I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities

Chapter 476: Six Days

Six days out, and the whole villa felt like it was holding its breath without knowing why.

Nobody said graduation out loud much anymore. It sat in the corner of every conversation instead, the thing everyone was circling without touching, the way you avoid a bruise on your own arm until you forget it’s there and then knock it against a doorframe.

Isole spent most of that week buried in exam prep for a set of finals that didn’t actually matter to her contract standing anymore, but she did the work anyway, meticulous as always, because that was just who she was. Vane caught her one evening staring at the same page for a long time without turning it, and when he asked if she was okay she just said "thinking" and left it at that. He didn’t push.

Ashe and Valerica kept arguing about pastries. It had become something of a running joke in the house by then, Mara tallying the frequency in the ledger like she’d threatened, and one evening Ashe actually lost a bet about it and had to admit, in front of everyone, that Valerica’s spirals really were better when nobody touched them. Valerica looked insufferably smug for two full days.

Mara finished a batch of something new that week too, some kind of spiced bread she’d been experimenting with, and burned the first two loaves so badly the kitchen smelled like smoke for an hour. She didn’t apologize for it. She just started a third loaf and got it right, and served it that night like nothing had happened, and it was genuinely good, and nobody teased her about the first two because everyone in that house had learned a long time ago not to mess with Mara when she was working something out.

Isaac came by twice that week, once for dinner and once just to sit in the kitchen and complain about a formal portrait sitting his mother was making him do before some family event. "She wants me in the ceremonial blues," he said, deeply unhappy about it. "I haven’t worn those since I was nine. I don’t even think they fit anymore."

"Wear them anyway," Nyx said, not looking up from her tea. "Suffering builds character."

"You’re not helping."

"I’m never trying to help. I’m trying to enjoy myself." She flicked a glance at him, something almost fond under the teasing. "Tell Isadora I said hello, by the way. And that she should come visit more. I like her better than I like you."

"Everyone likes her better than they like me."

"That’s not true," Mara said, without looking up from her own ledger. "I like you fine."

"Thank you, Mara. You’re a rare and precious soul."

It was, on the surface, an ordinary week. That was maybe the thing Vane noticed most, looking back on it later. How ordinary it all felt while it was happening.

Except Nyx got quieter as the days went on.

Not dramatically. Nothing anyone could have pointed at and said, there, that’s the problem. She still teased Isaac about his uniform. She still stole food off people’s plates and denied it with a straight face. She still curled up in the window seat most evenings with her tea going cold beside her, same as always.

But she stopped climbing the clock tower.

Vane noticed it on the fourth night, when he went looking for her up there out of habit and found the space empty, the wind moving through it with nobody to notice. He asked her about it the next morning, careful, over breakfast.

"I’ve seen the view enough times," she said, which wasn’t really an answer, and they both seemed to know it wasn’t, and neither of them said anything else about it.

She also stopped correcting people when they got something wrong. Small things. Isole misquoting a date in an old text. Ashe getting a name slightly off. Normally Nyx would’ve caught it instantly, dry and quick, half the fun of being around her. That week she just let things slide by, more than once, and Vane found himself keeping a private count without meaning to.

He didn’t say anything about the count. There didn’t seem to be a way to say it that wouldn’t make it worse.

Twice that week he almost brought up the corridor, and the door on the tower, and the lunch table with the boy talking about his grandfather. Both times he stopped himself before he got the words out. It wasn’t that he thought she’d lie to him if he asked directly. It was that he didn’t think she had an answer yet either, and pushing for one before she found it herself felt like it would only make her feel worse for not having it.

On the fifth night, he found her sitting alone on the villa’s back steps, no tea, no book, just sitting, looking at nothing in particular. He sat down next to her without asking.

"Six days," he said.

"Five, now. Give it a few hours."

"You okay?"

"I keep getting asked that this week." She said it lightly, but there was something tired underneath the lightness that hadn’t been there a month ago. "I’m fine, Vane. I promise. I’m just tired of pretending the ceremony’s going to feel the way everyone keeps telling me it’s supposed to feel."

"How’s it supposed to feel?"

"Like an ending you’re proud of." She wrapped her arms around her knees. "I don’t know yet if that’s what it’s going to be. I keep telling myself it will be. I’m not sure I believe myself anymore, and that’s new. I’ve always believed myself. It’s kind of my whole thing."

He didn’t have a good answer for that, so he didn’t try to force one. He just sat there with her a while, the two of them quiet, the villa’s lights warm behind them and the night going on without any particular urgency, same as it always did.

On the last full day before the ceremony, the whole squad ended up crammed into the villa’s small sitting room for no real reason, just because it happened, one person after another drifting in until suddenly there were six of them squeezed onto furniture built for four. Isole read. Ashe and Valerica argued, quietly this time, about something neither of them seemed to actually care about. Mara sat on the floor with her ledger and let the conversation wash over her without joining it, which was its own kind of joining. Nyx sat curled against Vane’s side, quiet, watching the whole room like she was trying to memorize it.

Nobody said anything about tomorrow. It didn’t need saying. It was already in the room with them, sitting there patiently the way big things do right before they arrive.

The morning of the ceremony came fast, the way big days always do once you stop watching the calendar closely.

Nyx came down early, already dressed in her formal robes, hair done properly for once instead of the usual loose mess she preferred. She looked, for a moment, exactly like what she was supposed to be. A graduate. Someone about to walk out into the rest of her life with four years of this place finally behind her.

She smiled at him from the doorway, easy and bright, all the quiet of the last week folded away somewhere he couldn’t see.

"Well," she said. "Let’s go be proud of something."

He wanted to believe her. He almost managed it.