PART 3

  Elias

  She was on a familiar beach. Water a few steps away, stretching as far as the eye could see, the sand under her hard and packed into the ground.

  There was a shadow beside her, as there usually was.

  “You need help?” she heard herself asking.

  “No.”

  Standing there, watching the dark clouds gather above, the faint rumbling of a storm nearing, she felt the shadow move.

  They stumbled slowly toward the water, clothed in a loose shirt and shorts, limping with a sheathed sword in hand that acted as a walking stick, half of their right leg gone and the rest heavily bandaged. In the hand opposite the sword was a small cloth pouch.

  Even from so far away, she could plainly see the innumerable scars covering their arms and legs: most small, some big, some raised bumps that had scarred over. Both their hands were bandaged as well, and their shoulder-length hair barely moved in the wind as they gradually entered the cold water.

  They walked as far as they could out into the sea without taking their feet off the sand, until the water came up to their chest, struggling to open the pouch when they finally stopped at a spot. They faltered for a moment as they tucked their sword under an arm but managed to stay upright long enough to untie the bag.

  She could not see what was inside, but the figure dropped its contents into the water, watching silently as whatever it was disappeared into the sea.

  A long moment of silence later, the shadow made their way out of the water, using the sword again as a crutch, wading with bloodied, bandaged hands as they left the water and approached her.

  “Do you need help?” she asked the figure again.

  “You can’t ask me that now,” the figure answered icily as they started walking past, their clothes wet and sticking to their skin.

  “Is there anything I can do?” she tried next.

  “No. Not anymore.”

  She turned around to watch the figure continue to walk off the never-ending beach, away from the never-ending waters.

  “I know it was my fault,” she called after her classmate when they were a few steps away.

  “Saying that after the fact means nothing.”

  “I want to h—”

  The figure turned around sharply, lifting the sword in their hand despite already being unsteady on their feet. “Well bring him back then!” they yelled, whipping it at her. “Fucking bring him back!”

  Standing defenseless as she was hit in the face with the encased sword, she recoiled and then picked the weapon off the ground by the red ribbon tied to its hilt. She looked up at the shadow, her friend, and saw that their eyes were cold. There was no warmth.

  The figure stood for a moment, breathing heavily and tears streaming down their face as they finally crumbled onto the ground under the strain of living.

  “Or kill me. Give me mercy and just kill me. I don’t want to fight anymore.”

  * * *

  Ty opened her eyes and sat up, dread seeping under skin. It had been a long time since the last new dream.

  “Nightmare?”

  She rubbed her eyes and let out a long sigh, pulling her knees up to her chest and hugging the blanket draped across her shoulders. “Yes,” she replied quietly.

  “Which one was it this time?”

  “It was new.”

  “Hmm. Anything special?”

  “A…a red ribbon…” she mused, looking down at the desk to see what she had been doing earlier. Her notebook lay open on a page for today’s date, along with a list of items she needed to complete before class started next week. “Tied to the hilt of a sword.”

  From across the table, Theo put his book down, looking pensive. “A sword, huh…”

  “Half the class knows how to wield one,” mumbled Ty, rubbing the tips of her fingers together, feeling the soft ribbon from the dream.

  “Alex, Elias, you and me…”

  “Faris and Callie, too.”

  After some haphazard deliberation, Theo raised his hand from his book to rest on the side of his face. “Maybe it’s Elias. You’ve been dreading today ever since receiving that last-minute message last week.”

  For a moment, she really did consider it. But the figure didn’t feel like him. It was that warmth…it was that warmth that was lacking from the shadow’s bitter words that had given her pause. That had made her heart ache with regret and ineptitude.

  “Maybe,” echoed Ty, sighing before stealing another glance at Theo. She had long ago decided that it was a fool’s errand to try to decipher all her dreams. Three years over fifteen Circles—they could be of anyone during any timeline. But most importantly, they were in the past. It would not be their future. “Were you up all night?”

  “Mhm,” he nodded, taking a pencil to the book in front of him. “Beginning to regret visiting Em over the weekend. Didn’t think he’d give me this much work.”

  Ty smiled, remembering how he had originally been excited to get more work from his teacher. “It’s okay, we’ve had lots of rest these past few weeks.”

  That he could not deny. “Maybe I’ll take a nap after you leave to do your stuff.”

  Right as she was about to reply, the tactician let out a yawn.

  He raised an eyebrow without taking his eyes off his book. “What was it you said last night? ‘I’ll be okay, I’ll do some work with you’? When I tried to convince you to sleep when you were already exhausted?”

  Knowing he was right, as he usually was, Ty defeatedly closed her book, slid the blanket off her shoulders, and gathered her belongings. “No,” she replied gently and with a small smile, “I have no regrets.”

  * * *

  Going through her normal morning routine—the one she had become accustomed to before the end-of-year break had started—Ty ruminated on all her freedom that had been the last three weeks. It had felt like too much, and it had felt greedy, but a simple reassurance from her mother, whom she had visited two weeks prior, chased away all her worries. Like it always did.

  The Headmistress, her mother had confirmed, was her birth mother. They had been friends, nigh inseparable when they had studied at the Academy. The Headmistress had been her mother’s tactician, and in turn she was her caster.

  That, her mother insisted, was all that Ty needed to know.

  But why? Why did she tell me? What do I do with this? she had asked her.

  Whatever you want, her mother had replied endearingly. If you don’t want to do anything, you can do nothing.

  Nothing. Was that what the Headmistress wanted, telling her this? How could the truth have been so anticlimactic?

  She never really did summon enough courage to ask her if she was going to die. It was mind-boggling to think that her own mother had no idea what was happening—or perhaps she didn’t have enough courage to say something.

  Ty got out of the bath and wiped herself down with a towel, sighing and pushing her long hair out of her face. After draining the water and evaporating any remaining impurities with a quick spell from the bathroom’s communal tome, she walked up to the neat pile of clothes she had left on a side table and began dressing herself, thinking about more pressing matters.

  Classes officially began for tacticians today, notably a week earlier than everyone else. It was just one class followed by reports in the afternoon, but it was a good way to get back into the rhythm of things.

  Combing through her hair, now fully dressed, Ty abruptly stopped to examine herself in the bathroom mirror.

  She leaned in close and held a hand up to her face, tracing the space under her eyes, her pink cheeks, her reddish lips.

  Alright. She felt alright. She had used a lot of magic, these past few weeks. Sometimes deliberately, like when she practiced magic with Theo, sometimes it had crept out on its own. Theo hadn’t ever said anything, but she never remembered herself ever looking so healthy. So humanlike.

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  Recently, she had rarely found it necessary to eat her morning medicine, and she couldn’t recall the last time she had thrown up. Even when Callie showered her and Theo with food and treats—some of which she had brought back from work, some of which she made herself—she still felt alright.

  She was content. She was happy. She found it increasingly superfluous to care about anything other than what she could change, what she could do. And right now, where she was at that very moment, she didn’t want anything to change.

  So what if the Headmistress was her mother? She hadn’t been the one to take care of her all these years, she hadn’t raised her. So what if she was going to have to leave one day? It didn’t matter to her. She had her class right now. She had her students. She had a life she had always hoped for. She felt like she had become someone she could be proud of.

  The books, the reports—they didn’t matter. It was all in her hands. She was going to do something about the state of everything. All she had to do was open her eyes, remember the people she loved, the people she wanted to cherish, to protect, and everything felt okay. Nothing felt too far, nothing felt too grandiose for her reach. Nothing mattered more than what she had right now, and she wanted to cherish it.

  I’m alright.

  She quickly wrapped up her morning routine and headed to class, where she knew a new professor and three remaining Year 1 tacticians would be waiting for her, heart as feather-light as it had been the past three weeks, conscience as clear as a cloudless sky.

  At the end of the report, Ty remembered how relieved she had been when there was no extra note from the Headmistress in her reports folder. There had been no surprise visits over the break either, no summons. Not even Nate approached her, though she often spotted him walking around campus like a black cat patrolling its territory.

  On the steps of Darius’s workshop, she let her gaze wander to the distant Lycean plains, blowing on the steam escaping from her mug and taking small, measured sips of coffee. Her tasks for the day were done, and it was barely evening. Class in the morning was fine, as it always was. The new professor was also old, like Levyarn had been, but this time he was male; loud, strict, and caring little for questions or breaks, it wasn’t until the end of class that Ty realized that perhaps their teachers had been all old so far because they were more of a liability on the field.

  Deploying students doesn’t make the most sense, either…at least right now, she mused to herself when, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a familiar figure arrive at the Academy gates.

  “Yeah, yeah,” they dismissed loudly, trying to shoo away the formally dressed individual behind him. “Tell ‘em thanks, I guess. If they remember.” And then the figure turned around, spotting the tactician right away.

  “Oh, Ty!” he yelled, fumbling in his pockets for his class pin, which he found after a few panicked seconds. “You’re here! You got my message!”

  Ty put her mug behind her and made some room on the steps for Elias, who arrived in no time with a silly smile on his face as he let the heavy bag on his shoulders drop. “Welcome back,” she smiled warmly, patting the space on the step beside her.

  “Oh, you have no idea how glad I am to be back,” he beamed, taking the seat she offered him. “It really was getting way too stuffy at home. Those three weeks, I tell ya, people just kept on annoying me about every little thing.” He took out a small cloth bag and set it on his lap before holding his head in anguish. “And parties. It’s like, the fact that you have gold doesn’t mean you need to spend it. Why would people ever want to pay to be dressed in awful, stuffy clothes for hours at a time?”

  She laughed, amused by his vivacity. “You could stay at the Academy next time.”

  But he seemed stuck in his little world, letting go of his head and turning now to unwrap the package on his lap. “Even today, they were complaining, ‘Oh, Elias, you need to be here, the blah-blah family, they’ve got a darling daughter,’ but anyway, I took the first carriage I could out of town. Graces.”

  This, Ty thought to herself amusedly, is probably the most I’ve ever seen him talk.

  “So,” he exhaled, taking out a sandwich and biting into it, “What are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’ve taken up smithery?” He chewed, paused, and then turned to Ty, eyes shining as a new idea presented itself. “Or were you waiting for me?”

  She shook her head, still smiling. “I promised Darius I’d do some work for him while he was away, but yes. I received your message, so I knew you were coming.” It was the truth—he had asked her to take care of her sword and check up on it every day…if he weren’t an Ancient and the sword hadn’t been for her, she would have likely denied that swords needed to be checked daily.

  “Good, good,” he murmured, calming down now that he was working on his food. “You didn’t go home, huh?”

  “I visited for a few days, but I stayed mostly,” she nodded.

  “Don’t get along with the folks?”

  She tilted her head and regarded him curiously.

  He eyed her back and comically tilted his head to mirror her. “Hmm?”

  “Folks?”

  “Oh!” he exclaimed. “Your parents. Do you not get along with them?”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to her. “Oh, no. It’s not that,” she answered hastily. “I just wanted to stay.”

  “Mmm,” he nodded, taking another bite of his lunch and turning his head back to face forward. “That’s good. I get little say; my parents pay for school. And they ask me to go back, so I do.”

  “Do you not get along with them?”

  Elias stopped, eyes trained on the vast Lycean plains in the distance. “No, I don’t think it’s that,” he answered after a pensive pause, “My parents oversee a lot of land and its people. They’re not really at home often, and they don’t really have much time to entertain me, so going home doesn’t really make any difference. All they do is bring me to gatherings so I can meet people while they conduct business or whatever. Y’know, get married, don’t worry about fighting and settle down, have kids, stupid stuff.”

  “Do you not want to?” prodded Ty.

  “Eh, don’t think I’m the type to get married or settle down, dunno.” A shrug. Another bite. “Relationships are annoying and messy. Even with the class, it’s difficult sometimes. I much prefer sleeping to dealing with people.”

  At that last sentence, he finished the last of his sandwich and flashed Ty a toothy grin. “Promise me you won’t tell my class lead though. She’s crazy strict.”

  His comments earlier about skipping class had made her frown, but unlike Cyril, his carefree attitude was more worrisome. With Cyril, she could tell they were lofty, casual statements that held no weight, but she didn’t know Elias well enough to tell. “But you’ve got to get along to fight together, right? We’re a class.”

  It was as if he had expected her to say that. “Don’t get me wrong,” he mumbled, reaching into his other bag to produce a water pouch. “I understand the merits of establishing good relationships with people—and I’ve certainly been lectured about it enough for a lifetime—but it doesn’t make it any less exhausting.” He took a sip of water. “Acting like I care about what professors say, doing work that I clearly don’t care about just to make them like me and to get a good mark out of it? All for what? Marks don’t mean shit in the real world.” He took a swig of water. “Now, unless you’ve got a good reason for me to actually care, I’m going to focus on what I’m good at—fighting.”

  “But…but,” she stammered, trying to think of something to prove him wrong. “But why did you go to those study sessions with Callie, then? If you don’t care about your marks?”

  Elias did not struggle with responding, but his words did falter as his confident smile flickered. “Well, once I realized that—well, I felt bad. I mean, I shouldn’t care about what she thinks, and I would’ve felt the same no matter who it was, but it’s a waste. No matter how many times I tell her I won’t go, she doesn’t listen. Isn’t…” His expression was somewhere between disbelief and frustration. “Isn’t that messed up? How she, like, says stuff about believing in me even though she knows she’ll probably get stood up anyway?”

  Ty put down her lukewarm coffee, nodding triumphantly. “There. There’s your reason. Make Callie not feel bad. Go to class and go to your study sessions.”

  At first, Elias narrowed his eyes at the tactician. And then he pouted. And then finally he got up and put his water pouch back into his bag before standing up. “What’s your angle? Why do you care?”

  “Because I know you.”

  “But you don’t.”

  She shook her head, deadly serious now. “No, I do.”

  Elias sensed the shift and wiped the grin off his face. “Do you now?”

  “I have a sense that you’re just trying to hide it.” It had been something similar with Luci, she had realized a minute ago. It was the same. That shadow of doubt, that meaninglessness of everything.

  He blinked. “There has to be another reason.”

  She nodded this time. “Yes, there is.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I’d like to live. For all of us to.”

  “We’re living right now. Including you.”

  “Yes, I am,” she answered conclusively yet a bit mellowly, breaking away from Elias’s piercing stare. “But being what I am, I probably will not have a long time left. The same cannot be said for you.”

  Elias backpedaled. “Wait, wait, wait. Hold up. Ya lost me. What?”

  Ty nodded slowly to herself and sipped her coffee again. “I’m a halfling.”

  It didn’t take long at all for the duelist to reply.

  “You look sad. Why? Is it a bad thing?” he asked with an upward inflection, puzzled by the somberness in her tone.

  She was speechless as she met his eyes with the same bewildered look.

  “Well, which one is it, tactician?”

  About to spit out a rebuke, Ty suddenly stopped. She realized how often she had taken advantage of her powers, remembered the good it had brought her. A good she hadn’t really thought about until now.

  Thankful. She was thankful to be alive. To live.

  “Yes,” she admitted slowly and quietly. “It has afforded me many liberties.”

  “A reason for a reason, then,” he chuckled before yawning loudly and hoisting his bag over his shoulder. “Ah, I wanted to catch up on sleep today, too.”

  “Oh, you have plans?” she asked when he turned away.

  Elias looked a bit taken aback when he swiveled his head around to look at the tactician. “Why, I have a reason now, don’t I?”