Chapter 127 MEMORY LOSS

Chapter 127 MEMORY LOSS

KAI

I looked at the door. Helplessness pressed hard against my ribs.

I thought about Lyra on the training field with her ankle twisted, her head bleeding and her eyes closed.

I thought about her face when she looked at me and said you're Kai with relief.

She knew me.

She knew me from somewhere the injury hadn't gotten to, some part of her that held me and I was holding onto that with both hands. A fragile, stubborn hope stirred beneath the dread.

"She'll come back to us," I said. The words came out firmer than I felt.

Yvaine looked at me.

"She will," I repeated. "The memories are still there. Coraline said so. They're still there, just—" I stopped. "We will wait. We give her what she needs. And when she's ready, when the healing has done what it needs to do, she'll come back." I needed to believe it as much as I needed her to.

Coraline looked between us both. "She needs support," she said. "Familiar faces. No pressure to remember, no recounting of events, no filling in the blanks she is aware of." She paused. "The worst thing you can do is try to rebuild the missing year for her verbally. Let her find it herself." She looked at me specifically. "I'm going to speak to Ser Thorian. You should both go and rest, you have been in that corridor since last night."

She excused herself and walked away down the corridor, her footsteps faded then it was just me and Yvaine in the quiet outside Lyra's door.

Yvaine walked up beside me.

She didn't say anything for a moment. Just stood there with her arms crossed and her eyes on the door, I stood beside her and looked at the same door. The corridor was very quiet. Shared worry filled the space between us.

"Kai," she said finally.

"I know," I answered. The words carried everything I couldn't put into sentences yet.

"She doesn't remember Tempest," she looked at me. "She doesn't remember the bonding. She doesn't remember—" She stopped. Started again. "She doesn't remember any of the things that have made her who she is this year."

I reached out and cupped her elbow briefly. She went still. The contact grounded us both.

"She'll come back to us," I said again.

I meant it.

I was also, as I said it, trying to convince myself as much as I was trying to convince Yvaine. Doubt and determination sat side by side in my chest.

The door in front of us stayed closed.

And on the other side of it, Lyra sat in a room she didn't recognise, with a year of her life missing. She had no idea what she had lost. The knowledge of that made my own chest ache in answer.

I pressed my hand flat against the door briefly as a silent promise.

Then I let it go.

~

Calista had not intended to overhear the conversation.

She had been moving through the corridor on her way back from the eastern stairwell when the voices reached her, Kai’s first, low and strained like she had never heard from him before, then the healer’s measured responses, then Yvaine’s. She stopped at the corner instinctively.

Memory loss.

She stood very still with her back against the stone wall and processed what she had heard. Lyra had lost a year’s worth of memory. From the timing the healer described, the last clear thing Lyra remembered was days before the Choosing, before any bonding, before any of the events of the last twelve months, she had lost everything.

The Academy, the bond with Tempest. Whatever she had been doing in the weeks leading up to flying into the realm of magic.

Calista’s mind moved through the implications without sentiment.

The dragon tooth under Lyra’s mattress. She had planted it there three days ago, in the brief window she created by directing Cassius toward the archive visit with Lyra. She had been in and out of the room in under four minutes, the tooth pressed deep into the gap between the mattress and the bed frame where a search would not find it.

She had expected it to produce a bond disruption during a roost visit. She had expected it to produce a visible reaction in Tempest. She had expected the result to be Lyra looking unstable and out of control in front of Ser Thorian and Principal Cerys.

She had not expected Lyra to fly into the realm of magic. She had not expected memory loss. Calista stood at the corner and thought carefully.

The tooth was from Stormweaver himself, Ivor had been clear about that. Something taken directly from an ancient corrupted storm dragon was not equivalent to a scale taken from Ripple. She had known it was more potent. She had not calculated for what more potent meant when it interacted with a storm bond specifically.

The memory loss could be from the head injury. The healer had said so, swelling, impact, the crash.

But it could also be from the tooth.

The tooth had been under Lyra’s mattress for three days before she flew into the realm. Three days of low-level exposure through sleep, through the bond, through whatever mechanism the concentrated corruption used to move between the source and the nearest bonded creature.

Calista did not know exactly what had happened in the realm. Nobody did, apparently, that was the other thing she had taken from the overheard conversation. Kai and Yvaine had no idea why Lyra had gone in. Whatever had driven her into the realm of magic was information that only Lyra held, and Lyra currently held nothing from the last year.

The question was why.

Calista had planted the tooth to cause a disruption. She had not sent Lyra into the realm of magic. Something else had done that... something inside the realm itself, or something Lyra had found or decided before the tooth’s influence had fully developed. Whatever it was, Calista had not caused it.

But the tooth was still under the mattress.