Archive of Our Own

Phainon nearly tripped over his only half-laced leather boots as he shoved his dormitory door shut behind him. He caught himself against the corridor wall, lurched upright, and kept running. His hair was a mess. His shoulder satchel hung open, one buckle flapping uselessly against his hip, and he had no recollection of whether he had actually eaten breakfast or merely dreamed of doing so.

He had slept in. There was no elegant way to phrase it, though he supposed there hardly needed to be one. He had gone to bed late, as young men often did while preoccupied with biological matters, and had paid for it in the rushed morning. At least he had enough sense and experience, as a second-year student, to know which mistakes could be survived and which could get him killed. Being late to Professor Anaxa’s Magical Devices course belonged firmly in the second category.

He tore down the stone staircase two steps at a time, catching the banister when his boot threatened to betray him again. The Grove School of Fine Magical Arts was the finest institution of magical study on the continent, and Phainon still had days when the fact seemed too absurd to have happened to him. The institution drew scholars from kingdoms he had only ever heard of in stories, renowned practitioners sent their children here, and the library alone was larger than all the buildings in the town where he had grown up. His parents had been proud enough to cry when his and Cyrene’s acceptance letters arrived.

Phainon had written to them afterward, too. He wrote often, whenever his coursework gave him the time, filling page after page with descriptions of the laboratories, the lecture halls, the gardens, the observatory, and the content he encountered in his classes. He told them how grateful he was. He told them how fortunate he felt. He told them that every morning he walked through those enormous halls somehow built into a giant tree and still had to remind himself that he belonged there.

He did not usually mention that the people responsible for designing the campus had apparently possessed a personal vendetta against the male students. Why else would the men’s dormitories have been built at the opposite end of the institution from nearly every lecture hall?

Cyrene never had this problem. His adoptive sister took great pleasure in pointing that out. The women’s dormitories were, according to her, practically next door to the academic buildings. She had demonstrated this fact to him on several occasions, usually while strolling beside him at a perfectly reasonable pace as he struggled to keep up after crossing half the grounds.

He had written that in one of his letters home once. His mother had written back that perhaps he ought to wake up earlier. His father, the comedic soul, had added a little sketch of a clock in the margin. Phainon had chosen not to write back about that.

He vaulted the last three steps and emerged into the main open-air courtyard, where morning had already settled properly over Grove. Students crossed between the buildings situated on different branches in loose streams, carrying stacks of books, floating instruments, bundles of parchment, and the various magical implements required by their courses. He crossed the courtyard at a leisurely… Well, sprint. Unfortunately his own magic had never made him particularly well suited to reckless exertion. Heat gathered inside him whenever he drew too deeply on his power, rising from a manageable warmth beneath his ribs to an oppressive furnace if he pushed too hard. He had passed out often enough to develop a healthy respect for the limits of his body. Running across campus at full speed before breakfast was therefore a questionable decision.

But Anaxa had little patience for lateness, and a gun propped up too close to his blackboard. And Phainon had even less patience for giving Mydeimos another reason to look at him with that infuriating expression of amusement.

He tightened the strap of his satchel, caught the loose buckle before it could fall, and rounded the corner toward the lecture hall. He was going to make it. He was absolutely going to—

“Auditioning for the track team?”

He stopped so abruptly that his boots scraped against the stone. Mydei stood at the entrance to the lecture hall with his arms folded, immaculate and princely as ever. His uniform had been pressed so sharply that Phainon suspected the sleeves could have been used to cut paper. Even his gloves and formal cloak were on, despite the fact that they were not really required for the lecture and the morning was already warm. The sight of him, composed and perfectly prepared, made Phainon acutely aware of the state of his own appearance. One boot was still only half-laced, after all.

“…Good morning to you too, Mydeimos.”

“Really? It doesn’t look like you’re having one, Phainon.”

There was a particular quality to the way Mydei said his name when he was pleased with himself. Mydei was too well-mannered to be openly cruel without cause, especially in front of other students. Instead, there was a faint upward turn at the corner of his mouth, as though he thought he were fundamentally better than Phainon.

He disliked it even more because Mydei had earned the right to wear it. For a second-year student, Phainon had done exceptionally well at Grove. His examinations were consistently near the top of his cohort, his practical work had earned praise from professors who rarely offered it, and his particular branch of magic had proven considerably more versatile than anyone in his village had expected. He could draw heat from his surroundings, concentrate it through his own body, and release it through spellwork with enough force to crack stone when he was careless.

Mydei was simply talented at making it all look easy. The foreign prince had arrived at Grove from afar with a reputation already attached to him, because his blood magic had attracted considerable academic interest before he had even begun his first term. Ordinary spellwork came naturally to him, but once he drew a small amount of blood, he could turn that living magic into crystalline structures of startling complexity. Walls, blades, bridges, you name it. Given enough blood and enough time, he could build an entire battlefield around himself. Phainon had once watched him construct a staircase during one of Professor Tribios’s practical examinations.

Mydei had not even looked winded afterward. Phainon had thought about that crimson staircase more times than he cared to admit. It had been, objectively, very impressive, but Phainon had seen better magic at Grove. What had stayed with him was the way Mydei had glanced over his shoulder halfway through the demonstration, caught Phainon watching, and smiled faintly.

Phainon had hated that. He hated, perhaps even more, that Mydei seemed to know he hated it.

“You know,” Mydei began again, his golden gaze dropping pointedly toward Phainon’s open bag, “if you were intending to arrive before the lecture, you might have considered leaving your dormitory before the lecture is due to begin.”

“I was aware of that, thank you, Your Highness,” he replied with a smile, though the bitterness was palpable. For reasons Phainon had never bothered to understand, Mydei hated being called anything remotely princely. Phainon had discovered this during their first year, and, being a young man of considerable integrity, had immediately begun referring to him exclusively as “Crown Prince.”

He had maintained the practice religiously for four months. Mydei had endured it for exactly that amount of time before retaliating with a dreadful nickname of his own, at which point Phainon had figured that perhaps they had reached an understanding. They clearly hadn’t.

“Were you?” Mydei asked, his smug expression having gone sour. “What made the Deliverer so late, then?”

There it was. The Deliverer. Phainon had acquired the title by accident. Professor Aglaea had called him that once during Defensive Glamours after he brought her a collection of materials she needed for a demonstration. Mydei had been present, unfortunately their schedules largely overlapped. He had evidently decided that the perfectly innocuous title was an excellent opportunity to imply that Phainon was little more than a teacher’s lapdog, and had been using it ever since.

“You know, you spend an astonishing amount of time wondering about me.” Phainon retaliated. 

Mydei’s reply seemed to have already been loaded and waiting. To be fair, they had conversations like this often enough that either of them could probably have written the other’s half in advance. “Only when you make yourself difficult not to notice.”

Phainon almost missed the barb in it. “Careful speaking so loudly, Mydeimos. Someone might think you pay extra attention to me.”

“I pay attention to anything that threatens my position in the rankings.” Predictable. Mydeimos always led them back to the same point eventually: their marks, their practical examinations, their place among the second-years. It was as though there existed a grand title for the most accomplished student at the Grove, and the two of them had spent the better part of two years competing for it despite such a position not existing.

“The part where you pretend this is solely about academics. You can despise me for other reasons too, you know. I won’t press you for your reasoning.”

Mydei’s brows drew together, and for once there was no immediate retort waiting behind his teeth. The pause was brief, but Phainon noticed it all the same. Mydeimos was usually far too quick with his answers, particularly when he thought he had found an opening worth exploiting.

Phainon never found out what he intended to say. His tie was yanked sharply sideways. “—What?”

Cifera had caught the end of it and pulled him bodily toward the lecture hall doors. The already questionable knot came loose beneath her fingers, leaving the white tie hanging crookedly around his neck. “Inside,” the grey-eared cat hybrid said, rolling her eyes as she let it fall. “Both of you. Before Anaxa decides you're worth the trouble.” Her Dolosian accent became considerably more pronounced whenever she was irritated.

Phainon caught his tie between his thumb and pointer finger before it slipped entirely off. “I was going inside!”

“We could see you both from a distance. You’ve been lingering in the doorway for three minutes.”

Castorice followed a few steps behind her, looking apologetic on Cifera’s behalf in the way she often did. The elf had her notebook tucked behind her back, held discreetly against her skirt as she walked. Phainon noticed it only because the corner of the cover kept peeking out whenever she moved. He often wondered what she was writing in there. “I apologize for her,” she said, though her expression suggested she agreed with every word. “But we really should get inside.”

Phainon glanced toward Mydei. Mydei had already folded his arms again. His tie, red as usual, looked immaculate.

“Don’t start speaking,” Phainon warned him.

“I said nothing.”

“You’re thinking loudly.”

“Maybe your magic skills are catching up. I wasn’t aware that the Deliverer could hear thoughts.”

“Yours are hardly subtle.”

Cifera made an exasperated noise from inside the doorway, popping her head out. “Are you two coming or do I need to borrow Anaxa’s gun to motivate you?”

Phainon walked inside. He spent the first few steps trying to fix his tie with one hand while holding his satchel with the other, achieving little beyond making the knot worse. By the time he reached the lecture hall proper, he had given up and decided he could repair it once he was seated.

The classroom was arranged in two broad, curved rows of tables facing the demonstration platform at the front. The rear row sat slightly higher than the first, giving everyone a clear view of the professor and whatever device he happened to be dismantling and remodeling for them that day. The arrangement was practical rather than particularly elegant, which was probably why Phainon liked the room more than most of Anaxa’s students did. There were fewer opportunities for anyone to hide behind a taller classmate, and Anaxa had a habit of noticing whenever a student tried.

Phainon made immediately for the front. There were advantages to sitting near the front in any of Anaxa’s courses. The greatest was Hyacine.

She was probably the student their professor tolerated best, which made sitting beside her one of Phainon’s more reliable survival methods. Anaxa was less likely to become irritated when she asked a question, and, on the rare occasions when Phainon managed to get himself lost in the more abstruse parts of a lecture, she was usually willing to quietly point him back in the right direction. It was too bad she was enrolled in the Woundweaver specialization programme.

Hyacine glanced up as he dropped into the seat beside her. Her eyes went immediately to his tie.

“Please don’t mention it.”

She smiled. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

On the other side of the same curved table sat Mydei, between Castorice and Cifera. Cifera would spend the entire lecture whispering things to Castorice if given the opportunity, and Mydei seemed to have somehow become the barrier placed between them for everyone’s benefit. Castorice, for her part, looked perfectly content with the arrangement, already setting her notebook on the table as Cifera leaned around Mydei to say one last thing to her before class began.

This meant Mydei was perfectly capable of being considerate toward other people. Perhaps he was even nice, on some rare occasions. It did not matter. He was decidedly not nice to Phainon.

Phainon finally managed to get his tie into a passable approximation of a knot and sat back in his chair. At the front of the room, Anaxa had set up a small table with a collection of artifacts arranged across its surface. There was a brass instrument with several articulated arms, a squat glass vessel filled with a pale, cloudy liquid, a little metal box with a keyhole in its side, and several other objects whose purposes Phainon could not immediately place.

Anaxa cleared his throat. “Assuming you have bothered to read your class syllabuses,” he began, his one-eyed gaze moving across the room, “you should all be aware that we will be beginning the first project of the course today.” He turned toward the board and wrote a title across it in his precise cursive script.

ARTIFACT APPLICATION AND FUNCTION

Phainon had, in fact, read the syllabus. He had also read it twice, because Anaxa’s course descriptions sounded straightforward on the first pass until one reached the practical requirements and assigned readings buried halfway through the page.

“Over the past several weeks, you have been introduced to a variety of artifacts and the principles governing their activation,” Anaxa continued. “You have studied the methods by which their functions may be identified, the magical conditions required to operate them, and the means by which their mechanisms may be manipulated when conventional activation fails. You have also examined the distinction between an artifact’s intended use and the functions that may be derived from it through alternative applications.”

Phainon glanced toward the little brass device on the table. That part, at least, had been interesting. They had spent weeks being handed objects and being guided through observation, magical analysis, and increasingly creative attempts at making them respond. Anaxa had been particularly fond of giving them artifacts designed to do one very specific thing and then asking what else they might accomplish if used improperly but intelligently.

“Today,” Anaxa said, “you will put that knowledge to the test.”

A few students shifted in their seats.

“You will be working in pairs.”

Several groans sounded from around the room. They were brave souls. Phainon kept his face carefully neutral, having no intention of becoming one of those students who made an open display of displeasure in Anaxa’s classroom, particularly when Anaxa had already demonstrated that he was perfectly willing to respond to complaints by making the following assignment considerably more difficult.

“Additionally,” Anaxa continued, entirely unmoved, “the pairs have been randomly assigned.”

Phainon felt the urge to groan then. Hyacine’s fingers tightened around her pen.

Phainon glanced sideways at her. He felt her pain. Being paired with a random student meant there was always a chance of being assigned to one of the people who treated practical work as unimportant. Phainon had spent enough time watching classmates nearly combust over poorly calibrated devices to know that there were worse fates than being seated beside Hyacine.

Anaxa walked back toward his desk and picked up a sheet of parchment. He returned to the center of the room with it in hand, clearing his throat once more before beginning to read.

“Castorice and Hyacinthia.”

Hyacine released a satisfied breath so quietly that Phainon almost missed it. Her shoulders loosened considerably, and the grip on her pen finally eased. It fell onto the table, startling her.

Phainon turned his face toward the front before she could catch the smile threatening to appear. He was not going to laugh. He was absolutely not going to laugh.

Anaxa picked up one of the artifacts from the table, holding it up for the class to see. It was a small device shaped rather like a knight chess piece, though its metal casing was covered in a series of tiny engraved symbols. “This will be yours,” he said, extending it toward the two girls. “Come collect it and sit together.”

Castorice rose first, gathering her notebook from the table. Hyacine followed with considerably more enthusiasm than Phainon thought the assignment warranted, and the pair made their way toward the front.

Anaxa waited until the girls had collected their artifact before looking down at the parchment again. “The next pair.”

There were still several students left to be assigned, and Phainon had no particular reason to expect anything unusual. He was one of the stronger students in the course, which meant there were only so many people Anaxa might reasonably put him with if the pairs were genuinely random. Anaxa’s eyes moved down the list.

“Mydeimos and…” A pause. “Mydeimos and Phainon.”

A genuine gasp went through the lecture hall, followed by a scattered collection of muffled noises that Phainon was fairly certain included laughter. Even Anaxa’s more reliable students looked up from their desks.

Their professor was fond of alchemy, so surely even he understood that there were certain combinations best left unattempted. Oil and water, for instance, had the good sense to remain separate.

By the time the professor had finished distributing the remaining artifacts, they had taken their places at the back row. Phainon had chosen the spot very deliberately. The elevated tables gave them a decent view of the demonstration platform, while the other students were far enough ahead that their conversations would be less conspicuous. If they were going to spend time working together, Phainon saw no reason to provide the rest of the year with a front-row seat to it.

Apparently Mydei had arrived at much the same conclusion. Their chairs had been pushed as far apart as the curved table allowed. The artifact sat between them.

It was a peculiar little resonance dial, roughly the size of a pocket watch and considerably heavier than it looked. Its outer casing was a dull brass, darkened in places with age, while a ring of tiny engraved symbols ran around its circumference. At its center was a shallow circular aperture filled with a translucent crystal that caught the classroom’s light. Two narrow bands of metal surrounded the casing, each etched with a different series of markings.

The assignment sheet sat beside it. Phainon had been reading it for five minutes. He had read the first page three times. Across from him, Mydei appeared to be doing much the same. Neither had spoken a word to the other.

Their task was simple enough on paper. Determine the nature and function of the artifact through experimentation; record their various attempts at activation and the magical conditions involved; identify which forms of magic produced a response, if any; and use those findings to develop a theory regarding its intended purpose. In other words, they had been handed an unresponsive object and told to irritate it until it confessed.

Phainon had always enjoyed this part of Anaxa’s courses. Hands-on work stimulated his learning more easily, compared to the long lectures commonplace at the Grove. He enjoyed it considerably less with his rival sitting across from him.

He reached toward the device. At the same instant, Mydei’s own hand moved toward it from the opposite side. Both stopped.

“You can try first,” Mydei magnanimously offered. “I’d rather see what you do wrong before I attempt to correct it.”

Phainon withdrew his hand entirely and stuck his tongue out. The prince rolled his eyes and grabbed the dial, placing two fingers against the brass casing, tapping around it. Whatever he was trying, nothing happened. He’d have better luck with a flute. He frowned.

Phainon watched him for a moment before picking up his pen and making a note on the assignment sheet. “No visible response to the crown prince,” he wrote.

Mydei glanced over at the words. “Very insightful.”

Another silence followed. They each tried physical activation first. The outer rings rotated independently, though neither seemed connected to the central crystal. One turned freely beneath Mydei’s fingers while the other resisted every attempt to move it. Phainon examined the engravings, checked the hinges, tested the casing for hidden seams, and even held it beneath the lecture hall’s overhead lamps in case he’d missed something, or on off chance the crystal responded to a particular wavelength of light. It did not.

Mydei tried channeling a small amount of his magic into the outer ring. The brass warmed beneath his hand. That was all that happened.

Phainon leaned closer. “Try that again?”

Mydei gave him a sidelong glance but repeated the attempt. The warmth returned, faint and localized around the ring his fingers rested against. The crystal in the center remained completely inert.

Phainon wrote that down too. “Your magic is producing a thermal response.”

For the next several minutes, they continued testing it separately. Phainon tried the same strategy, first with a controlled pulse of energy, then a sustained magical current. The device responded to each attempt with minor variations: at first the brass lit up, normal for his magic, and after a moment the crystal clouded for less than a second before becoming clear again. Nothing ever progressed beyond that.

There was, unfortunately, a fairly obvious reason their attempts were producing such different results. Mydei’s magic was blood magic, an uncommon discipline across most of the continent but considerably less unusual in his kingdom, which occupied a vast stretch of territory in the far southwest. The Kremnoans had generations of scholarship devoted to it, enough that even those without the ability to manifest blood crystals usually knew the basic principles behind its use. Mydeimos himself had been identified as a blood mage early enough that his parents had sent him to the Grove specifically to learn how to control it. There was little mystery surrounding what he could potentially do, even if the scale of his ability was unordinary.

Phainon’s magic had been another matter entirely. It had confused nearly everyone in his village when they first realized he possessed it. There was no convenient family history to consult, no local tradition that could be used as a reference, and no living elder who had seen anything quite like it before.

Cyrene’s magic, by comparison, had been remarkably easy to notice and almost immediately easy to approximate: the gift of prophecy. Nearly as soon as she had been adopted into Phainon’s family, she had begun trying to use various uninteresting household objects for divination. Dried beans had been among her first attempts. Their father had humored her, assuming it was merely a cute hobby, right up until the girl became remarkably good at predicting the village’s grain yield. After that, he had immediately gone out and bought her a proper set of shaking pebbles for kleromancy.

Phainon’s discovery had been considerably less charming. He had also been a child when it happened, playing with a length of fallen tree trunk as though it were a sword. He had been swinging it around the yard with all the seriousness he could muster, imagining himself as a warrior fighting off monsters, when the wood had begun to glow in his hands. He remembered very little about what happened after that beyond the sudden brightness, the shout from his mom watching from the yard, and the nearest scarecrow nearly being cut in two. For years afterward, the incident had been treated as an amusing family story whenever it was retold, though Phainon suspected his parents had been rather less amused while it was actually happening.

They had settled on describing it as a form of light magic, though even that was an approximation rather than a proper classification. Phainon could draw an immense amount of magical energy into himself and shape it through heat and light, but the relationship between those things was difficult to define neatly. It was less a spell he cast than a force he had learned, very gradually, to keep from getting away from him.

The more troublesome part of his magic had revealed itself later. Heat built up inside him whenever he drew on too much power, and the more forcefully he used it, the faster his internal temperature climbed. If he pushed beyond what his body could regulate, his vision would blur, his limbs would weaken, and eventually he would lose consciousness altogether. Learning to recognize the warning signs had taken years, and learning to regulate the magic itself had taken even longer.

Professor Aglaea had been instrumental in teaching him how to control the buildup rather than simply enduring it until his body forced him to stop. It had still happened with embarrassing frequency during his first year at the Grove. Phainon had passed out during practical examinations, after training exercises, and once in the middle of a particularly tedious lecture that had not even involved magic. He had learned to carry water with him everywhere. He had also learned that Hyacine kept spare cooling charms in her bag, though he had never asked why.

Across the table, Mydei’s blood magic produced another faint red shimmer across the dial’s outer markings. Phainon watched it carefully, and noted the change. Mydei’s magic now produced a trace amount of light. That was strange.

Phainon reached for his pen again. “Try the other ring,” he said.

Mydei turned the device around and pressed his thumb against the second ring. Nothing.

Phainon leaned back in his chair. “Well.”

Mydei’s eyes narrowed at the dial. For once, Phainon found himself agreeing with the man’s expression. That thing was beginning to irritate him.

The other detail Phainon had noticed when reading through the assignment in the syllabus was that the results were due at the next class. Which, considering it was Monday morning and their next Magical Devices lecture was Wednesday morning, did not bode particularly well.

Anaxa had clarified before the end of the lecture that they were expected to take their assigned artifacts with them and return them alongside their completed reports. Phainon hoped that meant none of the devices were capable of exploding, biting, poisoning, cursing, or otherwise causing serious bodily harm to the students when removed from the professor’s supervision. Given Anaxa’s teaching methods, he was not entirely confident in that assumption.

Unfortunately, it also meant that he and Mydei spent the rest of the day sitting next to each other.

Their next class was Potionmaking with Professor Tribios, another course Phainon generally enjoyed. The practical work made it considerably easier to stay engaged than a lecture alone, and Tribios was by far the gentlest soul among all the instructors Phainon had encountered at the Grove. She had never raised her voice at a student, never threatened anyone with disciplinary action, and had once spent nearly fifteen minutes patiently explaining to a first-year why their potion had turned purple without making them feel particularly stupid for having made it purple in the first place. They weren’t even supposed to be making any potions that day.

Having Mydeimos at the station beside him ruined much of that enjoyment. They had, at least, reached an agreement. “Shared academic resolve.”

That was what they had called it, though Phainon suspected Mydei had chosen the phrase because it sounded less cooperative than admitting they needed to work together. Whatever they called it, neither of them intended to spend the next two days staring at an inert brass dial and hoping it developed a conscience. Potionmaking offered an opportunity to test the device under entirely different conditions, and they had already begun discussing which ingredients might produce a reaction without damaging the artifact.

Phainon was still considering whether a low concentration of distilled mana would be preferable to an alchemical catalyst when he noticed Cyrene staring at him. She was seated at the station beside theirs, her attention very deliberately fixed on him rather than the apparatus in front of her. There was a particular look she wore when she was trying to understand a situation without asking about it outright. Phainon knew it well. She had been using it since childhood, usually shortly before predicting an event no one else had noticed coming.

He looked away. A few minutes later, a small folded piece of paper appeared at the edge of his workspace.

Phainon glanced toward Cyrene. She was already facing forward again, stirring her mixture with an expression of studied innocence. He picked up the note and unfolded it beneath the table.

In Cyrene’s familiar handwriting were five words and a plethora of punctuation marks:

Why the new seating arrangement????

Phainon looked at Mydei, who was currently measuring out an ingredient with the sort of concentration usually reserved for delicate surgical procedures. Of all the questions Cyrene could have asked, this was perhaps the least complicated to answer and the most difficult to explain without making it sound considerably more interesting to his nosey sister than it was.

He turned the paper over and began writing.

Anaxa assignment .. I might overheat myself for a medical note of absence

Cyrene was quick to read it, grinning ear to ear before returning her attention to their professor.

Tribios went over the instructions for the morning’s practical which were less intimidating than anything Anaxa had assigned them. They were making a simple fire-resistance potion, one intended to provide a temporary layer of magical protection against heat and open flame. It was a common enough preparation that Phainon had made it once or twice before, although Tribios still insisted they follow the recipe precisely rather than relying on memory.

Mydei went to the front of the classroom to collect the additives they would need while Phainon stayed behind to prepare their station. He slipped on his gloves and set the miniature cauldron onto its heating stand, checking that the little metal supports were properly secured before arranging the empty vials around it.

Cyrene had sent her own partner, Polyxia, to collect their supplies. Phainon had barely finished uncorking the base of their cauldron when she started talking. “So,” Cyrene said, pulling her gloves over her fingers, “one assignment together and now you have to sit together in every class?”

Phainon shook his head, setting the cauldron more firmly onto its stand. “We figured it would get us out of each other’s hair sooner if we used these shared classes to keep working on it.”

“I see,” There was a dangerous amount of amusement in those two words. Cyrene snapped the second glove into place. “What I would give to have seen the look on your face when you were paired together. It must have been so romantic.”

Phainon made a strangled gagging noise. “Stop talking to me.”

Cyrene laughed under her breath.

It was not as though Mydei was unattractive. Phainon was capable of acknowledging objective facts, and the other man happened to be the most attractive person in their year by a fairly wide margin. It did not mean Cyrene needed to say it aloud, particularly not when Mydei was already returning from the front of the room.

He carried a shallow tray filled with little vials, packets of dried ingredients, and several stoppered bottles. His formal uniform coat had been discarded over the back of his chair, leaving him in his shirt and waistcoat with the dark cape still hanging neatly from his shoulders. Even that looked like a calculated attempt at appearing composed. What a weirdo.

He set the tray beside the cauldron and reached into his pocket, drawing out the resonance dial. Phainon noticed that he had apparently kept it on him all morning. “Ready?” Mydei asked.

“As ready as I can be.”

They both put on their goggles. They were among Phainon’s favourite pieces of equipment at the Grove. The enchantments were simple but brilliant: the lenses adjusted themselves to the wearer’s face and would never slip down the nose, while the arms were magically prevented from pinching around the ears no matter how long they were worn. It was difficult to appreciate proper magical engineering until one had spent an entire practical trying to keep ordinary protective eyewear from sliding into a cauldron.

Mydei set the resonance dial on the table between them. “As we make the potion,” he said, “we can try to get the device to interact with the ingredients.”

Phainon nodded. He reached for the potion’s base, the largest vial on the tray, and poured it into the miniature cauldron while Mydei leaned over to activate the heating stand. He turned the setting to medium, and a faint glow appeared beneath the vessel. They would have to wait before adding anything else. Potionmaking rarely rewarded impatience, most preparations required the base liquid to reach a certain temperature before the ingredients could be introduced, and this one was no exception.

They used the time to test the dial again. Phainon took a swab of one of the flower ingredients and carefully applied a trace of its residue to the brass casing. Nothing happened.

They disinfected the dial. A drop of another ingredient followed. Again, there was no response.

Phainon wiped the surface clean and set the used swab aside. He glanced across the room. Tribios was helping another pair correct the temperature of their heating stand, completely unaware of their experiments. The water had begun to warm.

“All right,” Mydei said. “The flower first.”

He added it to the cauldron. Phainon followed with the required liquid, counting out each drop as he tipped the vial carefully above the steaming mixture.

“Why don’t you count them out as you add them?” Mydei asked.

“I do,” Phainon glanced at him. “I count them in my head.”

“We’re supposed to count them aloud. The professor can see that we’re taking each step seriously.”

Phainon looked toward Tribios again. She was still halfway across the room, patiently examining another student’s potion.

“Yeah,” he said. “I will do that when she’s watching, which she very clearly is not.”

A giggle came from his left. Phainon shot Cyrene a quick glare.

She had her back turned already.

He returned his attention to the station before he could be drawn into another conversation and found Mydei preparing the next step. He had taken two other ingredients from the tray and was measuring them into a separate vial, carefully following the quantities written on the recipe.

At least Mydei was independent. Phainon had worked with plenty of other students in Potionmaking who would reach the end of a step and stare at him until he told them what came next, despite the instructions sitting directly in front of them. Others hesitated over every measurement as though the potion might judge them personally for making a decision without permission. Mydei, at least, seemed perfectly capable of reading a recipe and proceeding without waiting for Phainon to tell him how.

He finished mixing the two ingredients together. The liquid inside the vial shifted colour into a sparkly vermillion, the active agent causing the resistance effect. Phainon watched it for a moment, thinking of the orange sunsets back home. “Should we try this one on the dial too?”

“Why do you think a resonance dial would resonate with something that causes a resistance effect?” Mydei held up the vial slightly, as though the answer were self-evident. “That’s like adding two negative numbers.”

Phainon rolled his eyes and gestured toward the cauldron. “Just pour it in while I stir.”

Mydei did. Phainon began stirring the mixture as the vermillion liquid disappeared into the warming base, muttering that he could be less of a prick about it.

Phainon kept stirring the potion with practiced flicks of his wrist, maintaining the same rhythm. Beside him, Mydei began sorting through the dry ingredients on their tray, selecting the ones associated specifically with fire resistance. He set three aside: ashbloom petals, emberroot shavings, and powdered salamander scale.

He took the first ingredient and rubbed a small amount onto a swab before reaching for the dial. A careful swab of ashbloom residue across the brass casing produced no response. Mydei wiped it clean. The emberroot received the same treatment. Nothing. He cleaned the surface again, then dusted the faintest amount of powdered salamander scale across the outer ring. The engraved markings remained dark.

Mydei stared at the dial for a moment. Then he cursed quietly in Kremnoan.

Phainon’s wrist faltered. He had heard Mydei swear in Kremnoan before, usually from across a lecture hall or buried beneath the noise of a crowded corridor. He had never been this close to it, delivered with an irritation that made the language sound elegant despite the profanity.

Phainon kept stirring. He thought about the phrase once. Then again. He was still turning it over in his head when Mydei began adding the dry ingredients to the cauldron.

“Deliverer, why did you stop stirring?”

Phainon blinked. “What?” He looked down. The spoon had been resting motionless in the potion. “Oh, shit.” He immediately started stirring again, perhaps with a little more force than necessary. Mydei gave him a long look before returning to the recipe.

Professor Tribios began making her way around the room, stopping at each station to check on the students’ progress. Phainon noticed her approaching only when she was already a few tables away.

He looked at Mydei. Mydei looked at him. The resonance dial sat in plain view between them. They reached for it at the same time.

Their hands collided, and Mydei stepped sideways at precisely the wrong moment, bumping into Phainon’s shoulder. Phainon’s stirring arm jerked with him, sending a small splash of potion over the rim and onto the surface of the desk.

Both of them froze. Tribios stopped beside their station. Her eyes moved from the spilled potion, to Phainon, to Mydei, and finally to the cauldron.

“That is quite a vigorous way of preparing the potion.”

Mydei immediately stepped away from Phainon. “I’ll get the cleaning supplies.” He disappeared toward the storage cabinet before Phainon could object.

Phainon swallowed and looked down at the cauldron, suddenly very conscious of the spoon in his hand. He adjusted his grip and tried to return to the proper rhythm.

His wrist had never failed him like this before.

Tribios leaned slightly over the cauldron, inspecting the potion with the same calm attention she gave every student's work. “Hm. At least the colour and scent are correct.” She straightened. “Please exercise caution.”

“Yes, Professor,” Phainon and Mydei said together.

Tribios gave them one last pointed look before moving on to the next station. The moment she was out of earshot, Phainon turned on Mydei.

“Great going. You bumped into me.”

“You reached for the dial without warning.”

“Because you were about to leave it sitting there!”

“I was trying to move it.”

“You could have moved it without walking right into me.”

“Yeah? You could have stopped stirring like you were trying to summon a storm.”

By the time the next break arrived, Phainon had decided he deserved lunch. More importantly, he deserved lunch away from Mydeimos.

The Grove’s dining hall was already crowded by the time he arrived, students spilling through the wide doors from lectures and practical rooms with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Phainon collected a plate of cabbage salad with goat’s cheese because the combination sounded extremely restorative after a morning spent wrestling with a potion and an artifact that hated him. He considered taking one of the more substantial dishes before deciding that consolation did not necessarily require meat.

He spotted Castorice near the windows. She was eating a plate of braised meat with a dark sauce, though she had apparently forgotten about it in favour of the notebook she had propped beside her. Phainon hesitated only briefly before carrying his lunch over.

“Mind if I sit?”

Castorice looked up. “Of course not.”

He sat across from her. For perhaps thirty seconds, they ate in relative peace. Then Phainon sighed. “You know what happened.”

She gave him a small smile. “I was there for the pairing.”

“That part was bad enough, but then Anaxa decided we needed to carry the artifact around with us until Wednesday.” Phainon stabbed a piece of cabbage with his fork. “Do you know what that means? I have to spend two entire days with Mydeimos.”

Castorice’s eyes dropped toward her notebook. Her free hand had already found her pen. Phainon noticed the first quick stroke of ink, then another.

“You’re not listening.”

“I am.” She continued writing.

Phainon narrowed his eyes. “What are you writing?”

Castorice paused just long enough to glance at the page. “Notes.”

“About what?”

“Things of note.”

That did not answer the question. Phainon took another bite of his salad. “We had to bring the dial to Potionmaking, which meant sitting together there too. We were trying to test it with the ingredients and he kept criticizing every idea I had.”

Castorice nodded sympathetically while her pen moved faster.

“He said my suggestion was like adding two negative numbers.”

Her pen stopped briefly. Then it resumed.

Phainon pointed his fork at her. “See? That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about.”

“Hm? I didn’t say anything.”

“You wrote something down just now.”

“I write down interesting things.” Castorice lowered her eyes to the notebook again, the corners of her mouth barely lifting as she continued to scribble.

He decided not to ask what she considered interesting. “And then,” he continued, “Tribios nearly caught us with the dial. We both reached for it at once, Mydei bumped into me, and I spilled potion all over the desk. She thought I was stirring too vigorously.”

That earned a quiet laugh. Phainon looked offended. “It wasn’t funny.” He sighed and pushed a piece of goat’s cheese around his plate.

Castorice finally looked up from her notebook. “At least the potion was correct, in the end?”

“That is not the point. I can’t believe I’m stuck with him. We don’t get along at all.”

“I can’t believe I’m stuck with him. We don’t get along at all.”

Mydei said it with considerably more conviction.

Cifera laughed. She was sprawled across the edge of her bed, hanging nearly halfway off it with her head and shoulders dangling toward the floor. One of her legs had been thrown over the mattress while the other rested against the wall, and her tail swayed lazily behind her. If she slipped, she would hit her head on the floor.

She had never slipped before. Mydei had stopped worrying about it.

“Welllll,” Cifera drawled, dragging the word out as she shifted just enough to peer at him upside down. “I’m with Dan Heng on this one. We already have our results pretty much figured out.”

His jaw dropped. “What? What object did you get?”

“A spinning top. It has some kind of mechanical function built into it.” She waved one hand vaguely toward the floor, as though the explanation ought to be perfectly sufficient. “We figured out that if we use magic while dropping it as it spins, it creates an air current.”

Mydei stared at her. “You already figured that out?”

“Pretty much. Dan Heng is very good at figuring things out.”

Mydei considered this. It was irritating, but fair. “How strong is the air current?”

“Strong enough to make a mess,” Her grin widened. Mydei already knew where this was going. “We tried it in the library.”

He laughed. He could picture it immediately: Dan Heng, who cared about books more than practically anyone at the Grove, even the librarians who were paid to do so, attempting to catch loose papers before they scattered between the shelves while Cifera laughed herself breathless. She had supposedly tried to fly at one point, too, though her attempts had been considerably less successful than the spinning top’s.

Cifera rolled onto her stomach, finally rescuing herself from the edge of the mattress. “So what did you get?”

Mydei reached into his pocket and pulled out the resonance dial. “This.”

Cifera sat up slightly. She had an interest in shiny things.

Mydei examined the device in his hand. “Hm,” He looked toward the floor. “We haven’t tried dropping it yet.”

He walked over to the small carpet beside her bed and held the dial out at arm’s length. He let go, and it landed with a dull clink. Nothing happened. He picked it up. Cifera watched with growing amusement as he turned it over in his hand, examining the casing as though it might reveal a hidden mechanism now. Then he tried again, this time giving the dial a small twist before releasing it. Nothing happened. Mydei sighed and bent to retrieve it.

Cifera looked up at him. “Looks like you’ve gotta experiment with that Deliverer boy, little prince.”

Mydei slowly turned toward her. “Don’t phrase it like that.”

Cifera’s tail gave an amused flick.

“Ever again.”

She snickered.

“Disgusting.”

Her unresponsive laughter followed him as he stood there holding the unresponsive dial.

Applied Spellcraft occupied a lecture room comparable in size to Anaxa’s, though Professor Cerces had managed to fit nearly twice as many students into it without making the place feel crowded. The curved tables had been arranged in broader tiers, each station supplied with a slate, a stack of practice sheets, and whatever small enchanted object the day’s exercises required.

Cerces stood at the front with one hand resting against the edge of her desk. The first half of the lesson was devoted to presenting a sequence of spells she had written across the board. Nothing particularly ambitious: a levitation charm, a brief illumination spell, a minor transmutation, a spell designed to produce a controlled current of air. Each one was meant to exercise a different principle of spell construction, and she explained the reasoning behind them before having the class attempt each in turn. Phainon copied the instructions onto the sheet between himself and Mydei, though neither of them particularly needed the notes. They had both performed every spell before. They simply happened to have a resonance dial sitting between them.

Cerces had noticed it within the first five minutes of them entering. She had not asked them to put it away. If anything, she seemed quietly pleased that they had brought an artifact into a practical spellcasting class and immediately decided to test it. Every so often, while making her way between the tables, her attention drifted toward them. She never interrupted, she only watched for a minute then continued around the room, leaving them to their testing.

Their first attempt was the levitation spell. Mydei cast it. The dial did not move. Phainon tried it. The dial did not move. They exchanged a look, neither commenting, and moved on to the illumination spell. Mydei cast first. The dial remained dull brass. Phainon followed, feeding a controlled pulse of light into the spell. The markings around the outer casing glimmered faintly, but whether that was a reaction or merely the reflected light that naturally occurred due to his light magic was impossible to determine. When the spell faded, the dial looked exactly as it had before.

The minor transmutation produced nothing. The air current produced nothing. The levitation spell produced exactly the same nothing as before. They tried the sequence again, and again. By the fourth repetition, Mydei had stopped hiding his displeasure. He stared at the dial with increasingly personal irritation.

Phainon had seen that look before, though this time it wasn’t directed at himself. Maybe he shouldn’t have been jealous that the object took his spot.

“You’re glaring at it like you can scare it straight,” he said quietly.

Mydei did not look away from the dial. “Is that wrong of me? We’re getting nowhere.”

Phainon glanced down at the brass casing. “You look like you want to kill it.”

Mydei ignored him and picked up the practice sheet, running his eyes over the next spell with a slight tightening of his jaw. He positioned his hand over the dial. The spell, like any other, required a precise verbal component followed by a controlled release of one’s latent magical ability. 

Mydei began the incantation for the levitation spell once again, but his thumb caught against the edge of the paper as he turned it, and the sheet slipped. He grabbed it instinctively, dragging his fingertip across the corner. A tiny red line of blood appeared, but he didn’t notice in time.

The magic answered before either of them had time to register what had happened. A sharp crimson shimmer flashed across Mydei’s hand, and the space around them filled with crystals that resembled rubies. They appeared in the air, dozens of them, perhaps more, suspended at varying heights around the table. They were not quite raw gemstones and not quite crystals, each one faceted with the unmistakable power of Mydei’s blood magic as his tattoos began to glow. Light fractured through their surfaces in red flashes, scattering across the desks and the floor. A few drifted near Phainon’s head.

Mydei stared. His eyes went wide as he looked from his bleeding finger to the gems and then to the dial he still held up in his hand. “Uh.” His gaze returned to his hand. “I didn’t intend– I…”

Phainon slowly reached over, dodging the crystals, and placed a hand on Mydei’s shoulder.

“Hey. Relax.” He put the smallest amount of calming magic he’d learned from Hyacine into the gesture, barely more than a quiet pulse meant to take the edge off whatever panic had seized Mydei’s thoughts.

Mydei’s eyes became even wider. His hand around the dial dropped. The device floated for a few seconds alongside all the ruby-like crystals before clattering onto the table and then the floor, taking several of the crystals with it.

Phainon took his hand away. “Mydei, are you...?”

Mydei cut him off without even looking at him. “Shut up. Help me clean this up. Damn it.”

Phainon had never seen him frazzled. Not genuinely frazzled. Mydei had been irritated, smug, exhausted, furious, sarcastic, sadistic, and offended by grading schemes. He had never looked like this.

So Phainon immediately listened and started helping. He crouched beneath the table and gathered the scattered gems, their edges cool and smooth against his palms. Mydei was already carefully inspecting the resonance dial, turning it carefully over in his hands and checking the casing for dents or any other sign that it had been damaged in the fall. By the time Phainon had collected the last fallen gem, Mydei had set it carefully on the table, and Phainon placed the gathered crystals beside it.

“Hey,” Phainon said, looking at Mydei’s hand. His tattoos had stopped glowing. “Let me see that cut.”

“It’s barely bleeding. It’s a paper cut.”

“And?”

“And I don’t need medical attention for a paper cut.”

Phainon folded his arms. “I thought you were a stickler for the rules earlier with all that counting nonsense. Sit down and give me your finger.”

Mydei remained still.

“I am not asking. I just don’t want you getting blood all over the dial.”

That got him. Mydei rolled his eyes, but he sat.

Phainon reached into the small medical kit he carried in his bag. He had started keeping it with him when passing out had become frequent enough that carrying such supplies became sensible. Most of it was cooling salves, restorative tablets, gauze, and little packets of electrolyte powder, but there was disinfecting cream in one of the smaller compartments and a collection of bandages that ranged from unnecessarily large to barely large enough for a fingertip.

He chose the smallest one. Mydei watched him apply the cream.

“It stings.”

“It’s disinfectant.”

“I know what disinfectant is.”

“Then you know why it stings.” Phainon carefully wrapped the tiny bandage around his finger. “There.”

Mydei inspected it. The bandage was almost comically small on him, but it did the job it was meant to do. “Happy?”

“Thrilled.”

Mydei pulled his hand back and glanced toward the pile of red crystals. Then toward the dial. Then toward the professor. Cerces was watching them quietly from the other side of the room. She did not look concerned. If anything, she looked delighted.

Phainon looked back at Mydei. “Well,” he said quietly, “at least we got a reaction. Or a few seconds of one.”

Mydei closed his eyes, looking for peace. “I hate you. I hate this class.”

“That’s fine, Mydeimos.”

“I hate this dial.”

“That’s the one I believe the most.”

Mydei opened his eyes and looked at the little bandage on his finger. Then at the dial. His expression darkened. “Don’t tell anyone about this.”

Phainon glanced at the gems still floating in the air, and at the ones now decorating their table. “I don’t think we have that luxury.”

They parted ways again after class. Phainon spent the next few hours in the library, although calling it studying would have been generous. The strange disturbance from Applied Spellcraft had followed him in the form of an entire room that looked as though a gust of wind had passed along the shelves. Strange.

By the time he finally gave up for the evening, he had accomplished very little. He met Cyrene in her dorm later that night, where she had already settled herself comfortably with her legs folded beneath her and a cup of tea within reach. She spent the first half hour telling him about the latest scandal among the divination students, which involved a reading performed without the subject’s permission. Apparently, that was considered a serious taboo, made worse by the fact that the person who had done it had presumably shared the results with three other students before realizing that was not a defensible choice.

Phainon listened with the appropriate amount of horror while Cyrene supplied increasingly ridiculous details. “You would think,” she said, “that after Professor Tribios spent an entire lecture explaining why consent matters in divination, they might have understood.”

“You have met university students, correct?”

“I know. That was my mistake.” Eventually she ran out of gossip and looked at him expectantly. “So. Want me to do a reading for you?”

“No.”

Cyrene blinked. “That was quick.”

“My fate is already certain.”

“Oh?”

“I am going to get a terrible grade in Anaxa’s course because I cannot figure out how to make a stopwatch-shaped object that is not actually a stopwatch do anything magical or interesting.” Phainon reached into his pocket and withdrew the resonance dial, settling it in his palm. He rubbed his thumb slowly over the dull brass casing. It looked thoroughly unimpressive in the warm light of Cyrene’s room. Heavy for its size, old-fashioned in construction. “It seems to hate magic, except for when Mydeimos cuts himself.”

Cyrene’s attention sharpened. “Wait. Mydei used blood magic on it?”

“He didn’t do it intentionally.”

“Did you make him?”

Phainon stared at her, taken aback. “I didn’t make him do anything! He was going haywire, accidentally cut himself,” Phainon said, already becoming defensive at the implication that he’d go out of his way to encourage that, “and I told him to relax. Then the thing levitated for a heartbeat and fell onto the floor.”

Cyrene considered this. “So you accidentally activated it with blood magic.”

“No. He accidentally activated his blood magic.”

“Which activated the dial. Interesting,” Cyrene reached for it. “So what is a resonance dial, anyway?”

Phainon handed it over. She turned it between her fingers, examining the casing while he explained what Anaxa had told them. “It continuously displays the actual time of day across two synchronized movements to maximize precision. Both sides are supposed to remain perfectly synchronized, which is part of the reason it has two separate mechanisms instead of one.”

Cyrene rotated the dial in her hand. “So what is that used for?”

“It has a dual-time function. You can set the left dial to your home time zone and the right dial to your local travel time zone. Since both sides are powered by independent gear trains, they can even be set to unconventional time zones that only differ by thirty-ish minutes.”

Cyrene nodded thoughtfully. “Hm. I guess that could be useful for travelling merchants.”

“Or diplomats.”

“Or people who travel a lot,” She turned it over again, inspecting the narrow casing and the translucent crystal set into its center. Her thumb hovered over the glass without touching it. “What does this gem inside of it do?”

“Gee, great question, Rene. I have no idea. Why don’t I just go ask Professor Anaxa about it?”

Cyrene frowned at him. “Hey, quit it with the snarkiness! Just because you’re all hot and bothered by your partner doesn’t mean you have to take out your frustrations on the rest of us.”

“Please stop. It’s not like that at all.”

“Really?” She gave him a deeply unconvinced look. “All this time, you haven’t noticed the way you talk about him so much that we all developed a strategy to change the topic?”

“Well, what am I supposed to do, not talk about the guy who’s trying to one-up me at everything I do?”

“Aren’t you trying to one-up him?”

“I’m not just going to let him win. That would dishonor my entire educational career.”

Cyrene sighed. “Ugh. Anyways.” She turned the dial over in her hands again, examining the little crystal set into its center. “This gem in this little thing looks like an emerald, honestly. If you really hate it, selling it might net you a good amount.”

Phainon looked at the crystal. “Hm. Any idea what emeralds represent?”

She nodded. “I do.”

“What do they represent?”

Cyrene paused, and suddenly tossed the dial back at him. “I have to sleep.”

Phainon barely caught it. “What?”

“Goodnight.”

“–Rene.”

“Out.”

She was already pointing toward the door. Phainon looked at her, then at the dial in his hand, then back at her. “Uh. Okay.”

He left the women’s dorm with considerably less information than he had hoped to gain and began the long walk back toward his own side of the school. The evening had settled properly over Grove by then, leaving the branches illuminated by small lamps and the windows of the surrounding lecture halls glowing warmly against the dark. He had only made it a short distance before a familiar voice reached him from behind.

“Leaving the women’s dorm, Deliverer?” Mydeimos stood a few paces away, watching him with an expression of deep suspicion.

“I was spending time with my sister, thank you very much. What are you doing over here?”

“I had a short meeting with Professor Tribios to explain the cause of our slip-up earlier. Rest assured, I only informed her that I slipped and nudged you, and it likely won’t reflect on your grades.”

“You really didn’t have to do that, Mydeimos. Thank you.” He paused, then added, “I never thought you’d be the one rescuing one of my grades, of all people.”

Mydei rolled his eyes. “Consider us even, then, considering what happened earlier.”

Phainon glanced at the tiny bandage still wrapped around Mydei’s finger. There was a brief silence.

Mydei looked toward the branching path ahead. “Are you headed back to the dorms now?”

“Yes. Are you?”

Mydei nodded. They both looked ahead. Then at each other. Then ahead. The problem was immediately apparent. Their dormitories were in the same direction, and there was no sensible reason for either of them to take the long way around merely to avoid walking together. Unfortunately, the boys’ dormitories were still situated at the far end of the campus, meaning the walk was not short enough to tolerate in silence.

The silence was worse than it had any right to be. Phainon had spent the entire day sitting beside him, arguing with him, watching him accidentally summon an assortment of gems, putting a bandage on his finger, and then hearing that he had gone to Tribios afterward to make sure the incident did not cost Phainon marks. Now they were expected to walk side by side as though none of that had happened.

Phainon eventually decided that ordinary conversation would be less uncomfortable than continuing to listen to their footsteps. “So…” Mydei glanced toward him. “How’s the weather in Kremnos around this time of year?”

“It’s hot.”

Phainon waited. Mydei kept walking.

“Cool.”

That was the end of it. They continued along the branch.

A minute passed. Phainon stared straight ahead, wondering whether asking about Kremnoan architecture would be too ambitious.

Eventually, Mydei spoke.“I am not one to indulge in small talk.”

Phainon scoffed. “Really? Hadn’t noticed.”

They tried, at first, to fill the silence. Neither seemed capable of producing a sentence that did not sound formal when directed at the other. Phainon complained that he wished the dormitories were not so far from the lecture halls, only for Mydei to agree that the placement was inconvenient. Mydei observed that he wished the campus offered more food options after dinner, and Phainon agreed, though neither of them had any particular interest in continuing the discussion. At one point Phainon mentioned that he wished Anaxa did not carry a gun to class, and Mydei gave a quiet, thoughtful agreement that was probably the closest either of them had come to genuine conversation all evening.

After that, they stopped trying. By the time they reached the men’s dormitories, the silence had become almost comfortable in its own way. Phainon was beginning to wonder whether they had exhausted every possible topic between them when Mydei glanced over.

“Do you have anything to do before our shared course tomorrow?”

Phainon shook his head. “No. I don’t have a class then.”

Mydei nodded, seeming to consider the information. “Good. Do you want to come to my room for a little while now and try to get this thing to do anything? I would ask to meet tomorrow morning,” Mydei continued, “but I would prefer to sleep in.”

“Really?” Phainon raised an eyebrow. “The guy who made fun of me for sleeping in is now admitting he does the same thing?”

“I made fun of you for nearly being late to the lecture. Different thing.”

Phainon could tell it had taken Mydei a great deal even to consider inviting him into his dorm room. Still, the resonance dial was not going to investigate itself. If this was their task, then they were going to have to work on it anyway.

“Fine,” Phainon said. Mydei gave a short nod, and together they turned toward the stairs.

Mydei’s room was, to Phainon’s immediate and private annoyance, considerably more put together than his own. He would never say that aloud. There was no reason to give Mydeimos the satisfaction. Still, the comparison was difficult to ignore.

The bed was made, for one, the black pillowcases and heavy blankets arranged with such precision that Phainon wondered whether anyone had actually slept beneath them yet. Even the fabric looked expensive, soft enough to sink into and thick enough to make the dormitory’s standard furnishings seem drab and miserable by comparison.

A few pieces of Kremnoan artwork hung on the walls, most of them depicting landscapes and figures rendered in a unique style Phainon did not recognize, though he could guess why Mydei had brought them. They had the quiet quality of home, he imagined.

Phainon had a few things from Aedes Elysiae himself. Two pieces hung above his desk, though calling them artwork was generous. They were sheets of parchment covered in bright, uneven scribbles made by children from the village when he had gone home between sessions. One had a lopsided drawing of the sea that looked more like a very large blue worm. He liked them anyway. They were the closest thing he had to home on the other side of the continent.

Mydei’s bookshelf was just as orderly as the rest of the room. The books appeared to be arranged by subject, with dividers separating magical theory, history, practical spellcraft, and several volumes written in Kremnoan. His desk had little clutter beyond what he actually needed, and even that had been arranged with an irritating degree of competence.

Then Phainon noticed the stationary. Pink.

He stared at it for a moment before realizing Mydei had noticed him staring. “They’re just a gift,” Mydei said.

“Really?” Phainon turned toward him, unable to keep the amusement from his voice. “I think they suit you. You should bring them to class sometime.”

“I think I would rather die.”

Phainon smiled and finally looked away, though the image of Mydei using pink paper for his meticulously organized notes was now firmly lodged in his mind.

Mydei sat on the edge of his bed while Phainon took the desk chair. Phainon had never imagined he would be sitting in Mydeimos’s dorm room. He might have continued staring at the shelves if he had not suddenly remembered why he was there.

“Oh.”

Phainon reached into his pocket, pulled out the resonance dial, and tossed it across the room. Mydei caught it without difficulty.

He examined the dial for a moment before reaching toward the desk. He picked up a small pin, pricked the inside of his forearm, and watched a bead of blood form against his skin. Phainon leaned forward slightly as Mydei brought the dial into his palm.

The levitation spell came again. Mydei spoke the same words under his breath, concentrating hard enough that the muscles around his eyes tightened. The dial remained exactly where it was, heavy and dull in his hand. No red shimmer crossed the brass this time. No crystals emerged from his skin or blossomed across the floor. Even the central crystal remained stubbornly cloudy and inert.

After nearly a minute, he lowered his hand and wiped the blood from his arm with a towel.

Phainon watched him curiously. “How did figuring out you have blood magic go?”

Mydei looked over at him. “That’s quite the question.”

“Well, you didn’t like the small-talk questions either.”

Mydei gave a quiet huff through his nose. He looked down at the pin between his fingers before setting it aside. “I found out when I was a child. I injured myself while training, and red gems began growing out of me.”

“Out of you? Jeez.” Phainon sat back in the chair. “Wait. You trained as a kid? A formal training?”

“Yes,” Mydei leaned back against the edge of his bed. “Strength is important in Kremnos. Particularly for the royal family. There are expectations placed upon us from an early age, I had a great deal to live up to.”

Phainon knew very little about Kremnoan culture beyond what he had picked up from lectures and the occasional stray comment from Mydei himself. “Wow,” he said. “I only know a bit about Kremnoan culture, but that’s really cool. Do you have any siblings?”

Mydei shook his head.

“Man,” Phainon said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I can kind of see why you get so intense about grades, then. I mean, I can’t relate fully, but I feel a bit of pressure too.”

Mydei’s eyes moved toward him. “How so?”

Phainon glanced around the room before settling back into the chair. He told him about Aedes Elysiae. About how small it was, how far it sat from the major cities and how most families survived by relying on what they could grow, catch, build, or trade.

He explained that neither he nor Cyrene had ever expected to attend a place like Grove. Their scholarships had made it possible, Cyrene’s because her divination had been powerful enough to attract attention from the people who came to assess her, and Phainon’s because those same people had discovered that his light magic was unlike anything they had encountered before.

They had wanted to study it. Phainon had wanted to study it too. That had been the beginning of everything.

Mydei listened without interrupting. When Phainon finished, he was quiet for a moment. “So it’s not only maintaining the scholarship,” he said. “You represent your village.”

Phainon shrugged. “Something like that. I just want to learn what I can while I’m here. Cyrene’s the real talent.”

“And you?”

“I’m trying to keep up. What about you? Any big plans for when you’re done here?”

Mydei looked down at his hands. The dial rested between them, its brass casing catching the dim light from the room. “I’m not sure I’m very wanted back home.”

Phainon frowned. “What? You’re their prince, though?”

“My father does not have much faith in my ability to control my powers.” Mydei's voice remained level, but the words carried a weight Phainon had not expected. “That is why he sent me here. I am not certain he would want me back soon.”

He turned the dial over in his hand.

“My father’s rule is… they use the term questionable. I would prefer to return when I am capable of standing before him without giving him cause to challenge my ability. If I am to return, I want to do so unchallenged and unquestionable.”

For the first time, the title he had thrown at Mydei so freely in their first year felt rather different. Crown Prince. He had used it because it irritated him. Because Mydei hated it. Because it had been the easiest way to puncture that infuriating composure. He had never considered what it might mean to Mydei beyond that.

“Wow,” Phainon said quietly. “Sorry if I ever came off as an asshole for throwing the title around. I really had no idea.”

“Well. Perhaps I haven’t been the most charitable toward you either.”

Phainon smiled faintly. “It’s okay, man. Anyways. Back to that dial.”

Mydei sighed. For the next several hours, they tried nearly everything they could think of.

They examined the casing with small tools, attempted spells that made less sense as the evening wore on, and tried directing magic into the central crystal from different angles. They tested physical movement, temperature, sustained magical current, brief pulses, levitation, alteration, illumination, and so on, but their dial remained indifferent. At first, they recorded each failure carefully. Eventually they stopped writing them down at all.

The longer they worked, the more their attempts deteriorated. Phainon tried speaking a spell into the dial while holding it upside down. Mydei tried another while standing on the opposite side of the room and projecting his deep voice, as if distance might somehow be the missing ingredient. Eventually they became tired enough that neither of them could tell whether their experiments were still productive.

Phainon held the dial between his palms. “Activate, you stupid little clock.”

Mydei, now lying back against the pillows with one arm over his eyes, said, “Please. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“You try.”

“I have been trying for three hours.”

“Try harder.”

Mydei lifted his head, took the dial, and stared at it. “Do the thing.”

Phainon started laughing.

Mydei looked at him. “What?”

“You sound like you’re talking to a dog.”

“I am exhausted,” Mydei looked back down at the dial. “Please do the thing.”

That made Phainon laugh harder. Eventually, neither of them could keep pretending they were going to accomplish anything else that night. Phainon stood, stretched, and gathered the scattered tools from the desk while Mydei placed the dial carefully beside his books.

“I’m going to let you sleep before you start asking the clock to explain itself,” Phainon headed for the door, still smiling to himself. “Good night, Mydeimos.”

“…Good night, Deliverer.”

It was the first time he’d heard it said earnestly by the other.

Phainon did not know what to do with himself the next morning. He had dreamt about red gems. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, growing across the walls of a classroom until there was scarcely any room left to stand. In the middle of it all had been Mydeimos, wearing their Grove uniform in pink, standing perfectly still while holding the resonance dial out toward him. It had made no sense even while he was dreaming, and it made considerably less sense now that he was awake.

It was not the first time he had dreamt about Mydeimos. That fact was not particularly alarming on its own. They spent half their waking lives competing with each other, it was hardly surprising that his brain had begun dragging Mydei into his sleep as well. Usually, however, the dreams had at least retained the decency of being vaguely comprehensible. This one contained pink, red, and a clock. Perhaps he was losing his mind. Perhaps that was why the dial would not talk to him.

Tuesday arrived with the assignment still stubbornly unfinished and only one day left before they had to submit their report. Phainon spent the morning trying not to think about it, which naturally resulted in thinking about it constantly. By the time he reached History, he had already considered several new approaches, rejected most of them, and decided that if the dial continued refusing to respond by the evening he was going to learn a thing or two about defenestration.

He arrived right on time and found the only empty seat available, between Mydeimos on his right and Cifera on his left.

Cifera greeted him with a grin as he sat down, her tail curling lazily around the leg of her chair. Mydei merely glanced at him before turning his attention toward the front of the lecture hall, looking far too composed for a person who had spent the previous evening begging a clock to “do the thing.”

Professor Cerydra entered a few minutes later and began the lecture without preamble. She had a remarkable habit of recounting historical events as though she had witnessed them, complete with details no textbook ever had. Phainon had once asked Cyrene how old she thought Cerydra was. Cyrene had refused to answer on the grounds that divination concerning a professor’s age was a terrible idea. So Phainon had no idea whether Cerydra had actually been present for half the events she described.

He tried to pay attention. He really did. Unfortunately, the resonance dial was sitting beneath the desk between him and Mydei, and every few minutes one of them would glance down at it as though the device might have developed a conscience during the night.

During a section on historical magical instruments, Cerydra described the ways scholars had once attempted to identify an artifact’s purpose through its relationship to its surroundings. Rather than simply testing the object directly, they would place it in locations or situations associated with its presumed function and observe whether its magic behaved differently.

Phainon slowly turned toward Mydei. Mydei was already looking at him.

Cifera noticed their quiet interaction. Her eyes moved between them, then down toward the dial.

Phainon tapped the edge of his notebook. Mydei gave the smallest nod.

It was not much of a plan, but by now they had learned that the dial seemed to resent any straightforward experimentation. Perhaps a less direct approach would finally produce a result. They waited until Cerydra had moved on to another example before quietly setting the dial beneath the table. Phainon drew a tiny illumination spell over it, then extinguished it. Mydei followed by feeding a controlled trace of blood magic into the outer casing without actually cutting himself, watching for the faint red shimmer they had seen once before.

Nothing.

They tried placing it against an old history textbook.

Nothing.

Phainon whispered a timekeeping spell at it.

Nothing.

Mydei turned one of the textbook pages beneath the dial, as though exposing it to a different historical era might somehow offend it into action.

Still nothing.

Cifera had been watching the entire process from the other side of Phainon. Eventually she leaned closer. “You two are trying to make a clock do homework? I want one.”

Phainon kept his eyes on his notes. “We are conducting an experiment.”

Cifera’s grin widened. “With a history textbook?”

“It is a historically relevant environment.”

Mydei gave Phainon a flat look, calling back to their Modes of Reasoning course. “That was not the strongest argument you could have made.”

“You’re welcome to contribute. You put a book underneath it.”

“I did. A historically relevant book, by your logic.”

Cifera covered her mouth, shoulders shaking. Phainon glanced toward her. “Don’t encourage this guy.”

“Whaaat? I think you’re both doing very well,” she lied.

Mydei looked back at the dial. Then, after a moment, he quietly pushed it toward Phainon. Phainon placed it on top of Cerydra’s textbook. He placed his own hand over it.

Nothing.

Cifera’s shoulders began shaking again. “You know, little prince, if this is how you two spend your evenings, I think I understand why you look so tired.” Her tail flicked happily against the chair as Phainon allowed his head to rest upon his arms on the desk.

The next class was Duelling. Professor Chartonus had the unfortunate habit of treating their class as though every student had enrolled with the express purpose of learning how to beat each other unconscious. Phainon generally adored him for it. He also never wrote home to his mother about it.

Today, however, he was less interested in the prospect of fighting than he was in dueling the resonance dial. Phainon had begun to suspect it might actually be defective. He quickly changed into the duelling uniform before joining the rest of the class in the outdoor sparring grounds, where a large circle had been drawn onto the floor.

Chartonus divided the class into pairs of roughly equal prowess, though there was little point in waiting for the announcement when half the students already knew where they were going. Phainon retrieved his greatsword from the equipment rack and rolled his shoulders as he crossed the practice floor. This was the sole class in which their partnership was not only normalized, but anticipated.

Mydei was waiting on the other side. His weapon-of-choice gauntlets were already secured around his hands, polished metal shining as he flexed his fingers. There was no surprise in his expression when Chartonus looked between them and gave a short nod.

“You two.”

There had been a time when Phainon and Mydeimos being paired together would have drawn an audience, but after two years of repeatedly ending their long matches in ties, most of the Grove had learned there were better uses for their time. True equals, some had called them, when their very first spar had finally resulted in a stalemate after ten hours of attempts to best each other.

Phainon took his position. Mydei lowered his hands. Chartonus gave the signal.

The greatsword came around in a broad arc, forcing Mydei backward before he stepped inside its reach. Phainon twisted the blade aside just as a gauntleted fist came toward his ribs, catching the blow against the flat of the sword. The impact travelled up his arms.

Mydei was quick with the gauntlets, faster than most people expected from someone who preferred brute force when given the opportunity. Phainon had learned not to let him establish a rhythm. He drove forward, forcing Mydei to retreat across the practice floor, then brought the greatsword down hard enough that Mydei had to cross both of his arms to block. The floor cracked beneath his boots.

“Still standing?” Phainon asked.

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

That request was always when things became dangerous between them. Phainon swung again.

Mydei ducked beneath the wide blade and drove his shoulder into Phainon’s chest. Phainon stumbled backward, recovered his footing, and brought the sword around in time to stop another strike. Their weapons met with a sharp clang.

The resonance dial was in Phainon’s pocket. He had put it there before class with the thought that perhaps they could test it during the practical portion. Now, with Mydei’s gauntlet locked against his blade, he wondered whether that had been a good idea. 

Mydei seemed to have the same thought. His eyes flicked briefly toward Phainon’s pocket.

Phainon broke away and swung again, feeding a little more magical energy into the blade than he normally would. Yellow-white light ran along the greatsword’s edge.

Mydei raised one gauntlet, pricking his arm with a claw and then striking. The impact sent a burst of red crystal skittering across the floor.

A few classmates gasped. Blood magic was still unusual at the Grove, but Mydei had used it often enough during their weekly sparring for it not to be unheard of.

Phainon, however, felt the resonance dial shift beneath his uniform. His eyes widened, and they both faltered.

Mydei saw it. The dial had not activated, but the brass casing had grown warm and lit up.

They separated and, without words, prepared for another exchange of blows to recreate whatever had just happened. This time Phainon drove Mydei toward the edge of the practice circle, forcing him to block high before sweeping the sword low to trip him. Mydei jumped over the strike, twisted in midair, and landed behind him.

Phainon spun to meet him. A glowing fist stopped a breath from his jaw. His glowing sword stopped against Mydei’s side.

The entire exchange had lasted perhaps three seconds. Phainon could feel the heat of Mydei’s body through the narrow space between them. Mydei’s fist remained raised beside his face, close enough that Phainon could see the faint scratches along the metal of the gauntlet. His own blade was just resting against Mydei’s ribs.

“Stalemate,” Chartonus called.

They stepped apart, but neither looked satisfied. Phainon reached for the dial, just to check its state, but it wasn’t burning a hole through his pockets anymore.

“Again,” Mydei said.

Chartonus raised an eyebrow from across the room. “You have a draw.”

“We’re testing something,” Mydei said, wiping sweat from his brow with his thick forearm. Chartonus stared at them for a moment before deciding that whatever they were doing was preferable to whatever the rest of the class had planned.

“Fine. Again.”

Phainon slipped the dial from his pocket and tossed it to Mydei. “Can you try more blood magic while we’re fighting?”

“You’re serious? That sounds like a terrible idea.”

“You’ve had worse.” Phainon smiled.

They returned to their positions, but this time Mydei kept the dial in one hand.

The match began. Phainon came at him hard.

Mydei blocked, shifted, and struck. Phainon caught the gauntlet against his sword and twisted the blade, forcing Mydei to turn with him. The dial remained trapped between Mydei’s palm and the metal of his gauntlet.

Mydei attempted another controlled pulse of blood magic as Phainon dodged. They fought harder, growing exhilarated from it.

The dial passed between them several times, thrown from hand to hand whenever one needed both arms. They each tried channeling magic through it during strikes, during blocks, while moving, while stationary, and once while Mydei had Phainon’s sword pinned beneath one knee. Eventually the experiment became indistinguishable from the duel.

Mydei’s breathing had grown heavier. Phainon’s arms ached from repeatedly catching his blows. Their combat uniforms were rumpled, hair dishevelled, and both had acquired enough dust from the practice floor onto their faces. It only made Mydei look more handsome in a rugged sense, which spurred Phainon on further. He swung.

Mydei caught the blade between both gauntlets.  They strained against each other. The dial was trapped between their hands. Phainon could feel the warmth of Mydei’s magic against his own, like two immutable forces pressed together. For one brief second, the crystal in the centre of the dial shone.

“Did you see that?” Phainon asked, grinning.

“Yes.”

They were still standing far too close to each other. Phainon became aware of it first.

Then Chartonus’s voice cut across the room.

“If you two are finished staring at the little clock, I would like my classroom back.”

Mydei cleared his throat. Around them, several students were watching closely. Cifera was openly grinning as Castorice continued to write furiously into her notebook.

Chartonus gestured toward the centre of the practice floor. “Hm. Final exchange. Make it count.”

Phainon raised his sword.

Mydei lifted his gauntlets.

The dial sat between them.

They charged.

The final exchange was fast enough that Phainon barely had time to think. Steel met crystal and red light flashed across the floor. He drove Mydei backward, Mydei broke the momentum with a rough shoulder check, and Phainon turned with it, bringing the greatsword around just as Mydei’s fist came toward his chest.

They stopped at the same instant. Phainon’s blade rested against Mydei’s shoulder. Mydei’s gauntlet stopped against Phainon’s chest. Neither could reasonably advance without giving the other the opening to finish.

Chartonus sighed.

“Tie.”

“Worth a try,” Mydei stared down at the device with contempt, chest rising and falling rapidly, trying to catch his breath. “We have half of a day left.”

The final exchange had ended cleanly enough. There was no reason to remain where they were, locked in that awkward approximation of a victory. Phainon’s greatsword still rested against Mydei’s shoulder, its edge no longer glowing. Mydei’s gauntlet was pressed lightly against Phainon’s chest, the metal warm even through the fabric of his uniform.

Phainon became aware of his own breathing. He tried to slow it, just as Mydei did. It was imperceptible at first: one measured breath drawn through the nose, then another, each exhale longer than the last. The rise and fall of his rival’s chest gradually became steadier beneath the disordered fabric of his uniform. Phainon found himself following the rhythm. It helped, but it was also difficult to concentrate when Mydei was standing so close.

The flush of exertion had not yet left his skin. A warm red had gathered beneath his cheekbones and along his throat, deepening wherever the collar of his uniform had fallen open. The blood magic had left its other mark as well. Fine lines of crimson light glimmered beneath his skin, tracing the tattoos that wound over his forearms and disappeared beneath the sleeves.

Phainon had seen them before, having watched Mydei use blood magic dozens of times. He had never had quite this view or angle. The collar of Mydei’s uniform had shifted at some point, exposing a narrow stretch of his chest. More of the glowing pattern disappeared beneath the cloth there, suggesting shapes Phainon could only guess at: lines curving over his substantial muscle, fragments of intricate designs vanishing beneath the fabric.

He wondered, eyes raking over it all, what the tattoos looked like beneath the uniform. Whether the crimson light followed the same patterns over Mydei’s ribs and stomach. Whether the glow was brighter there. Whether the markings were as elaborate as the ones he could see. Whether they changed when Mydei was—

Phainon stopped that thought before it could finish.

Mydei’s eyes flicked toward him. “You all right? You’re staring.”

Phainon smiled and nodded, though a small part of him suspected the heat in his own face had very little to do with exertion.

At last Mydei withdrew his gauntlet. He stepped away and rolled one shoulder, then reached down to unfasten the straps of his greaves. The movement pulled his uniform into different lines, revealing another brief glimpse of glowing red beneath the fabric.

Phainon looked away. Then his eyes returned.

Mydei was bent slightly as he worked the fastenings loose, thick forearms flexing beneath the remnants of the blood magic’s glow. The tattoos pulsed faintly with his heartbeat, brightening and dimming in time with the last remnants of exertion.

Phainon found himself wondering again how far the pattern went. He was beginning to suspect the device was not the only thing he had been studying recently.

Phainon had always noticed Mydeimos, which was hardly a remarkable fact. It was difficult not to notice the person who consistently ranked within a few points of him. Phainon knew the particularites of his fighting style, the cadence of his footsteps, the expressions he made when a classmate asked a stupid question. He sort of also knew how Mydei’s mouth twisted when he was trying not to laugh and how his eyes narrowed whenever he was genuinely annoyed. He knew what his blood magic looked like when it first began to gather beneath his skin.

What had changed was that Phainon had begun noticing that he noticed. That was more difficult to explain. He became aware of it again while they changed out of their duelling uniforms. Mydei was standing a short distance away, fastening the collar of his ordinary Grove uniform. The traces of crimson light had faded from his skin, though a few remained visible beneath the tattoos on his forearms. Phainon caught himself looking at them again. This was becoming a problem.

Their break between courses was long enough for both of them to return to their dormitories, but Phainon found himself lingering near the grounds while Mydei collected his things. When Mydei asked whether he was eating lunch now, Phainon said yes. When Mydei suggested they eat together, Phainon agreed far too quickly.

They ended up sitting beneath one of the enormous branches overlooking the lower glowing gardens, where students gathered in small groups with their lunches. Phainon had brought a fairly ordinary meal and was halfway through it when the conversation drifted toward cooking.

Mydei mentioned that he liked it.

Phainon looked up. “You cook? I didn’t know that.”

“Why would you? You have never asked.”

“Well, no. I suppose I haven’t.”

Mydei gave him a sideways look before pulling his lunch out of his bag. Mydei usually brought his own food in a sleek metal container. It looked like one of the newer models with a highly accurate temperature seal, designed to keep food at precisely the temperature it had been stored at until opened.

Phainon leaned forward slightly. “Do you ever make Kremnoan food?”

Mydei looked almost offended by the question. “Of course I do.”

“Wow.” Phainon paused. “I’ve never had it. I mean, I’d like to, but my budget is a little tight.”

Mydei rolled his eyes. Without another word, he pushed the container toward Phainon and opened the lid. Inside were several pieces of richly browned meat coated in a dark, glossy sauce, steam barely visible despite the magical temperature seal.

“Braised Cloudsheep ribs,” Mydei explained. “In soy sauce. Go ahead already.”

Phainon reached for a piece. He bit into it, and the meat practically fell apart. A warm, savory sweetness spread across his tongue, followed by the deeper flavour of the sauce and the faint richness left behind by slow braising. A quiet, involuntary sound escaped him.

Mydei reacted as though Phainon had just set off an explosive, physically leaning away as his eyes widened. Then he burst out laughing. A full, hearty laugh.

Mydei bent forward, one hand braced against his knee as his shoulders shook. “Haikas,” he managed between laughs. “What the hell do you usually eat to react like that?”

Phainon’s entire face had gone red. He grabbed his water bottle and drank far more than necessary, in hopes of hiding his own reaction behind it. Mydei was still laughing at him when he set the bottle down, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Salads,” he said. That only made Mydei laugh harder.

“You poor bastard.”

Phainon glared at him.

Mydei was still grinning. Phainon had seen Mydei smile before, usually at his expense, with that infuriating little curve at the corner of his mouth. This was different, his entire face had opened up. His eyes had narrowed with laughter and the sharpness Phainon was accustomed to feeling for had disappeared entirely. He looked really happy.

Phainon forgot about the resonance dial. For the rest of their break, the only thing he could think about was that he had never seen Mydeimos laugh like this before, and that he wanted to hear it again.

Advanced Glamours began with roughly ten minutes of Professor Aglaea explaining the day’s material before she dismissed the class into a work period. Phainon appreciated the arrangement. It gave him plenty of time to think. He and Mydei took up seats together, with Castorice joining them at the same table. The dial was placed between their notebooks.

“We know it can react to magic,” he said eventually. “Barely. So there has to be a variable we’re missing. We were throwing each other across the practice grounds, which we can’t replicate now because…”

“Aglaea would throw us out.”

“Exactly. So that’s not useful,” Phainon tapped his fingers against the desk. “What other factors changed?”

Mydei tapped his fingers on his notebook. “During the spar, our magic was being channeled through something else. Your sword and my gauntlets.”

“Hm…” Their weapons had both been designed to conduct magical energy, and both had been carrying their respective magic during the exchange. Perhaps the dial was responding to the interaction between their magic and another magical medium rather than their magic itself. “Do you have anything we could try to channel magic into?”

Mydei was already reaching into his bag. He rummaged around for a moment before pulling out one of the pink pens Phainon had seen in his room.

“Wait. Those are the ones from last night? You really brought them?”

Across the table, Castorice’s head lifted. “You... you were together last night?” Her eyes widened comically.

Phainon looked over at her, his arms draped casually across the desk. “Yeah?”

Castorice blinked so much she might’ve had debris stuck under her lashes. Then she quietly reached for her notebook. Her pen began moving very fast.

Phainon watched her go at it. Weird. He turned back toward Mydei.

“Can I?”

Mydei handed him the pink pen. It felt absurdly delicate compared to the equipment they had been working with all week. Phainon knew several spells designed to enchant writing apparatuses, though he still wasn’t certain whether the dial required an actual spell or merely a magical charge.

He decided to try both. He fed a small amount of energy into the pen first, and its pink casing began to glow. Mydei leaned closer to watch his efforts.

Phainon muttered an incantation beneath his breath, directing the spell into the pen’s mechanism. The glow strengthened, and the tip lowered itself toward a scrap of parchment. It began to write on a scrap piece of parchment they’d laid out.

M.

Y.

D.

E.

I.

The two of them stared at the name appearing across the parchment in fancy lettering. Their eyes then moved to the resonance dial. Nothing. Maybe the dial liked the colour green more than pink. Phainon let the magic go, and the pen dropped onto the parchment.

Cifera appeared at the edge of their table a moment later, having noticed their latest experiment from across the room and pulled up a chair next to Castorice. “Still struggling with this thing? Maybe it was the metal that helped during Dueling,” she suggested. “Your weapons were metal, weren’t they?”

Phainon wasn’t convinced, but at this point he was willing to try almost anything. “Whatever. Let’s test it too.” He looked toward Mydei. “Got anything metallic on you?”

Mydei chewed briefly at his bottom lip as he thought. Then he reached up into his hair and carefully removed the small clasp that held the end of the tiny braid woven in. Without it, the braid loosened slightly against the side of Mydei’s head.

Mydei set the clasp beside the dial. He placed his fingers against the metal and began feeding magic his own into it, muttering the levitation spell. The clasp lifted from the desk almost immediately, hovering a few inches above the surface. The dial did nothing. Mydei maintained the spell for several seconds before gently lowering the clasp.

Phainon groaned and let his forehead fall briefly against his hand.

“How interesting If I’m not mistaken, that device is Anaxa’s.”

Phainon jumped. He turned around so quickly that his chair scraped against the floor. Professor Aglaea stood directly behind them.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Mydei gestured toward the dial, holding it up a little closer to her. “It’s our assignment. We’ve been attempting to determine its function, but we’ve had very little luck getting it to respond.”

“Only a few minor reactions,” Phainon added. “It warmed up once or twice. Mydei managed to make it levitate for a few seconds yesterday, and today the central crystal lit up briefly during our spar.”

Aglaea leaned over the table. She examined the dial without touching it. Her gaze moved from the device to the pink pen, then to the little metal clasp, and finally toward the two of them. Then she smiled.

“You two have never worked together on an assignment before, have you?”

Phainon glanced toward his rival. “No, I suppose we haven’t. Honestly, I don’t mind it as much as I thought I would,” he shrugged. “We share some common ground, I suppose.”

“Really?” There was a strange note in Aglaea’s voice, and her smile deepened. “Perhaps that might help you with your assignment.”

Phainon frowned. Well, yes. That was the entire point of a partnered assignment, wasn’t it? Two people were supposed to divide the work, bring different perspectives to the problem, and ideally produce a better result in a more time-effective manner. He did not see what was particularly profound or new about that. The principle hadn’t applied to this assignment, clearly.

Aglaea left them to it.

“We already work together,” Phainon said, mostly to himself.

Mydei glanced toward him. “Not particularly well,” he leaned back in his chair, arms folding over his chest. “We have spent most of this assignment trying separate approaches and then comparing the results afterward. Maybe she’s implying that’s hardly the same as actually coordinating.”

Phainon frowned. He knew Mydei had a point, which made the comment more irritating than it would have been. “Then we coordinate more. What does that look like?”

“I don’t know.”

Phainon stared at him. “Why not? You just criticized me for not doing it.”

“I said I knew we weren’t doing it. I didn’t say I knew how to fix it.”

Phainon rubbed his forehead and looked down at the dial. They had already established that it could react to both of their magic. Mydei’s blood magic had caused the markings to shimmer. Phainon’s magic had warmed the brass and made the crystal cloud. During their duel, the reaction had been stronger than either of those instances, though even then it had again only lasted for a few seconds. They had both been using their magic at the same time, but they had also been moving, attacking, blocking, and forcing their magic through weapons built to conduct it. There were too many variables.

Before Phainon could settle on which one to investigate first, Cipher leaned across the table and peered over Castorice’s shoulder. Castorice did not seem to mind in the slightest. Cipher’s head tilted as she followed the lines of cramped handwriting, occasionally making a quiet noise of interest while Castorice continued writing without bothering to cover the page. Phainon watched the two of them for a moment with increasing disbelief. He was never allowed to glance at the pages without being met with a suspicious look as it was pulled away from him. Real fair of you, Castorice.

Mydei seemed less interested in their little arrangement. He leaned forward again, resting his forearms against the desk as he looked toward Castorice. “Do you have any ideas? You’re better at practical spellwork than either of us, and the levitation spell did produce a reaction for a little while yesterday.”

Castorice finally looked up from her notes. “Hyacine and I got our object to resonate.”

“You did?”

Castorice nodded and turned her notebook slightly, though not enough for Phainon to actually read it. “We had the knight chess piece. We tried using different spells on it, but it didn’t respond until we put it on an actual board and used it as a normal piece. After that, it began reacting whenever we moved it.”

“You used it for its intended function,” Mydei glanced toward him. “Have we actually used the dial as a clock?”

It sounded ridiculous when phrased that way. “We haven’t, but there’s a reason for that,” He picked up the dial and held it out toward Castorice. “The clocks don’t move.”

Castorice leaned closer, examining the two faces. The hands were fixed exactly where they had been when Anaxa first handed them the device at the front of the classroom. Phainon had assumed that was part of the artifact’s condition rather than a clue. The assignment had called it a resonance dial, after all, not a clock.

Cipher had abandoned Castorice’s notes by then and leaned her head against Castorice’s shoulder, peering at the dial from that position. “Maybe you have to twist it to set a time?”

Mydei shook his head. “We tried. The mechanisms won't move.”

“Either of them?” Castorice asked.

“Neither,” Phainon said. “They are firmly lodged in place. I’ve tried winding them, turning the outer rings, even pushing the hands directly. Nothing wants to move.”

Cipher hummed thoughtfully against Castorice’s shoulder, but Phainon was already looking back toward Mydei. “Say, do you know any time-related spells we could try on it?”

Mydei stared at him sternly. “Are you kidding? Neither of us specializes in temporal magic. We haven’t even learned those spells yet. If we start improvising with something like that, one of us is going to make the dial explode, or worse.”

“We don’t know that.”

“We know enough. Professor Anaxa implied that our current skillset would be sufficient.”

“At least I’m coming up with ideas instead of tearing down every idea we miraculously get.”

“I am not tearing them down. I’m pointing out when they’re bad ideas, Haikas.”

“You’ve spent half the assignment doing exactly that!”

“Have better ones, then. Because half your ideas have been bad.”

“And yours have been great?” Phainon stared at him, increasingly annoyed. The dial sat forgotten between them as the argument moved from one theory to the next, each new suggestion immediately challenged by the other until neither could remember which idea they had originally been defending. Castorice eventually returned to her writing, Cipher remained comfortably draped against her shoulder, and neither seemed particularly inclined to intervene as Phainon and Mydei continued bickering for the remainder of the work period. When Aglaea dismissed the class, the two of them gathered their things without another word to each other and went their separate ways, each still fuming.

Mydeimos had been walking for long enough that he had stopped keeping track of where he was going. There had been no destination when he left the lecture hall, only the vague conviction that continuing to move was preferable to sitting somewhere and driving himself further up a wall. The argument with Phainon had left an unpleasant residue in his mind. Every time he thought he had found a useful approach to the artifact, Phainon had found a reason to challenge and knock the idea down, and every time Phainon had proposed another theory, Mydei had done exactly the same. He had spent the better part of an hour afterward thinking of better arguments he should have made.

He turned down another branch of the campus and nearly walked straight into a familiar head of pink hair. Cyrene stopped short as well. Her eyes widened when she recognized him, and then her expression brightened with almost suspicious enthusiasm.

“Oh, just the person I was hoping to see! Can I do a reading for you, Mydeimos?”

Mydei stared at her. Of all the people he might have encountered while trying to clear his head, Phainon’s sister had been rather low on the list. He looked at her cheerful expression with suspicion. “Did the Deliverer put you up to this?”

Cyrene shook her head immediately. “Absolutely not, and I would never listen to him. Phainon would kill me if he knew what I was doing.”

A small, deeply uncharitable part of Mydei found the prospect of doing anything Phainon would disapprove of particularly appealing. If Cyrene was offering him an opportunity to do precisely the sort of thing her brother would object to, there was little reason for him not to accept.

Mydei’s expression softened by the slightest degree. “Fine.”

Cyrene looked pleased with herself. “Really?”

“Yes. ”

She laughed and gestured toward a nearby wooden bench beneath the canopy of green leaves overhead. Mydei followed her over, still regarding her with mild suspicion as she led him over. He sat at one end, leaving enough room between them to make it clear that whatever this reading may involve, he had not agreed to become particularly intimate about it.

Cyrene settled beside him and began arranging the little collection of divination tools she carried with her. “All right,” she declared with a flourish. “Let’s see what the fates have to say about you.”

She produced a small deck of tarot cards from the admittedly cute pink satchel at her side and began shuffling them with practiced ease. Mydei watched the cards pass between her fingers, colourful illustrations flashing briefly before disappearing back into the deck. “Three cards. Past, present, and future. Nothing too complicated,” She fanned the deck across her lap and held it toward him. “Pick one.”

Mydei drew a card from the middle. Cyrene turned it over and studied the illustration of a group of men that looked to be in some sort of conflict, the whole house angry. Her expression changed almost imperceptibly before she looked back at him. “This is the Five of Wands. It alludes to strife, conflict. A difficult past, usually one shaped by having to prove yourself against other people.”

Mydei stared at the card for a moment before giving a short laugh. “That is remarkably vague.”

Cyrene smiled. “Well, tarot usually is!”

“No, I meant… It is remarkably accurate.” He looked at the card again. If he did not know better, he might have assumed she had already known about his childhood or his family. But she certainly had not. She had no reason to know those details, and for all his downsides, Phainon had never struck him as the sort to casually disseminate another person’s life story. Perhaps, then, the Deliverer had not been exaggerating about her prophetic talent.

Cyrene gathered the card and placed it aside. “All right. One down. Pick another.”

The second card was the Two of Swords, featuring an illustration of a blinded person sitting on a bench by the sea, a sword in either hand. Cyrene’s brow furrowed as she considered it. “A crossroads, manifesting indecision. Having two paths in front of you and refusing to choose until you have enough information to be certain you're making the right decision.”

Mydei’s amusement with the cards faded. “That hardly narrows things down.”

“It’s advice, not a diagnosis.”

“And the advice is?”

“Usually, to think carefully. Don’t rush into a choice merely because you want an answer. Consider where each path leads before you commit to one.” She tapped the card lightly with one finger. “Although sometimes the answer is right in front of you, and you’re making things harder by looking everywhere else.”

That was the sort of advice he did not need at all. He thought through everything, all the time. Every decision had consequences, and every consequence could produce another set of circumstances that needed to be accounted for. He had spent years learning to consider what his actions might lead to before he ever took them. Even his arguments with Phainon had been subject to the same scrutiny, though he would never admit how often he found himself thinking of better responses hours after the conversation had ended.

“I already think things through,” he said.

Cyrene only smiled and gathered the second card with the first. “Last one. The future. Pick wisely~”

Mydei drew again. The card landed face-up between them. It bore an angel with their arms spread behind two figures who held hands. Behind them, the rising sun.

He read its name. “The Lovers,” Mydei said, and he looked from the card to her blank face. “What?”

Cyrene reached for the card, then stopped before her fingers touched it. Her expression had become much more complicated. “The Lovers,” she repeated cautiously. That was when Mydei began to suspect that whatever the card meant, she did not want to tell him. “The card… It can mean a meaningful connection, like the divided pieces of a whole coming together. It doesn’t necessarily imply impending romance.”

Mydei raised an eyebrow. Cyrene’s eyes flicked toward him, then toward the card, then away again.

“Actually,” she said, “I have a question. Are you or my brother carrying the resonance dial right now?”

Mydei reached into his coat and pulled out the little brass device for her.

She stared at it blankly. Her eyes widened as she looked from the dial to the Lovers card and back again. “Argh.”

Mydei frowned. “What now?”

“My stupid brother is not going to hear the end of this later,” Cyrene picked up the card and slipped it back into the deck with considerably more haste than she had shown when drawing it. “Sorry. Sometimes when we divine something, it’s best not to tell our subject.”

Mydei stared at her, waiting.

Cyrene stood. “Say, Mydei, could you do me a tiny favor?”

He looked up at her. “What kind of favor?”

“Well, I think I left my hairclip in the common space in the men’s dormitory last time I visited, and the winds are getting pretty bad lately!” She adjusted the strap of her satchel and glanced toward the path. “I’m not really comfortable going in there myself. Could you grab it for me and bring it to me outside the library in about… Hm, half an hour? I’ll owe you!”

Cyrene was already backing away before he could respond. “I have to water my plants!”

Mydei watched her turn and hurry down the branch, her long pink hair bouncing behind her. He remained seated for another few seconds, staring after her in complete bafflement. Was every person from Aedes Elysiae this strange, or was it just the two siblings?

Still, Cyrene had done him a small favor herself. Whatever the reading had actually meant, she had given him a welcome distraction from the dial, and he was hardly going to refuse a simple request for help. Besides, he had no desire to discover what happened if he left a prophet waiting outside the library with a missing hairclip. Mydei stood and brushed the dust from his trousers before slipping the dial back into his pocket. Half an hour was plenty of time.

Phainon had been sitting alone on one of the benches bordering the training grounds for long enough that the sparring match happening several yards away had become little more than background noise. His practice sword rested against his knee, his arms folded over the pommel as he stared down at the dirt between his boots.

“Phainon!” He looked up just as his sister came hurrying across the training grounds, slightly out of breath, her pink hair disheveled from the run. She stopped in front of him and braced her hands against her knees for a moment. “I need your help.”

Phainon frowned. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. I just reaaally need you to be somewhere in twenty minutes.”

“Where?”

“The front of the library.”

“Why?”

Cyrene straightened and smiled at him with the sort of innocent expression that immediately made him suspicious. “Come on! Can you just trust me on this one? Phainon.”

“Rene.”

She sighed. “Please? I promise it will make sense later.”

Coming from anyone else, he wouldn’t have taken that part seriously. Except, this was his sister with magical prophecy powers. Phainon rubbed a hand over his face. “Fine. Twenty minutes, in front of the library.”

“Thank you!” Cyrene beamed, already turning away.

“Wait. Why do you need me there?”

“I’ll explain when you get there!” She hurried off before he could ask anything else.

Phainon made it back to the men’s dorm with enough time to change before he was supposed to head to the library. His practice clothes were covered in a fine layer of dust from the training grounds, and while he usually would not have cared, there was no telling what his sister had planned for him. If she had gone to the trouble of making him promise to arrive promptly, he could at least avoid arriving looking as though he had just crawled out of a chalkboard.

He hurried through the corridors, making his way toward the common room. He had only just stepped through the doorway when he noticed a familiar figure crouched beside one of the couches. Mydei was bent over, digging through the cushions.

The irritation on Mydei’s face was immediate, and Phainon could hardly blame him. He felt much the same way. They had not spoken since Aglaea dismissed class, and neither had made any attempt to find the other afterward. The resonance dial remained unresolved, their deadline was getting closer by the hour, and Phainon had spent the better part of the afternoon trying not to think about the possibility of failing Anaxa’s assignment.

He hated the thought of a bad grade more than he hated almost anything. Unfortunately, right now, talking to Mydei came close.

Mydei returned his attention to the couch and reached deeper between the cushions. Phainon considered walking straight past him. It would have been easy. He had somewhere to be, after all, and whatever Mydei was searching for was none of his concern.

Then Mydei turned toward him again. “Have you seen your sister’s hairclip?”

Phainon blinked. “Why are you asking me that?”

“Why else? Because it is your sister’s hairclip,” Mydei straightened, clearly becoming more annoyed by the second. “She told me that she left it in here.”

Phainon stared at him for another moment. Since when did the two of them start talking to each other? Phainon himself hardly had classes with Cyrene anyways, seeing as the specialized divination programme diverged significantly from the standard sorcerer programme.

“My sister told you to find her hairclip? Why?”

“I don’t know, Phainon.”

Phainon looked around the common room, then back at Mydei. “When did you last see her? Why didn’t she just come herself?”

“Not long ago. She said she wasn’t comfortable going into the men’s dormitory.”

Well, that sounded exactly like the sort of excuse Cyrene would invent on the fly, but she usually had no problems barging into whatever location she targeted. And Mydeimos, poor Mydeimos, was considerate enough of her feelings to believe it fully.

Phainon’s suspicion deepened. “Did she say what it looks like?”

Mydei shrugged. “Just that it’s a hairclip.”

Then Phainon glanced toward the clock. He had twenty minutes. He really did not have time for this. “Look,” he said, moving toward the stairs, “I haven’t seen her hairclip either, but I’ll check my room. If I find it, I’ll let you know.” He hurried up the stairs before Mydei could reply or called him a Haikas again.

Phainon made it upstairs two steps at a time and pushed into his room, closing the door behind him before immediately stripping off his practice clothes. He pulled on a plain tunic and a clean pair of trousers, ran a hand through his hair, and glanced around the room. Thankfully, he had tidied it up a little bit that morning. There were still a few books sitting open on the desk and a pile of clothes waiting to be folded, but at least there was no collection of parchment or discarded training gear scattered across the floor. He checked beneath the desk, beside the small bed, and even along the edge of the window.

He had no idea why Cyrene needed a hairclip badly enough to send Mydei searching for it. He hurried back downstairs, only to find the guy still standing beside the couch.

“Any luck?” Mydei asked.

Phainon shook his head. “Nothing in my room.”

Mydei sighed through his nose and gave the cushions one last, deeply unenthusiastic look before straightening. “Fine. I suppose I’ll have to ask her whether she remembers where she actually left it.”

He headed toward the exit. Phainon followed a moment later.

Neither of them acknowledged that they were going in the same direction. It became difficult to ignore after they had left the dormitory, crossed the first branch, and continued along the same path toward the central grounds. Phainon considered taking the longer route around the lecture halls, but that would have required admitting that he was deliberately avoiding Mydei, and he refused to give him that satisfaction. Mydei seemed to arrive at the same conclusion, so they continued walking several paces apart, neither quite close enough to call it walking together.

“So,” Phainon began, keeping his eyes ahead, “what do we do about the assignment?”

Mydei glanced toward him. “I’ve been considering falsifying our results. Either that, or we try your time spell idea. We could alternatively tell Anaxa that Cipher stole the dial.”

Phainon sighed and looked toward the branches overhead, and all of the fireflies that began floating about in the evenings. “It’s just frustrating. We’ve tried everything he taught us, and then we tried everything else we could think of. I don’t know what it is that I don’t know, whatever it is that could be missing.” He rubbed the back of his neck, his thoughts returning to the stubborn little dial sitting in his pocket. “Maybe we should ask him tomorrow morning if the thing is defective. For all we know, this entire assignment is a test and we’re supposed to figure out that the object doesn’t work.”

Mydei considered that as they continued toward the library. “Paranoia is setting in. That would be an exceptionally cruel way to teach a lesson.”

They reached the library with several minutes to spare. The central library occupied one of the broadest branches of Grove, its entrance built directly into the trunk of the ancient arbor. Warm early sunset light spilled through the tall windows, catching on the leaves outside and turning the floor into a patchwork of green and gold. Students came and went beneath the arched doorway with tomes tucked beneath their arms, some heading toward the reading rooms while others had already begun their long walks back toward the dormitories. Phainon slowed as they approached, his eyes immediately searching the benches outside and then the entrance itself, but there was no sign of Cyrene. He checked the clock mounted above the doors. They were exactly on time.

“Your sister is not here,” Mydei observed.

“No kidding.” Phainon stepped closer to the library doors and looked down the branch, wondering whether she had decided to rest nearby, or if she was running late. If she had promised to meet him somewhere, she would usually appear with an apology already prepared and a story that was implausible or only technically true.

“Perhaps she is inside.”

“She said to meet at the front of the library, no?” Phainon frowned as the two halves of the situation finally began to fit together. “Wait, sorry. Why would she send you to find her hairclip when she knew I was coming here too? I made it there and back in the same amount of time. This feels off.”

“I am beginning to agree.”

Phainon pulled out his pocket watch, a functional one he carried instead of the stupid dial, and checked the time again, just in case the large one above the doors was incorrect. “She told me twenty minutes. It's been twenty-three.”

“Then she could merely be testing our patience.”

A minute passed, then another, and the students around them gradually thinned as evening settled properly over the school. The lamps along the branch brightened, casting pools of warm light across the walkways, while the fireflies drifted between the roots and low-hanging leaves. A bell rang to mark the hour. Phainon glanced toward the path again. He was just about to suggest going inside to look for her when a familiar flash of pink caught his attention through the library windows.

A pink haired girl was standing inside the entrance hall. She waited for Phainon to lock eyes with her, smiling before she turned around and walked through another doorway.

Phainon blinked, staring after her. “Did you see that?”

Mydei looked through the glass. “Was that really your sister?”

Phainon continued staring at the doorway where she had disappeared. A horrible suspicion began taking shape. “Rene!” he whisper-shouted through the open doors hopelessly. He took a step inside, and Mydei followed. “Cyrene!” Phainon called again, slightly louder this time, but the only answer was the stern look of the librarian and a muted rustle of pages.

They entered the library together, passing beneath the high wooden archway and into the entrance hall. Phainon looked around, checking the nearest corridors and the reception desk, but Cyrene was nowhere to be seen. The desk itself was unattended, while the nearest librarian stood several rows away sorting returned books onto a cart. Phainon’s gaze wandered across the counter, searching for any indication that his sister had left in a hurry. Instead, he noticed a small pink hairclip resting neatly on the edge of the reception desk.

Oh, she was dead.

Mydei reached for the hairclip, picking it up from the edge of the reception desk and turning it over between his fingers. “Very pink. Your sister’s hairclip,” he said.

Phainon took one last look toward the entrance before turning deeper into the library. “Come on. I think I know where she went.”

Mydei followed, and together they moved farther into the building. Phainon abandoned calling Cyrene’s name after the first few rows. The librarian’s severe expression had made it clear that the library was not the place for that, and Cyrene clearly knew that too. If she had wanted to be found, she would have answered him by now.

Instead, Phainon kept his attention on the spaces between the shelves as they passed. The farther back they went, the less crowded the library became. This part of the building was rarely used for studying, partly because the older shelves had been arranged so closely together that navigating between them was awkward, and partly because there were so few proper seating spaces. Most students preferred the broader reading rooms near the front, where they could spread their spellbooks across tables without having to worry about knocking into a shelf every time they stood.

Phainon searched each row on his side while Mydei did the same on the opposite side, occasionally glancing toward him when they reached the end of a passage and found nothing. They continued like that for a few minutes, communicating mostly through looks and gestures until the rows of shelves finally opened into a wider patch of floor near the back wall. There were a handful of really old tables scattered through the space, their surfaces covered in scratches and etched in messages.

Phainon stepped into the opening and looked around. “Rene?”

No answer. He turned toward another row.

A quick finger tapped his shoulder. Phainon spun around.

Before he could process what was happening, the library disappeared beneath a powerful roar of wind. A tremendous gust tore through the opening between the shelves, catching him full in the chest and throwing him backward, smacking him with his own tie. He barely had time to understand what was happening before an arm hooked firmly around his own. Mydei had reacted faster and yanked him downward, quickly dragging them both beneath the nearest table as the vicious current swept over them.

Phainon landed hard on his hands and knees as the wind howled above them. Mydei landed beneath him, having managed to twist himself onto his back beneath the table, one shoulder pressed against the floor and his other arm still wrapped around Phainon’s wrist, caged in by the other man. His blond hair had been thrown across his forehead by the wind, and the exertion had brought a faint flush into his cheeks. His uniform had shifted at the collar, exposing a little more of his neck.

Phainon stared.

No, absolutely not. What?

Proximity during a duel was one thing. They had spent hours with swords and claws and magic flying between them. He had often been close enough to feel Mydei’s breath against his face. That was combat. There were rules for that.

This was a table. Did they have rules for laying under a table with your rival? They really should’ve. Phainon could see the rise and fall of his chest from barely a foot away. He had already spent enough time noticing Mydei lately. His laugh. His hands. His tattoos. The way his expression changed when he forgot to be guarded. The warmth of his body after they sparred. That had not been enough for his broken brain, because trapped beneath a table with the most handsome man in the entire school, Phainon found himself thinking that he could probably kiss him.

Not just kiss him. Kiss him senseless.

No, no! What the hell was wrong with him? He shifted his weight, realizing with horror the position they were in. Mydeimos was between his arms and knees, refusing to make eye contact.

The wind continued, and Phainon thought he could hear voices above them until something small scraped across the floor. Phainon glanced toward the opening beneath the table. A small object had just been kicked or thrown beneath it. It rolled once before coming to a stop beside Mydei’s shoulder.

A chess piece, in the shape of a horse. The piece gave off a faint glow, barely visible beneath the table, and Phainon could feel the magic radiating from it even though there was no visible current in the air. It was almost like the sensation of standing near one of his own spells before it fully formed; his magic responded instinctively to it, recognizing the presence of another active current.

He stared at the chess piece, opening his mouth. What he wanted to say was something along the lines of “hey Mydeimos, what the hell is that?”

That was not what came out of his mouth.

“Why didn’t we do this sooner?”

Phainon’s eyes widened. He slapped a hand over his own mouth, which only made him fall forward a little closer.

Mydei’s golden eyes snapped toward him, widening. His gaze dropped briefly to Phainon’s mouth, then returned to his eyes. His arm was still around Phainon’s wrist like he’d forgotten it there. “I was wondering the same thing.”

It was his turn to look shocked at himself. The tips of his ears had gone red first, followed quickly by the rest of his face until he was nearly the same shade as the ends of his hair, bright and unmistakable beneath the dim light filtering in. It was the exact red Phainon had seen spill across his skin whenever his tattoos were visible, the colour of the crystals that grew from his hands, the colour of the tiny bead of blood he would coax from his fingertip.

Phainon needed to say something. He needed to point out the chess piece. The chess piece was right there. That was what had started this entire speech disaster, and if he could just draw Mydei’s attention toward it, perhaps they could both remember that they were students capable of dismantling it.

Phainon lifted his hand and pointed toward the horse. “The horse,” he tried to say.

What came out was, “You’re cute.”

Phainon slowly lowered his hand. He wanted to crawl out from beneath the table, sprint through the library, cross the entire school, climb the central branch, find Professor Anaxa’s office, and dive directly for the gun. He would take the consequences.

Mydei’s face somehow became even redder. Phainon shut his eyes, knowing he wouldn’t be able to have a conversation while looking down at the prince in his arms.

He imagined Mydei must have done the same, because after a second of laboured breathing, the prince finally spoke. “The horse is doing it.”

Phainon refused to open his eyes. “The horse,” he repeated, testing whether his brain was capable of understanding language again. It was the same knight piece Castorice and Hyacine had been working with earlier, though Phainon had never seen it up close before. The magical current running through it was not particularly powerful, certainly not compared to either of them, but it was active.

Castorice had said their piece had only begun resonating when they used it for its intended purpose. They had tried spell after spell until they finally put it on a chessboard and treated it as an ordinary piece. Perhaps it really was specially crafted for chess, something to make players reveal their thoughts and give away their strategies.

“Magic,” Phainon said, forcing the word out through a throat that still felt painfully tight. He pointed toward the glowing knight. “Same time. Turn it off.”

Phainon kept his eyes shut. He was not opening them. He was never opening them again.

Then Mydei asked, very quietly, “Can I pull your tie?”

Phainon’s teeth caught his lower lip. They had to hurry up, or he was going to start to react in even worse ways. Several voices rose at once, followed by the scrape of furniture against the floor. The wind that had been tearing through the library abruptly weakened, then stopped altogether. Phainon remained perfectly still for another few seconds, waiting for another current to sweep through the shelves, but nothing came.

Mydei shifted beneath him, and after a moment he spoke in a much calmer voice. “Power it off together. On three. One, two, three.”

Phainon opened his eyes at the same moment Mydei did, and they both directed their magic toward the little knight. Their respective currents met around the piece, and the faint magical aura surrounding it flickered once before fizzling out entirely. After a moment, the horse went dark. Phainon stared at it, hardly believing that it had actually worked, before a strange warmth began spreading through the pocket of his trousers.

The prince was already looking down. Phainon followed his gaze and immediately reached into his pocket, pulling out the resonance dial so quickly that he nearly struck the underside of the table with his head. The dull brass casing had taken on a golden sheen, and the translucent crystal at its center was illuminated from within. The tiny markings around its circumference glowed softly, one after another, while the two previously immovable hands had begun ticking forward. Phainon stared at the device in his palm. After two days of trying every spell, material, mechanism, and ridiculous theory they could invent, it had finally decided to function.

“There’s no way,” Mydei said. The prince was staring at the dial with the same bewilderment, his brows drawn together. “There’s no way it was that easy.”

“What?” Phainon looked back at the glowing dial. “What is it? We had to direct our magic onto another special object?”

Mydei rolled his eyes and slipped out from underneath the table, brushing dust from his uniform as he stood. Phainon followed him, emerging from beneath the table and immediately snatching up the little knight. Only then did he properly take in the state of the room around them. The back of the library had seen better days. Several books had been knocked from the shelves, loose parchment was scattered across the floor, and one of the tables had been shoved several feet from where it had originally stood. Dust hung faintly in the air, and chairs had been left at odd angles after the force of the wind had passed through.

Phainon barely paid attention. He was still staring at the dial, turning it between his fingers as though the movement of its hands might reveal what they had missed.

Mydei had stopped beside one of the tables. He was staring down at a small spinning top. It was the object Cipher and Dan Heng had been working with. The little thing sat innocently on the tabletop. Mydei sighed. “You have got to be kidding me.”

Phainon looked between the top, the knight in his hand, and the glowing dial. He frowned. The hands had been fixed when Anaxa gave it to them, but now both were moving steadily, each ticking along at a different hour. He watched for a few seconds before a thought occurred to him.

“Wait.” He lifted the dial closer to his face. “This time… I think this is the current time in Aedes Elysiae.”

Mydei glanced over. “You think?”

“It should be around this hour, yeah.” Phainon rotated the dial slightly, studying the second face. “I don’t know what the other one is, though.”

Mydei stepped closer and took the dial from his hands. His eyes moved over the markings and then stopped on the second face. His expression went flat. “It’s the time in Castrum Kremnos. The two faces,” he said slowly. “They’re displaying the time in our respective homelands.”

“So...” Phainon looked down at the knight. “The resonance dial is meant to be used by two people.”

“Using magic at the same time,” Mydei finished. “That is what activates it. It takes the magical signatures of both users and displays their home times.”

Phainon thought back over every failed experiment. “So that’s why it worked briefly when we sparred.”

Mydei nodded. “We were both using magic on our weapons. You used that little bit of soothing magic when it levitated, too,” he said. “Aglaea was trying to tell us.”

They stood in silence for a moment, surrounded by the aftermath of their discovery. Loose pages shifting across the floor whenever a faint breeze passed through the open shelves. Phainon should have felt relieved. They had finally solved the assignment, and after two days of frustration, they now had an explanation that accounted for nearly every strange reaction the dial had given them. He should have been thinking about the report, about how they would explain their findings to Anaxa tomorrow morning, about whether the ruined section of the library would get them both expelled from the course.

Instead, he noticed that Mydei had gone quiet. “Did you mean it?”

Phainon looked at him. “Mean what?”

Mydei crossed his arms over his chest and sat on the edge of the table, looking off toward the shelves rather than at him. The tips of his ears were still faintly red.

“What you said. When we were under the table.” He paused. “About what we should have been doing sooner. Was that real?”

Phainon swallowed around nothing. There was no reason for his heart to be beating this hard anymore. But Mydeimos was making that face again, the expression he wore whenever he wanted to pretend he did not care.

Phainon set the little knight and the resonance dial down on the table beside him. Then he stepped closer. “What about what you said, Crown Prince?” he asked quietly. “Weren’t you thinking the exact same thing?”

Mydei’s arms slowly uncrossed. “Deliverer,” he said, his voice lower now, “do something, or I’m going to blame this entire mess on you.”

Phainon smiled. “Gladly.”

He leaned down and kissed him. It was chaste, barely more than a meeting of their lips, and Phainon pulled away almost as soon as they touched.

Mydei’s eyes remained half-lidded, his expression softened into an unfamiliar openness that Phainon had never seen directed at him before.

Phainon found himself staring. “How’s that for an answer?”

Mydei did not reply. His hand caught the end of Phainon’s tie and pulled him forward.

Their second kiss was nothing like the first. Phainon stumbled against the table as Mydei drew him close, but he barely noticed. His hands found Mydei’s sides, fingers curling into the fabric of his uniform as they kissed again. Mydei’s other hand slid into his hair, and the touch sent a shiver through Phainon that had nothing to do with magic. A helpless sound escaped him against Mydei’s mouth, and Mydei seemed to take that as encouragement, pulling him closer by the tie.

Reality left his thoughts in complete disarray. Mydei was warm beneath his hands, warmer than he should have been, and the faint taste of the food they had shared earlier came back to him in a way that made his stomach turn pleasantly. He had no idea when his eyes had closed. He only knew that Mydei’s fingers were still tangled in his hair, that his other hand was gripping the front of Phainon’s uniform, and that every sensible thought in his head had been replaced by the simple fact that he wanted to stay exactly where he was.

Mydei tried to say his name between kisses. “Phainon, you’re—” He never finished.

Phainon felt warmth gathering beneath his skin, except this time he barely registered it. His magic was responding to his emotions, gathering without his permission. The warmth spread from his chest through his arms and into his hands where they rested against Mydei’s sides. But Mydei kissed him again, and Phainon forgot.

He was warm. Mydei was warm. The entire room seemed to have become very warm, and Phainon was far too occupied with the prince in his arms to care why. Phainon’s knees weakened.

Mydei broke the kiss with a gasp just in time to feel Phainon’s weight drop against him.

“Haikas?”

Phainon’s forehead landed against his shoulder. Then he felt the heat radiating through Phainon’s clothes and his eyes widened.

“Haikas.”

He shifted his grip and lowered Phainon carefully against his shoulder, patting his cheek once. “You cannot possibly be serious.”

When Phainon woke, the first thing he noticed was that his head was resting on something far softer than the infirmary pillows. The second was that someone was running their fingers through his hair.

His eyes opened slowly, the room coming into focus in pieces. White curtains. The familiar scent of healing herbs. Hyacine leaning over him with a small vial in one hand, her expression changing from concentration to visible relief when she noticed him blinking. Beyond her stood Cyrene, Cipher, and Castorice, all three of whom seemed to have been waiting for exactly this moment. Their collective breath of relief was very audible.

Phainon frowned, still too groggy to understand why they were all staring at him. He tried to lift his head. A hand immediately pressed against his forehead and gently but firmly pushed him back down. “Stay there, Deliverer.”

Phainon blinked up at Mydei. The prince was sitting on the edge of one of the infirmary beds, Phainon’s head resting comfortably in his lap. He looked tired. His hair was slightly dishevelled, and there was still dust caught in the folds of his uniform from the library, but otherwise he looked composed.

“Mmm, ‘kay,” Phainon said, deciding that whatever was happening could wait. He let his head settle back against Mydei’s lap.

Mydei’s hand remained against his forehead for another second before he withdrew it, though not before brushing a loose strand of white hair away from Phainon’s face.

Cyrene folded her arms, looking unbearably pleased with herself. “See? I told you you’d understand everything later, Mydei.”

Mydei’s eyes narrowed. “I could have done without the hazard in the back of the library.”

Cipher immediately raised a finger. “Actually, that part was Castorice’s idea. And so was the knight–”

Castorice’s eyes widened. The elf’s hand shot out and covered Cipher’s mouth before she could continue. Cipher’s muffled protest came from behind her palm, ears twitching.

By the time they reached the main branch, Phainon was beginning to regret every decision that had led him to this school where he was constantly sprinting around. They had spent most of the night writing their report. What should have been a straightforward account of their findings had turned into several pages of observations, crossed-out theories, revised diagrams, and increasingly desperate notes about the exact conditions under which the resonance dial responded. They had barely slept before dragging themselves out of Phainon’s room and heading for Anaxa’s class.

Phainon hurried alongside Mydei, clutching their finished report against his chest. “Doesn’t feel so good on the other side of it, huh?”

His partner, now in multiple ways, gave him a tired look without slowing down. “You are never going to let that go, are you?” Mydei reached over and pinched him sharply by the ear.

“Ow.” Phainon recoiled, rubbing the offended ear as they continued down the branch. Hyacine released him with strict instructions to rest, which neither of them had followed for more than a few hours. Now the two of them were running on stubbornness alone.

They reached the classroom just before the doors closed. A line of students had already formed near the front, each waiting to hand their completed assignments in. Phainon slowed beside Mydei, breathing hard, and tried to straighten up his uniform before anyone could notice how exhausted he looked. Mydei did much the same, though the faint shadows beneath his eyes made the effort pointless.

One by one, the students reached the front of the line and surrendered their artifacts and reports. Eventually, it was their turn.

Mydei stepped forward and placed the resonance dial into Anaxa’s waiting hand. Phainon followed, presenting their report.

Anaxa looked down at the artifact, then at the pages, and finally at the two of them. His expression was as severe as ever, though there was a trace of suspicion in his eyes as he examined the state of his students. “I trust you had no difficulties.”

Phainon quickly looked toward Mydei. He noticed the white tie first. What?

His exhausted mind took a second to process it. Then he looked down at his own uniform. Red.

Mydei’s tie.

Phainon slowly scratched the back of his neck. “Oh,” he said. “Not at all, Professor.”