Chapter 20
Elora
The smell found her before consciousness did.
Bacon. Eggs. Something warm and salted and achingly ordinary threading itself through the crack beneath the door and up into the space where she’d buried herself.
Elora lifted her head from beneath her wing.
Her eyes were wide before she was fully awake, nostrils flaring, the nightglider’s senses cataloguing the smell with automatic precision—fat rendering in a pan, yolk just beginning to set, wood smoke from a cook fire one floor down, two doors to the right.
The nightglider mind was good at this— at simple instinct while holding the rest of her mind at a distance, at keeping the noise of last night somewhere behind glass where it couldn’t press in.
She could feel it back there. The questions.
Her spoken vulnerabilities. Rell’s confession.
The warm press of his forehead against hers, his thumb at the nape of her neck, his lips on hers.
All of it hovered just beyond reach, muffled and remote, the way sound travels underwater.
Good. She wasn’t ready for any of it.
Morning light lay across the floorboards in pale, flat bars, filtering through the curtains in the thin, watery way that belonged to early hours. The room was quiet. The kind of quiet that meant the village hadn’t fully stirred yet.
Then she saw him, folded into the armchair near the window, one arm draped over the side, his head tipped back against the cushion at an angle that would ache when he woke.
He was shirtless still, loose pants riding low on his hips, his dark hair falling across his forehead in the careless way sleep allowed.
His journal was open in his lap, resting against his thighs where his hand had gone slack around it.
She eased herself upright, slowly, testing the bed frame’s willingness to cooperate. The wood groaned faintly beneath the shift of her weight, and she froze, watching Rell. His chest rose and fell without interruption. His fingers didn’t tighten around the journal.
She waited another breath, then stretched her neck forward, feathers rustling in the softest possible way as she angled her gaze toward the open page in his lap.
A sketch. As she expected. The man spent many quiet nights back in The Whispering Woods sketching in his journal, never letting her see what he was drawing.
This sketch was rough, done in charcoal by the look of the dark smears along the inner spine. The lines were confident, as if he were drawing a still life right in front of him. She peeked closer; it was a nightglider at the edge of a treeline, wings spread, muzzle snarling.
The proportions were right. The wingspan, the heavy chest, the way the tail curved outward for balance. It was specific. Observed, not imagined.
Her chest tightened.
Is that me?
She turned her head slightly, trying to find the angle he would have had.
There was something written beside it, small and cramped, tucked into the margin near the figure’s outstretched claws.
She couldn’t make it out from here. She stretched her neck further, the bed frame shifting beneath her as her weight redistributed, and still the words blurred at the edge of legible.
She rose onto her haunches.
One careful step forward, then another, until her front talons curled over the very edge of the mattress, and she was balanced on the precipice of it, wings lifting automatically to compensate, spreading wide in the small room.
She was still trying to parse the margin letters when Rell’s eyes opened.
Not gradually, not with the slow blinking of someone surfacing from deep sleep. All at once, the way people woke when something in the dark had changed.
His eyes found her before the rest of him had caught up.
The sound he made was not quite a scream—something shorter, more percussive, punched out of him before he could stop it.
Then his whole body did the rest: a full-body flinch that became a shove that became a backward launch, chair and all.
The legs caught on the uneven floorboards and tipped, and then he was gone, crashing behind the chair’s back with a sound that definitely woke everyone else up, the journal slapping the floor somewhere in the chaos.
Elora sat back on her haunches.
A wild, unfamiliar sensation bubbled up from her chest, something between delight and mischief that had no proper human translation.
It moved through her ribs and out her throat in a sound that was neither a rumble nor a bark, but a huff of breath pushed through bared teeth that on a human face would have been a laugh.
It came again before she could stop it, that same involuntary, undignified burst, her shoulders shaking with it, tail sweeping once behind her in a wide arc.
She jumped.
The bed frame issued a final complaint as she cleared it, four paws landing on the floorboards with a weight that shook the nearest window in its frame. She padded toward the overturned chair, the laughter still working through her in fading ripples, and let the shift come.
She straightened, human again, her hair falling loose around her face, the leaf-woven garment cool against her collarbones.
Rell was on the floor on his back, one arm flung over the toppled chair, blinking at the ceiling with the expression of a man reassembling his dignity piece by piece.
She offered her hand.
He looked at it. Then at her face.
Whatever he found there—the smile she hadn’t managed to put away, the remnants of that laugh still visible in the corners of her mouth—did something to his expression. The alarm drained out of it slowly, replaced by something quieter. His jaw unclenched. The line between his brows smoothed.
He took her hand.
She pulled, and he was lighter than she remembered, but she didn’t strain. He came upright in a single motion, close enough that she had to tip her chin to keep her eyes on his face.
There was a pause.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Morning,” he said at the same time.
They both stopped. He looked at the overturned chair. She looked at the overturned chair. He bent to fix it, and she stepped back to give him room she didn’t need to give him.
“You were reading my journal,” he said to the chair.
“I was trying to.”
He retrieved it from the floor, checked the spine, and tucked it under his arm. His hair was wrecked from sleep, a dark smear of charcoal on the heel of his palm. He looked as if he were about to say something else and then didn’t.
Then the smell hit him. His nostrils flared, his chin lifted, attention redirecting as cleanly as a compass needle finding north.
Her own stomach answered before she could stop it. A long, low sound that started somewhere beneath her ribs and made itself embarrassingly known in the quiet room.
Rell looked at her.
She looked at the wall.
“Right,” he said. He crossed to the wardrobe, dragged out a linen shirt, and pulled it over his head without bothering with the laces. “We need to eat.” He grabbed his coat from the hook by the door. “And then we gotta move.”
Elora didn’t follow him immediately.
She stood in the middle of the room, her arms loose at her sides, the morning light lying flat and pale across the floor between them.
Last night’s decisions—or the absence of them—sat heavy in her chest. She had fallen asleep before she had to make any.
The beast had been very convenient about that.
Rell paused at the door with his hand on the frame, coat half-shrugged onto one shoulder. He looked back at her.
Something in his expression had changed from a moment ago. The easy deflection was gone. He studied her with that measured gaze he reserved for moments when he thought she wasn’t looking.
He leaned one shoulder against the doorframe.
“Listen, I said I wanted to help you, and I mean that.” He walked over to her, almost reached out to touch her arm, but pulled back.
“If you were to keep going south, to The Institute, fly in and find Thorn and do what you came back over those mountains to do. I will go with you.”
The offer sat differently than it had the night before. She wasn’t sure if that was because she still half-suspected his reasons had more to do with Kira than with her, or because she was only now letting herself consider what it would actually mean to say yes.
“But you can also come to The Hive, see what we are actually building. The whole damn picture.” He scratched the back of his neck, not quite meeting her eyes.
“It’s not just about talking to farmers and redirecting children.
There’s a plan. A real one. Aimed at The Institute itself—not just Thorn.
Everything it was built to protect.” He let that settle before adding, “And Thorn doesn’t disappear off the board if you come with me.
He’s still there. He’ll still be reachable if that’s what you decide you want afterwards. ”
The pull toward the window burned hot and immediate—now, now, now—and the simplicity of it was almost a relief.
One target. One outcome. No one else’s plan to trust, no one else to lose.
But Rell had said they were targeting The Institute itself, not just Thorn, and she didn’t know what that meant, and she found, with some irritation, that she wanted to.
She nodded.
His posture loosened slightly. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t push. Just turned back toward the wardrobe and opened the door.
He pulled out a robe that she recognized before he’d fully turned around.
It was dark, the kind of dark that held purple in it when the light moved across the fabric, deep as the hour before true night.
The hem and cuffs were trimmed in gold thread that caught the pale morning light and held it; fine work, the kind that didn’t fray or tarnish.
The material was lighter than it looked.
Imperial alchemist issue. She knew the weight of it without touching it.
Rell held it out to her.
She had imagined wearing it. During the years of preparation, during the drills and the lessons and the carefully measured progress toward trials she had believed she would pass.
She had pictured herself in the courtyard with the gold catching the sun and felt something that she’d been allowed to call pride.
Now, it looked like the version of her future that Thorn had crushed underfoot and kept as a souvenir.
It matched his study. His robes. The gold detailing on The Institute’s gates and doors and official correspondence.
The Empire’s signature rendered in thread, quiet and permanent, stitched into the hem of every alchemist it produced.
You belong to this. This belongs to us. The honor is ours to grant.
She didn’t reach for it.
Rell’s expression shifted, patience dissolving into something drier.
“Stop overthinking it,” he said. “It’s a robe. The bacon is getting cold.”
She took it from him.
The fabric settled across her shoulders with a weight she hadn’t anticipated, not oppressive, just present.
The gold thread caught the morning light along the cuffs as she worked the front closed, and she made herself look at it without flinching.
It didn’t transform into something else.
It remained exactly what it was—well-made cloth, good stitching, nothing more than that unless she decided it was.
She smoothed her hands down the front once, then stopped.
Rell was already at the door, coat on properly now, journal tucked under his arm. He glanced back, and the look on his face lasted only a second before he turned away, but she caught it. Something between satisfaction and awe.
Rell gestured her over. “Come on. Food first, then a surprise.”
She followed.