Chapter 141 EVER AGAIN

Chapter 141 EVER AGAIN
Calista was awake.

She had been awake since the sounds in the corridor had reached her room, nothing loud enough to bring people out of their doors, but the sounds of movement at an hour when there shouldn’t have been any. Footsteps, a door opening. The low voices of people.

Someone had been in the corridor.

She had not gone to look. Going to look would have meant being seen, and if she was seen in the corridor at such an odd hour trying to find out about the events happening near Lyra Voss's room was not a position she wanted to be in. She had stayed in her bed and tried to listen to what she could from what reached her through the walls.

The tooth was in her desk drawer. The tooth was wrapped and contained, the drawer was also locked. Nobody knew it was there.

She thought about what it was doing in the drawer.

The tooth was not inert. It had been in Lyra's room for three days and whatever it had done in those three days had produced consequences that extended considerably beyond what she had planned. The consequences included a crash and a year of missing memory.

She had moved the tooth from under Lyra's mattress.
Lyra was no longer in proximity to it. And yet Lyra had apparently just walked through the Academy in the middle of the night.
Calista sat up in her bed.

She looked at the locked desk drawer across the room.

The tooth was no longer near Lyra. The tooth was in her room. Which meant if the tooth was still active… if whatever it carried was still radiating like it had then it was now radiating here, in Calista’s room, near the nearest bonded creature in proximity.

Which was Gale

Calista was out of bed and across the room before the thought had fully completed itself. She unlocked the drawer and looked at the wrapped cloth inside. She picked it up. Through the wrapping she felt nothing which meant the dampening cloth was doing its job, the charge inside it muted and contained but the fact of feeling nothing was only reassuring if she trusted the cloth to contain the corruption from the tooth.

She did not know enough about the tooth to know whether that trust was warranted.

She needed to get rid of it.

Not hide or move it but get rid of it entirely, somewhere that was not the Academy, somewhere that was not near any bonded pair, somewhere that the charge in it could not reach anything it could affect.

The river, she thought. Three miles east of the Academy boundary. Deep and fast-moving. If she wrapped it in something heavier than cloth and dropped it in the deepest part of the channel, the water would contain whatever it carried well enough that no dragon in range could be affected by it.

She needed to do this soon.

She sat on the edge of her bed with the wrapped tooth in her hand and thought about Ivor and whether he would expect it back. She had sent a message through the usual channel three days ago indicating the item had been used and the outcome had not matched expectations. She had received no reply. 

He would not want it back. She was nearly certain of that.

~

Kai sat at his desk, quill in hand, parchment spread before him, and wrote at a measured pace.

He was not uncertain of the words. He had been thinking about the letter since he left Lyra’s room, testing one version after another, discarding those that sounded too detached. He settled on the one where he stayed honest without being straightforward enough to send Lyra’s mother into panic before she knew the full picture. He wrote with care, meant every line, and when he finished he read it through twice and was satisfied.

He pressed the seal then set the letter aside. Then he looked at the other one. It rested at the far end of the desk where he had put it earlier, far enough that it would not confront him, close enough that he had remained aware of it every moment since sitting down.

It was not a large letter. The paper had been folded simply and sealed with nothing: no wax, no crest, only the fold itself holding it shut. On the front, in his mother’s handwriting, stood a single word.

Cadence

Just the name.

It should not have felt heavy. It was only paper. Paper carried no weight beyond its own, and the physical weight of this particular folded page was slight, yet it sat there. He had not opened it.

He had told himself the reason was everything else demanding attention. Lyra in her chambers, her ankle that refused to mend, her night wandering still unexplained and Yvaine keeping watch over the room. All of it real and  pressing, which he admitted to himself in the quiet of his room was also useful as an excuse not to sit down and open a letter that might finally answer questions he had carried his entire life.

He reached out and picked it up.

The paper felt old at the edges but not deteriorated, someone had stored it carefully, protected it from the worst of the years but still old. He turned it over in his hands. Then he broke the fold.

He drew out the sheet.

The handwriting was small, angular, and careful, the script belonged to someone who wrote with deliberation.

Thorian,

By the time you are reading this letter, I would already be gone with Stormweaver and our baby. Do not bother to look for me. I could never have imagined you would betray me as you have. I trusted you with my worries, my visions, and you took everything to the Council. You were the reason my Stormweaver was taken from me. You do not know how I have suffered with this fractured bond, you could never imagine. Did our love truly mean so little to you? I will never forgive you and you will never see me or our child ever again

That was all.