Chapter 3

 “Mira!” Eamon Elav waved at her from the path.

It was clearly just a friendly wave, not an invitation—but Mira would take any excuse to escape Kerys. She said a quick goodbye to Nell and Hester and grabbed Lorien by the sleeve, dragging him toward the path.

Lorien, poor thing, already looked like he’d hit his daily limit on human interaction. His eyes had that dazed glaze he got when he'd overdosed on small talk.

“You can make your retreat to the library now,” Mira said as they crossed the lawn.

Lorien sneezed as they passed through a patch of sunlight, and laughed. “You want some alone time with Eamon, huh?”

“What?” Mira blinked at him, startled. She realized that Lorien was referring to the brief time last semester that she and Eamon had gone on a few dates. “Oh — no. I just wanted to get away from that -- freaking -- person.” She shuddered and then grinned. “Plus,” she added, “you have that look.”

“What look?” Lorien asked, blushing and ducking his head, his most dangerous allergy — being perceived — flaring up.

“That why-isn't-my-face-looking-at-something-cog-shaped look,” she teased.

He laughed again, shoving his hands into his coat pockets.

Eamon stood a little ways up the path, short and broad-shouldered, with the perpetual energy of someone who lived more in the air than on the ground. His dark blond hair refused to obey gravity, wind-tossed even on a still day, and a thin sunburn crossed the bridge of his nose—a souvenir of too many hours spent in the aeronautics yard.

He wore his usual uniform: cargo shorts, an oversized white T-shirt with a tuxedoed deer printed across it, and smudges of engine oil streaked across both. His goggles hung around his neck like a badge of honor, and a tool belt was strapped to his hips.

“Hey, guys!” Eamon’s grin was wide and effortless. He gave Mira and Lorien each a quick, gruff hug that smelled faintly of metal and sun.

“You are dismissed,” Mira said to Lorien, mock-authoritative.

Lorien gave her a half-serious salute, smiled at Eamon, and then sauntered off toward the main building, muttering something about blessed solitude.

“I thought you might want an excuse to get away from Kerys,” Eamon said, still smiling. His eyes—warm, crinkled at the corners—made it clear he understood exactly how desperate she’d been for rescue.

Mira gave him another hug. “You are the literal best,” she said, muffled against his shoulder. Eamon laughed and patted her back. He was one of the few who knew she didn’t like Kerys—but not why.

“How was your summer?” he asked, stepping back.

Mira sighed dramatically and let her head fall back. “Bliss. I miss the Ecliptica already.” Her grin returned, a little wistful. “How was yours?”

Eamon mimicked her pose, head tilted to the sky. “Less blissful.” They both laughed. “It was fun, but it was hard work. I was fixing more than I was flying. Some of those old rigs—they don’t glide so much as politely fall.”

“Tragic,” Mira said. “Maybe you should build your own.”

He arched a brow. “Maybe I am.”

Mira crossed her arms. “You’d better not crash it into the clock tower again.”

“That was one time,” Eamon said, indignant but grinning. “And technically the tower hit me.”

She gave him a mock glare. “Right. The tower attacked you out of nowhere.”

The teasing came easily. Around Eamon, she didn’t have to think about tone or timing—he just caught it, matched it, turned it into something bright. The air between them felt lighter than it had all day, the last of Kerys’s sharp edges fading from her thoughts.

Eamon adjusted his tool belt, which clinked faintly with wrenches and folded brass. “You wouldn’t believe the state of some of the gliders they assigned me. I swear, one of them had been patched with kitchen foil. I told them I wasn’t a miracle worker, but apparently word travels fast—‘that Elav kid from Blackmere can fix anything.’”

Mira smiled. “You sort of can, though.”

“Yeah, but not when someone’s replaced a power conduit with a spoon.”

That made her laugh out loud, and Eamon looked quietly pleased, like he’d achieved the day’s objective.

They walked together toward the central court, the sun glinting on the academy’s brass railings and clockwork lanterns. The air smelled faintly of aether-oil and cut grass.

“So,” Eamon said, glancing at her. “You and Vale are…what now? Study partners? Ghost-hunting associates? He looks better than last term. Less likely to fall over from forgetting to eat.”

Mira had thought the opposite. She gave Eamon a look. “We’re friends. And you know perfectly well I’m retired from ghost-hunting.”

He smirked. “Sure you are.”

“Anyway,” she added, bumping him lightly with her shoulder, “you’re one to talk. You practically live in the airfield. You and your beloved deathtraps.”

“They’re not deathtraps,” he said, mock-offended. “They’re experimental prototypes. Entirely different. You want to grab lunch?”

She smiled. “Rain check. I left Nell alone in our room today. I want to see what kind of damage she's done to my desk.”

They parted with a quick wave. Mira took the path toward the west dormitories, the air warming as the sun rose higher. The cobblestones clicked under her boots; she passed a pair of seniors carrying a crate of glass tubes, one of them whispering excitedly about Brass and Bloom. It wasn't surprising to see seniors already talking about the exhibition. They always had one huge project that would fall apart if even one student failed at their task. The entire senior class was graded on a curve, the school believing that teamwork was where ingenuity and invention were tested.

As she walked, Mira replayed Eamon’s laugh, the warmth of it fading as she neared the dormitory. The air smelled quieter here — tinged with honeysuckle and machine oil — and the memory of the lake pressed faintly at the back of her mind. Inside the dorm, Nell’s side of the room was a small, living garden -- mostly kept alive by Hester — a tangle of green leaves and hanging charms that caught the mid-morning light and scattered it across the ceiling. Her desk was neatly stacked with books, stationery tucked into drawers and pens in their holders. Even her satchel hung perfectly centered from the back of her chair.

Mira's desk, next to it, was scattered with cogs from a half-dismantled cuckoo clock. Books were piled here and there (more neatly than Mira had left them) around the floor. Nell closed the ones Mira had left open, but had been kind enough to place bookmarks this time, which Mira appreciated. Tools were attached to a magnetic strip above her desk. The strip had been mostly empty when Mira had left the room, but were all now neatly lined up by size across the strip. Nell had shared some of her plants with Mira, dotting the shelves above her bed. The books and jars of cogs and sprockets had also been organized by size and type, which Mira also appreciated. She'd been nervous to leave Nell alone in their room, but the wars waged between Nell’s neatness and Mira’s chaos had ended in a truce Mira could actually live with.

They both had copper-framed four poster beds. Nell's cover was a puffy pastel patchwork quilt, tucked into fluffy hospital corners and one pastel blue pillow set neatly at the head of the bed. Mira's bed was sloppily covered with an oversized dark teal duvet shot through with copper stitching. Her pillow in a matching pillow case was under her bed, along with a cluster of velvet pillows in garnet, indigo, and emerald. Mira slept under her bed most nights, enveloped in the canopy of her duvet, on top of the plush, colorful rug that bridged both sides of the room.

Mira sat on her messy bed and kicked off her black, steel-toed boots. The laughter from the greens drifted faintly through the open window. She'd been tense since she'd read the first canto, and being around the lake felt -- odd. She wasn't sure if it was part of the effect of the book, or something else, or nothing.

She pulled out the book that had been thumping against her leg for an hour, almost as if impatient to be read. The silvery shimmer of the cover seemed to catch her reflection for a moment—ridiculous, because it was only leather, with a trace of mica worked into the grain. She slid to the floor and crawled under her bed, pulling the duvet down on all sides, leaving just enough light from the window to be able to read. 

She snuggled into the pillows, rearranging them where she liked them, and then, finally found where she'd left off earlier. The pull of the book that she'd been resisting finally succeeded in pulling her in. She read through it quickly once, then slowly a second time. It only took about an hour to read it twice, but the effect crept into her senses, and on her third time around, she fell asleep with the imagery of the second canto playing out in her dreams over and over.

The morning after the lake, Alaric woke with the feeling that something had been written inside him during the night — a sentence in a language he did not yet know. The sound of her voice still shimmered in his thoughts like light caught beneath ice.

He went about his lessons — transmutations, theory of wards, the subtle geometry of spells — but everything felt muffled, dream-stained. Words blurred. Chalk trembled in his hand. When he looked at the lake through the classroom window, the world beyond the glass appeared half-submerged.

It was not curiosity that led him to the lower libraries that night; it was hunger. The upper halls held knowledge that glowed like a polished apple. The lower ones held what had gone dark from keeping too long in the heart.

No students were allowed below the bronze arch after curfew. But the stairway itself seemed to lean toward him as he passed. A lantern floated to life of its own accord, pale and slow, as if guiding him downward.

The Library of Shadows was less a room than a cavern — carved beneath the castle’s oldest wing, its air heavy with dust and the perfume of sleep. Shelves rose like pillars into darkness. Between them, portraits hung not of founders or heroes, but of the forgotten — those whose names had been written over, whose faces the castle had decided to remember differently.

Alaric traced his fingers along the spines: On the Elemental Pact. Treatise of the Bound Spirits. Chronicles of the Fourfold Hall. And there, tucked between two cracked tomes, a thin volume bound in silverleaf — untitled, almost translucent.

When he opened it, the pages breathed. The ink shimmered like mist. Words formed and unformed, as though written by water itself.

“She is the keeper of the deep vow,” the book whispered. “The Lady of the Blackmere, sworn by the founders to guard the source from which all learning flows. But to bind the guardian is to bind the heart of magic. And hearts, once bound, hunger.”

The lantern flickered. Somewhere above, the castle groaned — a sound like old grief moving through stone.

He turned another page. A sketch: the Lady standing upon the lake, her arms lifted toward the moon, her eyes hollow with light. Beneath it, a single line of script:

“Should she wake, the school shall remember what it has forgotten.”

A chill moved through him, soft and certain. The Lady was no myth — no ghost conjured by lonely students. She was real. Bound. Watching.

The candle hissed. Behind him, a whisper breathed his name.

“Alaric.”

He turned — and the Lady was there, reflected in the glass of a cabinet door. Her image trembled between worlds, as though she stood behind the mirror’s skin.

“You seek what should remain asleep,” she said, her voice no louder than the sigh of parchment.

“I only wish to understand,” he answered.

“Understanding is a wound,” she replied. “Once opened, it does not close.”

And then the reflection was gone — leaving only the shelves, the book, and the echo of water lapping at the edge of thought.

Beneath her bed, Mira stirred once, but was otherwise lost in the world of the Lady and the lake.