Chapter 36: Saga 36: Business as Usual (Sort Of)
Student council duties, as it turned out, did not pause for supernatural revelations, budding romances, or ancient evil organizations lurking in the dark. Kael discovered this the hard way when he found himself buried under a stack of festival committee paperwork three hours before a meeting he’d completely, catastrophically forgotten about until Claire physically shoved a clipboard into his hands.
"You look like a man being slowly crushed by bureaucracy," Yuki observed, dropping into the chair across from him with his boots already propped on the desk.
"The Harvest Festival needs a security detail, a vendor roster, and someone to deal with the fact that the Fireworks Guild double-booked themselves with a rival troupe who are apparently in the middle of a decade-long feud over pyrotechnic patents."
"Delegate."
"To who? You?"
"I’m offended you’d even ask, honestly, deeply wounded. I’m far too important and mysterious for paperwork. My talents lie elsewhere." Yuki examined his own fingernails with theatrical disinterest. "But seriously. Sylvia handles logistics like she was born for it, which given her family, she probably was. Claire’s terrifyingly good at conflict resolution when she’s not the one causing the conflict in the first place. Harriden’s basically invisible, so he can spy on rule violations without anyone ever noticing him watching. We’re an absurdly overqualified student council for a school festival."
"We’re literally the strongest hunters in the entire kingdom, moonlighting as high schoolers, arguing about fireworks vendors and lantern permits."
"When you say it like that it does sound incredibly stupid."
"It is incredibly stupid."
Despite the sheer absurdity of it all, the festival planning gave the six of them—seven now, with Kael folded properly into the group—something rare and precious: normalcy. An excuse to just be a group of overachieving students bickering over budgets, rather than a secret organization quietly holding the world together at the seams while nobody watched.
Sylvia, against every reasonable expectation Kael had ever held about her, turned out to have a genuine, almost frightening talent for logistics, cross-referencing vendor schedules with the same cold precision she brought to battle formations against Mythic-tier monsters. Watching her calmly, methodically dismantle a scheduling conflict between two furious festival vendors—resolving in under two minutes what the previous council president had apparently failed to solve for an entire week—was, in its own strange way, more quietly terrifying than watching her summon a thousand celestial swords into the sky.
"You’re staring," she said, without looking up from her ledger, pen never pausing.
"You’re just really good at this. Unsettlingly good."
"I’m good at everything." A beat, the ghost of something almost playful crossing her expression. "Except, apparently, hiding that I like it when you stare at me like that."
Kael nearly choked on his own tongue. Yuki, watching from the corner with unabashed delight, mouthed the words ’get some’ with an exaggerated wink, and Kael made a mental note to strangle him at the earliest possible convenience, preferably somewhere private and soundproof.
Beneath the mundane, welcome rhythm of paperwork and festival planning, though, something darker moved quietly through the capital’s underbelly—a scattering of disappearances too random to draw official attention, too spaced apart in both time and location to seem connected to any casual observer. Not yet, anyway. Not until someone started actually looking.
The meeting eventually wound down, vendor conflicts resolved, security rotations assigned, and Kael found himself walking Sylvia back toward the girls’ dormitory afterward, the campus quiet in the early evening light.
"You handled that ridiculous fireworks dispute better than I could have," he admitted. "I was about thirty seconds from just setting both troupes’ equipment on fire to solve the problem permanently."
"That would have been considerably less diplomatic."
"It would have been faster."
"Not everything needs to be solved with overwhelming force, Kael. Some things just need someone patient enough to listen to both sides complain until they’re too tired to keep arguing."
"Is that a skill they teach at elven finishing school, or something you picked up yourself?"
Sylvia allowed herself a small, rare smile. "A bit of both, honestly. My mother could talk warring nations into truces over tea. I suppose some of it rubbed off eventually, whether I wanted it to or not."
"I like this version of you. The one who talks about her mother without flinching."
"Don’t get used to it. It’s a limited engagement."
"I’ll take what I can get."
They reached the dormitory steps, and for a moment neither of them moved to say goodnight, the space between them comfortable, unhurried, full of things neither quite needed to say out loud yet.
"I should go," Sylvia said eventually, though she made no actual move to leave.
"You should," Kael agreed, equally unmoving.
Neither of them budged for another few minutes, trading small talk about nothing in particular—the festival preparations, a rumor about the guild master reorganizing patrol schedules, the increasingly ridiculous card tricks Yuki kept attempting to teach Adian. It was, Kael realized, the kind of conversation that didn’t matter in content but mattered enormously in the simple fact that they wanted to keep having it.
"Kael."
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for today. For the walk, and the paperwork, and just—" She paused, searching for words that didn’t come easily to her. "For treating all of this like it’s normal. Like I’m allowed to have normal things."
"You are allowed. More than allowed. You deserve normal things just as much as anyone."
Sylvia studied him for a long moment, something unreadable passing behind her crystal-blue eyes. "I’m still getting used to believing that."
"Take your time. I’m not going anywhere."
She finally turned to head inside, pausing at the door to glance back at him one last time. "Goodnight, Kael."
"Goodnight, Sylvia."
He waited until the door closed behind her before allowing himself the smile he’d been holding back the entire walk home, and made his own way back to the dormitory, feeling lighter than he had in weeks despite everything still looming on the horizon.
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End of Chapter—
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