Chapter 151: Getting Caught
As the students behind Aveline tried very hard not to laugh openly, she rose with a slow, offended grace that made it quite clear she knew exactly how ridiculous the whole thing was.
"Fine," she muttered. "It was only a question."
"OUT!!!"
The professor looked as though he wanted to throw something at her again, so she decided not to stay long enough to give him the opportunity.
With a final flick of her skirt, she walked out of the classroom, chin high and expression flat.
Once outside, however, her annoyance cooled into stubborn determination. If no one in the classroom would answer her, then she would find someone who could.
And there was only one place in the Arcanum where she knew answers lived in abundance.
Professor Lucien’s laboratory.
The thought alone made her lips twitch with the faintest hint of mischief.
The archduke’s laboratory was not a place any ordinary student wandered into, much less uninvited. But Aveline had long since abandoned the idea that rules were meant to stop her when they were inconvenient.
She slipped through a side corridor, then another, avoiding the noisier passageways and following the quieter current of the building until the air itself seemed to change.
It smelled different here.
Less chalk and ink.
More smoke, old parchment, heated metal, and something sharp and electric lingering beneath it all.
She slowed as she approached the door.
Voices drifted from inside. All belonged to Lucien.
Aveline pressed herself against the wall beside the entrance and listened.
"...the stones are reacting out of sequence," he was muttering to himself, his voice rough with concentration. "No, no, that cannot be right unless the resonance has shifted. But that would mean—"
A pause.
Then, lower this time, almost to himself again.
"Of course. The frequency pattern isn’t wrong. The stones are simply not being read correctly."
Aveline’s eyes widened slightly.
She glanced down at her own hands, almost unconsciously thinking about the colors she saw whenever she looked at the stones. Frequency. Resonance. Pattern. It was not the same language she used in her head, but it was close enough to make her pulse quicken.
Carefully, she eased the door open. It was left unlocked.
No one noticed her.
The laboratory beyond was half chaos, half brilliance. Stacks of books teetered precariously on every available surface. Glass containers glowed from the shelves. Crystals, tools, and unfinished runes lay scattered across desks in an organized disorder only a mind like Lucien’s could understand.
Aveline slipped inside like a thief.
Lucien was bent over a worktable at the far end of the room, one hand braced on the edge while the other hovered over several aetherstones arranged in careful rows. He was muttering to himself as he moved them, separating them by what she realized now might have been some deeper quality of pulse or resonance.
"A false blue again," he muttered. "No. Too slow. Too damp. That one will fail under pressure." He moved another stone aside. "And this one—hmm. That one is dangerous."
Aveline froze in place.
Dangerous?
That stone looked almost plain to her. Pale, almost lovely. But if Lucien called it dangerous, then there had to be something hidden in its pattern that she had not yet learned to interpret.
She pulled a small notebook from her satchel and began to write.
Not quickly. Not carelessly. Carefully, with the focus of someone afraid to lose even a single detail.
Stone color. Pulse. Resonance variation.
Lucien was still talking to himself, turning one stone after another beneath the laboratory light.
"People insist on visual classification because it is simpler," he muttered. "Fools. They ignore the wave entirely. The resonance is what matters. That is what makes one aetherstone sing and another collapse."
Aveline’s pen stilled.
That was it.
A song.
Not literal, but close enough to make sense of the feeling she had been carrying for days. Some stones did not merely glow. They resonated. They carried a kind of internal rhythm she could perceive, and perhaps that rhythm was what her eyes translated into color.
Her breathing slowed as excitement began to build in her chest.
This was more than she had learned in class. Far more.
And Lucien, maddening as he was, seemed to know things no professor would ever bother to teach to students who only memorized and recited.
Aveline wrote faster now, quietly recording the differences she saw as Lucien moved from one stone to the next.
Blue: sharp, clean pulse.
Gold: slower, steadier, dense.
Violet: unstable, prone to distortion.
Crimson: hot, aggressive, difficult to hold.
Her fingers moved with growing certainty.
Maybe the others can calculate the readings. Maybe she saw the resonance beneath it.
And if that was true, then the stones were not merely beautiful. They were speaking.
And she intended to learn how to listen.
And she could not help wondering what would happen if more than one color were mixed together.
The thought tugged at her with the force of a secret opening its own door. If each stone carried its own pulse, its own vibration, then a blend of stones might create something entirely new.
As she looked more closely across the laboratory, that suspicion only deepened. Some of the stones that Lucien had set aside were not settling into their assigned piles at all. Their colors seemed to flicker against each other, subtle shades slipping in and out of alignment.
A few of them pulsed with a strange violet hue that did not look quite natural, as though blue and red had been forced into the same body and were struggling not to tear each other apart.
Aveline leaned closer, her eyes bright with fascination.
Maybe that was what instability looked like. Maybe that was what happened when two frequencies clashed without fully merging. Maybe the stone did not know whether to burn or cool, whether to pulse or shatter, and so it became something in between. Something volatile.
She was so absorbed in the sight that she forgot everything else.
Forgot the door.
Forgot the fact that she had crept in like a thief.
Forgot that Lucien did not know she was there.
She had dropped to her knees beside one of the lower tables and was peering at a cluster of stones when her foot nudged something lying on the floor. The object shifted beneath her, and Aveline jerked in surprise, reaching out quickly to catch herself against the table before she could fall.
The scrape was small.
But in the silence of the laboratory, it sounded enormous.
Every muscle in her body stiffened.
"Who’s there?"
Lucien Caelvaris’s voice cut through the room like a blade.
Aveline froze.
For one terrible heartbeat, she thought she might still be able to stay hidden, to crouch low and pretend she had not been seen. But there was no time for lies now. She was caught.
She opened her mouth to speak.
Before she could, light flared.
Heat followed.
Lucien had lifted one hand, and from the cup of his palm a blue flame burst outward, compact and fierce and aimed directly at where she crouched.
Aveline’s breath caught in her throat.
