The uniform came off with the relief of something worn long enough to become uncomfortable without the wearer noticing when the discomfort had started.
Solandre folded it over the back of his chair and opened the wardrobe. Black trousers, straight cut, a leather belt. A white shirt, plain, no pattern, no detail worth remarking on. He tucked it in and checked the result in the mirror for two seconds.
It would do.
He picked up his key and left.
The path between the dormitory building and the rest of the academy at night had a different quality than it did during the day. The barrier above caught the city lights and returned them in a diffuse glow that made the dark not quite dark, the grey of an enclosed sky that had forgotten how to be black. The air was cold, carrying the faint chemical undertone of the barrier's maintenance systems that Solandre had stopped noticing sometime in the first week.
He walked without hurrying.
He would not have gone at all under normal circumstances. Social obligations of this kind had never appealed to him. They were theaters. Everyone performing a version of themselves slightly adjusted for the audience, the adjustments invisible to everyone except the people making them.
But he was the last of the Sanislas.
The title was technically accurate and practically meaningless. A baron's name attached to no land, no staff, no assets, no living members. The family crest existed on paper somewhere in the Central Kingdom's registry and nowhere else. Just a name that had once meant something in rooms he would never enter and to people who no longer existed.
Still. Names carried obligations even when they carried nothing else. Showing up was the minimum.
The building came into view as he rounded the eastern path and he stopped without intending to.
It was enormous. Not in the way the main hall was enormous, built to impress through scale alone. This was different. The building rose against the sky with the confidence of something designed to be looked at, its facade carved from dark stone chosen specifically for its darkness. Four stories at minimum, wide enough that the edges disappeared into shadow on both sides.
But it was the decorations that stopped him.
Every surface that could hold a carving held one. Every alcove that could hold a figure held one. And every single one of them was wrong in the same way, wrong the way a familiar thing became wrong when one detail had been changed and the mind took a moment to identify which. Halos. Wings. The iconography of the divine rendered in precise stonework across the entire facade.
Except the wings were not spread.
They hung. Every pair of wings on every figure pointed downward, the feathers trailing toward the ground as though the weight of them had finally become too much. The halos were intact. The faces were serene. But the wings fell.
Solandre looked at it for a moment longer than he had planned to. Then he walked toward the entrance.
A group had gathered near the doors. Six or seven students, standing in the way people stood when they were trying to appear casual about doing nothing.
He was almost past them when one spoke.
Student : "You're late. She's been waiting."
Solandre stopped.
Solandre : "I don't have a partner."
Student 2 : "The girl with the dark red hair. She told us to let her know if we saw someone with white hair."
A girl stepped slightly forward, her eyes moving to his hair.
Girl : "Is that a dye? Or natural?"
Solandre : "Natural. It runs in my family."
Student : "Which family?"
He considered not answering. Then decided against the calculation.
Solandre : "Sanislas."
The group went quiet in the way of people who had just received information they did not know how to place. Not recognition exactly. More the silence of a name that carried weight without context, the kind that arrived in history lessons or in the margins of military records and produced a reaction before the person reacting could explain why.
Solandre nodded once and pushed through the doors.
The noise hit first. The hall was full in the way enclosed spaces became full when too many people had been in them for too long, the air thick with body heat and alcohol and perfume. Voices layered over voices. Music from somewhere he could not identify. A hundred people deciding simultaneously that tonight was the night to be someone slightly more than they usually were.
He stood near the entrance and surveyed it. No familiar face. No recognizable corner. He moved into the crowd and let it absorb him, drifting through groups in mid-conversation and tables occupied by people deep in the intensity of early-night socializing. He was not looking for connection. He was looking for the appearance of not needing it.
Ten minutes passed. The crowd did not thin.
He found the corner near the emergency exit at the far end of the hall by following the logic of it. Away from the music. Away from the main tables. Close enough to a door that the air was slightly fresher. The kind of corner a person found only if they were specifically looking for it.
Someone had found it before him.
He stood against the wall opposite, his long black hair braided back tonight, a few strands loose at the temples. The braid changed the face entirely. Without the curtain of hair the features were clear and sharp, the kind of face that was difficult to look at for long not because it was unpleasant but because it had a quality of attention to it, as though it was always processing something just below the surface. His eyes, visible now for the first time, were red.
Not the red of irritation or a particular light catching an iris at the wrong angle. A clear, settled red, the colour of something that had decided what it was and had no further questions about the matter.
Solandre leaned against the wall beside the door. Then, because the silence between them had a shape that required addressing, he spoke.
Solandre : "You hate these events too?"
The other man said nothing immediately. The noise of the hall continued around them. Someone near the center laughed at something loud enough to carry. A glass clinked somewhere to the left.
Then he answered.
??? : "No. I just hate people."
Solandre looked at the floor.
The particular cruelty of a world that distributed happiness unevenly along the lines of how much a person was willing not to see. The ones who moved through the hall with ease, who collected names and exchanged them like currency, who built their lists of connections without stopping to calculate what each name would eventually cost them. They did it easily because they did not do the calculation. Most people chose not to run it.
The ones who ran it ended up in corners near emergency exits.
Solandre : "I don't understand how they do it. Add names to a list of people they know, in a world where a name on a list of losses can destroy a person."
The man with red eyes looked at him. His expression did not change but something in it shifted, the adjustment of someone who had heard something unexpected and was deciding what to do with it.
??? : "Then why are you talking to me?"
Solandre : "I'm still human. I need to feel understood."
A pause.
??? : "Who said I understand you?"
Solandre looked at him directly for the first time.
Solandre : "You wouldn't be in this corner if you didn't."
The man held his gaze for a moment. Then he exhaled once, quietly, barely audible beneath the noise of the hall. He pushed himself off the wall and extended his hand.
Solandre took it.
Silvestre : "Silvestre. Silvestre Chamberland."
Solandre : "Solandre Sanislas."
Silvestre did not react to the name. Not the silence of the group outside, not the shift in tone, not the recalibration of someone who had just received information and was deciding what to do with it.
Nothing.
He simply nodded, let his hand fall, and turned back toward the hall.
It was enough.