angle that no one else seems to notice, not the two beside you, not the one in your arms, not any of the people in the crowded hall. You give him a light smile, no different than your usual. He can’t see much else past the pink that tinges on his vision.
Your presence weighs heavy, oppressive, and undeniable.
It’s a warning that his body screams at him to heed.
He returns to an empty hall, all the first years gone. He wipes the corner of his eye, his glove coming back tacky. He presses his thumb and index together until the texture dissipates. He catches the scent of metal until the wind blows it away.
Rook stares down at his notebook splattered in ink from his pen resting for too long, the lone page scorched with no reasonable explanation.
Divus hates teaching first years.
If he were to elaborate, he hates teaching all the years equally. Despite him giving multiple warnings, and issuing various punishments, children continue to be stupid. Age doesn’t change that, but first years are particularly dumb.
Stupidity truly has no bounds.
He knows today won’t be any different when the first years saunter in and he can feel the headache building from the way they ramble before they take their places by their cauldrons. They’re happier than they should be, which is going to lead to carelessness.
He commits himself to watching his class a bit more closely, despite the way his brain seems to want to crawl out of his ears.
He verbalizes the instructions as he writes them on the chalkboard, giving a quick demonstration afterward for the visual learners. He receives confirmations when he asks if they understand.
He knows they’re lying to him.
Still, Divus calls the students up to gather their ingredients from the front. He organizes them in this way because he really can’t trust them to not get the wrong ingredients from the back and blow up the whole school. Even the third years mess up on occasion.
He hates this class the most.
He thinks it’s because of you, the student who seems to have been at the centre of all the overblots over the school year. Or it’s the shrill voice of your beast that grates on his nerves.
It’s probably the latter. He knows you’re a good student. The only deductions on your grades come from the one with flaming ears. It’s just a bit easier to blame you.
You’re obedient to a fault.
He sees a slight movement in the corner where your group is. He assigned you to that area to help protect you from discrimination. It can’t be easy for you to be the only magicless student.
The two puppies who are always by your side are on guard in an instant at the approach of an unwelcome lab coat, baring their teeth and glaring. With a smile on your face and a shake of your head, you wave off their worries, stepping up to deal with the sneer yourself.
The foreign face in your circle steps closer, leaning close to whisper something in your ear. Your face doesn’t change, at least, Divus doesn’t think it does. It’s hard to see from the front.
The rest of the class happens without anything noteworthy happening. He makes the mistake of relaxing when only five minutes remain. Everyone has handed in their potions and are now filling in the accompanying worksheet.
Divus doesn’t expect to see your figure by the shelves where he keeps exemplary potions on display. Almost all of them are made by third-years, the students trusted to concoct dangerous tonics without killing themselves.
His heart rate spikes when you wrap your hand around the neck of one of the flasks and pull out the cork.
His voice makes the whole class flinch as he tells you to stop. How could you have the audacity to smile at him as you bring it to your mouth?
He starts across the class, hoping to slap it out of your hand, maybe give you a nice smack too.
He isn’t quick enough to stop you.
Your throat bobs as you swallow something purple and fluorescent, staring right into the eyes of the mutt that surely suggested this farce. In his rush, he thinks the mutt’s crying.
Divus only reaches you when the bottle is empty. He mutters a curse when black oozes from your closed lips, bubbling and foaming.
He throws caution into the wind, shoving his fingers down your throat in an attempt to make you throw it all up. The staff knows you’re not from this world. He always wondered if things here affected you worse.
He hisses when you bite down on his fingers with more teeth than you should have, shoving him away with a light push. You wipe your mouth on the sleeve of your lab coat and his head spins as you smile.
The bell rings, signalling the end of class. Divus dismisses the students with a furrow in his brow, his fingers throbbing under his gloves.
Everyone files out, piling completed worksheets on the front desk. You’re the last to leave, your beast in your arms like some stuffed animal. Neatly, you lay your papers on top of the stack and say something that he can’t quite make out, a smile on your face as you go.
Divus cleans the class at the end of the day, not knowing why there’s an empty flask on the shelf dated three years back, but he knows it must have something to do with the inexplicable pain in his fingers.
Jamil doesn’t want to cook around you.
Your cat had more presence than you did, and he knew the quiet way you hung back was intentional. After all, it was the same way he held himself around the Asim family.
It got on his nerves.
Jamil kept an eye on you, chalking up the headaches to magic overuse. You always met his gaze evenly, making his teeth grind.
At one of the night banquets, you took Kalim’s bowl, or the fool offered it to you. Regardless, you ate something you weren’t supposed to. You swirled Kalim’s spoon through the murky soup and Jamil thought he heard a laugh.
It was a chilling sound, but somehow managed to be soft. It worsened the pounding in his head. When he looked back, the bowl was empty.
He narrowed his eyes at the colour of the spoon, a soft mahogany shade, unassuming against the rest of the ceramic patterns. His heart thudded in his chest and he swallowed, his mouth feeling dry.
Kalim’s spoon only turned that colour if the food contained poison.
Jamil caught your attention by tapping the carpet next to you. You didn’t turn to him, but his vision swam and he knew he needed to act quickly before you keeled over in front of everyone.
Hell, he felt like the one that got poisoned, not you.
He whispered to you and forced a bit of magic into his words, ordering you to make yourself throw up with urgency. You simply shook your head and that haunting chuckle returned.
You offered to help him cook the next day and his throat bobbed, his tongue suddenly feeling heavy in his mouth. He nodded wordlessly and turned on all the appliances if only to drown out the faintly whispered words on the wind.
He scooped up some of the sauce to gauge if it was as sweet as everyone liked, but he ended up frowning when it tasted bland.
He spared a sideways glance at you because you were the only variable in his carefully constructed kitchen. He knew all his ingredients were right, could list the many recipes by heart, and measure them just as surely.
So why couldn’t he taste anything?
Jamil refused to ask you to try it, instead beckoned a passing student, and held up the sauce plate impatiently. He received an enthusiastic response about how delicious it was that made his brows furrow.
Your beast called you over and you excused yourself with a slight nod.
He tried the sauce again under the admiring gaze of his dorm mate and pursed his lips to stop from scowling at the sudden burst of flavour. That wasn’t to say it was bad. It couldn’t be when he was the one that made it, but the brief absence of his sense of taste rattled him.
You returned and resumed cutting some vegetables as he instructed you to. He took a moment to just stare before slowly taking another sip of the sauce. He tasted nothing, again.
Jamil sighs when he’s forced to sit with your group in the cafeteria, moving to the end opposite of you, and wonders why the ghosts made the food so bland.
Sam loves it when you visit the shop.
He’s not the only one. His shadows squirm and twist, crawling along the walls to greet you at the front door. Why, they even leave his side to be by yours instead, as if they prefer you to him.
He’d be offended if he wasn’t just as excited.
You’re alive, he knows that, yet his friends from the other side view you as one of their own. It’s a silly thing to him, but he too feels at ease in your presence. Another person would be cautious, but Sam’s just happy to see you.
You’ll go along with his shadow’s whims, entertaining them with an unchanging smile on your face. You treat his friends like your own, wasting away so much time without a care.
You’ll come into his shop looking for tuna cans for your little beast. It never ends up being the short trip it’s supposed to be when his shadows catch you in their grasp.
The lights flicker as they lure you to the centre of the store, their cackles carrying an echoing quality as they force you into a waltz that you’re all too happy to comply with. It’s an ethereal image, at least, the parts he can see.
With the lights, your figure writhes, disappearing and reappearing in odd intervals, as if trying to escape your skin to join his shadows on the other side.
He gives you a discount, just for visiting. You try to refuse it, but he insists. It’s only when he brings up how you can buy more tuna cans for your beast that you accept. You’re kind to a fault.
Sam tries to dance with his shadows when you leave, but they refuse him and he simply laughs, agreeing that he could never replace you.
Idia wants you to go away.
He’s not saying that because he’s antisocial, or a recluse, or anything else that normies call him. He’s saying it because you keep breaking Ortho.
It shouldn’t be possible, but you keep doing it. He knows it’s you, would swear on it even.
Idia usually only needs to do maintenance on Ortho once a year, just to make sure everything’s working as it should be. But this year alone? He’s had to perform emergency maintenance five times.
He doesn’t want to pry, but he needs to know the reason. So he loads Ortho’s data and memories into his computer to sort through them.
Every time, the last thing Ortho sees before he shuts down is you, corrupted and blurred like a crime documentary censorship.
The first time he saw it, he almost threw up.
The pictures aren't particularly gross. If anything, they were normal, like you are. At least, he thought you were.
He scans the screenshots again, squinting hard when his eyes scream at him to stop. He tries to find what’s wrong with you, or his programming, trying to figure out why Ortho can’t process you.
You’re the only one whose image is distorted in a way that can’t be called human. The beast on your shoulder is fine, if not growling at something off-screen. The duo you’re always with is glaring at something too.
Your head is turned? Or facing forward? He can’t tell what direction you’re facing, but he knows it radiates danger.
He pulls up the school security feed and searches the scene around the time Ortho shuts down.
He rewinds and presses play enough times to make him nauseous because just looking at you seems to make him sick to his stomach.
Something blurs in the corner of the screen. Two things, actually. It makes his eyes burn, but the things are corrupted the same way you are.
Idia hisses and digs the heels of his palms into his sockets to alleviate the ache. With a slow breath, he drags his hands away and focuses back on his computer. He wishes the school cameras had audio because your friends are saying something and pointing, almost agitated.
He zooms in. Were you… saying something?
Idia’s sort of glad Ortho is shut down right now because when you suddenly turned your head to the camera, he fell out of his chair with a scream.
He takes the warning for what it is and shuts down his computer quickly, instead booting Ortho back up. Golden eyes blink at him and he heaves a quiet sigh of relief.
He warns Ortho to stay away, but Idia knows he won’t listen. Ortho likes you and the other first years too much to leave. He dismisses Ortho with a lazy wave of his hand.
Idia destroys the memory files and security feed as if on autopilot, cringing and not knowing why he tried to give unsolicited social advice.
Lilia laughs at how people scramble to adjust to your otherness.
He’s seen those like you before. It’s a faint memory, one that was supposed to be repressed, but the being allowed him to keep the moment as a passing amusement.
He doesn’t realize it at first, thinking the darkness on your face is only a trick of the shadows. It isn’t until he starts experiencing gaps in his memory and strange senses of deja vu that he understands.
Someone in the academy was not quite right, wearing the skin of those around it.
The sharper ones are bound to notice. He knows Malleus suspects something, but the young lord is so elated to have a friend that he chooses to overlook it.
Sebek was hesitant to join your merry group, but once he knew of his liege’s fondness for you, he held no more qualms. It was cute, seeing first-years from so many different dorms congregating around you.
It was also a little strange, he thought. Wasn’t your kind more solitary?
Even Silver is restless around your facade, his instincts warning him of the danger you could pose. Though nearly flawless, there are still gaps, almost like a sieve in which your true self seeps through.
Lilia likes it though, if only for the entertainment it provides him in the scant instances you allow him to perceive you.
He knows it’s more for his sake than yours, the memory gaps, that is. Not even fae could handle you in your entirety, so how could the many humans that attend the school?
You are kind to them, instead allowing small inconsistencies and erasing yourself from the feeble minds of others. It causes irritation in the obstinate ones, but you take on their anger when they lash out as an apology for causing them distress.
You don’t hurt others even if they hurt you.
Only when they touch what’s yours do you threaten to break, like a dragon protecting its treasures. No wonder you get along with Malleus.
Lilia remembers, only vaguely, passing the statues and seeing your little group. He paused and grinned, knowing he could delay online gaming because you would surely provide better entertainment.
But the air you exuded just about choked him. His ears popped and rendered him deaf. He crumpled to the ground like two other masses in front of you, your face beyond recognition, a maelstrom of pure malice as three tried to hold you back.
That’s all he remembers. That’s all you allowed him to remember.
He woke up in a heap against cool cobblestone with the moon shining above. Your face stood above him, highlighted by the stars. You wore the same smile you always did, not a hint of the hatred from before.
Slowly, your lips parted and murmured words he still couldn’t hear, his vision blurring at the endless space past your mouth.
Lilia chuckles, hoping you’ll keep making exceptions for him and filling his academy days with endless entertainment.
Dire doesn’t know what the Dark Mirror brought to his school.
You are everything a student should be; studious, curious, brilliant. Yet, something nags at him when he visits the classrooms.
His eyes burn when he tries to look at you, as if his mind refuses to recognize your visage. You are wrong on a visceral level that can’t be explained in words.
Still, you’ve helped his school in ways he could never repay you for. His students seem to love you as well, strange behaviour for those attending Night Raven.
At least, some of them. The rest of them are downright discriminatory and he’s glad nothing has happened to the poor fools yet.
You’re an oddity, through and through.
There are books that speak of things that are similar, things that wear the skin of others, but Dire knows that is not you.
You are not them. You are not unkind and lacking sympathy. You don’t devour those who come close to you.
You are kind, almost to a fault, but he knows not to mistake your composure for ease. He knows that beneath your guise is something far beyond his comprehension. He can only pray that you continue to be benevolent.
Dire doesn’t know what the Dark Mirror brought to his school, but he’s grateful you took his hand.