Chapter 22
Talia
Sebastian arrived before Leander reached the common room.
I had barely finished asking the Fifth Wing to find him when Shadow appeared beneath the study door. It spread across the floor, gathered beside the desk, and rose into his human form.
He looked at the red wall runes.
“What happened?”
“Leander told me the truth.”
Sebastian’s attention moved to the closed door. “All of it?”
“I don’t know. I suppose that depends upon whether another demonstration tries to kill me.”
He crossed the study and stopped on the opposite side of the desk.
The scale at my wrist remained visible, though its colors had faded after the healer treated me. A faint clear edge reflected the lamplight whenever I moved.
Sebastian looked at it.
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“Any heat?”
“No.”
“Pressure beneath the skin?”
“Not until you started asking questions.”
He lifted his gaze.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t fair.”
“It was accurate.”
He did not sit. He waited as though I had summoned him for a specific task rather than because I did not want Leander nearby.
I folded my arms, then let them drop when the scale caught against my sleeve.
“Leander gave his family information about me. They used it to design the demonstration.”
“I know.”
“Did you know before today?”
“No.”
“Would you tell me if you had?”
“Yes.”
I looked at him.
He understood the doubt.
“I submitted the assessment report without telling you,” he said. “I won’t repeat that decision.”
“You believed you were being accurate.”
“I believed information mattered more than your right to know what I intended to do with it.”
The answer sounded rehearsed only because Sebastian had probably examined it from every possible direction before speaking.
“Is there a difference?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“You are the difference.”
The wall runes softened from red to clear.
I looked down at the scattered pages on the desk.
Sebastian reached for the nearest chair.
“Do you want me to stay?”
“Yes.”
He sat.
He did not ask me to explain Leander’s betrayal before I was ready. He did not offer reassurance he could not prove. He simply placed himself within reach and allowed the room to be quiet around us.
For a while, neither of us spoke.
The silence with him did not feel like waiting. He took the black return-channel fragment from his coat and set it beneath the rune lamp. I opened my notebook and tried to record the sequence of the demonstration.
We worked at the same desk until the lamps dimmed for the evening bell.
Sebastian found three marks on the black metal that did not match the academy’s standard inventory seals. I wrote half a page before realizing I had repeated the same sentence twice.
He noticed that too.
Without comment, he turned my notebook facedown and moved the rune lamp so its beam no longer struck my wrist. The scale faded to a clear edge. For the first time since it appeared, someone deliberately chose not to look.
“You need rest.”
“So does everyone.”
“You nearly collapsed.”
“I didn’t.”
“Torren caught you.”
“I was lowering myself carefully.”
“Into his arms?”
“It seemed safer than the floor.”
Sebastian’s mouth shifted slightly.
The wall runes turned gold.
“You’re making a joke,” I said.
“Technically, you made it.”
“You found it funny.”
“Moderately.”
“I didn’t think you knew how.”
“I know how to do many things you haven’t observed.”
The gold deepened.
I looked at him.
His expression remained composed, but something had changed in his eyes.
Heat moved into my face.
Sebastian looked toward the wall.
“The runes are inconvenient.”
“Rafe likes them.”
“That supports my conclusion.”
He wrapped the black metal fragment and returned it to his coat.
“Come with me.”
“Where?”
“The observatory.”
“Why?”
“I want to test the scale under natural light.”
My brief warmth disappeared.
“Of course you do.”
Sebastian heard the change.
“Talia—”
“You stayed because I asked you, and now you’ve found a reason to examine me again.”
“The observatory may tell us whether the scale responds only to magical light.”
“I already spent the day on a platform while people tested what kinds of power my body would accept.”
“This is not the demonstration.”
“It always becomes a demonstration.”
I stood too quickly. The chair scraped against the floor.
Sebastian remained seated.
“Everything that happens to me turns into a question you need to answer,” I said. “The beam. The torc. The fire. The First Trial. The scale.”
“Yes.”
The immediate agreement hurt.
He rose.
“But I didn’t ask you to come because I need another result.”
“You just said you wanted to test the scale.”
“That was a reason I thought you would accept.”
“What is the real one?”
“I wanted to show you the observatory.”
I stopped.
“Why?”
“Because I think you would like it.”
No one had ever looked less comfortable admitting something kind.
The study runes became gold again.
I glanced at them, then at him.
“Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“And you won’t record what my scale does?”
He hesitated.
“Sebastian.”
“I won’t bring a notebook.”
“That is not the same promise.”
“I won’t record it.”
“Mentally either.”
“That may be beyond my control.”
I tried not to smile.
He saw me trying.
“You may examine it only if I ask,” I said.
“Agreed.”
The promise changed the invitation. He was not taking me somewhere to produce information. He was offering me something beautiful and accepting that whatever my body did there would remain mine unless I chose to share it.
We left the Fifth Wing.
The academy observatory occupied a narrow tower above the Shadow archive. Sebastian’s torc opened the lower door, but the upper staircase remained dark until he sent a small thread of violet light into the wall.
Shadow lamps illuminated one after another.
“Do you come here often?” I asked.
“Whenever the archive feels crowded.”
“There are six people in the entire restricted archive.”
“Exactly.”
The staircase ended beneath a circular room.
Bookshelves filled the lower walls. Instruments occupied the tables: star maps, sighting lenses, rotating brass rings, and several devices I could not identify.
Above us, clear glass formed the entire ceiling.
Night covered the academy.
Without the tower walls blocking the view, the stars appeared in numbers I had never seen from the ground. Their light was faint compared with the rune lamps, but the glass had been enchanted to magnify it without changing its color.
Sebastian deactivated the lamps.
The stars brightened overhead.
I walked to the center of the room.
“Why isn’t this in the public academy tour?”
“Most visitors prefer the dragon arenas.”
“They’re missing this.”
“I know.”
He remained near the staircase, giving me space.
Shadow rested at his feet instead of filling the room. He had brought me into one of the few places where he came to be alone, then made certain I did not feel watched inside it.
I tilted my head back.
The scale at my wrist caught the starlight.
A faint line of color moved across my hand.
Sebastian saw it.
He did not comment.
I appreciated the effort that required.
“White light isn’t actually white,” he said after several minutes.
“That sounds like a comment.”
“It’s a general fact.”
“A conveniently relevant one.”
“Yes.”
I looked at him.
He came to stand beside me.
“White light contains many colors,” he continued. “Most materials absorb or reflect them together. A prism changes the angle of each one, allowing us to see what was already present.”
“So I’m a prism.”
“I don’t know what you are.”
The honesty no longer felt cold.
I lifted my wrist. “The scale doesn’t create the colors.”
“No.”
“It only reveals them.”
“Yes.”
“Is that what happened in the Hall?”
“With the elements?”
“I saw each one separately. I could direct them because they never truly mixed.”
Sebastian looked toward the stars again.
“Refraction.”
“What?”
“The bending of light as it passes between materials. Your power may be doing something similar with elemental magic.”
The word fit better than unknown manifestation.
“Refraction,” I repeated.
He watched me say it.
The expression on his face was the same one he wore when a sealed record opened.
My brief sense of discovery tightened into something else.
“There,” I said.
“What?”
“That look.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me like I’m an answer hidden beneath a seal.”
His expression changed.
“You brought me here because you thought I would like it. Then my scale reflected light, and now I’m a discovery again.”
“Talia—”
“I know the mystery matters. I want answers too. But sometimes I need you to see me before the thing happening to me.”
“I do.”
“No. You see patterns.”
“I see both.”
“Which one did you see first?”
He did not answer.
That was answer enough.
I moved toward the staircase.
Sebastian caught my hand.
He avoided the scale and held only my fingers.
“Wait.”
“I don’t want another explanation.”
“I don’t have one.”
I looked down at our hands.
He had never touched me without asking. Not until now.
His grip loosened, but he did not release me.
“You are the question this entire academy was built to answer,” he said.
I looked up.
“That is exactly what I don’t want to be.”
“I know.”
“Then why would you say it?”
“Because it is true. The Fifth Wing, the hidden runes, the altered Trial records—every unanswered part leads to you.”
“I am not an answer either.”
“No.”
His thumb moved once across my fingers.
“Then you are Talia.”
I remembered the study on the night he discovered my scale.
He had said the same thing after calling me an unidentified manifestation. A correction added too late because he saw that the first words hurt.
“You tried that before,” I said.
“I didn’t understand it before.”
“What changed?”
“You summoned me tonight and I was glad.”
The admission was quiet.
He looked at our joined hands as though they presented another puzzle, but his expression held no fascination now. Only uncertainty.
“I wanted you to call me,” he said. “Not because your scale was visible or because you had new information. I wanted you to choose me when you needed someone.”
“I did.”
I had chosen him because he understood silence, because he could sit beside pain without trying to rename it, and because when the academy turned my body into evidence, he had finally learned to put me before the discovery.
“Yes.”
His fingers tightened around mine.
I moved closer.
“Does anyone call you Bastian?”
His eyebrows drew together. “No.”
“Do you dislike it?”
“I haven’t considered it.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“I’ve considered the historical and linguistic use of the name. I haven’t considered it applied to me.”
“Of course you haven’t.”
“Why Bastian?”
“Sebastian is the man who files reports and examines sealed cabinets.”
“That is most of me.”
“Not all.”
The observatory remained dark enough that I could not read every change in his face. I felt the change in his hand.
“Bastian,” I said.
His Shadow moved across the floor.
It reached me without covering the starlight.
“Say it again.”
“Bastian.”
He lowered his head.
“May I kiss you?”
“Yes.”
His mouth touched mine.
The kiss began with the same caution he applied to unfamiliar runes. Light pressure. One hand holding mine, the other resting at my waist without pulling.
I leaned into him.
His control broke.
The change thrilled me. Sebastian examined every impulse before allowing it into the world. Bastian kissed me as if my permission had opened a door he had been holding shut with both hands.
Bastian’s hand slid to the back of my neck. He kissed me again, deeper this time, his body pressing against mine while Shadow gathered around our feet.
I released his hand and gripped the front of his coat.
He made a quiet sound against my mouth.
The Shadow rose around us, dark enough to hide the bookshelves and instruments while leaving the glass ceiling clear.
We stood beneath the stars with the rest of the room gone.
His Shadow did not trap me. It gave us privacy, holding the academy and all its questions beyond a soft violet-dark edge while starlight continued to reach my skin.
When the kiss ended, his forehead rested against mine.
His breathing was no steadier than mine.
“Was that another experiment?” I asked.
“No.”
“Did you learn anything?”
“Yes.”
I waited.
He touched my lower lip with his thumb.
“I like when you call me Bastian.”
I smiled.
Color moved through the scale at my wrist.