The next morning, Aveline woke to the sensation of sothing warm and heavy pressing against her legs. For a few sleepy seconds, she thought she was still dreaming.
Then she opened her eyes, and nearly scread.
"Hamilton!"
The creature lazily lifted his head from the foot of her bed and blinked at her with complete innocence.
Aveline stared.
Yesterday, he had been the size of a kitten. Now he was the size of a small dog. A very chubby small dog.
His body had beco longer, his scales richer in color, and his wings had grown significantly larger during the night. Folded against his sides, they no longer looked ornantal. They looked capable of carrying him into the air soday... maybe today, if he wanted to.
Hamilton rely stretched, yawned, and revealed a mouth full of tiny sharp teeth before settling comfortably back into her blankets as though he owned the place.
Aveline pressed both hands over her face.
"Oh no."
This was becoming a problem. A very large problem.
She had no idea whether Hamilton was truly growing this quickly or whether the pill Theron had given him was gradually losing its effect.
The thought imdiately brought Theron to mind. A familiar ache settled in her chest. Normally, she would have asked him. Theron always seed to know things she didn’t. Or at least pretended he did with enough confidence that she believed him.
But asking him was not an option anymore. She had no way of reaching him. No way of finding answers. And sohow that realization hurt more than she wanted to admit.
Aveline sat beside Hamilton and studied him carefully.
The aetherstones. It had to be the stones. He had eaten only two of them and grown almost overnight.
What exactly were those stones?
And more importantly...
What exactly had Hamilton beco?
The creature wagged his tail and attempted to climb into her lap. Aveline grunted as forty pounds of enthusiastic dragon-lizard landed directly on her.
"You are not helping."
Hamilton chirped proudly.
And...The real disaster ca when Lydia knocked on the door. Aveline froze. Hamilton froze. Another knock followed.
"Lady Vaelreth? Are you awake?"
Aveline imdiately sprang into action.
"Hamilton. Under the bed."
The creature tilted his head.
"Under. The. Bed."
Hamilton wagged his tail. Then... sat down. Aveline nearly cried.
"Lydia is outside!"
Hamilton wagged harder.
The third knock sounded.
Aveline lunged forward and began physically pushing the increasingly oversized creature toward the bed.
Hamilton seed convinced they were playing so sort of ga. He rolled onto his back. Aveline pushed harder.
He kicked happily with all four legs. The bedfra creaked ominously.
"Hamilton!"
At last, with trendous effort, she managed to shove most of him beneath the bed.
Most.
His tail remained sticking out.
Aveline grabbed it and stuffed it underneath just as Lydia opened the door. The room fell silent. Aveline stood in the middle of the room, breathing heavily.
Lydia blinked. "Lady Vaelreth..."
"Good morning!"
Lydia glanced around suspiciously.
"Why are you sweating?"
"I was exercising."
Lydia looked unconvinced. Very unconvinced.
But thankfully, she asked no further questions. Aveline silently thanked every deity she knew.
Under the bed, sothing rustled ominously. Aveline stomped her foot loudly.
Lydia blinked.
Aveline smiled.
Lydia slowly decided she did not want to know. Although Lydia initially intended to leave early and walk to class alone, Aveline insisted on accompanying her.
The younger girl seed nervous about it, perhaps because everyone already knew who Aveline was. Or perhaps because everyone knew nobody willingly associated with her because of her "status".
But Aveline did not care. She was tired of being alone. So the two girls walked together through the Arcanum’s stone corridors.
As expected, heads turned imdiately. Students glanced at them. Whispers followed. So looked surprised. Others looked confused. A few looked openly offended.
After all, the mysterious foreign noblewoman who occupied one of the finest suites in the Arcanum was now casually walking beside a poor scholarship student from the attic dormitories.
The pairing made no sense.
Aveline ignored every stare. Ignored every whisper. Ignored every judgntal glance.
Lydia, however, looked ready to disappear into the floor.
"You don’t mind?" she asked quietly after a while.
Aveline looked at her.
"Mind what?"
"Everyone staring."
Aveline snorted.
"They stare when I’m alone."
Lydia blinked.
"They stare when I’m breathing."
Another blink.
"They’d probably stare if I died."
Lydia covered her mouth as a laugh escaped her.
Aveline smiled.
The sound surprised both of them.
And for the first ti since arriving at the Arcanum, walking through those halls did not feel quite so lonely.
-----
By the third stretch of the lecture, Aveline’s patience had begun to fray.
The classroom was warm, the air heavy with chalk dust and the drone of the professor’s voice, and the wooden bench beneath her felt harder by the minute.
She had tried, at first. She had really tried to follow along, to make sense of the diagrams on the board and the repeated explanations about stone classification and elental behavior. But the words kept slipping through her grasp like water through her fingers.
What did hold her attention, however, were the stones.
She had noticed it before, quietly and with increasing certainty. They did not all look the sa to her. They did not simply glow. Each one carried a different kind of color, a different rhythm, a different weight in the air around it. So seed to hum softly, others flickered like unstable embers, while a few felt almost silent yet strangely intense, as though they were holding their breath.
So when the professor began speaking about resonance, Aveline finally lifted her hand.
"Could it be that the stones each have their own frequency and hence the difference?" she asked.
The professor paused and stared at her as though she had suddenly started speaking another language.
"Frequency?" he repeated with a frown. "What exactly do you an by that?"
Aveline straightened a little in her seat, encouraged rather than discouraged. "The waves," she said. "If each stone emits a different frequency, wouldn’t that explain why they appear different to so people? Maybe with the proper tools, they would have colors, the color a reflection of the vibration itself."
For a mont, the room fell silent.
Then one of the students near the front gave a short, disbelieving laugh.
Another followed.
Soon a few more joined in, the amusent spreading like a cruel little spark through the class.
The professor’s face darkened. "This is not a theory lesson," he said sharply. "We are discussing established classifications."
"But that is what I’m asking about," Aveline said, genuinely confused now. "If the stones are not uniform, then shouldn’t frequency matter? So of them feel louder than others."
The professor’s jaw tightened.
"Enough," he snapped.
One of the boys in the front row snickered under his breath, and that was apparently enough to push the man past his limit.
"Out," the professor barked, pointing to the door. "If you cannot respect the lesson, then you may continue your nonsense elsewhere."
Aveline stared at him.
What nonsense?
She had only asked a question.
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