Amber City was deep in its morning rhythm by the time Zayden reached its wider streets.
Vendors lifted shutters.
Cart wheels ground against old cobblestone.
The air still carried a faint sweetness from the festival lamps of the previous night — clinging to the stones like a half-remembered dream, not yet burned away by the daylight pressing down from above.
He moved quickly, the new coat settling across his shoulders with each long stride.
Hash would find it amusing, he thought — all that careful choice of colour, and here I am sweating through it before I’ve even reached the Academy gate.
He was late.
Not catastrophically, but enough.
Move.
The pale spire of Sunlight Academy caught the morning light between the rooftops ahead — ivory stone crowned with gold-veined crystal, unmistakable from half the city away.
The Academy’s crescent-shaped body curved around its base, white walls worn smooth by decades of mountain weather.
Old enough to carry history in its stones.
Maintained with the obsessive precision of an institution that understood its own significance and had no intention of letting the world forget it.
Zayden slipped through the gates into a corridor of complete silence.
Classes were already underway.
His footsteps echoed too loudly against the flagstone — each one an announcement of precisely how late he was.
First class: the botanical garden.
He took the fast route.
The garden occupied the terraced ground behind the main building — two levels, the lower planted with orderly rows of common medicinal herbs, the upper wilder, stranger, rare specimens from across the continent growing behind careful barriers.
The smell was layered and impossible to separate: green and earthen and medicinal all at once, with something sweeter threading through from flowering plants whose names Zayden was still learning.
Professor Richard stood at the centre of a gathered cluster of students, holding a pale delicate stem between two fingers and explaining its root structure with the measured patience of a man who had given this lecture many times and still found it worth giving.
Every head turned when Zayden arrived, breathing audibly from the run.
“My apologies, Professor. I was delayed.”
Professor Richard regarded him without hurry.
White-haired, spectacled, wearing his customary thick sweater despite the morning warmth — he had the look of someone who had spent most of his life among books and grown entirely comfortable there.
His brown eyes moved briefly to the coat.
“Late,” he confirmed mildly.
“And considerably better dressed than usual for it.” A short pause.
“It appears to be your birthday, Zayden.”
“It is, sir.”
“Then everyone will kindly acknowledge that.”
A round of murmured acknowledgments moved through the group.
Most were perfunctory — the sound of polite obligation, exchanged with a classmate you recognised but had never truly thought about.
A few faces produced genuine smiles.
Most looked, assessed, and looked away again.
Zayden absorbed this without expression.
The social landscape of the Academy was not warm toward him.
Whether it was the previous Zayden’s reputation, the long withdrawal after Mark’s death, or simply the invisible currents that decided who belonged and who merely occupied space on the margins — he couldn’t be certain.
It didn’t matter urgently.
“Join us, then,” Professor Richard said, already turning back to his subject.
The lesson moved carefully through root structures, harvesting cycles, preparation methods that preserved active properties through processing.
Zayden listened with the part of his mind that never fully rested, pressing each detail against everything he had already absorbed.
Knowledge connected sideways when you paid real attention.
A plant’s response to temperature sometimes said something about the soil.
The soil sometimes said something about the region’s geological memory.
Mark would have enjoyed this class.
The thought arrived without warning, carrying more weight than he expected.
He would have asked three unnecessary questions just to watch the professor’s expression.
He let it pass.
Steadied himself. This story is hosted at g.com.
When Professor Richard posed a question about cellular response in trauma-affected root tissue, three students attempted partial answers and trailed off into uncertainty.
Zayden answered precisely and completely.
A brief silence.
“Correct,” Professor Richard said — without surprise, as though he had expected nothing less.
When the class ended and the group broke apart toward the main building, two figures fell into step beside Zayden before he had gone twenty paces.
Antonio Cyrus — blonde hair slightly dishevelled, spectacles tilted, dark green eyes warm with feeling that was entirely genuine — reached into his satchel and produced a small cloth-wrapped package tied with plain string.
He held it out with the careful awkwardness of someone who had rehearsed this moment and found the real version slightly harder than imagined.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
Low.
Sincere.
“It isn’t much.
Just something I thought you might find useful.” A pause, then more quietly: “Mark always remembered your birthday.
He told me last year, to make sure I didn’t forget this one.”
The simplicity of it hit harder than any formal gesture could have.
Zayden accepted it with both hands.
“Thank you, Antonio.” He meant it, and let it show.
Natasha Carl shook his hand with brisk warmth — black hair, sharp features, composed in the way that filled space without needing to announce itself.
She shared Officer Harry Carl’s bone structure but none of his cold authority.
Where her brother was winter, she was something harder to categorize.
“You look better than you have in weeks,” she said, her dark eyes direct.
“After Mark died, you stopped talking to us. We were his friends too — which means we’re yours, whether you’ve decided to accept that yet or not.”
“I know,” Zayden said.
“I’ve been too far inside my own head. I’m sorry.”
Her expression shifted — not quite satisfaction, but the look of someone who had waited a long time for a simple acknowledgment.
“That’s fine. Just don’t make it a habit.”
They walked together.
The conversation drifted to examinations, to Professor Richard’s notoriously punishing written assessments, to the grinding pressure of the upcoming term.
Antonio contributed carefully chosen words in his calm, understated way.
Natasha had a dry wit that surfaced in short bursts and retreated just as quickly.
For several minutes it was almost ordinary.
Then Natasha’s tone shifted — barely perceptible, but there for anyone paying attention.
“Actually,” she said, keeping her voice light.
“Before Mark died — you two were out near the mountains together. Did he tell you what you were looking for? Did you find anything?”
Officer Harry Carl’s sister.*The thought filed itself away cleanly.
Coincidence, or an extension of his investigation?
Either way — careful.
“I don’t remember,” Zayden replied.
He touched his temple briefly — the gesture of someone genuinely troubled by a gap that wouldn’t close.
“Those weeks are just gone. Like something cut them away cleanly. I’ve tried to reach back. There’s nothing there.”
Natasha watched him for a moment.
“You should see a physician about that. Memory loss that precise isn’t natural.”
“You’re right,” Zayden agreed.
“I’ve been thinking the same.”
She nodded — apparently satisfied — and the conversation moved on as though the question had never carried any particular weight at all.
The afternoon passed without incident.
Zayden sat through lectures, absorbed what needed absorbing, and let the hours move.
He didn’t let his mind run through everything at once the way it sometimes did — sorting and cross-referencing and building theories until the world became nothing but variables. You are reading on NovelPing, the official source.
He was tired of feeling like a machine processing inputs.
He held Antonio’s small wrapped package in his bag and thought about the fact that Mark had remembered his birthday last year and told someone else to remember it too, and found that thought both painful and quietly steadying.
He was a good person, Zayden thought simply.
Whatever happened to him, he did not deserve it.
As the final class drew toward its close, Professor Richard cleared his throat with the air of someone who had saved an announcement for the last possible moment.
“Before you leave for the day — we have a new student joining us. Transferred from the Lumio City branch. I expect everyone to extend appropriate welcome.” A brief, professional pause.
“Aluras Wikcus.”
The door opened.
The young man who entered carried silence in with him like a second skin.
He was pale in the way of someone who rarely sought sunlight — dark hair, darker eyes, a face unmarked by the small softnesses that most people accumulated through ordinary living.
His expression held the room not with hostility but with a complete and settled indifference, as though every person present was furniture he had not yet decided whether to acknowledge.
His clothes were dark and precise, entirely wrong for a student setting — as though he had dressed for somewhere considerably more serious and arrived here only as a detour from wherever he was actually supposed to be.
He stopped at the front of the room.
“Aluras Wikcus.” His voice was unhurried, low, carrying a weight that had nothing to do with volume.
“Transferred from Lumio City.”
He said nothing else.
Not a word of introduction.
Not the faint awkwardness of someone new in an unfamiliar place.
Just his name, delivered like a door closing — final, deliberate, inviting nothing further.
The silence that followed stretched exactly one beat too long.
Professor Richard filled it smoothly.
“From tomorrow’s noon session, I’d ask everyone to include Aluras appropriately in group work and study. That will be all for today.”
Students filed out.
Zayden exchanged brief farewells with Antonio and Natasha at the corridor exit, then turned toward the Academy gate — calculating how long to the house, whether Hash had settled on a restaurant, whether Zyla had finished her studies yet.
He stepped through the gate into the cooling evening air.
Something made him stop.
He looked back without fully understanding why.
Aluras stood alone in the emptying courtyard, not moving toward the dormitories, not moving toward the gate.
Simply standing with his hands at his sides, eyes fixed somewhere above the middle distance — like a man who had paused mid-thought and not yet decided whether to continue it.
He was not looking at Zayden.
But the Ligtirs badge inside Zayden’s coat pocket pulsed once.
Slow.
Low.
Uneasy.
Not the warmth it had given during the morning prayer — that gentle ember-glow of something recognising its own name.
This was different.
This was the pulse of something awake and wary, the way an animal went still when it caught a scent it couldn’t identify but already knew it didn’t like.
Zayden held it for exactly three seconds.
Noted it.
Stored it away behind everything else that still had no explanation.
Then he turned and walked into the evening crowds of Amber City, and the warm light of dusk swallowed him whole.
Behind him, in the emptying courtyard, Aluras Wikcus finally moved.
He turned his head.
He looked at the gate through which Zayden had just disappeared.
And his dark eyes held something that was not curiosity, and was not coincidence, and was not the expression of a student who had simply transferred from another city.
He looked.
And said nothing at all.
Some truths sleep beneath the surface for a reason.
Disturbing them always comes with a price.