Morning Again
The alarm didn't wake him—Mira did, with a spoon tapping a glass like a tiny cymbal.
"Up, maestro. If you sleep through your encore, I'm selling your pillow."
Junheon stretched, the last of yesterday's noise draining off like rain from a coat. They dressed and packed with a rhythm they'd practiced for years—Mira narrating her day in bullet points, Junheon answering with dry counterpoints—then stepped out.
Two Lightward soldiers at the entrance lifted their hands in a clean salute. Junheon returned it. The hallway's hush trailed them to the street, where the world was louder, brighter—and today, oddly busier.
Patrol SUVs ghosted past in pairs. Overhead, the chuff-chuff-chuff of rotors laid a moving grid on the sky.
Mira pointed up, eyes wide. "Helicopters. Stylish. I approve."
"You approve of anything that goes thump-thump," Junheon said.
"Correct," she said. "It's the sound of being escorted by fate."
They caught the bus. Through the window, Lightward checkpoints flickered by—quick scans, green flashes. Mira's chatter ran from homeroom gossip to gourmet notes on yesterday's pizza to a point-by-point critique of the school's hallway posters.
Halfway to Naves she tugged the pull cord. "Here's good."
"This isn't your stop."
"Exactly," she said, standing. "No need to draw a crowd at the gate. You, however, are going to be on time. Go. Go!"
She hugged him quick—fast enough to be casual, tight enough to be real. "Thanks for yesterday," she added, softer. Then she hopped off, waved once, and vanished into a side street like a magician's final trick.
Junheon rode two more stops, disembarked, and cut toward Novarion at a steady clip. Extra patrols hummed in the periphery. He set his pace, even, calm.
The Pull
He had one hand on the classroom door when three boys and a couple of girls slid from the flow of students and closed around him with the easy geometry of practice.
"Bathroom," one boy said. "Now."
No yelling. No spectacle. Just firm hands and a corridor that seemed suddenly well-designed for detours. They funneled him into a tiled room at the end of the hall; the lock clicked behind them.
"Let's talk," said the tallest. "About boundaries. About how close you stand to Seol Harin. About how you look at things that aren't yours."
Junheon leaned against the sink, palms visible, voice even. "There's nothing to talk about."
"Wrong answer," a girl said. Her smile was thin and self-pleased. "You people always think you can ride a name up the stairs."
Another boy lifted his chin toward the mirror. "You hear that? Burslu thinks he's invisible."
Junheon's silence held. If they needed to throw words at him, let them throw words. Words wash off.
Then one of them—shorter, angrier—stepped too close. "How's your family, scholarship? Oh right, you don't have one—"
The punch never happened. Junheon didn't throw one either. He simply caught the wrist, turned, and set the arm into a lock so clean it was almost polite. The boy gasped; tendons sang. Junheon released before anything snapped.
"Don't," he said.
The room changed temperature. The tallest moved first, a shove that tried to be a tackle. The next came low, the girl swung high with her bag; two more cut in from the sides. It was messy, fast, and quiet—sneakers sliding, elbows clipping tile, the muffled thud of a shoulder into a stall.
Junheon stayed small and close, redirecting more than striking—forearm checks, pivots, a knee that found a stomach just hard enough to end that angle. He took a hit to the rib, another to the shoulder. The mirror rattled in its frame. He kept his feet.
"Hold him," someone hissed.
A stall door banged open behind him. A shadow lifted for a blindside shot—
White Door, White Dragon
—when the bathroom door exploded inward. Not shattered—surrendered, as if it had decided in a hurry that it now opened the other way.
Harin stood in the threshold, hair a pale river, blazer immaculate, eyes like ground ice. In her hand: an antique staff, clear as mountain glass—a white crystal that held light the way a note holds air.
Her voice was calm and ceremonial at once. "Naraka, grant me strength."
She lifted the staff. "Crowley!"
Light didn't burst; it arrived—as if the room had always been full of it and only now remembered. Spirit threaded it, silver within silver. From that braided brilliance unfolded a white dragon, long and powerful and beautiful, scales like snow forged under pressure.
The roar filled the building and kept going, a clean, flawless tone that settled somewhere behind the eyes. The dragon dipped its head; white fire kindled behind its teeth—not a blast, a promise.
Everyone ran.
The brave ran fastest. The cruel set a speed record. Even the boy with the smarting wrist found at least three new gears. The bathroom emptied in four heartbeats and a single skid mark.
Junheon did not move.
Harin didn't take her eyes off the space where the trouble had been. "You can return," she said, clear and sure. "Thank you—as always."
The dragon's blaze dimmed to pearl. It coiled once in midair, then flowed inward—light and spirit drawing down into the staff, into the crystal's patient heart. The tiles remembered how to be tiles. The air remembered how to be air.
Harin stepped fully inside, set the broken door gently against the wall as if it had merely chosen to rest, and turned to him. Only then did the steel in her face relax by a millimeter.
"You okay?" she asked.
Junheon exhaled. "Define okay."
"Standing. Not bleeding. Capable of sarcasm," Harin said. "That's a passing grade."
He flexed the shoulder that had met the wall. "I'll audit the course."
Her gaze flicked to the reddening spot at his ribs. "Clinic," she said.
"I can walk."
"I wasn't planning to carry you," she said, then paused. "Unless you insist. That would be dramatic. People would talk."
"That's the problem," he said. "People are already talking."
"Then we'll give them enviable material." She reached out, took his forearm—not the wrist, not the hand; a grip that was firm and formal. "Come on."
He let her lead. At the threshold she glanced back at the crooked door, then at the crystal staff in her other hand. The staff looked perfectly at home there, like a word she'd been born knowing.
In the hall, the world remembered how to be ordinary: footsteps, locker clinks, a distant announcement about library hours. Somewhere far off, students were still buzzing about the roar.
Harin angled them into the flow. "For the record," she said lightly, "if anyone asks, we were discussing resonance integrals—and some geniuses thought it would be fun to break the door."
"Geniuses," Junheon echoed dryly. "Got it. Broken doors, integrals, completely normal day."
They turned the last corner toward the clinic. Harin's hand stayed steady on his arm, and the crystal staff caught the ceiling lights and quietly made them better.