The leviathan crossed into open sky an hour after departure. The academy vanished into the thick cloud cover below. After that, there was only the ocean. It was dark, enormous, and terrifyingly empty. Faint stars were just beginning to prick through the horizon where the daylight had not fully surrendered.
Vane sat on the freezing upper deck with his back pressed against the vibrating iron hull. His spear lay flat beside him. The changing air pressure gnawed rcilessly at his fractured ribs. He welcod the dull, grinding ache. It gave him sothing physical to focus on.
He had the communication crystal in his tight grip. He had been holding it since the carriage ride.
He slowly turned the smooth stone over in his palm. The acknowledgnt pulses still glowed deep within its core. Two small, warm embers. The ssages had arrived. They had been read.
He had not sent much. Just two short, desperate ssages, hastily composed in the rattling dark while Ashe pretended to be asleep.
He had choked on the words. That was the ugly, honest truth of it. He had known exactly what he wanted to say for weeks. He had practiced it in the echoing quiet of the training room, staring at the ceiling in the dical ward, and sitting in the armchair while Ashe slept nearby. The words existed. The perfect mont had existed too, for exactly six minutes in Villa 1, right before a Transcendent walked through his front door and tore his life off its hinges.
So, he had sent a coward's apology in the dark.
'I didn't choose this timing. I had sothing to say tonight. It still needs to be said. Twelve weeks, then I say it properly.'
He had sent the exact sa text to both of them. It was a brutal piece of honesty, wrapped in cowardice.
In Villa 1, Valerica stood frozen in the common room.
She had arrived a breathless twenty minutes after the crystal chid. She had practically run from her own quarters, a frantic lapse in composure she refused to examine too closely.
Isole was already there. She sat rigidly in the armchair, her wooden staff resting across her knees. A steaming cup of tea sat untouched beside her. Mara had apparently produced it without being asked.
Mara lingered in the kitchen doorway. She swept her flat, ancient gaze between the two older girls, registering the thick tension in the room. Then, she simply turned around, went back to the stove, and made more tea. It was the absolute most useful thing she could have done.
Valerica read the glowing text ssage one more ti. Her throat felt incredibly tight.
The villa felt entirely hollow. It was not just the normal quiet of a late night. It was the specific, suffocating absence of his gravity. She had noticed this unique brand of emptiness soti around their third month together. She had never spoken a word of it to anyone.
She set the crystal face-down on the side table with a soft click.
She forced herself to look at the bookshelf.
The boxes were still sitting there. The crimson one from her. The silver one from Isole. The midnight blue from Nyx. All three of them remained perfectly sealed. They had been sitting in the exact sa spot since the Day of Concord. She had walked past them every single day. She had bitten her tongue every single ti, deciding to let him choose the mont. She had fiercely held onto that patience through a brutal evaluation, a campus lockdown, and a hospital stay.
Now, her patience had been rewarded with a twelve-week exile.
Isole was watching her closely.
"He had sothing to say," Isole murmured into the quiet. It was not a question.
"Yes."
"Tonight."
"Yes," Valerica breathed, her voice betraying a slight tremor.
Isole wrapped both her hands around her teacup, seeking the warmth. She stared at the shelf. "He sent the ssage before the leviathan even left the docks."
"Yes."
"He didn't have to do that," Isole noted softly. "He easily could have let the twelve weeks pass, walked back into second year, and claid the timing just slipped his mind. Most people would have taken the easy way out." She paused, her eyes softening. "He didn't."
Valerica looked away, staring out the dark window. The spring night was mild. The campus was a ghost town with almost everyone gone for the break. The lights were completely dark on the spiral hill.
She had been carrying a heavy, terrifying thing inside her for a very long ti. It was a feeling she was vastly more honest about in the dark than in the light. She carried it the way her aristocratic father had rigorously trained her to carry every burden: privately, thoroughly, and with absolutely no visible indication of the imnse cost. She was furious at herself for how quickly that lifeti of training had shattered the second it actually mattered.
She swallowed the confession building in her throat.
"Twelve weeks," Valerica said instead.
"Yes," Isole agreed quietly.
A heavy silence settled over the tea cups.
"That is a very long ti to think," Valerica whispered. The raw honesty slipped out before she could catch it. She decided to just let it bleed. "I an that for him. Not for us. Twelve weeks isolated with that monster and Lancelot. He will co back completely different."
"He cos back different from everything," Isole replied. The timbre of her voice was remarkably gentle. "It is one of the fundantal things about him."
Valerica looked back at the shelf. She stared at the small crimson box.
She had made those chocolates herself. She had spent four agonizing hours tempering the sugar, telling absolutely no one, while the kitchen staff politely pretended not to notice her panic. She had wrapped the box in her house colors because it was tradition. Mostly, she had wrapped it because she had stood trembling in that kitchen, clutching the paper, terrified by an emotion she had no tactical frawork to defeat. She had chosen to simply step off the cliff rather than analyze the fall into paralysis.
The box had been gathering dust for three months.
"Do you think he actually knows?" Valerica asked, her voice tight.
Isole was quiet for a long, thoughtful mont. "Yes," she finally said. "I think he has known for quite a while. I think he has been agonizing over what to do about it, and the deciding has been vastly harder for him than the knowing."
Valerica closed her eyes and thought about this.
"He told to not miss when we went into the third practical," she said quietly, rembering the heat of his hand. "On the night before the deploynt. He looked right at and said, don't miss." She paused, fighting the knot in her chest. "I had been desperately trying to tell him sothing for an hour. He knew that. He said it anyway." She opened her eyes. "It was the exact perfect thing to say, and I have absolutely no idea if he even knew that."
"He knew," Isole said with absolute certainty.
The copper kettle shrieked from the kitchen. Mara materialized in the doorway with a fresh tray. She set it down with a sharp clink and looked at the two older girls with ancient, twelve-year-old eyes. She had seen enough of the world to remain entirely unsurprised by a broken heart.
"He will be back in twelve weeks," Mara stated. She did not try to sound comforting. She delivered it as an ironclad fact. "He always cos back."
She turned and vanished back into the kitchen.
Isole looked up at Valerica. A very specific weight passed between them. It required no ssy language. It was the deep, quiet understanding of two proud people standing on the exact sa battlefield. They had never directly discussed the shape of their rivalry. Sowhere along the way, they had silently agreed that holding the line together was a form of profound respect.
Valerica finally picked up her steaming tea.
She looked at the shelf one last ti. She looked at the crimson box and the three agonizing months of waiting it represented.
"Fine," Valerica said firmly. Just that.
Isole let out a soft, warm breath that might have been a laugh.
On the leviathan, Vane was still freezing on the upper deck.
He had no idea what was happening in the hollow quiet of Villa 1. He would not know for eighty-four days. He sat in the dark and forced himself to swallow that reality. He had sent the only words he had. It was incredibly inadequate, but it was all he possessed. The massive, aching gap between those two truths was a physical weight he would have to drag across the ocean, carry through the eastern compound, and drag all the way back.
He closed his eyes. He felt Valerica's cold fingers brushing his arm in the dark before the practical, the electric wire between them humming with tension. He saw Isole sitting patiently in the armchair for a full hour, demanding nothing, simply waiting for him to be ready.
He thought about both of them. He thought about how incredibly simple his life would be if they were different people, or if he were a lesser man, or if the brutal world would just stop spinning for five minutes. Then he forcefully shoved the thought away. Simple had never been the goal.
He closed his fist tightly around the warm communication crystal.
He rembered Ashe's voice on their last night in the villa, quietly admitting she saw the tangled ss between him and the others. He thought about the mountain evening that had just been violently stolen from him.
He held all of this grief at the exact sa ti. He refused to resolve any of it. It was the only honest choice he had left.
The wind whipping off the black ocean was like ice. The stars were fully blazing now, a sprawling, violently bright canvas you only ever saw when you were completely untethered from the island's protective mana field.
He heard footsteps. They were light and highly specific.
Ashe dropped down heavily onto the wooden deck right beside him. She did not pry. She did not ask him how he was holding up. She just stared out at the black water. After a long minute, she pulled her knees up to her chest, rested her chin on her arms, and studied the stars. She tracked the constellations the exact sa way she calculated angles in a knife fight.
He was aware of her heat beside him the way he had beco aware of her everywhere. Fully, instantly, and without a single ounce of effort.
Neither of them spoke a word for a very long ti. The rusted leviathan pushed relentlessly east. The ocean below them was dark and terrifyingly wide. Sowhere miles behind them, a floating island was swallowed by the clouds, hiding a quiet villa, a dusty bookshelf, and two girls who were waiting.
"You sent the ssages," Ashe murmured to the wind. It was not a question.
"Yes," Vane said.
She nodded slowly. She dug a piece of dried fruit out of her heavy jacket, took a bite, and kept her eyes locked on the sky. "Good," she said.
He leaned his head back against the vibrating hull and looked at the horizon.
The crossing was ten days long. Twelve brutal weeks waited in the east. The chaotic volu of their first year was rapidly closing in the dark behind them. Straight ahead, the eastern dawn was just beginning to announce itself, faint and freezing and entirely real.
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