POV: Arthur Starlight
Time passed, but it didn't move.
They told us three days had gone by. I didn't count them.
Recovery, they said. Observation.
But no one observed us for long.
Not after what happened.
The Sky Garden remained sealed. Our names weren't whispered in the halls. The students were told it was a "containment breach." A failed spell test. A training accident.
But the walls still hummed when I passed.
The windows bent light around me.
And the sword they kept locking away kept finding its way back.
Even asleep, I felt it—coiled beneath my ribs, like a story waiting for permission.
Vanitar didn't talk much.
But silence is a language.
His wrapped hand twitched sometimes. Not from pain. From memory.
I'd hear his breath shift, and I'd know—
He was dreaming of the thing that had spoken through us.
The thing still watching.
We didn't talk about it.
We didn't need to.
Something had been stitched between us. Not trust. Not friendship.
Recognition.
Like we were mirrors just now realizing we were reflecting the same fire.
Then the door opened.
And the room skipped.
Not time. Not sound. Something deeper. Like meaning lost its place for a second.
She didn't enter. She glitched in.
Scrolls bundled under one arm. Ink-stained sleeves. Glasses too big for her narrow elven face. A braid unraveling behind one pointed ear.
"Is this… the Containment Chamber?" she blinked. "Or did I fall into a pre-causal echo?"
No one answered.
She tripped, caught herself, looked up—and froze.
Eyes on me. Then Vanitar. Then me again.
Something behind her gaze fractured.
"I've seen you," she whispered. Not to us. To the part of herself that already had.
Nyriel.
Temporal Alignment Division. Apprentice tier.
Scholar of things the world forgot how to remember.
She moved like time couldn't finish wrapping around her. Like her presence flickered in and out of seconds just by breathing.
"I get visions," she said, almost apologizing. "Random. Faint. Usually false. But a few weeks ago…"
Her voice thinned.
"I saw a library burning that never existed. Stories turning to flame. And at the center—"
She stopped. Swallowed. Adjusted her glasses like they could erase it.
"I wasn't supposed to find this room," she murmured. "But I always end up where I shouldn't."
Vanitar tilted his head slightly, cloth tightening around his hand like it understood her.
I said nothing.
She stepped forward.
Then flinched.
"You…" she pointed. "Time hiccups around you."
Her eyes locked onto mine.
And her whole expression collapsed.
"You're not in the thread," she whispered. "You're between them."
Something cold slid down my spine.
I didn't flinch.
But something inside me recoiled—like a future had just tried to look at me and failed.
Nyriel's voice dropped lower.
"You're not even echoes. You're what makes the world forget the sound in the first place."
She stepped back, almost stumbled.
"I shouldn't be here," she whispered. "This wasn't my moment."
And then she was gone.
Not walked. Not vanished.
Cut from the scene.
Silence again.
Vanitar stirred beside me.
"She doesn't know."
"She sees time," I said. "But not us."
"We're not part of it," he murmured. "We're the break."
We sat with that.
And for the first time, I understood.
We hadn't been chosen.
We'd been noticed—
by whatever writes between the margins.