I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities

Chapter 487: What’s Left of Her

The Grand Hall’s outer doors hung open, one of them cracked clean off its upper hinge, and Vane was three steps through the gap when someone lunged at him from the shadow of a fallen banner.

He didn’t recognize the boy, some loyalist third-year with a short blade and more nerve than sense, swinging wide and desperate at Vane’s throat the way people swung when they’d decided courage mattered more than technique.

Vane caught the wrist before the blade got anywhere close, twisted once, and the boy’s own momentum did the rest, sending him stumbling face first into the wall hard enough to drop him where he stood. Vane didn’t slow down to check if he was breathing properly. He was. The boy groaned into the stone and didn’t get back up, and Vane stepped past him without breaking stride, already three paces further into the hall before the boy’s blade had finished clattering across the floor.

That was the easy part. He knew it even as he did it, some cold clear corner of his mind cataloguing the difference between a scared kid with a short sword and whatever waited further in. He’d handled worse than that boy in his sleep for years now. It cost him nothing, barely registered as a fight at all, and some part of him was almost grateful for it, one small clean thing to do with his hands before the part of today that wasn’t going to be simple at all.

Behind him, further down the corridor, someone was dragging the boy clear of the doorway, one of the medical volunteers Isole had organized earlier, and Vane didn’t look back to check who. There wasn’t time to be gentle about small mercies today. There was only time to keep them from adding up against him later.

The main hall opened up in front of him a moment later, and the temperature of the air itself seemed to change the instant he crossed the threshold.

She was still at the podium. Still standing exactly where she’d been standing when he’d tested that first step forward and felt the Dreamscape pass over him like weather noticing something and moving on. The seven frozen faculty members hadn’t moved. Sael still knelt where she’d gone down, breathing shallow and ragged but alive. The overturned chairs, the abandoned notes, the whole wrecked architecture of a ceremony that had been, an hour ago, the proudest day of her life, all of it sat frozen in the same suspended moment, waiting.

"Nyx."

His voice carried further than he expected in the emptied hall, echoing once off the high rafters before the wrongness in the air seemed to swallow the rest of it.

She turned her head.

For half a second, hope flared bright and stupid in his chest, some part of him already composing the next sentence, already believing this might actually be simple. Then he saw her eyes properly, up close now, no longer opal, no longer anything he had a name for, and the hope died fast and quiet.

"Nyx, it’s me."

Nothing in her expression changed. She looked at him the way she’d looked at the instructors, the way she’d looked past him during that first testing step in the courtyard, distant and total and entirely unbothered by whatever he represented to whatever was left of her mind.

"It’s Vane." He took a step closer, slow, hands open at his sides. "You know me. You’ve known me for three years. You named a crack in the kitchen ceiling. You call me little rat. You fell asleep on my shoulder during exam week and pretended you hadn’t."

The distortion around her didn’t ease. If anything it thickened, the air rippling harder now that he was closer, pressing against his own mind with the same cold, searching pressure he’d felt at the courtyard’s edge, except stronger now, more insistent, like something enormous leaning down to look at him properly for the first time.

"You told me the sixth version of the tea was still wrong," he said, voice cracking slightly despite himself. "You said the door was empty when Isaac was standing right there. You’ve never gotten anything wrong in three years and you got that wrong and it scared you, and you told me anyway, because you decided I was allowed to know when something was actually breaking."

Something in the depthless black of her eyes flickered, so faint he almost convinced himself he’d imagined it.

Then it was gone, and the pressure against his mind sharpened into something closer to an actual push, cold and vast and utterly indifferent to the words he’d just spent everything he had on.

She didn’t know him.

He said it to himself plainly, the way Isole had taught him to name things without flinching from them. Whatever stood at that podium, wearing the shape of the girl who’d named stray cats and stolen bread off his plate and cried once over a bird with a broken wing, did not currently recognize a single word he’d said, did not recognize his face, did not recognize three years of a friendship that had turned, slowly and carefully, into something neither of them had ever quite found the right words for.

"Nyx." He said her name a third time anyway, because stopping felt like giving up on something he wasn’t ready to give up on yet. "Come back. Please."

The pressure against his mind built further, patient and enormous, the same slow heavy turn he’d felt before, except this time it didn’t move past him. It stayed, considering him properly, and for the first time since he’d walked into the hall, Vane understood with total clarity that whatever he’d been hoping this conversation would be, it wasn’t going to be that.

She raised one hand, slow, the same lazy, almost gentle gesture that had frozen seven trained faculty members without a single blow landing.

Vane called the Silver Fang before he’d fully decided to, silver mana pooling clean and quiet along the spear’s length, every instinct in his body screaming that whatever came next wasn’t going to be a conversation anymore.

"I’m sorry," he said, quiet, mostly to himself. "I really did want it to be words."

The hand came down.

Vane moved.

He didn’t try to dodge clear the way he might have against an ordinary opponent. He drove forward instead, straight into the gesture, Silver Fang leading, betting everything on closing the distance faster than whatever she was about to do could fully form. The air around her palm ignited with the same cold, mind-locking pressure that had frozen seven trained instructors solid, and Vane felt it brush against the very edge of his own thoughts, searching for purchase, looking for the exact seam it had found in all of them.

It didn’t find one. Not yet. Three years of Isole teaching him to name his own fear instead of hiding from it had built something in him the instructors hadn’t had, some small stubborn resistance that bought him half a second, no more, and he used every part of that half second to close the last of the distance between them.

The spear met her raised hand.

Nyx didn’t flinch. She looked at the silver mana singing along the blade an inch from her palm with the same distant, weatherlike interest she’d given everything else today, and something in that total absence of fear frightened Vane more than any counterattack could have.

"Nyx," he said again, one last time, quiet, spear trembling faintly in his own grip. "I’m still here. Whenever you’re ready to be too."

She didn’t answer. The hall’s wrongness pressed in around both of them, patient, endless, and neither of them moved.