Fabrisse adjusted his footing beside the shuttered stall, gauging distance and light. The creature was two yards ahead, half-hidden in the spill of dim lanternlight. It was busy washing its face with one paw, utterly unguarded. His Stealth was working as intended.

Good. Predictable pattern. Grooming meant stillness, and stillness meant angles.

He slowed his breathing, let his heartbeat taper down until the air around him seemed to steady in response. Everything was clear now with that sharp-edged clarity that always came before motion: Left angle meant unstable footing; right angle meant better alignment. He shifted right.

He lunged, smooth and precise. I've got it this time.

The cat looked up too soon. Its pupils flared, not from him but from a dim glow near him: a shimmer, quick and low, like smoke cutting free from shadow. He didn't know what the creature was looking at, but he did know it broke its concentration. He froze, mid-motion, recalculating trajectory, but the creature had already sprung toward the anomaly.

He watched as a dark filament, looking like a wisp made of pure darkness, slipped through a narrow passage between two shuttered stalls, the cat bounding after it.

Fabrisse's pulse jerked onto his throat.

The way it distorted the light, the faint pulse at its edges. It was the same kind of distortion he'd seen before the Void had come for him.

He hadn't meant to be alone. Not after that.

His stomach went cold at the realization of how foolish he had been once again. The dusk suddenly felt much larger, the air too thin around his ribs. He looked around once—no witnesses, no sound but the slow, retreating echo of the wisp—and then he moved. Severa was still standing where he'd left her, framed in the dull orange wash of a lantern, huffing and panting for some reason as if she'd just finished a cross-country run. She had a bit of cotton wedged under one nostril and a thin strip of bandage just beneath it, like some absurd declaration of pride disguised as injury.

Severa wiped the last trace of blood from her upper lip as her eyes followed the cat, and sprang to her feet. "It's heading east. Move!"

The cat was gone, but the path it had taken was obvious: faint paw-marks in the dust, the ripple of disturbed air where the wisp had drifted. He traced the trajectory downward.

"That way leads toward the lower terrace," Severa said, her voice finally cutting through as his attention widened again. "If it keeps going in that direction . . ." She hesitated, exhaled. "It'll be near my family's estate before long."

He nodded once. "Understood." As long as it didn't actually run into the estate, he'd be fine. Probably. Still, the realization that the Void might be following him crawled cold under his skin. Nausea rose, but so did logic: Severa was the best magus-student he knew. Staying close to her was his safest option.

The real problem was figuring out how to get home afterward—preferably without dying of embarrassment or the Void.

They began to walk. The slope ahead dimmed into the hour between amber and indigo, when shadows stopped belonging to anything. The sunset had bled out over the rooftops, and the lanterns along the street had begun to glow brighter than the sun's remains.

Severa quickened her pace. "We'll have to move a tad quicker," she said. He followed suit, and they started walking aggressively.

They walked in silence for a while. The only sound was the soft tick-tick of the contraption in his hand, its needle twitching now and then to reassure him that the cat-thing was still somewhere ahead.

It was, objectively speaking, a better arrangement like this. Severa Montreal, when not talking, was somewhat tolerable. She walked with long, deliberate strides, and there was something orderly about that silence, like a lecture room before the professor arrived.

He hadn't seen her this way before—unguarded, not yet armored by tone or posture. She hadn't even bothered with cosmetics tonight, and he found himself wondering what she had been doing earlier, skulking behind a cowl with a bag of pears clutched to her side. She'd looked—what was the word?—furtive. Not the sort of thing one expected from someone who usually walked like she owned gravity itself.

The light caught the faint sheen of dried blood along the edge of her bandage, and the bit of cotton still wedged in one nostril made her look halfway between dignified and ridiculous. And maybe that was why, for the first time, she didn't seem particularly threatening.

She fell into steps behind him, and he stopped walking when he thought about the darkened edge of her old bandage. The dried crimson had spread nearly to the fold, which meant it was unhygienic.

'Without warning' was apparently the wrong way to stop, because a second later, Severa nearly collided into his back.

"You have this really bad habit of stopping right in front of me without telling me," she grumbled.

He turned halfway toward her.

From one of the inner pockets of his robe, he retrieved another folded square of linen.

He had purchased six of them earlier, and three small rolls of cotton, because her nose had been bleeding heavily when they'd left the market and he hadn't known if it would resume. That seemed the sort of contingency one ought to prepare for.

"Your last one," he said quietly, "no longer has the capacity to absorb more blood."

Her blink looked like surprise. "My nose has already dried."

He studied her face for a moment. The bleeding had stopped, but there was still a small, uneven streak below her nostril. "You forgot one spot."

"Where?"

He hesitated. Pointing at people was impolite, but explaining where exactly without pointing seemed inefficient. So he raised his hand in what he thought was a careful indication of the area. She frowned.

"Where?" she said again, sharper.

That was probably the wrong way. He should've just handed her the cloth immediately. He extended it toward her, hoping to communicate neutrality.

She stared at him for another second with the same pair of eyes he'd seen from her when he caught her falling earlier. Her fingers brushed the bandage from his hand a little too quickly. "I'll handle it," she said, voice brisk and brittle.

He nodded once. That seemed like the correct response. The tick-tick of the detector resumed, and he adjusted the dial by a degree and a half west.

The silence between them carried a faint static quality. It was fine, until Severa decided to break that silence. "Have you felt anything new," she asked, "since bonding with the Eidralith?"

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Of course. It's the Eidralith with her all over again. He didn't answer because he wasn't sure what she wanted from the question, but he just knew she would never get off his back until she'd somehow forgotten he had bonded with the artifact to begin with.

She tried again, a touch lighter. "Did it leave you any permanent damage since smashing into that head of yours?"

Okay . . . This is getting suspicious. Is she going to ask that I unbind again?

If she was going to start in that direction, he was prepared to say no. Preferably in a way that didn't result in another outburst. Still, the thought of actually having to say no to Severa made his throat tighten. She had that look again—the one that made it sound as though disobedience was not a moral choice but a technical error. It got him quite nervous, if he had to admit it.

She continued on, "What's your third elective, then? I know you're in Fire and Air. What's the last one?"

What does that have to do with the Eidralith? Was she changing the subject, or was this part of the same conversational trap? He'd seen her do that before: start with a harmless inquiry, lure him into a false sense of safety, and then pivot neatly into some pedagogical ambush involving mandatory 'supplemental study'.

Fabrisse only realized he had spent too much time saying nothing when Severa's voice grew several degrees more frustrated. "Did you cast a mime spell on yourself, or do you just enjoy making me sound like a lunatic talking to empty air?"

He looked at her sidelong, not quite meeting her eyes. "Do we have to go back to your estate?"

She raised a brow. "What's the matter? I didn't ask you to come inside. And to be perfectly frank, you embarrassed me far more than I embarrassed you last time you were there."

Kestovar glanced up and, for once, used a gesture that was unambiguous: a single, quiet tilt of his chin toward the low row of terraced roofs ahead. "There," he said, voice small but steady.

The contraption in his hand clicked more urgently as Severa followed his line of sight. Severa followed his gaze and saw her family's estate rising at the far edge of the terrace line, sprawling so broadly that it seemed to swallow the lesser houses below it whole.

"It went that way?" she asked, tone almost careless.

Kestovar nodded.

A smile crept across her lips, and he caught it just in time as she said in a voice that was suspiciously light, "How convenient. If it's already on the grounds, I will invite you in."

Wait. I can't stay. I have to finish the quest by eight, I don't want to spend an entire evening with both Severa AND her father.

"I—"

"If it is transport you are concerned about, I will personally request a carriage home for you. I imagine you don't get many opportunities to ride in one."

The tone was still annoying. The offer, however, was correct. Safety was of higher priority.

A sudden rattle of wheels interrupted his thoughts. A black carriage, gleaming with the Montreal sigil, rolled to a halt beside them.

The window slid down, revealing a man who looked unmistakably related to Severa—same auburn hair, same red eyes, though where hers held poise, his carried ease. His features were handsome in a deliberate way, all clean lines and confidence, as though charm were something he could switch on by habit.

"Ah," the man said, resting his elbow lazily on the window frame. "Severa. How convenient. It seems you've invited a guest." His voice was smooth, polished the way hers was deliberate. "So you do have friends after all. Or is this some quiet, defiant statement I'm meant to interpret?"

Fabrisse didn't need much context to know this wasn't friendly. The resemblance between them was close enough to make the difference striking: she went still at his tone, and he smiled with the kind of calm enjoyment reserved for people who liked seeing that reaction.

"This is my friend from the Academy," Severa said, her politeness bright and brittle. "We are very good friends, in fact. We have spent many semesters learning Fire forms together."

Wait, what? Since when are we friends?

Kestovar blinked. "We—"

Her heel brushed his boot. That was her telling him to shut up.

"Yes," she said, over his strangled sound. "We. I was just about to bring him inside for the evening. We have much to discuss."

The man's smile deepened. Older brother, Fabrisse concluded. Probably the sort who won arguments by tone alone.

"Well then," the man said. "The Magister will be delighted to see the both of you inside. Do you need a ride up?"

Oh no. I am not going inside.

QUEST RECEIVED: "Trial by Table Etiquette"

Objective: Survive a dinner in the Montreal household without embarrassing yourself.

Bonus Objective: Embarrass Severa Montreal in front of the guests.

Reward: +50 EXP, +2 FOR,+2 INT, +3 Random Mastery Points

Accept the Quest?

[Yes] [No]

[SYSTEM NOTE: You only have one bell left to finish the "The Cat-Thing Caper" quest.]

[TIME REMAINING: 59 minutes 49 seconds]

The reward . . . it's actually so good. The bonus objective is kind of mean, though . . .

But the condition . . . 'without embarrassing myself'? How would the Eidralith even quantify what counted as embarrassment? Was there an internal meter somewhere tracking degrees of social failure? Did it log points every time he said something strange, or when Severa sighed in that particular disappointed way that meant he'd done it again?

"No, thank you," Severa replied to the man, her voice all porcelain composure.

"As you wish." He gave a knowing little nod. "And you ought to remove the cotton from your nose before you enter the mansion."

Severa immediately plucked the roll of cotton off and squeezed it in her hand. Then, the carriage rolled off with a slow clatter of wheels.

For several seconds, silence reigned again—only the faint tick of Fabrisse's device between them. Then, in a strangled voice that sounded halfway between confusion and horror, Fabrisse said, "What was that about?"

Severa exhaled, already striding ahead. "You are to be my friend for the night," she said. "We met during my first senior year. I helped you with your coursework. You bonded with the Eidralith under my guidance. Are we clear?"

"I have to find the cat, and I—"

"Forget about the cat," she snapped. "I will reimburse you a thousand Kohns for your discretion. Just be present, and don't say anything unnecessary. You can manage that much, can't you?"

Fabrisse hesitated. The reward had gotten even better now. He couldn't possibly resist free money, not with him potentially kicked out for not being able to pay off his tuition. It came with invisible social complications, but since he was effectively immune to those, it might as well be a no-risk quest.

He accepted the Eidralith's quest.

There was still something profoundly weird about the request, however.

With painful sincerity, he asked, "You pay people to be your friend?"

Her hands shook, and she clasped them together behind her back to keep them still. "Do not think you're clever. Now straighten up and stop arguing."

"I haven't argued," he said mildly.

"Just keep silent." She walked off first.

"Friends are supposed to walk side-by-side."

Severa stopped dead for a second. When she walked again, she slowed until they were level, her glare sharp enough to peel paint. "Fine," she hissed, each word a controlled detonation. "Now chin up and walk, my dear friend."

He gulped. The venom in her voice alone already made him regret having accepted the quest.

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