Chapter Text
It was a surreal feeling, walking down these halls.
What Lilia had told me was true. The moment I entered Night Raven College, it felt as if the world itself was vibrating, as if everything around me was far more than it appeared to be.
I also found it difficult to imagine my father once walking these same halls, not as a king, but as a student.
It was probably expected that I would eventually attend this school as well.
Perhaps fifty or sixty years later. Around the same age as my father had been.
I continued down the hall and saw my father speaking with the Headmage, a man who was a mystery in himself and the only “relative” my mother had. I was still unsure what the purpose of this visit was, or why I had been asked to accompany him here.
“Malirs,” my father called. “We have to get going.”
My father was not the type of person to raise his voice. His voice always carried a gentle undertone, whether he was speaking or scolding. He never yelled or became angry, at least not toward me.
He was gentle at heart.
That was what I believed, anyway.
“If you wish to run off to the library, I will not object. There is much to learn from this school.”
I wish I had listened to him more. He always had so much to say, but I lacked the maturity to listen.
The reason I had agreed to accompany him was simple.
I wished to learn about my mother.
And he knew that.
I knew very little about her. It felt as if her presence was always here, hidden in a corner of the castle, or among the willows, looking into the library. Her magic, her language, her spells, and her customs. Was it my responsibility to understand them?
This woman, who had come to this world from another, had left traces of herself in the corners of the universe and then disappeared, leaving me to collect the scraps.
I may have resented my mother. I am still unsure, even now.
My mother had given me life and had loved me even after my birth damaged her health beyond repair. On one hand, I saw a woman who had cherished me. On the other hand, I saw the woman who had left me absolutely nothing of herself, who had, in a way, disappeared from my life.
The reason I came to Night Raven College was partially due to my own selfishness. I wished to see the place my mother had lived, the Headmage’s home, formerly known as Ramshackle Dorm.
Apparently, after my mother appeared in this world, the Headmage took the displaced girl in and placed her in that forgotten dorm, and they, together over the years, turned it into a home.
Truth be told, I did not know what my mother’s role had been at Night Raven College. I always assumed she had been placed under the Headmage’s care, thrown into an entirely new world, and that being trapped in an all-boys school could not have been easy.
I wondered if she had kept a journal.
Or perhaps a diary.
Anything that could prove she had once been here.
As I watched my father’s figure grow smaller and smaller, I felt a gut-wrenching sensation in my chest.
My father was a good father.
From my earliest memories, I remembered holding onto him, and him holding me in return. Close. Safe.
As I walked toward Ramshackle by myself, I realised two things.
Although I had permission to “see” the house, I did not have permission to enter it.
Oh well.
It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Besides, when this house was rebuilt, Mother had somehow brought over various magical plants, books, and other magical objects. And since I was her son, all of them would be mine by inheritance.
Technically speaking.
Headmaster Crowley was from Briar Valley, so there was no question about it.
Probably.
I was not breaking any laws.
At most, I was stepping into a legally ambiguous situation with sentimental intentions.
Which sounded much better.
And if anyone asked, I had not broken in.
The door had simply failed to remain closed in my presence.
A common architectural weakness, I was sure.
As I walked into the house, I noticed several things at once.
The first was that Ramshackle was no longer very ramshackle.
I had seen pictures of the dorm before, back when it had lived up to its name far more honestly. The walls had been cracked, the windows crooked, the halls dark and tired-looking. But now, the house was different.
It was warm.
Homey, perhaps. I was not sure if that was the right word. There was something carefully arranged about it, something pretty without being grand. It looked like the sort of place a girl might have made for herself if she had been given a broken house and decided, for reasons no one else understood, to love it anyway.
A girl of fifteen, maybe sixteen.
That thought felt strange.
My mother had not always been the woman spoken of in half-sentences and careful silences. She had once been a girl. Younger than I was now, perhaps, or close enough that the difference hardly mattered. A girl who had walked through these halls, climbed these stairs, slept beneath this roof.
I tried to imagine her.
A girl a little shorter than me, perhaps, walking down the hallway with her arms full of books. A girl standing in the kitchen, trying to cook something from her own world with ingredients that did not quite behave the way they were supposed to. A girl sitting in the library near the Headmage’s office, reading quietly while the rest of Night Raven College carried on around her.
I wondered if she had laughed here.
I wondered if she had cried.
If she had still been alive, would the house have looked different?
Perhaps there would have been more plants. Not the decorative kind placed by servants and forgotten until someone remembered to water them, but living things she cared for herself. Pots in the windows. Vines near the stairs. Herbs in the kitchen with labels written in her handwriting.
Perhaps the library would have had more visitors. More hands taking books from the shelves, more voices filling the silence, more signs that someone had loved the room enough to disturb the dust.
Perhaps she would have gone out with her friends on the weekends. Tried on new clothes. Gone shopping. Bought unnecessary little things and placed them around the house simply because they made her happy.
That was what girls did, was it not?
I did not really know.
And my mother, when she had lived here, had not been a mother yet. She had not been my father’s wife. She had not been the woman whose absence shaped every room I entered.
She had been a girl, a child.
Like me, in a way.
Younger. More naive, perhaps.
Alive.
I had always wondered what she looked like. I had seen a few pictures, but not many. Most of the time, I was told, she had disliked having her picture taken.
I knew she had black hair. The last time Lilia saw her, he said it had been so long it fell past her thighs. I knew she had blue eyes. My father’s eyes were green, but mine were a strange, bright blue, the sort people looked at for a moment too long before politely looking away.
So that much, at least, must have come from her.
Was she tall?
My father was tall, so perhaps she had been as well. Or perhaps she had been short. Perhaps she had needed to stand on her toes to reach the higher shelves. Perhaps she had climbed on chairs even when she should not have. Perhaps someone had scolded her for it.
Did she have hobbies?
Did she like to read?
Did she paint?
Did she sing?
Did she collect things? Did she keep flowers pressed between pages? Did she write notes in the margins of her books? Did she prefer tea or coffee? Did she hate waking up early? Did she ever look out the windows of this house and wonder if she would ever see her own world again?
Did we have anything in common?
The questions kept appearing in my mind, one after another, each one small and sharp and impossible to answer.
I climbed the stairs slowly, letting my hand trail along the bannister. The wood was smooth beneath my fingers. Someone had polished it carefully. Someone had chosen to preserve it.
At the top of the stairs, I came across a door.
It was closed, of course.
Still, it stood out immediately.
The hallway around it was all muted greys, greens, and browns, soft colours that belonged to old houses and quiet things. But the door itself was light blue.
A gentle, unmistakable blue.
It stood out terribly.
Like a sore thumb, I thought.
Or perhaps like a secret that had grown tired of hiding.
I stopped in front of it.
I knew, somehow, what it was.
Or more specifically, who it had belonged to.
The room itself was not very large.
Still, there were so many pretty little things inside that, for a moment, I did not know where to look.
There was a bed with curtains, the sort one might find in a princess’s room. They were probably meant to keep out insects or anything else that could slip in through the balcony doors. The balcony itself was small. So small that even stepping out onto it seemed slightly dangerous.
Near it were plant remnants. Flowers, perhaps. Or herbs. Lavender, maybe.
I knew that scent.
Many of the things Mother had left behind in the castle smelled faintly of lavender.
Her room was blue and purple, though some parts were so pale they were almost white. The bed rested on a slightly elevated platform, only one step higher than the floor. There were shelves along the walls, filled with little objects, books, and pictures of people whose identities I could not always guess.
One picture, however, caught my attention.
I recognised Sebek immediately.
Beside him stood a short, pretty boy with purple hair. On the other side was a girl with black hair, cut just below her chin. Standing with them were two boys, one with reddish-orange hair and the other with blue. They had card suit symbols drawn on their faces.
I recognised the girl.
I recognised my childhood guard.
But the other three were strangers to me.
Behind that photograph was another one. In it, I saw a beastman, perhaps a wolf, or a jackal. I was not entirely sure. He had spiky grey hair and the expression of someone who did not enjoy being photographed.
This was my mother’s childhood room.
That realisation settled over me slowly.
The room had been left untouched, but not abandoned. There was no dust, no cobwebs, no sign of decay. Everything was clean. Everything was perfectly in place.
Too perfectly.
It did not look lived in.
It looked preserved.
Like a museum exhibit.
Perhaps that was the Headmage’s doing.
I sometimes forgot that I was not the only one who had lost someone when my mother died. The Headmage had, in his own strange way, lost his only daughter.
The carpet beneath my feet looked soft and fluffy. I could imagine my mother lying there, staring up at the ceiling where painted stars shimmered faintly above her. Thinking. Reading. Daydreaming.
I wanted to do it too.
The thought came suddenly, and with such force that I almost did not understand it at first.
I wanted to lie where she had lain. I wanted to touch the things she had touched. I wanted to do everything she had once done, as if repeating her movements might somehow bring me closer to understanding her.
There was a bookshelf beneath the raised platform where the bed stood. Beside it was a desk, scattered with crystals whose purposes I did not know. There were dried plants, bookmarks, old notes, and other small things I could not name.
There were also hoodies.
Several of them.
Folded carefully, stacked in a way that made me think they had not originally belonged to her at all.
Some were too large. Some had dorm colours I recognised. Heartslabyul red. Savanaclaw yellow. Octavinelle purple. Scarabia gold. A few had old stitching, loose cuffs, or initials that were not hers.
Hand-me-downs, I realized.
My mother had arrived in this world with nothing. No family, no money, no clothes of her own, and, from what little I understood, no real explanation anyone wished to believe. In those early days, she had hidden herself behind borrowed uniforms and oversized jackets, pretending to be a boy because that was easier than telling the truth.
Or perhaps because the truth would have made her life far more complicated than I had known originally.
I touched the sleeve of one hoodie carefully.
It was strange to imagine her that way. I opened the drawers beside her desk and found books inside.
Some were written in an unfamiliar alphabet. Others were in languages I knew. I recognised English. I recognised Japanese. But there was another language mixed in, written with the same letters as English, yet arranged in words I could not understand.
It frustrated me more than I wanted to admit.
Lilia had taught me some of my mother’s languages when I was younger. He had told me they were gifts she had left behind for me.
As always, he had been right.
Her handwriting was beautiful.
Not perfect. Not stiff or royal or carefully trained. But pretty in a way that felt alive. Some letters leaned too far. Some words were pressed harder into the page than others, as if she had been thinking too quickly while writing them.
I started going through the books more carefully.
If I could not understand everything yet, then perhaps I could copy it down and ask Lilia later. Or the Headmage. Or anyone who might know.
I reached toward her pencil case to take a pen.
My hand caught the edge of it.
The pencil case tipped over and fell to the floor with a soft clatter.
I bent down to pick it up.
That was when I saw the words carved into the wall beside the desk.
Small.
Almost hidden.
Ad meliora.
I stared at them for a long moment.
The letters looked familiar, but the meaning was lost on me.
I wondered if she had carved them herself.
I wondered what they meant.
And, more than anything, I wondered why she had chosen to leave those words behind.