Chapter 4 Things That Remember Us

Lucien never prays, but tonight he almost does.

The bells keep humming through the walls of the boys’ dorm, a low sound like thunder that hasn’t quite gathered the courage to split the sky. It crawls through the plaster, through the old pipes, through the thin mattresses and iron bed frames. Through bone.

He sits on the windowsill with one knee drawn up, forehead resting lightly against the cold pane. Outside, the cloister looks almost gentle from here: lanterns in soft circles of light, ivy threading the stone, the chapel windows glowing like watchful eyes.

Far below, a faint line of light creeps along the edge of the courtyard stones, then fades again. The wards, breathing.

Every time they flare, he tastes the same thing in the air.

Her heartbeat.

Anil.

He closes his eyes for a moment.

He shouldn’t have spoken to her in the corridor yesterday. He shouldn’t have said her name. He certainly shouldn’t have watched her stand in front of that room like she’d already remembered it.

But when he’d seen her eyes—still carrying that small refusal, that quiet no to a story that keeps trying to force her into its shape—he’d forgotten all the rules he’d promised to follow.

He touches the scar under his collarbone, fingertips brushing the raised, burned line.

The brand of exile.

It used to sting when he defied an order. Now it burns less, like even the light that wrote it there is no longer sure it wants the punishment to stand.

A knock.

“Open up, Lucien.”

Cael’s voice. Smooth, measured. The kind of voice designed to deliver instructions and make people thank him for it.

Lucien doesn’t move. “Shouldn’t you be at evening prayers?”

The door opens anyway.

Cael steps inside and closes it softly behind him. The cheap dorm light flickers once, as if uncertain about how to sit on him. His presence shifts the room – not brighter, exactly, but clearer.

“She’s here,” Cael says. No preamble. No greeting.

Lucien watches the cloister instead of turning. “I noticed.”

“You spoke to her.”

“I noticed that, too,” Lucien murmurs.

“You can’t keep doing this.” Cael’s eyes flare, a faint rim of gold brightening around his irises. “Every time you interfere, it shifts sooner.”

“Shifts what?” Lucien turns at last, leaning back against the window frame. “Call it whatever you like. Fate. Pattern. Catastrophe. It doesn’t make it less true.”

“Every time you get close to her,” Cael says quietly, “the pattern accelerates.”

“And every time you stay away,” Lucien replies, “it still ends the same way.”

Silence settles between them for a few seconds, old and familiar.

Cael looks away. His shoulders tighten. “You don’t know that.”

Lucien huffs a breath that’s almost a laugh. “I know what the bell sounds like when it’s about to go wrong. I know what the wards taste like when they’re bracing. I’ve walked these corridors more times than you’ve let yourself admit.”

He stops himself before saying the rest.

Before saying and every time, she doesn’t make it to the end.

Cael’s wings flicker faintly through his shoulders, half-there ghost-feathers that tremble and reabsorb into his skin. “You don’t understand the cost,” he says.

“Oh, I understand it,” Lucien says, pushing off the windowsill and walking past him. “That’s the problem. I’m the only one who stopped pretending the cost was acceptable.”

Cael’s hand closes around his arm. There’s no force in it, just pressure. A plea.

“Don’t drag her into shadow again,” Cael says quietly. “Not this time.”

The words lodge in Lucien’s throat. He covers the sting with a crooked almost-smile. “And you think light did better?”

Cael’s grip tightens. “She was meant to go to the chapel, not the cloister. To the hymn, not to you in the hall. If she had—”

“What?” Lucien cuts in. “Would she have grown old under stained glass while you stood in the rafters pretending you didn’t remember all the other times it went wrong?”

Cael flinches. Barely, but Lucien sees it.

“You don’t get to talk about what I remember,” Cael says.

“Someone has to,” Lucien replies. “Because you keep acting like this is the first time. It isn’t.”

Cael’s eyes flash brighter. “And you keep trying to break it without thinking what happens when it actually breaks.”

They stand close now, the air tight between them—too many arguments layered over one another, spoken in rooms that were almost like this one and almost not.

Lucien eases his arm out of Cael’s grip.

“She’s already found me,” he says, deliberately light. “She always does. This time, she just moved faster.”

“That’s the problem,” Cael says.

“No,” Lucien murmurs, turning back to the window. “That’s our only chance.”

Down in the courtyard, a cluster of first-years hurries across the stones, voices echoing. At the far edge of the cloister, a single figure walks alone, head tipped back as if mapping the sky.

Anil.

The loop is already shifting.

Behind him, Cael says, voice softer, “If she chooses you again, I’ll have to stop it.”

Lucien looks over his shoulder, a small, reckless smile touching his mouth. “You can try.”

Cael’s glow dims, pulling back under his skin. “I’m not your enemy, Lucien.”

“Tell that to whoever wrote the rules,” Lucien answers.

Cael leaves without another word.

The door clicks shut.

Lucien stays at the window for a long time, watching Anil until she disappears under the archway. The bells eventually fall quiet, but the brand under his collarbone does not.

He exhales.

He still doesn’t pray.

But the thought is there, uninvited:

Let her be more stubborn than we are this time.

The next day looks almost ordinary.

Blackthorn glows under a pale September light. The sky is washed and thin, the kind of blue that looks tired around the edges. The morning bell rings properly this time—simple, clear, announcing breakfast and class instead of whatever it tried to announce last night.

Students drift into the dining hall in varying states of awake. Some have already learned to enchant their coffee, some haven’t and regret it. Uniforms are shrugged into, sleeves rolled up, collars half-buttoned. Magic hums low around them, soft as breathing.

Anil sits by the window, hands wrapped around a mug that has gone lukewarm.

Outside, the bell tower stands solid against the sky. The bells at the top are still.

She can still feel last night’s wrong note under her skin.

“Okay,” Mira says, dropping onto the bench across from her hard enough to jostle the table. “New rule. If the walls start humming again at three in the morning, we move into the nearest chain coffee shop and live there forever.”

“They only hummed once,” Anil says. She’d lain awake after lights-out, listening to the faint vibration in the stone long after everyone else seemed to settle.

“Once is enough,” Mira insists, reaching for the jam. “Once is ‘architecture with personality.’ Twice is ‘pack your bags.’”

Anil tears off a piece of toast, although her stomach still feels heavy and unsettled. “Maybe there’s a rational explanation.”

“Sure,” Mira says. “I’m just saying, if the rational explanation involves the words ‘portal’ and ‘open too far,’ I’d like advance notice.”

Anil almost smiles.

Her mind keeps replaying the night before: the mirror, the flicker of ash, Lucien’s low murmur—want to see? The deep hum in the walls. The scar on her wrist burning like someone had lit a match inside her veins.

She hasn’t decided what she believes about any of it.

“You’re doing a face,” Mira says, studying her.

“What face?”

“The one where you know more than you’re admitting,” Mira says. “I recognize it. That’s also my face when I’ve just found a cursed forum thread.”

Anil digs her thumbnail into the crust of her toast. “Hypothetically… what would you do if someone told you you keep making the same choices? Over and over. And they never actually work.”

Mira leans back, thinks for a second, then shrugs. “I’d ask who’s counting.”

“What?”

“Well, someone has to be keeping track to say ‘over and over,’ right?” Mira says. “Whose rules are they using when they decide your choices ‘don’t work’? The person who set the test, or you?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It never is,” Mira agrees. “But stories don’t repeat themselves for nothing. Someone always benefits from the loop. Step one, find out who. Step two, ruin their day.”

Despite everything, a small, startled laugh slips out of Anil.

“You’re impossible,” she says.

“Probably,” Mira says easily. “But you can ignore me until you’re ready to overshare. I’m very patient when there’s a mystery.”

The first-period bell rings—this time bright and normal.

Students start pushing away their plates, pulling bags onto their shoulders. The normal noise swells up again.

Mira stands, gathering her tray. “Come on. If we’re late to Transmutation, they’ll make us practice on something alive.”

“That was a joke, right?” Anil asks.

Mira does not answer clearly enough to be comforting.

Classes unspool one after the other.

In Transmutation, the professor spends half the lesson talking about responsibility toward living matter before having them turn apples into feathers. Anil manages something between the two – a half-fruit, half-fluff thing that never quite decides what it wants to be. She stares at it on her desk, unsettled by the way its edges keep shifting.

“It’s fine,” the professor says when she notices Anil’s expression. “Most things worth doing resist their final form.”

In Runic Architecture, they walk the perimeter of the grounds with Professor Halbrook. He shows them where the ward-lines have been carved into the foundation stones: thin, precise symbols that catch the light and redirect it.

“This,” he says, tracing one knot of lines with a gloved fingertip, “is part of the bell system. It activates under very specific conditions.”

Mira raises her hand. “And those conditions are…?”

“Above your clearance for now,” Halbrook replies. His smile is kind but closed. “You’re here to study the structure, not its failures.”

Mira mutters under her breath. “Old guilt,” just loud enough that only Anil hears.

Anil pretends her shiver is from the breeze.

By late afternoon, the sky has gone the color of paper that has been erased too many times. The wind picks up. The trees on the edge of the grounds creak quietly.

The common room is loud with card games, music from someone’s speaker, and half-hearted attempts at homework. Anil lasts ten minutes with her books open in front of her. The words slide off her focus. Every sentence dissolves.

Her mind keeps circling the same few things.

You’re one of them.

You always say that.

If I keep dying in your versions…

She closes the book.

“Going somewhere?” Mira calls from the couch, one earbud in, laptop balanced on her knees as she edits audio.

“Library,” Anil says.

Mira glances up. “Of course you are. Text me if a shelf tries to eat you.”

Anil manages a small nod and slips out.

The library feels different in the evening.

Quieter, but not less full.

Students are scattered at tables, hunched over notes and open books. The high windows let in only the palest gray. Most of the light comes from the candles on the tables and the lamps along the walls, their glow softened by old glass.

Anil chooses a seat near the tall windows, where she can still see the outline of the courtyard and the darker band of the cloister beyond. The shadow of the bell tower lies over everything like a second set of walls.

She takes out her notes.

Stares at the same paragraph three times.

Nothing sticks.

Her attention keeps tugging sideways—toward the far row of shelves where the tall mirror stands.

Don’t, she tells herself.

She goes anyway.

The mirror waits in its corner, framed in carved angels whose wings are so detailed they almost look soft. The glass is dull, the silvering faded and cloudy, like it has spent too long reflecting things it wasn’t supposed to.

Her own face looks back at her: hair slightly loose, tie crooked, shadows under her eyes deeper than they should be for the second week of term.

Just a girl.

She leans a little closer.

Her breath fogs the glass.

Her reflection does the same.

She exhales again, slower. The fog clears.

This time, her reflection moves a fraction too late.

The blink comes after hers.

The faint smile is out of place—on the wrong face, at the wrong moment.

Anil jerks back, her heel catching the leg of a nearby table. A small stack of books wobbles and slides to the floor with a dull thud.

A few heads turn.

Mira, from their earlier table, frowns up from her notes. “You okay?”

“It just—” Anil swallows. “The mirror. It—”

“Mirrors are creepy,” Mira says, but she’s watching Anil closely. “Want me to sage this place next time? I brought some.”

“You brought sage to school?” Anil asks, distracted.

“Occupational hazard,” Mira says. “Podcaster.”

Before Anil can respond, everything in the air shifts by a few degrees.

The warmth drains out of the aisle. A faint scent of rain and something scorched threads through the dust.

She doesn’t have to turn to know who just stepped out of the shadows between two shelves.

“You shouldn’t linger here,” Lucien says. “This room holds on to things.”

He comes into view beside her—barefoot again, dark hair falling into his eyes, uniform worn like more of a suggestion than a requirement. The shadows in the aisle seem glad to have found him.

Mira stiffens across the room when she recognizes him. She leans toward Anil and mutters, “That’s him, isn’t it?”

Anil nods once.

“Is he faculty or trouble?” Mira whispers.

Lucien’s mouth twitches. “Trouble,” he answers without looking at her. “Not faculty.”

Mira blinks, then clears her throat. “Right. I’m going to… relocate before I become a side character in someone else’s prophecy.”

She gathers her things. As she passes Anil, her hand brushes her sleeve—quick, anchoring. “Text if anything starts chanting Latin. Or if he does.”

Then she’s gone, disappearing between the stacks.

Silence settles over their section of the library, softer than before.

Lucien nods toward the mirror. “That isn’t what it looks like.”

“It looks like a mirror,” Anil says, folding her arms even as her pulse jumps.

“It’s a seal,” he replies, circling slowly around it. “A lock. It holds what this place couldn’t contain any other way.”

“Contain what?” she asks.

His gaze flicks to her wrist, where her hand has once again found the scar through the thin fabric of her sleeve.

“Leftovers,” he says. “Echoes. The parts of you that didn’t fit into the story they wanted.”

Her throat goes dry. “I don’t remember leaving anything here.”

“That’s the point,” he says, and the softness in his voice is almost worse than if he’d smiled. “You weren’t supposed to.”

He steps closer to the glass. Standing beside him, she sees his reflection appear next to hers. His image is clearer. Sharper. As if the mirror approves of him.

“You’ve been in front of this before,” he says. “Not just once. Every time you got close to changing something, this started to strain. Every time the pattern twisted, it held onto a piece of you. A promise. A decision you nearly made.”

Anil laughs once, but there’s no real humor in it. “You’re not exactly making this feel better.”

His smile flashes, small and real, then fades. “You always say that.”

The words land oddly.

“Always?” she repeats. “As in… more than once?”

He looks at her, and there is no lightness in him now.

“As in every time,” he says quietly.

Her skin prickles. She takes a step back, bumping into the edge of a shelf.

“You and Cael keep dropping these phrases,” she says. “Stories. Loops. Storms. You talk like this isn’t the first round. Like we’ve done this before and I just… forgot.”

“Not just this,” he says. “All of it.”

She swallows. Her voice comes out rougher than she means. “Say I believe you. That I’ve stood in front of this thing before. That it’s full of whatever I couldn’t keep. Why are you the one telling me this? Why not Cael? Or the headmaster?”

“I’m not the only one who knows,” he says. “I’m just the only one who stopped pretending that keeping you ignorant is an act of mercy.”

“Cael said—” she starts, then hesitates.

Lucien’s focus sharpens immediately. “What did he tell you?”

“He said I’m one of them,” she says. “Whatever that means. That something in me keeps being pulled to the same storm. That he’s trying to make it end differently, and I’m the one who pays when he fails.”

Lucien’s jaw tightens. “Of course he framed it like that.”

“That’s it?” she snaps. “No ‘he’s lying, I’m the good one’? No ‘don’t trust him’?”

Lucien is quiet for a few seconds.

“That wasn’t exactly a lie,” he admits. “Just… incomplete.”

“Incomplete how?”

He studies her like he’s trying to decide how much weight she can carry.

“Cael still believes the worst thing that ever happened to you was his fault,” Lucien says.

“Wasn’t it?” she asks, because the narrative fits too easily.

“Maybe,” Lucien says. “Or maybe heaven built a machine and he’s very good at blaming himself for its design.”

The answer settles over her, uncomfortable and half-true in a way that feels more dangerous than any outright lie.

He turns back to the mirror.

“Do you want to see?” he asks.

Her heartbeat kicks up. “See what?”

“What you left behind,” he says. “The parts of you that didn’t fit their version of who you’re supposed to be.”

She’s not sure when the fear changes into curiosity. Only that it does.

“And if I say no?” she asks.

He looks at her then, and something like affection passes through his expression, worn and tired.

“You never have,” he says.

The mirror darkens.

Not with shadow, but with depth.

The silver seems to thicken, as if the glass is filling up with liquid light. For a moment she sees only her own reflection and Lucien’s beside it.

Then that image breaks.

Pictures come in flashes, too fast to hold:

Rain on slick stone.

A chapel filled with smoke.

Students running.

Cael shouting her name, face streaked with ash.

Lucien’s hand reaching toward hers through dark air.

Under the images, there’s another sensation—weight. The knowledge of standing somewhere that feels like the edge of a cliff, knowing there is no direction that doesn’t require a fall.

She gasps.

The vision snaps.

The mirror clears.

Just the library again. Just shelves and dust and the two of them, both a little paler.

Anil staggers back, one hand flying to her mouth.

“That was real,” she whispers.

“It will be,” Lucien says. “Unless we stop it.”

Her laugh breaks halfway. “You say that like you know how.”

His mouth tilts. “I have ideas. They usually don’t survive contact with you.”

Before she can question that, footsteps echo down the hallway outside. Steady. Measured.

The air shifts—warmth seeping under the door, heavy and familiar.

Cael.

Lucien’s jaw clenches.

“He shouldn’t see you with this,” Lucien says quietly, nodding toward the mirror.

“Why not?” she asks.

“Because he’ll fold every crack into his guilt,” Lucien says. “And because he still thinks the only way to keep you safe is to keep you in the dark.”

The door opens.

Cael fills the archway—sleeves rolled to his forearms, light humming under his skin like a quiet storm. His gaze jumps immediately to Anil, then to Lucien, then to the mirror.

His face goes still.

“Step away from her,” he says, voice low.

Lucien’s expression doesn’t change much, but the atmosphere tightens. “Always straight to orders,” he says lightly.

“I mean it,” Cael says.

He doesn’t move closer.

He doesn’t raise his voice.

The room responds anyway.

Candles straighten. Dust motes hang unmoving in the light. The old boards of the floor hum faintly under his feet.

“Nothing happened,” Anil says quickly. “We were just—”

“Showing you things you’re not ready to hold,” Cael finishes, eyes still on Lucien.

“You don’t get to decide that for her,” Lucien replies.

“She is not your experiment,” Cael snaps. Light flares brighter around him, shadows thrown sharp against the walls.

“And she’s not your punishment,” Lucien throws back.

The tension between them pulls at her.

Two directions. Two forms of gravity.

Her eyes sting suddenly, heat pressing behind them.

“I’m right here,” she says.

They both fall quiet.

Both look at her.

She hates that her voice shakes when she goes on, but she speaks anyway.

“Cael,” she says, “every time you talk about me, it’s like the damage is already done. Like I’m something broken you’re trying to keep from getting worse. But when Lucien talks—” she swallows, “—he sounds like he still believes I get to choose.”

The words hang there.

Lucien looks at her with something like pain and something like a strange, quiet gratitude.

Cael’s expression doesn’t change immediately. Then hurt flickers through his eyes, quick and sharp before he covers it.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you choose,” he says slowly. “It’s that I’ve seen what this place does to your choices.”

“And you?” she asks softly. “What do you do to them?”

He opens his mouth.

Closes it again.

Looks away.

“That’s what I’m trying to change,” he says finally, voice roughened.

Anil looks between them: Lucien, leaning back against the shelves, shadows pooling around his feet like they’ve chosen him; Cael, in the doorway, light bleeding through the seams of his restraint, the library itself uncertain which one to lean toward.

“Both of you talk like I’m a story that’s already written,” she says. “Like I’m walking a path you’ve seen before. But I’m the one who has to feel every step.”

Her wrist throbs.

The mirror’s surface ripples once, like water disturbed from the other side.

Lucien glances at it. “We’re running out of time.”

“For what?” she asks.

“For pretending this is just a difficult term,” he says.

Cael’s gaze comes back to her.

“Anil,” he says quietly. “He will draw you toward the shadows and call it freedom. I will pull you toward the light and call it safety. Somewhere between those two directions is where the ending has always gone wrong.”

There’s no malice in the words.

Just honesty.

“That’s not your decision to make anymore,” she says.

She steps away from the mirror.

Away from both of them.

Her hands shake, but her voice stays steady.

“If I keep dying in your versions,” she says, “maybe it’s time I stop walking into them. Maybe this time, I write my own version.”

Cael looks as if the sentence has hit something vital.

Lucien looks as if she has handed him back something he thought he’d lost.

Neither of them reaches for her as she walks past Cael and out of the library.

The corridor outside feels colder.

Normal sounds rush in at once: footsteps on stone, distant laughter, doors shutting, the faint clatter of plates from the dining hall. For a second the contrast makes her dizzy.

She walks without really seeing the path, trusting her feet in the way she doesn’t yet know how to trust her memory.

By the time she stops, she’s on the staircase leading to her dorm.

The room looks almost exactly as she left it.

Almost.

Mira’s bed is empty; her headphones and laptop are gone. A half-finished mug of tea sits on the nightstand, gone cold. The window is cracked open just enough to let in a sliver of wind.

On Anil’s desk, the cracked music box waits.

The tiny cathedral shape catches the dim light, the crack down its center like a line of lightning frozen halfway.

She closes the door behind her and stands there for a second, listening to her own breath.

Then she crosses the room and picks up the box.

The metal is cool against her palms.

Her fingers find the small key at its side. She winds it slowly. The mechanism clicks and resists, then yields.

The melody that comes out is thin at first, like a song heard through walls. A fragile, wavering tune that straightens itself as it goes, notes sliding into a pattern that feels too familiar.

The same note she heard the first day.

The same note from the corridor.

The scar on her wrist flares.

Heat blooms under her skin, running along the line of the old mark and out into her palm. It hurts, but less like a cut and more like something buried trying to surface.

She presses her thumb over the scar hard enough to sting.

“Fine,” she says into the quiet. “Show me.”

Nothing answers.

Not with words. Not with visions.

The note from the music box hangs in the room, bright and thin, then fades.

The silence that follows is not empty.

Somewhere inside the walls, deep in the old skeleton of Blackthorn, something adjusts.

A ward-line shifts by the width of a breath.

A memory seal strains.

A pattern that has repeated too many times tilts a fraction of a degree.

A story that has been told too many times tilts a fraction of a degree.

Just enough to make room for one more word:

Otherwise.