People fear many things. The dark. Insects. Animals. The depths of the ocean. Death, hunger, sickness. But in this age, the thing people feared most could be summed up in a single word: Creatures.
The robes were heavier than they looked.
Eren had laid his out on the bed when it arrived — folded flat, stiff at the creases, smelling faintly of cedar and something older, like a wardrobe that hadn't been opened in a long time. Black, embroidered with silver along the collar and down the front seam in a pattern that was almost architectural, geometric. It wasn't decorative in the way noble clothing was decorative. There was a restraint to it. The embroidery said something, though Eren couldn't have said exactly what.
He put it on.
The fit was precise. He checked the collar, straightened the front. Looked at himself for a moment in the small mirror on the wall — the kind of looking that doesn't really see anything, just confirms that something has changed.
A knock at the door.
"Are you dressed?" Raphael's voice.
"Yes."
The door opened. Raphael was already in his robe, the silver embroidery catching the torchlight. His collar was slightly crooked. He noticed Eren noticing and adjusted it without saying anything.
"Kayra's waiting." He paused. "And Orin has been ready for twenty minutes apparently. He was just standing in the corridor."
"Like a statue?"
"Like a very well-dressed statue, yes."
Eren almost smiled. He picked up his coat from the chair — he'd wear it over the robe, he decided; the night was cold — and followed Raphael into the corridor.
Kayra was there. Black robe, silver embroidery, hair pinned back with a simplicity that looked deliberate. She looked at Eren, then at Raphael's collar, then said nothing. Orin was standing further down the corridor, hands at his sides, exactly as described.
"You look like you're about to sentence someone," Raphael told him.
Orin looked at him. "I'm ready."
"That was a compliment."
Orin considered this. "Thank you."
They went downstairs.
The carriages were waiting in the courtyard.
Four of them — black lacquered wood, brass fittings, each drawn by two horses. The Academy's own stable. Students were already climbing in, talking, some still adjusting their robes. The air smelled of horse and night-cold stone and something faintly floral from someone's perfume.
Dusk was standing near the lead carriage. Not in a robe — he never seemed to wear anything that matched an occasion, just his coat, the same coat. His shadow, as ever, sat at the wrong angle on the ground.
"Fifteen minutes." He didn't raise his voice; it carried anyway. "We leave in fifteen minutes. Anyone not in a carriage gets left."
Raphael looked at Eren. "Is he going to the celebration?"
"Apparently."
"Does he celebrate things?"
Eren looked at Dusk standing motionless in the dark, hands at his sides, shadow pooling wrong. "I genuinely don't know."
They found Gus near the second carriage, already holding a small parcel. "I packed some rolls," he said brightly, as if this were obvious. "You can't arrive somewhere like that on an empty stomach." He offered the parcel around. Raphael took one immediately. Kayra declined. Orin took one and ate it in three precise bites.
Eren took one. It was still warm.
The carriages departed.
The streets were quiet at this hour — not empty, but quieter than the day. Lampposts went past in amber intervals, the sound of hooves on cobblestone filling the enclosed space of the carriage. Nobody talked much. Raphael watched the city through the window. Kayra sat with her hands folded. Orin looked straight ahead. Eren looked at the darkness between the lamps, where the city existed in shapes and edges rather than details.
The ride was longer than he'd expected.
They left the central district, crossed a wide bridge, and the road began to rise slightly. The houses on either side grew further apart, the gardens larger, the trees older. Safe Haven at its edges, where it remembered it had been something before it was a city.
Then the Celebration Hall appeared.
It was separate from the Academy entirely — a different kind of structure, standing on its own grounds behind low stone walls and rows of torches that had already been lit. Even from the carriage window it read as large, but the word didn't quite cover it. It was the kind of building that asked something of you before you entered — a slight adjustment of the spine, a raising of the chin.
A dome dominated the roofline, wide and pale in the torchlight, its lantern at the top visible from a considerable distance. The exterior was carved stone — not ornate, exactly, but deliberate, every surface considered. The approach was a gravel path between two lines of iron lanterns, and along that path students were already moving in clusters, robes catching the light.
Raphael leaned out the window slightly. "How big is it."
"If you walked from one end to the other it would take you eight minutes," Dusk said from the front of the carriage.
Raphael withdrew. "Eight minutes."
"Walking."
Raphael looked at Eren. Eren looked back.
The carriages stopped. Students climbed out. The four of them stepped onto the gravel, and for a moment they simply stood there, looking at the building in front of them.
"Well," Raphael said. "In we go."
The interior was three floors.
The entrance level opened into a hall of considerable height — not the full dome, but a vaulted ceiling high enough that voices dissolved before they reached it. Chandeliers burned overhead, dozens of candles each, the light warm and uneven, pooling in some places and thin in others. The floor was pale stone, polished until it gave back soft reflections. Tables ran along the walls, laden with food and drink. In the center, open space — already filling with students in their team colors, black and silver, orange and brown, blue and grey, red, green, the full spectrum of the Academy's divisions present and moving.
The noise was immediate. After two months of tower corridors and training rooms and Dusk's sustained silences, the sound of several hundred people in a single room was almost physical.
Raphael inhaled. "This is more like it."
Kayra was already scanning the room, doing what she always did — reading exits, positions, the location of people she knew.
"Rowan's over there." Eren had spotted the orange curls above the crowd near the far wall, a head taller than most of the people around him due to the fact that he'd somehow ended up on a step. He had his staff and was using it to gesture at something, talking to someone Eren couldn't see.
"And Mira." Kayra tilted her chin slightly.
Mira was easier to find once you knew what to look for — she wasn't standing with the main crowd. She'd found a position near one of the archways that led deeper into the building, back to the wall, a vantage point. Watching. Always watching.
Raphael was already moving. "I'm getting something to eat before the tables get destroyed. Come or don't."
Orin followed him without being asked.
Eren and Kayra made their way toward the archway.
Mira saw them coming and said nothing until they were close.
"You both look different."
"It's the robes," Eren said.
"No." She looked at them for a moment, assessing with that same precision she applied to everything. "Two months. It shows."
Kayra accepted this without comment. Eren wasn't sure what to do with it, so he didn't do anything.
Rowan arrived before a response was necessary, descending from his step with more haste than coordination. "You're here. I kept looking at the door." He had a cup of something and was visibly more animated than usual. "Have you seen the size of this place? I walked to the second floor and I could see all the way—" He gestured broadly and nearly sloshed his drink. "Sorry. Have you been training? You look like you've been training."
"We have been training," Kayra said.
"Right. Of course. Shadows." He said the word with a specific kind of weight, slightly awed, slightly unsure whether that was appropriate. "Is it—"
"It's fine," Eren said.
"Good. That's — good." Rowan nodded. He was going to say something else; he thought better of it.
Raphael materialized at Eren's elbow with a plate. He'd gotten food for two, which meant he'd gotten food for himself and assumed Eren would want some. He was usually right. "Mira," he said, as if they'd parted five minutes ago rather than two months. "Still watching doors?"
"Still worth watching." She turned her attention back to the room.
"That's a yes."
They stood together for a while, the five of them, and it was easy in a way that surprised Eren. Not unchanged — nothing was unchanged, and he didn't expect it to be. But the ease was still there, underneath everything that had shifted. Some things didn't need rebuilding.
The second floor was reached by a wide staircase off the main hall, its banister carved from dark wood, smooth from years of hands.
The space up there was different in character — lower ceiling, alcoves along the walls with benches, quieter than below. Some students had clearly come here specifically to escape the noise of the ground floor. Others were in small groups, talking seriously or not seriously, leaning against walls with drinks.
Brom found them at the top of the staircase.
He looked the same — large, blunt, the kind of face that had never quite worked out how to look casual. He was in the Headless Reapers' blue and grey, which suited him in the way that straightforward things often did. He clapped Raphael on the shoulder hard enough to shift his balance.
"Finally. I've been standing at this staircase for twenty minutes."
"You could have come downstairs."
"I didn't want to lose the spot." He looked at the rest of them. "Lena's in the third alcove. Oryn was with her but I think he went somewhere."
Lena was in the third alcove, exactly as reported, sitting with her legs crossed and a drink she wasn't particularly interested in. She looked up when they arrived. Her eyes moved over the group, settling briefly on each face with that particular economy of attention she had, the kind that didn't linger because it didn't need to.
"Two months," she said, which seemed to be what everyone was leading with tonight.
"Two months," Raphael agreed. He sat down across from her with the ease of someone for whom furniture was always optional. "How's the Headless Reapers treating you?"
"Well." No elaboration. That was all she gave, and somehow it was enough.
Oryn appeared from the direction of one of the other alcoves, carrying nothing, wearing his usual expression, which was to say no particular expression at all. He looked at the assembled group and sat down. The rainbow-like flash that the crystal had shown — Tricksters — seemed very far from how he actually moved through the world, which was quietly and with a certain deliberate invisibility. But then, Eren supposed, that was probably the point.
"Good evening," Oryn said.
"Good evening," Eren said back.
That was that.
The third floor was quieter still.
A gallery, essentially — a walkway that ran around the interior of the dome's base, wide enough for people to stand and look down at the floors below, or to look up at the dome itself, which from this vantage showed the full architecture of the thing. Ribs of pale stone radiated from the lantern at the top, meeting at the base of the drum in carved reliefs that were too far up to read clearly in the candlelight.
Not many students had come up this far. A few stood at the railing, looking down. A couple sat on a bench near the far wall, talking. The light was thinner here, reaching from below rather than from above.
Eren had ended up here without entirely meaning to. The press of the ground floor had become, after an hour, something he needed a break from, and the second floor had already filled in the time since they'd visited it. He'd climbed the next staircase more or less by instinct.
The view from the railing was worth it.
You could see the whole first floor from here — the movement of color, the patterns that people made without meaning to. Pumpkins orange in one cluster. Shadows black and silver scattered through the room. Lanterns' yellow catching the candlelight. The building from the inside was a different thing than the building from outside, less monumental and more alive.
"You came up here too."
Leila. She'd appeared at the railing a few feet away, which was exactly how she moved through rooms — you didn't notice her arriving, you noticed she was there.
"Needed air," Eren said.
"There isn't more air up here. Same building."
"Different air."
She considered this. "Fair." She leaned against the railing, looking down at the floor below. The robe suited her differently than it suited, say, Raphael — there was something in how she wore it that made it look like it had always been hers, no adjustment required.
Eren kept his eyes on the crowd below. "You look like you belong in this."
A pause. "In what."
"The robe. The whole—" He gestured vaguely at the room, the building, the evening. "This."
"I've been at this Academy longer than you." There was no edge to it. Just information.
"That's not what I meant."
She looked at him then, a direct look, the kind she didn't apply often and therefore meant something when she did. "I know what you meant."
Eren looked back at her. Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Then she turned back to the railing. "Two months ago you could barely keep Suru in your legs for four steps. Tonight you walked up three flights of stairs without thinking about it."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It's an observation."
"It sounds like a compliment."
Something shifted at the corner of her mouth, too brief and too controlled to call a smile. "Don't read too much into it."
"I'm not reading anything into it."
"Good."
"Good."
Below them the party continued, voices rising and falling, the occasional burst of laughter reaching up to where they stood. The candles in the chandeliers had burned lower. The evening was in its middle hours.
Leila was looking at the dome again. Something in her posture had settled, loosened slightly — the almost-always-held quality that was her baseline had relaxed, just a fraction. Eren noticed it the way you noticed a change in the sound of a room.
"My family would have wanted me here for the wrong reasons," she said. It wasn't directed at him, exactly. More like something she'd thought before and was saying now, out loud, because the occasion permitted it.
Eren didn't answer immediately. Then: "Because it's impressive."
"Because it looks impressive. Different thing." She looked down at the first floor. "They wouldn't have seen any of the rest of it."
"The training. The—"
"All of it." She said it simply.
Eren understood. He didn't say he understood, which he thought was probably the right choice.
They stood at the railing a while longer.
It was, Eren thought, the easiest conversation he'd had in two months. Which was strange, because it hadn't really been easy at all.
They went back down to the second floor eventually, where Raphael had secured a bench and was holding court to a small audience that included Brom, Rowan, and two Pumpkins students he'd apparently befriended in the last hour. Gus was there too, somehow, with a new batch of something from a table on the first floor. He'd carried it up three flights of stairs.
"Gus." Kayra looked at the tray.
"They were going cold," he said apologetically.
The evening moved forward. Conversations folded into other conversations. Mira appeared and disappeared with the regularity of someone who didn't consider social gatherings to have arrival or departure rituals. Orin sat in the same alcove for a long time, apparently content to simply be present. Lena at some point said something to Kayra, quiet and brief, and Kayra nodded, and neither of them felt the need to explain what it was.
Arlo had made it, somehow. He was in an armchair that Eren was fairly certain hadn't been in this room an hour ago, his robes appropriately elegant and completely unremarked upon. His eyes were half-closed. He had a drink.
"I didn't know you were here," Eren said.
"I'm everywhere," Arlo said. "I just choose which parts to make obvious."
Nicholas was near a window, looking out at the dark. The red scarf was around his neck even here, even now. The same as always. Eren didn't try to talk to him; he didn't think Nicholas wanted that, and he was probably right.
Cain was not visible at all, which might have meant he wasn't there or might have meant he was somewhere Eren hadn't looked. Eren didn't investigate further.
Shirou was there — he'd spotted him briefly on the first floor, near the edge of the room, watching people in the way that had nothing curious about it. Just watching.
It was getting late. The candles had burned to stubs in some of the chandeliers and been replaced; the second round were already a quarter gone. The noise had shifted in quality — a little looser, a little louder in some places and quieter in others.
Eren was mid-sentence — something to Raphael, something unimportant — when the sound came.
From above.
Not loud. Not a crash, not a crack, not any of the sounds that would have made it immediately alarming. It was more like a pressure — a sustained, low resonance, the kind that you felt in your sternum before you registered it as sound. As if the building had shifted its weight slightly, or as if something very large had settled against the exterior.
The room didn't quite go silent. But it changed.
Heads turned upward.
Raphael, mid-bite, looked at the ceiling.
Kayra was already still.
Orin had straightened in his seat, not visibly alarmed, but present in a way he hadn't been a moment before.
Mira, at the archway — of course she'd found an archway — had her hand near her side.
Eren looked up.
Stone ceiling. Plaster between the ribs. Candles in their brackets. Nothing.
"Did anyone else—" Rowan started.
"Yes." Eren said it without looking away from the ceiling.
The sound was gone. The room held its breath for a moment, listening for something it couldn't name, and then the sound of conversation gradually returned, quieter and more careful than before.
Raphael set his food down.
"What was that," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
Nobody answered.
Eren kept looking at the ceiling. The plaster. The stone. The dark space between one rib and the next, where the candlelight didn't reach.
Nothing.
But the weight of it was still there — not in the room, not in the air. In him, somewhere he couldn't locate exactly. The same sense he'd had on the island, the night the forest went too quiet.
Something knows we're here.
He didn't say it.
He looked at Kayra. She was already looking at him.
Neither of them said anything.
The candles burned. The party continued. Above them, the dome rose in its pale silence, holding whatever it was holding, saying nothing.