Page 49 of Embers of Midnight

Darian falls into step without ceremony. He doesn’t touch my sleeve this time. The absence is loud. The rocks in my stomach settle further with the kind of weight that feels like a commitment I didn’t sign.

“You look like you learned three things and invented two,” he says.

“I learned not to poke dead portals,” I say primly. “Which feels like growth.”

He huffs a laugh. We walk in a stretch of silence that isn’t empty. The Academy lets out students in small tides, chatter skimming the stone and dissipating in the warm air. When a crowd swells toward us, his palm touches the small of my back once, light pressure, a little current, gone.

My skin pays attention. My brain files a complaint. I do not say any of that aloud.

Lunch is a quiet ambush. We end up at a corner table. Caelum appears with a tray exactly when breathing seems like work again. Ash arrives mid-story, drops into the spare chair like the seat owes him money, and begins a passionate defense of terrible movies. Ronan sets a bottle of water by my elbow without comment and steals a forkful of my pasta with a look that dares me to make him earn it.

On any other day, I would be leaning into it, dragging heat out of jokes, handing it back. Today, Taya’s words unspool under everything: not a leash, a door. My bones hum; my head shakes itself like a dog that fell in a lake.

Caelum’s gaze finds mine, sharp, soft. “You’re quiet.”

“I have a lot of information to choke on,” I say. “It’s crunchy.”

Ash’s grin fades a notch, like he hears the rocks shifting under my ribs and wants to swap them out for sweets. He opens his mouth to pester me into smiling. I give him a look that says not yet. He obeys without making it a scene. Ronan’s thumb hooks the lip of my water bottle and nudges it closer, an entire lecture packed into one centimeter.

We eat. We sprawl. We pretend to be ordinary. It almost works.

After, Caelum walks me to the door of the house because of course he does. “I’ll be in the office,” he says, neutral, which iscode for I will be ten seconds away if you trip over your own worry.

“Okay.”

In my room, the bed looks like an apology I don’t deserve. I drop my bag, press two fingers to the spot under my collarbone where the anchor hums like a cat that knows too much, and lean my forehead against the glass. Outside, Aetheris lays its sky out like a patient map. Inside, my chest is a mess.

I replay the morning. Darian’s knuckles on my sleeve. Taya’s voice turning a myth into a plan. Kieran’s gates, the ones you should never open because curiosity lies better than fear. The way four different men occupy air: heat, stillness, gravity, spark. The way I want, annoyingly symmetrical.

I could ignore it. Pretend. Walk slow until the feeling trips over itself and dies. That was the strategy that worked with most things in my life: delay until the world got bored.

But they don’t look bored. And it doesn’t feel temporary.

By the time dinner rolls around, I’ve decided two things. One: I am not going to blitz this just because the universe put a buffet in front of me. Two: tomorrow I will ask for what I need, out loud, without humor to cushion it.

I find them in the lounge, half-arguing about card rules, half-watching something on a screen that keeps exploding. Ash takes one look and opens his arms like a joke. I dodge the hugand drop onto the couch anyway, shoulder to Ronan, knee to Darian’s. Caelum claims the arm of the chair like a cat and offers me the corner of a smile that lives very close to a promise.

“What did Kieran teach you,” Ash demands. “Besides how to be more cautious in ways that ruin my fun.”

“Breadcrumbs,” I say. “Echo. Tether. How not to let doors flirt with you.”

“Useful,” Caelum says, amused. “We like you un-lost.”

“Me too,” I say, and let the house breathe for me until my lungs remember how.

When lights go out and the hall quiets enough to make small sounds big, I stand in my doorway and listen to the hum in the walls that says the room knows me. The rocks in my stomach haven’t shrunk. They’re not supposed to. They keep me grounded.

Tomorrow, I bring this up at breakfast. No evasions. No jokes to dodge the point.

Tonight, I lie under a heavy quilt in a world with the wrong constellations and let my body admit what my mouth won’t yet—four separate gravities tugging at the same heart. I do not pick one. I do not run.

I make space.

Say It Out Loud

Seraphina

The shower does what it can. Heat on shoulders, steam in my mouth, water drumming hard enough to drown the little voice that keeps asking if I’m about to wreck the best thing that’s happened to me since… ever. I rehearse the line until it stops sounding like a prayer and starts sounding like a choice. I try to swallow nerves. They have claws.