Chapter 5: Cold Fingers

Elora's POV

The cold woke me before anything else did.

A draft cut through the gap in the window frame and raked across the back of my neck like a blade. I opened my eyes to a ceiling of mold-blackened stone that swam in and out of focus for a long moment before it held still. I had no way of knowing how long I'd been out. My bones ached deep in the joints — my knees, my ribs — and any attempt to shift my weight pulled a sharp hiss through my teeth.

I pressed my palm against my forehead. Still burning.

The dark-red fire that had surged through my veins was quiet now, but the channels it had scorched remained raw and throbbing. Human flesh wasn't built to carry borrowed divine power; every organ felt like it had been struck with a hammer. That was the price of using what didn't belong to me.

I turned my head. The small dragon lay on the wooden board beside me, still wrapped in my damp, ruined cloak. Its breathing was faint — barely there — but it was breathing. That was enough.

Then footsteps sounded in the corridor beyond the door.

Soft footsteps. But in the dead silence of the underground passage, they landed like stones dropped into still water.

Every muscle in my body pulled taut. I fought down the dizziness and pushed myself off the stone floor, closing my fingers around a jagged splinter of wood that had broken off one of the rotted bed legs. I pressed myself into the shadow behind the door and waited.

The door swung open with a low creak.

A wedge of dim, amber light spilled across the floor. The person who entered was carrying a cheap magic lantern, and the voice that followed was so careful, so deliberately quiet, that it almost sounded like an apology.

"Is anyone here?"

I didn't move. The knuckles around the splinter had gone white.

The figure stepped further into the room, and as the lantern light reached her face, I had the brief, disorienting conviction that the fever had given me hallucinations — that some nobleman's daughter had wandered down from one of the tower floors and stumbled through the wrong door.

The girl looked about my own age. Her hair was the color of pale gold, soft enough that it caught even the lantern's weak light, and it fell loose across her shoulders. Her features were flawless in a way that seemed almost architectural — skin so white it was nearly translucent, like the finest carved jade. She was wearing the same coarse grey robes that every student at Greystone wore, and on her, the rough cloth looked like an act of violence against the person inside it.

She had no business being in a place like this. She belonged beside a fireplace, on a velvet rug, somewhere with actual ceilings.

She lifted the lantern and swept the light across the room. She found the small dragon on the bed first, then turned sharply — and found me, pressed into the shadow behind the door like a cornered animal with a sharpened piece of wood in my fist.

"Oh —" She caught herself before the sound could travel.

She saw the dried blood on my face. She saw the makeshift weapon. And she didn't back away. She took a step forward instead.

"Don't." My voice came out raw, scraped hollow, like I'd been swallowing gravel. The splinter extended between us.

She stopped. Her eyes — a deep, clear green — stayed on my face, and something moved in them that I couldn't quite name.

"I don't mean you any harm." She set the lantern down on the floor and raised both hands, palms out, fingers spread. "My name is Nyx. I'm an apprentice here. I live in this room — I'm your roommate."

Roommate.

I studied her without blinking. The room did have two beds. But nothing about this girl suggested she had ever been assigned to the lowest level of Greystone's dormitories alongside the rest of the commoners.

"You're hurt." Her gaze dropped to my wrist, where blood had soaked through and dried in a dark ring, and a faint urgency entered her voice — the kind that was hard to argue against without feeling unreasonable. She reached into the wide pocket of her robe and drew out a small tin and half a piece of black bread, then crouched and set both items on the floor between us, just close enough to reach. "This is Dictamnus dasycarpus. For bleeding. The bread I saved from supper."

I stared at the offerings. Then at her.

I didn't move.

In the lower districts, no one offered you anything without calculating what they'd take in return. Generosity, down there, was the opening move of a longer game.

"Why?" I kept my eyes on her face.

She paused. Then gave a short, wry laugh — and for just a moment, something genuinely tired surfaced beneath the careful composure. "Because in a place like this, people like us don't survive if we spend all our energy tearing each other apart. The nobility on the upper floors are already doing that for us."

She moved back to the other bed and sat down on the bare wooden frame, folding her hands in her lap. "Eat. I swear there's nothing wrong with it."

The cramps hit at exactly the right moment, doubling through my stomach with enough force that I nearly lost my footing. I hadn't eaten — I couldn't remember how long. The tension I'd been holding since I arrived at Arcanum had masked everything; now it was all surfacing at once. Hunger, thirst, the steady burning of my wounds.

I lowered the splinter. Crossed the room, picked up the bread, and retreated to the wall.

It was hard enough to bruise my teeth. I didn't leave a crumb.

Nyx sat quietly and watched me eat, without comment.

When the last of it was gone, she rose and walked toward me. My hand shot back toward the splinter.

"Hold still." Her voice didn't rise. She knelt and pried the lid from the tin, pressed her finger into a pale green paste, and reached for my wrist.

She was close enough now that I caught a scent — not the sour smell of sweat and earthen damp that most people in Greystone carried, but something faint and cool and strange, without a name I could put to it.

Then her fingertips touched my skin, and I flinched so hard I nearly wrenched my arm back entirely.

The cold was wrong. Not the cold of winter or stone floor or icy drafts — this was something deeper and more fundamental, a chill that had no warmth underneath it at all, the kind that made my flesh register an absence rather than a temperature. Living people didn't run that cold.

"Sorry." She glanced up. A small, apologetic smile. "I've always run cold. Poor circulation, since I was a child."

She dropped her gaze and continued spreading the salve in slow, even strokes. The sting of the Dictamnus dasycarpus crested briefly, then dissolved into something cooler, and the bleeding stopped. The ointment worked. That much was real.

I watched her lowered face from a distance of inches.

And then I followed the line of her vision — past the wound, past my shoulder — and saw that she wasn't looking at my wrist at all. She was looking at the dragon on the bed behind me, staring at it with an intensity that didn't belong to idle curiosity, something that moved through the green of her eyes like a current seen through water. Hunger, maybe. Or something that wore hunger's shape.

"It's beautiful," she murmured.

I pulled my arm back and stepped between her and the dragon in a single motion.

"Don't touch it." No softness in it. Just the warning, flat and final.

She blinked, and whatever had been in her expression rearranged itself quickly into something softer, slightly startled. She stepped back, tucking the tin into her pocket with the slightly too-careful movements of someone recalibrating. "I wasn't going to. I'm sorry. I've just never seen a living magical creature up close."

She returned to her bed without another word and lay down fully clothed, pulling her knees toward her chest.

"Get some sleep," she said, from somewhere in the dark. Her voice had gone light again, almost careless. "There are a mentor's rules to learn come morning."

I stayed where I was, my back to the wall, the splinter of wood held loosely in my fingers. My wrist had stopped hurting. My stomach had stopped its worst contractions. The body, given the smallest concession, was already trying to rebuild itself.

I looked at the gold-haired girl curled away from me on the other bed, motionless and quiet.

Maybe I was reading too much into it. After a full day of being examined like something pulled from the gutter — by guards, by instructors, by every face in every corridor — perhaps my nerves had simply worn through and I was seeing knives in everything. She was the only person in Arcanum who had offered me bread and asked for nothing in return.

I closed my eyes. The splinter stayed in my sleeve.

I wouldn't sleep deeply. But I was alive, and the night was still around me, and I had made it through my first evening inside Arcanum's walls.