The quiet moments in Dragon Tower were quickly becoming my favorite. I was downstairs having a cup of tea. The chunks of dried dragon fruit made it a shade pretty close to my pink. It was also pushing the limits of my sweetness tolerance.

"Are you thinking or just letting yourself dissociate before bedtime?"

I was perhaps getting too used to Red and the Echoes.

"Not sure," I told her.

She sat right in front of me. I could see the sink behind her through her red coat. She was looking down and hiding her face with the hood.

She had a cup of tea of her own. A pink mug with brown liquid. She had the same black gloves as before.

"It's been a day for me, where are you at?" She asked.

"Met my coven. They seem…interesting."

She chuckled. "Yeah. That's a word for it."

Okay…? "Do you know the Hearths?"

She swirled the mug before taking a drink. "You could say that."

Cryptic as ever.

"What about your day?" I asked.

She let out a slow sigh, "I reunited with someone today. Someone I had expected to never see again. But we haven't talked in a very long time and I don't think either of us knows how to talk to each other anymore. But that's not your problem to worry about."

"But you're worried." And if her current track record was anything to go by, her being worried meant I should be worried.

"Worried? Maybe. I'm mostly confused. I don't understand what the Tower was thinking when it chose him. It doesn't add up. But at this point that's basically the status quo." She held up her mug and made a motion as if she was toasting me. "You are in for a wild ride."

"You sound so confident. How do you know that?"

How could she know that?

"That's for me to know and you to find out at a later time. But I promise it won't be boring." She laughed before taking a sip of her drink.

"I'd rather have boring."

"Me too. But people like us don't get boring. Not for long at any rate." She made a face at her mug like whatever was in it was distasteful to her.

"People like us?" I asked. "What do you mean?"

"Accursed, Dragons, leaders, students, girls, who knows?" She was teasing me.

"You're never going to give me clear answers, are you?"

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"I can't."

Great. "Okay then Miss Mysterious," I folded my hands and rested my chin on them. "What's your favorite song?"

"Really? You're not even pretending to be subtle."

"You can't answer the questions I really want to ask. So let's go for ones you might be able to."

Red scoffed, "Master of Puppets by Metallica."

"Ooh. Someone has good taste."

A Metallica fan? Here?

"I have it on a physical record so I can listen to it here."

"I'm jealous." That still doesn't explain when, where or how she got exposed to Metallica. Unless 'here' meant Maginisi. But still…

"It took a few listens to get my cousin on board, but I managed to turn him to the dark side."

I laughed.

"My turn for a question," Red announced. "Do you regret it?"

"Regret what?"

"The choice that brought you here."

How did she…

"I have no idea what you're talking about." It was a bluff. One I wasn't remotely confident would work.

She chuckled humorlessly. "Let me rephrase it then. If you could talk to your best friend and tell him everything. Would you? If you could talk to him again, what would you do?"

I slammed my hands on the table with enough force to stand me up from my chair. "He is not my best friend. He lost any claim to any part of that title."

She didn't flinch despite my raised voice.

"I know it still hurts. But I would still like to hear your thoughts on it. You spent how many years wishing you could just tell him? He poured his heart out to you. Perhaps he deserves the same."

"I couldn't!" And if she really knew anything then she should know that!

"But does that change anything?" She pressed.

What did she know about what happened between me and…

Over a year later and it still hurt.

Three thousand miles and it still hurt.

"It's okay."

Except it wasn't!

"You're allowed to still care about him. You're allowed to miss him."

Something wet touched my hands. I wiped my face to find tears streaming down my face.

Red stood up and walked around the table. She paused for a moment and stood there.

Then arms were around me.

She was somehow still hiding her face.

For someone I could see through she felt just as solid as the world around me.

"It's going to get better."

"You can't possibly know that."

"You'll be surprised. But I promise, it will. Bad things are about to happen to you. But you're going to make it through. Dragon Tower wouldn't have picked you if it thought you couldn't handle this."

How could it possibly know that?

"By the way," Red's voice was low in my ear. "Magic always has loopholes."

And then she was gone.

I let my hands fall to my sides.

What?

(*********)

Red's words were still bothering me hours later. Long past curfew and even with the time difference too late to call my parents.

Magic always has loopholes?

Was she talking about the curse? Or something I wasn't aware of?

And how did she know those things?

Who, and what, was she?

I stood in my room and stared at my rock shelf and tried to find a distraction from the ringing in my ears.

My Focus, or what would have been my Focus if it weren't for the curse, was sitting nicely on my shelf next to my other rocks.

My first thought when I saw it was that it was very pointy-looking.

My second was surprise that something like that came from me. If only a little bit.

The thing was…I had seen diagrams of what a Focus was supposed to look like. It was supposed to look like a flat, round piece of smooth rock. Reminded me of a magnifying glass.

My Focus was halfway there. What I had deemed the bottom of it was the smooth flat surface. The top half was covered in very sharp and unsafe looking spikes that were all pointed upwards.

And of course, the colors.

The original red that quickly faded to my pink which then switched to curse green at the very tip of all the spikes.

Figures the dangerous bits would be green.

But it was still ruined. Unusable, apparently. So on the shelf with my rock collection it goes.

I stared at it while wondering if I would end up with any more mementos of my time here.

Hopefully ones that didn't involve bloodshed.

"I guess we're both full of surprises, huh?" I asked the walls around me. "But one thing at a time, I guess." I tapped the shelf a few times and stepped back.

I stood there fidgeting. Red's words circled in my head.

How did she know about that? How was that possible?

There was something here I was missing. But what?

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