One by one, Ty checked the Great Hall, the lecture halls, the library and its study rooms, the class practice yards, the dining hall, the open area at the front of the Academy, the dorms, the physician’s courtyard, the caster’s courtyard, the infirmary, and the back of the dorms leading into the forest, all to no avail.

  With no other ideas, stepping forward onto the dirt path that led into the woods, Ty dared not look back, trying to convince herself that the forest was a good of a place as any: it was nice and quiet, and the tall, dense trees provided a perfectly covered canopy. About ten minutes down the path was a nice little pond, and past that were several peaceful clearings of all sizes, filled with so many flowers she could not even begin to name them all. The underbrush was lush and green all throughout the year, and even at night, the moon would often shine through to illuminate the sandy path. Sometimes even fireflies would dance in the darkness like little wayward stars.

  Her boots made little sound on the path as she walked slowly into the forest, wondering what she’d say if Theo asked for some more time again. She knew she could be hard to talk to sometimes, and was severely lacking in her social skills, but he was patient with her when she had needed it most. When he could have told her to get over it, do it by herself, he stayed with her.

  Far be it from Ty to deny him his time when he needed it, right?

  She looked up at the trees above her and observed the deepening glow of the evening sun streaming through the leaves. Her eyes followed a bright, far beam in front of her as she walked toward it, not particularly concerned about where she’d end up because the forest’s layout was child’s play compared to the forest by her home, but also because she didn’t really mind getting lost in nature for a while.

  Following streams of light one after the other, she kept going until she could see nothing but the luscious forest around her. No sign of anyone else but her and the birds above.

  “Hello,” she whispered into the forest, looking above again at the golden rays peeking through. Thinking about the Earth Mother, wondering if this was the right path, the one she had set herself on.

  The Earth Mother replied with silence, but she didn’t mind this time.

  She continued to walk down the trail and followed another ray before she realized that she couldn’t get to it—it was far, through dense shrubs and trees. The route she had been following ended where she stood.

  Turning around in her spot, wondering where she should go now, Ty loathed to think about using magic to disturb the forest in any way. She stepped a bit to the side, through a sparser area, and resumed her path toward the light.

  She walked and walked, and when she got to the light, she decided to get back onto the path again and spotted a slight opening off to the side. Slowly, making sure not to make too much noise, she made her way to it, dodging branches and leaves, gingerly pushing twigs away until she finally arrived at a small grassy clearing full of beautiful wildflowers and, sleeping against a tree, a present bestowed unto her by whichever Graces had been kind enough to have been following her that day.

  “I found you.”

  Theo opened his eyes. “You found me.”

  Hearing his words, she walked closer and knelt down on the grass a few steps away from him, hands in her lap. He was hugging a black book, and his voice was raspy.

  “You saw Em?”

  She nodded.

  “I thought I wanted to think, but all I’ve done is sleep.” He cracked a smile, still not meeting her eyes. “I thought I’d feel better if I saw him.”

  “Did it work?” she asked gently.

  “No, not at all.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not really.”

  Ty understood, nodding absently as she smoothed her skirt. The ground felt cold and wet under her legs. “Do you want to continue sleeping? I didn’t mean to bother you.”

  She had been prepared for him to ask her to leave again, but he cleared his throat and replied a little less hoarsely, “No, it’s alright. I feel a bit better now.”

  A faint smile played on her lips. “This is quite deep into the forest. I’m impressed you made it so far.”

  He glanced at her before looking away with an impish grin. “Ah, then you’d also be happy to know that I almost passed out getting here. Yes, yes, hold the applause.”

  She couldn’t help but chuckle. “Really is a shame that Fieldwork isn’t graded, then.”

  “Oh, don’t you dare give them ideas,” Theo retorted, laughing. “And what’s your excuse, walking through the forest instead of working?”

  Prepared with a quip, she stated matter-of-factly, with a prideful smirk on her face, “Finding out where my students are is part of my work.”

  “Mhm,” hummed Theo amusedly. “I’d ask you how you did it, but you’re probably going to give me some spiel about fate, right?”

  “You know me well,” she smiled as she distractedly played with her hands in her lap, knowing that it hadn’t been the whole truth. “Well, I…I also wanted to ask about that spell for the flower. From the other day.”

  “Oh, yes. The flowers.”

  As soon as the words had left his mouth, the smile was wiped off his face, turning blank.

  Even after waiting a minute, he still did not answer.

  “Theo?”

  “No, I—” he mumbled, “I…was thinking about the spell. I don’t have it with me here, I’m sorry. I think I remember most of it, but not all. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” nodded Ty. “You can show me another time.”

  “The…the trick with that spell,” mused Theo distractedly, his eyes scanning the forest as he deliberated, “is to calculate the coordinates from the stem of the flower as it extends. As long as you have the shape…start with big petals. And then smaller ones. The spell is meant to make large crystals, so you’ve got to know which part of the spell to take so that it produces the shape you want…begins at ‘to e’en chrys’ which is the edge, and then you slowly add the lines for numbers as you…” He trailed off, took a moment to realize how much he had spoken, and then met Ty’s eyes, asking a bit worriedly, “D-does that make sense?”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  A part of her wished that he hadn’t come to the realization and had kept going. “It does.” After all, it was information she already knew. It was his exact spell from last time that she wanted, so she could replicate the flower that she could see perfectly in her mind from that day. But she didn’t have the courage to tell him that yet.

  His eyes returned to the forest. “I also thought about what you said, about keeping it forever. Why don’t we get some sparkling dust? We could have it tinted the same color if that’s important. Since it’s dust, it’ll look like your stars, and it’ll be much wieldier, too. I liked your stars.”

  Somehow, when he said it, it felt okay.

  “That sounds good,” she replied quietly, bewildered by the amount of thought he had put into everything when their exchange hadn’t even been that long ago.

  “You looked like you liked those stars a lot, too,” he continued. “You tried to catch them with your hands like it was your first snow.” He lowered his head and smiled to himself. “It was fun to watch. Very cute.”

  She lowered her head too and shuffled in her spot. “It’s a spell my mother taught me. She called it a Starshower. I was told my birth parents made it.” And then she told him the story, how she got lost in the forest, how her mother had used the spell to bring her home. How special it was, how no one else knew.

  “That sounds like a warm memory,” he said afterward with a gentle smile. “Most chanting spells are old. Decorative, not good for battle. Very Ancient-like. I was never taught any.”

  Something clicked in Ty’s head. “If you want, I can teach you it.”

  Theo immediately met her steady gaze, astonished. “Does your mother not own it?”

  “No, she gave it to me when I left.”

  “…Doesn’t it have a finite number of uses, though?”

  “It does.”

  He watched her as she reached into her notebook and flipped to the inside of the back cover, where there was a small pocket. She patted it gently. “I carry it with me always. I’ve always wondered why my mother gave it to me when I’ve memorized the words.”

  “It’s special,” said Theo with a sad look on his face, nodding, turning his attention to the trees. “It’s a present you can keep with you.”

  “Do you have anything like that, Theo?”

  “Nothing I keep with me,” he murmured, wistful again. “I have a picture in my room…Em painted me.”

  Ty took the opportunity to come clean. “I’ve…seen it on your desk.”

  Instead of getting mad, the smile on his face didn’t falter. “People usually ask about it when they visit. It’s a long story. Em gave me some spending money once, and I used it to buy a book and some tarts. He got mad at me for the book and reprimanded me. I cried. He liked the tarts, though.” He paused. “I was sad for a long time, so he made me a gift to cheer me up—a painting. Told me he had forgotten about the book, but always remembered how sweet the tarts were. Kind of like how you do something embarrassing, and then you realize that no one remembers but you. You’re the one who’s trapped yourself into a corner, not someone else.”

  As he finished his story, he finally groaned loudly and passed his face through his hands.

  And then he said nothing. Just sat there, back to the tree, his unknown book and knees to his chest, his face wracked with despair.

  “I don’t know.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “I don’t know,” he repeated, his eyes empty, gazing into the distance again, his voice weak. “I don’t know.”

  There was nothing she could think of saying that felt correct. She wanted to tell him that it was alright. That it was okay. What else was there to say? Tell him the truth, a truth she could only confirm with her gut feeling?

  “When I went to see Em, I thought…I thought I’d feel better when he told me everything would be okay.” He hugged his knees tighter and rested his forehead on them. “But when he did, I couldn’t help but feel like…like he was lying. But…but…”

  But isn’t it natural for a parent to want to protect their child?

  “But he sounded like he always did. He sounded like Em. My Em.” His voice wavered. “What if he’s been lying to me, all this time? And I’ve just been blind? Who do I listen to? Who’s right? There’s so much noise. My brain feels like it’s trying to keep on running when I’ve barely got enough energy. I need to think, but I want to sleep. I want to get this dread out of my mind, I want to feel like everything will be okay. I want to believe myself, I want to believe Em. If only I could just close my eyes, wish it all away. If only the two could somehow reconcile.”

  He let go of the book and wrapped his arms around his knees, his hands on his head. “What did I expect from him? Telling him everything I was worried about, thinking he’d help, all so that he could chalk it up to me being foolish. All with a smile on his face, as if that’d allay my doubts and fears. And then there’s the fact that I feel some sense of…I don’t know, there’s just something in the back of my mind that I’m missing, and it’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t figure it out. There’s something familiar about all this, but that shouldn’t be possible. I’m so confused. Something in me just feels so, so tired, like I’m being weighed down by something I can’t comprehend. Is it bad that I want to just lay down instead of doing something about it? If only I could rest.”

  If there was a right time to say anything, it would be now.

  If he believes Emrys, then what would it matter what you say?

  I believe in Theo.

  “Do you trust him?”

  Theo was silent for a very long time. He let his arms fall limply to his side and sat upright, looking impassively to the side. His eyes were cold.

  He was quiet for so long that she began to think that he hadn’t heard her. But she didn’t have the courage to ask again, and his posture hadn’t changed, so she opened her notebook on her lap. She tried to stifle the ache in her chest by biting her cheek, by working on the last piece of translation for the second challenge in her book. Anything to fill the dreadful silence.

  As she wrote, head down, her words barely lit by the setting sun, she wondered if what she had said was wrong. If she should have said something else, comforted him instead.

  Quietly, the two sat in the grassy clearing.

  When she could no longer see the words on her page, and the night breeze had woken up from its diurnal slumber, Ty finally set down her notebook.

  Theo looked like he was sleeping—she couldn’t be sure of it, but his head was angled lower now, his hands lay on his lap, and his breathing was steady. The book he had been holding earlier sat on the ground beside him, its pages dangerously close to touching the dirt. He looked vulnerable, cold.

  She noiselessly put her notebook back in her bag and stood up, her feet barely making any noise in the grass as she walked the few steps it took to reach him. The breeze scattered her hair in the wind, but she gathered it into a bunch when kneeling down by Theo’s side to pick up his book, which must have been special for him to have been keeping so close. She couldn’t let it get dirty.

  She kept hoping that he wouldn’t wake up as she hugged it and carefully sat down beside him so that she could soften the cold breeze, so that she could keep the book by him in case he wondered where it went. So that she could give him even a small iota of the peace he so desperately sought.

  All to satisfy her indescribable desire to protect him, to protect her classmates, to keep whatever happiness they could salvage for a little while longer before the world caught up to them, before all the bloodshed, loss, and destruction arrived and there would be peace no more. Not for a long time.

  Staring into the dark forest, patiently waiting for Theo, observing the faint traces of moonlight shining down from the sky, the slight twinkle of fireflies in the distance, she felt an undeniable warmth beside her—life—even in the cold of the night, and decided that she didn’t need an answer from him to know how she felt. The answer she had already found herself, the answer she knew was true, the answer that would never change, that was enough for her.

  And then, in the darkness, was another answer.

  “Every time I close my eyes, I keep seeing that flower field. I keep seeing you, and you’re smiling. There’s this look on your face that fills me with relief, that makes me feel like everything’s going to be okay. It chases away all my doubts, all my worries, all my pain. Sometimes you say something silly to me, sometimes you laugh. Sometimes you do nothing. But every second in that field feels like the world to me. Every second is worth far more than anything I can quantify, and I don’t know why. I’m just so happy to see you again. Even though I know it’s just a dream, and none of it is real, even though you’re here right now with me, I’m just…I’m just so happy to be able to see you again. I’m so happy to have found you again. I don’t want to wake up. I don’t want to go back to a world where you’re gone, a world where I know I’ll lose you, a world where you’re not there with me. A world without you.”

  Theo wept.