"Have you forgotten the beatings I gave you?" Lara snapped at Eldric's remark on Chronveil. "Don't you have any shame, showing your face here after failing to win even a single match against me all this time?"
"Tch, let's duel again and see who wins this time." Eldric said, and almost seemed on the verge of calling out his runebear, the same one he had summoned during the battle royal.
Alex tensed as the situation escalated, his nerves sharpening to a fine edge, his body ready to dodge at the first sign of any attack aimed his way.
Lara stepped forward and planted herself directly in front of Eldric. Her green eyes locked onto his black ones with barely restrained fury, both of them coiled and ready, yet neither willing to strike first.
Alex turned toward Thalia, who stood off to the side with her arms crossed over her chest. Her long white hair was braided into a single ponytail that fell to her waist, and her snow-white eyes were fixed on Lara and Eldric as though she was calculating the exact moment the confrontation might boil over. Yet beneath her face carried a different kind of tension, she seemed to have frustration directed at herself for having followed Lara here at all. She looked torn between stepping in and simply letting it play out.
"Should you not stop them?" Alex asked, stepping beside her. Thalia instinctively turned her head toward him, her brow creasing, her mouth opening and closing several times without sound. Then she glanced back toward Lara and Eldric, who had pressed their foreheads together like two beasts about to collide.
"They are not naive children. They both know what it means to start a fight inside the academy walls." Thalia replied.
As if proving her right, Eldric withdrew, clicking his tongue in sharp irritation. He cast one last look at Lara, then let his gaze drift to Thalia, and finally settled it on Alex with an expression that said, plainly and without room for misunderstanding, I will deal with you later.
Alex stood there, genuinely baffled, unable to make sense of where such hostility had come from. His only encounters with Eldric had been brief and unremarkable. He had seen him at the level-checking crystal grounds, and they had crossed paths during the final battle royal match. Before that, the only other time Alex had laid eyes on him was from a distance on the very first day, when Eldric and his father, flanked by a retinue of knights, had blocked the gate and kept Alex and his family from getting any closer.
It was deeply strange that so much anger was being directed at him. Eldric looked like a man who had a lot of pent up anger against Alex, which was the last thing Alex needed. Alex already had more than enough weighing on him, adding an enemy he could not deal with would only make the plate even larger.
Lara turned away from Eldric's retreating figure and walked over to Alex, placing her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes were wary, scanning him the way someone does when they can already see trouble forming on the horizon.
"You should stay away from Eldric," she said. "He seems to have some beef with you." Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Did something happen between you two?"
Alex shook his head. He could not recall a single moment where he might have provoked Eldric, not even during the battle royal, where he had said nothing cutting and thrown no taunts. "No," he said. "I don't think I've done anything to him. The first day of the entrance exams was the first time I'd even seen him."
"Hmm." Lara pressed a finger to her chin, her expression shifting into something more deliberate and inward. "You're sure about that? Because the amount of hatred coming off him was not a small thing."
"I'm telling you, the entrance day was the first and only time," Alex said, his frustration beginning to surface. He could feel the eyes of everyone nearby still drifting toward him with that idle, spectator's curiosity that had nothing better to fix itself to, and Lara's repeated questioning was not helping.
"Why would I lie about something like that?" Alex snapped.
Lara gave a small nod and let go of his shoulders. She turned toward Thalia. "By any chance, do you know why Eldric seems to resent Alex so much?" she asked, her green eyes narrowing at Thalia with a raised brow. "Considering that you yourself seem to carry some resentment toward him as well."
It was the first time Alex had seen Thalia flinch. She opened her mouth to respond. "I don't hate him. It is just that he i-"
But before she could finish, a wave of presence swept through the hall as multiple figures entered through the wide doors beside the elevated platform. Each one of them radiated the kind of quiet, settled power that only comes from having faced something truly difficult and survived it wholly.
They were dressed in suits and long coats, some of the women in skirts, but no matter what they wore or how they looked, every single one of them wore the same expression, the expression of someone who had fought long and brutal battles of every conceivable kind and had emerged from all of them standing.
At the front of the group walked a woman with deep orange hair that flowed freely to her waist, sharp black eyes framed by round glass spectacles, and the kind of composed, refined bearing that seemed to sharpen the air around her. She wore a red robe that complemented her hair in a way that felt deliberate, and mesmerizing.
Alex recognized her immediately. She was the one who had intervened on the first day, stepping between his father and the Sealborne patriarch before their confrontation at the academy gate could turn into something far worse. He had not learned her name that day, having had earplugs in his ears to not let the noise of the crowd hurt his ears, and she had flown off into the air the moment the fight was stopped.
"Oh," Lara said softly, sounding almost delighted. "Vice Headmistress Sylara looks quite stunning, doesn't she?"
"She does look beautiful," Thalia murmured in quiet agreement. "The Aerwyn family is known for it. Beauty and air affinity tend to run together in that bloodline."
Huh? Vice Headmistress. Alex stored the name into his memory and was about to look more carefully at the assembled faculty when his gaze snagged on something else entirely and would not let go.
Princess Eva was among the group, walking just behind the professors, and the moment his eyes found hers, everything around him seemed to slow. She had the same red lines tracing across her white part of her eyes that he had, and the same dark circles carved beneath her eyes from having not slept properly.
For a stretched, silent moment she looked back at him with a face that carried a grief so open it looked like something breaking inside her. She clenched her fist at her side, and her eyes shimmered briefly before she turned her head away from him.
Alex felt his chest clench so tightly that breathing became hard and swallowed. Every part of him wanted to cross the distance between them, to tell her that he loved her, that he had been a coward for not saying it sooner, that he could not imagine his life without her in it. She had been his first real friend and, in every quiet and unspoken way, everything else to him as well.
But he did not move. He could not. She was engaged to someone else, and from the way she had turned her face away from him just now, it was clear she understood that too, understood it in the same heavy, resigned way he did.
***
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