Aadyan found her exactly where he knew she would be when the world felt too loud.

  Sama's café had always felt slightly out of time-tucked between two stone wings of AstraVana's Cliff , its low ceiling and warm lamps making the rest of the Institute's bustle sound like someone else's problem. Conclave preparations roared outside: carts rattling over stone, voices arguing in at least three languages, wards humming a little higher as additional layers were tested and re-tested.

  In here, the chaos came in muffled, like rain behind glass.

  Lira sat at the withered old corner table they used to claim as children, hands wrapped around a cooling cup of chai. She wasn't drinking it.

  Her gaze rested somewhere past the opposite wall, pupils slightly unfocused, shoulders held too tight. The chair opposite her was empty. Sama was nowhere in sight.

  Of course she'd picked the quietest place in AstraVana and still looked like she was standing in a storm.

  Aadyan lingered in the doorway a moment longer than necessary, letting his eyes adjust from the harsh white of the courtyard to the amber of the café. He catalogued details out of habit.

  Two second-years at the counter arguing softly over coins. The smell of cardamom and burnt sugar. The way Lira's thumb kept tracing the rim of her cup, again and again, as if she could wear the porcelain down by thinking hard enough.

  He crossed the room and sat opposite her without asking. He never needed to.

  It was only then that she blinked, as if surfacing.

  "Aadyan," she said, voice low. "Didn't hear you."

  "You weren't listening," he replied. It came out gentler than it sounded in his head.

  Silence settled between them for a breath. Up close, he could see the faint smudges under her eyes, the way the skin at the base of her neck flushed when she was stretched thin.

  There was a time he would've teased her about overworking her gift. Now, with the Conclave swelling on the horizon and old stories waking up in the Vana, the joke felt too small for what sat between her ribs.

  Outside, a ward shivered-just a small shift in tone, gone as quickly as it came. Lira had noticed it for a while now—the way Aadyan’s shoulders never quite relaxed, the tension sitting there like a weight he refused to name.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked quietly. “You’ve been carrying something all evening.”

  He hesitated. Just enough.

  “I don’t know much,” he said finally. “Not details.”

  Her gaze stayed on him, patient. Waiting.

  “But the leaders are… unsettled,” Aadyan continued. “Amar doesn’t look like that unless something’s gone very wrong. Iravati called in people who don’t usually get summoned together.”

  Lira felt a chill slip under her ribs. “About the Conclave?”

  “About something else,” he said.

  “Something no one wants to name yet.”

  She searched his face, her gift brushing against the edges of what he wasn’t saying—fear without shape, urgency without direction.

  “I spoke to Nandini,” Aadyan added, lower now. “She wouldn’t explain. Just said there’s a discussion tonight.”

  Grimly.

  Lira wrapped her fingers tighter around her cup. The chai had gone cold.

  "So," Aadyan said thinking of distraction keeping his tone light, almost idle, as if they were still children trading gossip about schedule changes.

  "You seem to be spending more time with the new boy."He said offhandedly .

  That changed the direction, possibly igniting something that should be left unsaid. Her eyes snapped to his face, wary and sharp, like he'd just stepped closer to a line she'd drawn without telling him.

  "His name is Aresh," she said, the correction immediate. A defensive instinct, or just habit, he couldn't tell.

  "Mother asked me to find out what connection is there before anybody takes advantage."

  There it was again-connection. The word everyone had started using since the nymph opened her mouth and old echoes slipped out. Connection to the Vana. Connection to some failed binding. Connection to a history no one had consented to carrying.

  Aadyan let the term sit in his mind like a sour seed.

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  "Connection," he echoed, tilting his head. "Convenient word."

  Lira's jaw tightened. "You know what I mean."

  He did. That was the problem.

  He remembered the look on Sama Kaul's face after the debrief, the tempered urgency under her calm. He remembered Chief Warden Vedant's silence, the way her father's fingers had drum-tapped once against his own forearm and then stilled. He remembered the way Aresh had stood in the hall later, shoulders hunched, as if his own fire was something he could shrink away from.

  He also remembered Lira walking beside that same boy, arguing about something small, the ghost of a smile on her mouth she didn't wear for many people anymore.

  "I don't like him," Aadyan said.and realized too late that he hadn’t meant to say it at all.

  He hadn't meant to say it so plainly. The words dropped between them like a stone into shallow water.

  Lira blinked. "You don't even know him."

  "I know enough.He doesn't even know himself , who ,where he came from.." He kept his voice level, but the edge was there, thin and cold. "He looks wrong. Feels wrong. And I don't want you getting hurt."

  Her eyes flashed. "I can take care of myself, Aadyan.I am not a child , I can perceive people good , it's in my gift , if you have forgotten."she said bitterly.

  “Mother asked me to look into it,” Lira repeated — then hesitated, just long enough to notice the hesitation. “Before anyone decides for us.”

  He'd expected that. The instinctive bristle, the refusal to be wrapped in cotton. He'd watched her fight for her own agency since they were small and the world kept trying to decide what she should be-scribe's daughter, empath, weaver, prophecy fragment.

  He respected it. He loved it, in a way he didn't have a safe word for.

  "You worry too much," she added timidly, hoarse around the edges.

  He studied her across the table. The way she said it, it didn't sound like a complaint. It sounded like a plea to stop before she had to decide whether to lean towards him or away.

  The wards shifted again, a faint pressure in the air. People outside shouted something about schedules and seating arrangements. Somewhere, someone dropped a crate; the crash rang through the stone like an omen.

  Aadyan leaned forward trying to diffuse the situation between them, telling himself to stop but couldn't..

  "Just know," he said quietly, letting each word find its place, "that I am always here for you. Prophecy or not."

  Her breath caught. He saw it-the tiny hitch at her throat, the way her fingers went still on the cup.

  He reached out, hand steady, and brushed his thumb along her cheekbone, just under her eye lurking there longer than he should have. There was nothing there. No ash, no dust, no flint from Aresh's clumsy sparks. He knew that. They both did.

  His skin met hers, warm and soft and too familiar, and something in his chest twisted. Her pupils dilated. Her heartbeat picked up-he could see it flutter in the line of her throat, feel the tension leap under his touch.

  Time thinned.

  For a moment, the café held its breath with them. The sounds from outside blurred into a dull roar. She didn't pull away. He didn't move his hand. Aadyan realised, with a clarity that felt like stepping off a cliff, that this was the closest he had ever come to saying what he meant , what he felt.

  Lira's eyes widened, dark and startled, like she'd just realised the ground under them wasn't as solid as she'd believed.

  "Aadyan-" she began.

  A voice cut through the moment like a knife.

  "Headmistress Iravati has asked for you."

  Aresh stood in the café entrance, framed by lamplight and the doorway. His usual restless fire was banked low, but there was nothing calm about him. His gaze took in the scene in a sweep-the table, the untouched chai, Aadyan's hand still hovering near Lira's face, the flush high on her cheeks.

  For a heartbeat, no one moved.

  Aadyan let his hand fall back to the table, unhurried. He didn't look away from Aresh.

  They regarded each other in a silence that felt heavier than any shouted argument. Aresh's jaw was tight, shoulders rigid, like a man holding onto control by his fingernails. Aadyan met his stare with bland, steady calm, the kind he'd learned from years of watching his father navigate Veil politics: expression polite, eyes giving nothing away.

  Inside, something much less polite uncoiled and smiled.

  He let the corner of his mouth tilt up. Not a big grin.It wasn’t triumph that curved his mouth — it was certainty.

  Aresh's eyes flashed, a flicker of heat breaking through the restraint. He didn't rise to the bait. He just turned slightly, angling his body so the line of his attention cut past Aadyan and landed squarely on Lira.

  "We should go," Aresh said, voice rougher than before. "She doesn't like waiting."

  Lira pushed her chair back, movements a little too quick. Her face was still flushed, colour blooming bright across her cheekbones. She avoided Aadyan's eyes for a second too long, then forced herself to glance at him, as if remembering that not looking would say more than anything else.

  "Right," she said. "Let's not keep her."

  She moved to stand between them by instinct, the old habit of being the bridge. Aresh stepped aside to let her pass. Aadyan rose at the same time, close enough that his shoulder brushed hers.

  Walking between them felt wrong in a way Lira couldn’t explain — like standing over a fault line she’d helped draw.

  Neither boy spoke as they fell into step, one on each side of her.

  In the narrow corridor outside the café, the air felt thicker. Aresh kept his gaze forward, jaw clenched. Aadyan walked on Lira's other side, hands tucked loosely behind his back, the ghost of his earlier smirk still resting at the edge of his mouth where only he could feel it.

  Lira's pulse hadn't settled. He could hear it in her breathing, see it in the way her fingers twisted in the hem of her sleeve.

  Prophecy or not, Aadyan thought, glancing sideways at the fire-wielder for the briefest of moments, he was not planning on stepping aside.

  He didn't have to say it out loud. Not yet.