"Man, I really need to start to hold back on those late-night anime marathons", Ishaan yawning like a yeti as he walked in a half-dazed state.
"I told you yesterday we had to leave early, or we wouldn't have time to explore the area you are heading to," Estella scolded him, although it seemed Ishaan was too sleepy to take it seriously.
"So this place is far, or what? Like assuming we are going so early", Aaron asked Isabella as he put his hand on Ishaan's sleepy head.
"Well, ya it's a bit far, it's in the old capital, which is now just overgrown by forest, at least a good part of it," Isabella replied.
"Ya, but the place we are taking you is unique, and it's quite huge, call it your guide's hidden gem", Estella added pridefully.
"Ohh.. is it really?" Ishaan, giving a sarcastic glance to Aaron, said, "bro, it seems we might need to fight again" Ishaan gave a sarcastic remark and then ran off.
"You, little… come back !!!!!" Estella chased him down as they ran ahead of the two.
"Well, at least they seemed to be full of energy", Isabella remarked
"True"
As they proceed through the early walk, a thought hits Aaron about how peaceful and truly beautiful Alzaras is, the sun rising across the Alps, and the only sound audible is that of shopkeepers setting up their shops for the day.
"It's actually quite nice, you know, how calm it is", Aaron remarked as he walked with a certain ease.
"True, I normally go for early walks occasionally too," Isabella added.
Although Aaron enjoyed the beauty of it all, a part of him was still unsure why, but he felt that he might not have felt the same if she weren't there with him.
"Now let's get moving before we lose sight of those two loose cannons" Isabella moved ahead of Aaron and gave a soft smile as she looked back at Aaron
Somehow, Aaron didn't know what it was, but something shifted in him as he saw her as the light fell from behind her and her white tea-length dress.
With a soft smile, Aaron followed behind.
As the group travelled for about an hour, the clean and petite city was behind, and now shrubs and bushes started to cover the somewhat existing roads.
"Really, it feels more like an adventure than a tour at this point, eh.. Aaron" Ishaan speaking as he tried not to step into the mud puddles.
"Yeah, can't argue with that— *He steps in the puddle.* "Shit!"
"Be careful, you doofus"
As the group finally reached their destination, the building came into view. It was a majestic, if nothing less, and felt as if they were seeing the Pantheon, but old and full of moss, giving it a mysterious air.
"HOLY COWWWW !!! Bro, it feels like we have entered one of Indiana Jones's movies," Ishaan exclaimed as he was taken aback by the master piece.
"Welcome to the old library !" Estella exclaimed as if she were welcoming guests into her house.
"This place used to hold important documents and scriptures back in the day, but when the capital moved, it was abandoned", Isabella tried to explain to the boys, who were still quite dumbfounded with what they had seen.
Ishaan was still standing with his mouth open, neck craned back, staring up at the facade like someone had unplugged him.
Estella looked at him. Then at the building. Then back at him.
She snapped her fingers directly in front of his face. Nothing.
She waved. Still nothing.
So she grabbed his collar and shook him like a rag doll.
"EARTH TO ISHAAN."
"—huh WHAT—" He nearly tripped over himself. "What, who, where—"
"In there." Estella pointed at the entrance, eyes already lit up. "We're going in."
"We're—" He blinked once. Twice. Then something clicked behind his eyes, the sleepiness evaporating in real time. "Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Is that an actual underground section I can see from here—"
"Yes—"
"Are those carvings on the—"
"Yes—"
"BRO." He spun to Aaron. "BRO, THERE ARE CARVINGS—"
"Go," Aaron said, already not looking up from the entrance arch he was studying.
That was all Estella needed. She grabbed Ishaan's wrist mid-sentence and pulled. He went willingly, loudly, already shouting something about hidden chambers as their voices swallowed the building whole and then disappeared into it.
Silence fell over the entrance.
Isabella watched the doorway for a moment after they vanished, then exhaled through her nose — the particular exhale of someone who had accepted long ago that Estella was simply a force of nature.
"She's always like that," Aaron said, not as a question.
"Since she could walk," Isabella confirmed.
She turned toward the left corridor — the longer one, darker, lined with alcoves that vanished into shadow — and glanced back at Aaron once.
"Come on then."
She didn't wait. She just walked, her voice carrying back over her shoulder as she went. "The main hall gets all the attention, but the real architecture is in the side wings. Most people never bother."
Aaron followed, sketchbook already in hand, fingers loose around it — not gripping, not ready, just carrying it the way you carry something you might need. His eyes tracked the ceiling first, then the walls, then the floor where the stone had worn unevenly in the middle from centuries of feet.
"How do you know that?" he asked. "About the side wings."
"I used to come here as a child," she said, ducking slightly under a low archway. "When things got loud."
She said it simply, like it was just information. But the word loud sat in the air a beat longer than the rest of the sentence.
Aaron didn't press. He just looked at the archway she'd ducked under — the carved border around it, worn smooth at the bottom where hands must have touched it over and over for a hundred years — and wrote it down in pencil on the corner of his page.
As both of them walked through the side wings, Isabella started to talk about the brief history of the place, how earlier it was used to store various sorts of data regarding the kingdom's formations, its wars and more, while adding some of her personal opinions and memories to the lesson.
Aaron, following behind her, was paying attention to her and in more ways than one it seemed, but still at that point his head was occupied by the beauty of that place, the designs, cracks and its history.
After walking for a while, they saw a very comfy bench under a tree in the middle of the library.
"We can wait here for the two. Estella will eventually bring him here too, after all, this is our spot when we visit" Isabella made herself comfortable as she sat on the bench.
Aaron also sat on the other end of the bench and then, without saying a word, started to draw as if he was just eager to draw.
"You really like to draw, don't you? Like you, almost instantly started to draw," Isabella closing the distance, a bit curious about what he was drawing.
"Well, I just found this way too interesting not to draw, it's just when I find something truly beautiful, my hands just want to draw and preserve it in my book", Aaron told all this as his hands moved over the canvas.
"Then, if you don't mind, can I watch as you draw ?" Isabella asked as she sat beside Aaron, gently looking at the book just enough not to obstruct his vision.
Aaron usually would shove people off as he didn't want people to stare at his work, as he used to feel uncomfortable, but today, somehow, he felt an odd warmth, a warmth that made him continue to draw even though there was an observer.
As he continued to draw, Isabella noticed something; she noticed how detailed his drawings were in the sense that, although it was a simple graphite drawing, it included all those cracks and chips that people normally would skip.
"You sure are very detail-oriented to draw even such tiny details", Isabella remarked.
"Ya, well, I believe even small cracks and chips add to the persona and identity of a place, so why skip them?" Aaron said as he drew the piece.
Isabella placed her head gently on Aaron's dormant shoulder
"I see"
As they were sitting there, a soft yet clear sound of piano and cello came into hearing
"Ah.. it seems she has dragged him into the orchestra room"
"This place has an orchestra room ?! What is this, a library or a palace?" Aaron was awestruck with the things he was learning, as Isabella laughed at his reactions
While all this was going on, the other party were already raving through the place left, right and centre.
Estella had a system. Ishaan had enthusiasm. These were not the same thing.
She moved through the library with the ease of someone who had memorised it in childhood — knowing which doors opened, which corridors looped back on themselves, which rooms were worth showing and which were just dust. Ishaan moved through it like a pinball, stopping at everything, touching things he probably shouldn't, reading plaques out loud in accents that got progressively worse.
"Ishaan, stop doing that."
"I'm being culturally immersive."
"You're doing a pirate voice."
"Medieval European, actually."
"That's not a thing."
"Debatable."
She grabbed his sleeve before he could disappear through another doorway and steered him firmly left. "Orchestra room. Come."
"There's an orchestra room?"
"There's an orchestra room."
He stopped walking. "Estella."
"What?"
"This library has an orchestra room."
"I just said that."
"No, I heard you. I just needed to say it myself." He looked at her with the expression of someone whose entire opinion of a place had just fundamentally shifted. "This is the best building I have ever been in."
The orchestra room was smaller than the name suggested — more of a rehearsal space, really, tucked behind a heavy wooden door that groaned when Estella pushed it open. The ceiling was high and curved, built for sound. Two instruments sat on a low platform at the far end, draped in cloth that had kept most of the dust off — an upright piano, old but intact, and a cello on a stand beside it.
Ishaan walked straight to the piano like it had called him by name.
He pulled off the cloth, sat down without ceremony, cracked his knuckles exactly once, and played.
Not well, exactly. But not badly either. The notes came out a little uneven at first, fingers finding their way back to something half-remembered, but the melody settled quickly into something recognisable. An old Hindi film song, slow and clean, the kind his father used to hum in the kitchen on Sunday mornings when he thought nobody was listening.
Estella had stopped in the middle of the room.
She was watching him with an expression he hadn't seen from her before — not teasing, not ready with a comeback. Just watching.
Then, without saying anything, she walked to the cello, lifted it from the stand, and drew the bow once across the strings to test the tension. Adjusted. Drew it again. Nodded once to herself.
"You know that one?" Ishaan asked, still playing.
"My grandmother used to sing it," Estella said simply.
She found the note. Then another. And then, somewhat against the odds, the piano and the cello were playing the same song in the same room, filling the curved ceiling with something neither of them had planned.
It was not a perfect performance. Ishaan lost the melody once and had to find it again. Estella's bow slipped on a note she reached for too fast. At one point, they were half a beat apart and had to slow down together to find each other again.
But the room held it all. The old curved ceiling had been built for exactly this — to take something imperfect and make it fill the space anyway.
They played it through to the end.
The last note faded.
Ishaan sat with his hands still resting on the keys, not pressing them. Estella held the bow just off the strings.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"Your dad taught you?" Estella asked.
"Ya." Ishaan's voice was quieter than usual. "He had this thing about wanting us to try everything. Like, everything. Guitar, piano, swimming, chess, football, art — the man was convinced one of us was secretly a genius and he just hadn't found it yet." A short laugh. "Aaron got drawing. I got a reasonable left foot and this."
"This isn't nothing," Estella said.
Ishaan looked at the keys. "No," he said. "I guess not."
Estella set the cello back on its stand carefully, running her thumb once along the neck before letting go. "My grandmother was the one who made me learn," she said. "Isabella was always a dedicated student. I was the one who dropped everything halfway." A pause. "Except this."
Ishaan looked at her then — really looked, the way he didn't usually let himself. "Why this one?"
Estella considered the question as if it deserved a real answer.
"Because it sounds like how things feel," she said finally. "Not how they're supposed to feel. How they actually feel."
Ishaan didn't have anything to say to that. Which was rare enough that Estella noticed.
She picked up the cloth from the floor and tossed it at him. "Come on. Aaron will think we fell through the floor."
"To be fair, I almost did, there's a loose stone back there—"
"Ishaan."
"Coming, coming."
But as he followed her out, he glanced back once at the piano — the dust cloth folded on the bench, the keys still slightly warm — and felt something he didn't have a name for yet quietly settle somewhere in his chest.
He'd figure it out later.
Probably.
The four of them regrouped at the bench under the tree, arriving from opposite ends of the library within minutes of each other. Nobody asked what the other pair had been doing. The answer was obvious enough from the state of them — Ishaan slightly dusty, Estella with a small smudge of rosin on her sleeve, Aaron with three new pages filled, Isabella with the particular calm of someone who had spent an hour somewhere they hadn't been in a long time and had needed it more than they'd realised.
They sat for a while without much conversation. The library settled around them, quiet and old and entirely unbothered by any of it.
"Same time tomorrow?" Estella said eventually.
"We have the hike," Isabella reminded her.
"Same time tomorrow," Estella repeated, to the boys this time.
Ishaan looked at Aaron. Aaron looked at his sketchbook. Then closed it.
"Ya," he said. "Same time tomorrow."