“Thank you for saving me,” Elara said, bracing her hand against the wall and carefully pushing herself up from the floor.
Her legs were still shaky, but she forced them to hold her weight. She refused to stay cowering by the door while the bandaged woman watched her with such total calm. She no longer heard the whispers or the wet, dragging sounds coming from the laboratory, but she didn't dare look back to see what had happened to the dolls or the hand protruding from the red bin.
“Do not stay alone in the Ash Wing until you acquire the necessary knowledge and strength,” the stranger said in a low voice. Elara heard every word with unnatural clarity. “At night, you are only safe in your own room.”
“I’m sorry, I didn't know that…”
“Do not tell anyone you saw me.”
Elara snapped her mouth shut and nodded before she could even wonder about the reason behind the instruction. The woman raised her hand and made a small gesture. A gentle breeze brushed across the girl's face, forcing her to blink reflexively.
When she opened her eyes again, she was standing outside the door to room 604.
She stared at the familiar numbers for a moment, then jerked her head in both directions, seeing nothing but the dimmed lights and the empty corridor of her dorm level. There was no sign of the bandaged figure, the laboratory doors, or the path she would have had to take to get back to the sixth floor.
She had no intention of standing out in the hallway to ponder a miracle. She opened the door, stepped inside, and shut it immediately, keeping her hand pressed flat against the wood for several breaths, until she finally started to believe that this time, she really had managed to escape.
***
Just past midnight, the blue hourglasses flipped. The sand that had filled the lower chambers began to trickle down all over again.
On the eleventh floor of the Glass Wing, the doors to two rooms opened almost simultaneously, spilling narrow strips of pale light into the corridor.
Mara stepped out first. She looked diagonally across the hall toward the doorway where Sylvara had just appeared.
“It’s past midnight, which means our arrangement is over,” she said, showing not a trace of her earlier polite smile. “I agreed to do this once. Regardless of whether she survived or not, from this moment on, she is simply my mentor's junior apprentice.”
Sylvara leaned her shoulder against the doorframe, studying the other woman with mild amusement.
“Of course, that was the deal. Are you absolutely certain you don't want to know why I’m so eager to see the girl dead, though?”
“No,” Mara replied. She turned around and shut her door, leaving no room for further conversation.
Sylvara stared at the spot where she had vanished for a moment, then scoffed, running a hand through her dark cherry hair.
“Boring. Spend all day around corpses, and eventually you start acting like one.”
She lowered her head, letting a shadow fall across her face. The amusement gradually gave way to a tension she hadn't shown Mara. She clenched her right hand into a fist and unfurled her fingers several times, trying to recall the exact weight of the small book and the coarse texture of its cover.
I had it right in my hand.
She had only realized what the object was after she hurled it at the maid's head. By the time she rolled the body over and started searching the uniform, the book was already gone. A moment later, the girl drew another breath, even though Sylvara had been absolutely certain the blow had killed her.
Ever since then, her mind kept circling back to a single explanation: the Epitaph must have saved her.
All those years of searching, and you just got it handed to you along with your next breath…You cursed child, you don't even understand what fell into your lap.
According to her grandmother's journals, the book reappeared upon the death of its current owner, but it could not be claimed by the person who dealt the killing blow with their own hands. Sylvara didn't know how much truth those notes held, but she had spent far too long hunting the artifact to risk losing her chance over one impatient move.
That was exactly why she needed someone else’s hands, dangerous chores, and situations a weak little girl couldn't possibly survive.
She stepped back into her room and closed her eyes, recalling page after page of notes, and the names of all the people who had died long before the search for the book became her own personal obsession.
The Epitaph Codex… What on earth can you do, to make killing friends and family worth it?
She didn't know the answer, but the sheer ignorance only fueled her desire to possess the artifact even more. If it was worth driving such a talented person to the brink of madness, she was going to uncover its secret - even if she had to get rid of a maid who had accidentally stumbled into her path first.
***
Elara finally lay down past midnight, fully aware she would have to be up for classes again in a few hours.
For a moment, she tried to focus on the softness of the mattress and the familiar light on the wall, but the moment she closed her eyes, the image of the opening cabinet doors rushed back in.
She wondered if Mara had known what would happen after she left, and if the order to put things away was just a routine instruction, or a deliberate setup to lead her exactly to where the doll was hidden.
The face in the doorway hadn't belonged to the real older apprentice, but that didn't explain why it had used her voice and repeated her familiar threats.
She also had no idea who the bandaged woman was.
The stranger had walked into a room where Elara couldn't even move her legs, and with just a few calm words, put an end to an entire nightmare that had been promising inevitable death just seconds before.
Then, she had transported her right back to her own door with an ease the girl couldn't connect to any piece of information she had read so far.
I should probably come up with a name for her so I don't have to keep calling her the woman in pink bandages…
The Pink Savior?
Sounds like I’m making up a character for a children's story.
She pulled the blanket closer to her chin, allowing her mind to drift to such trivial details for a moment, simply because they were far less unpleasant than wondering what had been inside the red bin. Her thoughts began to blur. The sound of the falling sand faded into the background, and the tension in her shoulders slowly yielded to drowsiness.
A knock at the door made her snap her head up.
Her first thought was Kelira and the morning classes. But when she sat up, brightened the light, and checked the hourglass, she saw it was only one in the morning. The sound repeated - patient and not overly loud - and Elara felt an immediate, intense reluctance to leave her bed.
“Lady Elara?” a voice called from the hallway.
She recognized the maid who had delivered her supplies, though she couldn't guess why she would be back at this hour.
She approached cautiously, cracked the door open, and saw the girl wearing a pink cloak thrown over her uniform, sporting the exact same carefully practiced smile.
“What do you need?” Elara asked, keeping her body shielded by the door.
“I came to help.”
The maid raised her arm. The sleeve slipped down, revealing pale wood instead of skin.
Elara jerked back instantly and shoved the door shut, but the girl jammed her head into the gap, stopping the wood so that only her lips were visible from the inside.
Her smile stretched unnaturally wide. A familiar, escalating scream tore from her throat.
“Help me… kill me! Kill me!”
Elara threw her weight against the door, but the wood beneath her hands began to vibrate in time with rhythmic thudding, until she finally realized she was hearing knocking from an entirely different direction.
She snapped her eyes open with a sharp gasp. For a moment, she just stared at the ceiling, unable to immediately separate the reality of her room from the nightmare she had just been looking at.
Only the feel of the blanket under her right hand and the sight of the dimmed flame on the wall convinced her she was still lying in bed.
However, the knocking hadn't stopped.
Elara got up, brightened the room, and looked at the hourglass. This time, it indicated half past midnight. She wiped a hand over her face, feeling a cold sweat at her temples.
Then she reached for the crystal ball, though she had no idea if it could help her with anything outside of meditation.
It was just a dream… She stopped by the entrance without touching the handle.
“Who is it?”
When no answer came, she clutched the crystal tighter against her stomach and spoke again.
“If this is about the supplies, I already received everything. I don't need any help.”
“It’s me. Vespara.”
Elara closed her eyes for a single breath, wondering how exactly she was supposed to verify if the voice belonged to the person who owned it this time. Still, she couldn't pretend she hadn't heard, especially if the older apprentice really had come to talk.
Finally, she stepped aside and carefully pulled the door open.
Standing in the corridor was a woman in a robe with a deep hood pulled low, revealing only a delicately defined chin and displeased lips.
“Lady Vespara,” Elara said, opening the door wider.
The futa walked in without waiting for an invitation, sat at the desk, and pulled her hood back, exposing the glass dome filled with murky fluid. Elara still couldn't look at it and call it normal. But after the sheet of skin in the laboratory doorway, just the presence of a face actually attached to a body felt almost comforting.
“For a new apprentice, you have remarkably restless nights,” Vespara noted, crossing her legs and resting her elbow on her knee. “Do you send everyone away like that when they knock?”
Elara set the crystal down, shut the door, and turned to face her.
“You finally came.”
“Are you starting to understand your position?”
The girl looked down at her left hand, then back up at the futa sitting at the desk.
“If you mean the fact that the test result pointed to Darkness, even though I don't perceive it particularly clearly during meditation… yes, I noticed the discrepancy.”
Vespara gave a soft snort.
“Did you honestly think your elemental perception was that sharp? Without my intervention, you might not have even picked a viable primary path.”
Elara didn't answer immediately. She thought back to the lights she had observed after returning from class. She had seen various colors, but none had stood out sharply enough for her to confidently name a dominant one.
Vespara's words might very well hold some truth, even if they still left far more questions than answers.
She stepped closer to the desk, making sure her voice sounded much calmer than her thoughts.
“Did you come to help me?”
“Of course. I don't visit you in the middle of the night just for the company.”
Vespara produced a small vial and held it up between her fingers. The container looked exactly like the one she had used to administer the medicine earlier. Elara reflexively glanced at the smooth skin of her right hand before focusing back on the vial's contents.
“What is that?”
“A potion that temporarily heightens your sensitivity to Darkness motes.”
“Is it the same as the last one?”
“Not exactly,” Vespara replied. “You will take one drop of this before your daily meditation. The effect will last for a few hours. Once your body acclimates to it over the course of a month, I will give you the next one. It should help you reach ten AU before your first evaluation.”
Elara felt a sudden, powerful urge to snatch the vial right then and there, but she caught herself before her hand even moved.
She hadn't told Vespara about Caldra’s condition.
Yet the older apprentice knew both the required score and the exact deadline Elara had been given to achieve it. The way she mentioned 'the next month' strongly implied a plan that had been prepared long before this late-night visit.
She knew which mentor I should pick, she knows what was demanded of me, and she already has a potion ready…
How much of this happened without her involvement?
She studied the small flask, thinking of her exposed bones, the freezing chill of the cauldron, and the fine line between offering help and making someone completely dependent on their next dose.
She needed a path to ten AU, but that was exactly why she couldn't let the sheer promise of passing the evaluation overwrite all of her questions.
“Lady Vespara,” she finally spoke, keeping her hands firmly at her sides.
“What are the side effects of this potion?”