As the sun dipped below the horizon, painting the sky violet and gold, the heavy oak dormitory door swung open with a purposeful thud.
A gust of expensive perfume - jasmine, cold mountain air - preceded the newcomer. In walked a young woman. She seemed to command the room without trying. Striking: tall, with a lithe, athletic build and a mane of mahogany hair that fell in loose waves down her back. Her eyes were a vivid green. Sharp intelligence shone there, lit by a hint of mischief.
She carried a massive mahogany staff topped with a swirling emerald crystal. Yet she held it with the casual ease of a walking stick. Behind her, two floating trunks hovered through the doorway. They drifted after her like well-trained hounds.
She stopped in the centre of the room, her gaze sweeping over the spartan surroundings until it settled on the slight figure of Lily sitting on the edge of the bed.
"Well," The girl said, her voice a rich, melodic contralto, "I was told I'd be sharing with a mystery candidate. Then that mystery candidate nearly brought down part of the Grand Hall this morning."
She snapped her fingers. The trunks glided into the corner and settled with a synchronised click.
She turned fully to Lily and folded her arms, the gesture more curious than confrontational.
"I'm Samantha," she said, with a small smile. "Valois, if you care about surnames. I was told your name might be Lilith, and although it is written on the door's plaque, I thought I'd rather hear it from you than from a hallway full of dramatists."
Her eyes flicked over Lily's clothes, and her smile became more appreciative.
"And that weave is incredible," she added, stepping closer. Her fingers hovered near the silver embroidery. "Is it real lunar-silver? My family has old pieces locked away that don't look half so fine." She glanced up, smiling more lightly. "As for the rest, people downstairs were already telling stories about a girl from the North who cracked the Hall floor and terrified half the first-years."
Lily's eyes dropped, her shoulders folding inward as though bracing for impact.
"People call me Lily," she said. After a pause, she added, "And I think we all ought to work to become the best versions of ourselves."
Her words hovered in the air, her voice barely audible, as if confessing something deeply personal to the shadows more than to Samantha.
Even so, she could not help looking at Samantha properly, if only for a moment. She noticed the ease in her posture, the polished confidence, and the obvious strength beneath her grace. Perfect poise, powerful magic - a body that looked trained rather than merely gifted. Samantha must have worked very hard, prodigy or not.
Lily quickly looked away, heat prickling at the tips of her ears. She hated being caught staring.
Samantha hummed softly, pleased.
"Lily," she repeated, as though testing the sound of it. "And philosophical too. I like that."
She set her staff across her own bed and moved a little nearer, though without the earlier air of challenge.
"Most people here spent their first evening trying to decide who had the grandest family name or the most ridiculous luggage," she said. "A sentence like that was a marked improvement."
Lily said nothing.
Samantha's attention sharpened. She tilted her head slightly, studying Lily's face.
"You're very quiet," she said at last. Her tone was gentler than before, but still curious. "And very small, if I could say so. It's hard to reconcile that with the crack in the Hall floor. If I hadn't seen you do it myself, I might have thought the stories were about the wrong girl."
The bold assessment, especially Samantha's casual mention of her size, made Lily's stomach clench with sudden vulnerability.
For one disorienting instant, she was no longer in the North Spire with a new roommate standing over her, but somewhere else entirely, in another room and another century, listening to a softer voice teasing her in much the same way.
A fierce flush crept up Lily's neck, an uncontrollable reminder of something lost.
She angled her face away, fingers knotting the fabric of her sleeve with barely controlled tension.
"Excuse me," she said quietly. "I do not usually speak very much."
At once, Samantha's expression changed.
Not dramatically. The smile did not vanish. But something in it softened. She straightened and gave Lily a little more room.
"I have noticed," Samantha said. "Most people rush to fill silence. You look as though you weigh whether speaking is worth the trouble."
Lily kept her eyes down, voice trembling. "Silence is often safer," she whispered, the words laced with something old and aching.
Samantha's posture stiffened, her gaze sharpening with grave curiosity.
"Safer," she repeated. Her tone lost its playful edge. "That sounded less like shyness and more like experience."
Lily stayed silent.
The quiet that followed was not empty. It drew taut between them. Outside the balcony doors, the evening wind moved around the old stonework of the tower with a long, lonely sigh.
Samantha watched her for another moment, then exhaled softly.
"All right," she said. "We could do this at your pace."
She sat sideways on her bed, one leg folded up beneath her with careless grace, and rested her hands on the blanket.
"I'll ask one real question," she said. "You may answer it if you like. If not, I will be forced to invent something outrageous and believe it wholeheartedly."
That made Lily glance at her despite herself.
Samantha's grin returned, quick and bright.
"There," she said. "A reaction. I was beginning to think the Hall had admitted a very elegant ghost."
A trace of annoyance entered Lily's expression. She felt, quite clearly, that she was being tested.
"What is your question, then?" she asked.
Something in Samantha's face brightened at once, not mockingly this time, but with unmistakable satisfaction.
"There you are," she said softly. "A little steel. Good."
Lily's expression remained unchanged.
Samantha seemed to notice. The amusement in her eyes settled into something steadier, more respectful.
"A real question, then," she said. "When the Void-Stalker appeared this morning, why did you look at it like that?"
Lily blinked.
That had not been what she expected.
"Like what?" she asked.
"As if it had offended you," Samantha said. "Not like someone who was frightened. Not even like someone trying to be brave. You looked..." She searched for the word, then found it. "Personally, angry. And then you hit it hard enough to make the entire Hall forget how to breathe."
Lily did not answer at once.
She was looking at Samantha, but her eyes seemed very far away.
When she finally spoke, her voice was so quiet that Samantha had to lean forward slightly to hear her.
"Have you ever lost someone dear to you?" Lily asked. Then, after the briefest pause, with something sharper beneath it: "Someone whose death you believed you could have prevented?"
The room seemed to tighten around the words.
Lily's hand clenched against her sleeve. Her anger was old. Because it was old, it burned low and deep, entangled with grief, memory, and a helplessness that had never died.
"Have you seen what those things leave behind?" she asked, her breath catching unevenly in her chest. "What do they do to a body?"
Samantha's expression changed at once.
Not into pity. Not into discomfort. The brightness simply left her face, stripped away so quickly that what remained looked unexpectedly young.
"No," she said after a moment. "Not like that."
She did not try to dress the answer in borrowed understanding.
"I have lost people," she said quietly. "But not that way. And not with that kind of blame tied to it." One shoulder lifted in a small, humourless motion. "So I won't pretend I understand more than I do."
Lily drew in a ragged breath and tried to steady it.
"There are things that cannot be forgotten," she said. "Nor forgiven."
Her eyes lowered again, distant with some memory Samantha could not see.
"You think of one moment over and over. If only I had been there. If only I had arrived sooner. If only I had understood."
Silence followed.
Then Lily looked at Samantha properly.
The anger was still there, but it had thinned enough for something gentler to show through. Sadness softened the line of her mouth. In her eyes, beneath all that pain, there was a quiet warmth that almost hurt to see.
"She would have scolded me," Lily said, and the faintest, most fragile smile touched her lips. "And told me to stop looking backwards so much." Her fingers brushed the charcoal-grey fabric of her new academy uniform, as though testing the reality of it. "Perhaps it was time."
A tremor eased from her posture, shoulders sagging with the burden of spoken memory.
Samantha noticed immediately. This time, when she spoke, she did so with care.
"I was prying. And trying to be clever about it, which usually makes it worse."
Lily lowered her lashes.
"You were," she said quietly.
That might have stung from someone else. Samantha only inclined her head once, accepting it.
"Fair enough," she said. Her gaze flicked briefly to Lily's hand, where it rested against the new uniform. "Then let me ask something better. Does wearing this feel like moving on, or like surrendering?"
A soft smile appeared on Lily's mouth, far too delicate for the words that followed.
"I surrendered a long time ago," she said. "But this..." Her fingers smoothed over the dark cloth. "This is a new chapter. As a student."
She said the last words as though trying to persuade herself that speaking them aloud might make them more real.
She closed her eyes briefly.
"I think it is time," she said.
Then she rose before she could lose her nerve.
The old uniform lay folded at the foot of her bed, midnight-blue silk and silver embroidery catching the last of the evening light. For a moment, she only stood over it, very still, her hands hanging at her sides.
Then she bent and gathered it into her arms.
The fabric was cool, impossibly familiar. For an instant, memory folded inward around her: cedar chests, quiet corridors, careful hands smoothing silver thread flat, lamplight on dark silk, the warmth of a life long gone and yet still near enough to ache.
Her fingers tightened on the cloth.
Samantha did not speak.
After a few seconds, Lily drew a slow breath and folded the uniform even more carefully than before. She crossed to the small trunk beneath her bed, opened it, and laid the garment inside with great deliberation, as one might place away something precious rather than discard it.
She rested her hand on it for a moment longer, then closed the lid.
When she straightened, the room felt subtly different.
Samantha watched her in silence, all trace of easy wit absent now. There was only stillness in her face, and a kind of respect.
"That," Samantha said at last, her voice low, "did not look like surrender either."
Lily let out a breath that nearly became a laugh.
"No," she said. "Perhaps it did not."
Her eyes dropped to the academy uniform again. It was plain beside what she had just put away, sensible and modern and utterly lacking in history. It did not carry old ghosts in its hem. It belonged to no one but the girl she was trying, however uneasily, to become.
She reached for the fastening at her collar and fumbled it.
The movement was small, but Samantha was on her feet almost at once. She did not crowd Lily this time. She stopped at a distance close enough to help and far enough to leave the choice wholly Lily's.
"You're doing that wrong," she said, and in another moment the line might have sounded smug. Here, it only sounded practical. "The academy uniforms have an infuriating clasp. Whoever designed them clearly despised shoulders."
Lily blinked at her.
Samantha lifted one hand and waited.
"May I?" she asked.
After the smallest pause, Lily inclined her head.
Samantha stepped behind her. Her fingers were deft and unexpectedly gentle as they straightened the collar and guided the fastening neatly into place. There was no teasing brush of breath this time, no deliberate closeness for its own sake, only the warm efficiency of someone choosing, without performance, to be kind.
The gentleness of it almost made Lily lean into the touch.
Instead, she closed her eyes and held herself still, as though any movement might break whatever strange, quiet balance had settled over the room.
"Thank you," she said softly when Samantha withdrew.
The mirror fixed to the wardrobe door caught both of them for a moment: Samantha standing tall behind her, composed and intent, and Lily herself in charcoal-grey wool that sat a little awkwardly on her narrow frame.
When Samantha stepped back, Lily turned fully toward the mirror.
"I suppose it fits," she said after a moment. Her fingertips smoothed over the front of the tunic and down one sleeve. "More or less."
She tested the cut with the seriousness of someone evaluating light armour. She lifted her arms, rolled one shoulder, bent carefully, twisted from side to side, then took two small steps across the room before turning back again. The fabric pulled beneath one arm.
Lily frowned.
With the grave focus of a scholar correcting an annoying error in a manuscript, she pinched the seam between two fingers. A thread of silver-white magic slid through the cloth. The stitching loosened, shifted, and settled again. Unsatisfied, Lily gave the garment one practical tug with considerably more force than someone her size ought to have managed. The seam yielded with a quiet pop and fell into a better line.
Samantha, now leaning one shoulder against the bedpost, watched this in silence for perhaps three seconds.
"Did you just tailor a regulation uniform by assaulting it?" she asked.
Lily glanced at her reflection rather than at Samantha directly. "I adjusted it."
"With brute force and a complete disregard for academic standards."
"I adjusted it," Lily repeated.
Samantha laughed softly. "Fair enough."
Lily checked the fit again, lifting her arms a second time. Better. The collar no longer sat strangely, and the tunic hung more cleanly across her slight frame. It was still plain. Still modern. Still nothing like what she had worn before.
But it no longer felt borrowed.
She studied the girl in the mirror: pale, silver-haired, charcoal-clad, with an expression caught somewhere between uncertainty and resolve. A student. Or at least something close enough that, if she kept looking, she might eventually learn to believe it.
Very carefully, as though testing an unfamiliar spell, she let herself smile.
It was small. Tentative. Slightly awkward, as if the muscles had not been asked to remember that shape in a very long time.
She tried again, just a little more surely.
Behind her, Samantha paused.
Lily noticed at once in the mirror, and the smile faltered. "What?" she asked.
"Nothing," Samantha said too quickly.
Lily turned enough to give her a sceptical look.
Samantha exhaled through her nose and pushed herself away from the bedpost.
"Only that you ought to do that more often," she said. Her gaze flicked, almost despite herself, back to Lily's reflection. "It suited you. You looked cute."
The words hit Lily like a fireball to the chest.
Heat rushed up her throat and into her face so fast it left her nearly dizzy. She turned away on instinct, as though presenting Samantha with her back might somehow undo what had just been said, and lifted both hands to cover half her face.
It did nothing at all.
The mirror betrayed her completely. Even with her eyes half-hidden behind her fingers, the startled curve of her mouth remained painfully visible.
"I see," Lily said, which answered nothing.
For one heartbeat, Samantha only stared.
Then she laughed.
It was not sharp or cruel. It broke out of her all at once, low and warm and openly delighted, until she had to brace one hand against the bedpost. The sound filled the little room and, somehow, made the air feel lighter rather than harsher.
Lily's blush deepened at once.
"Do not laugh," she muttered.
"I am trying very hard," Samantha said, which was plainly untrue. She caught her breath and looked at Lily's reflection with bright amusement. "But from where I am standing, you have just turned scarlet because I called you cute, hid your face, and started smiling at the wardrobe. You must understand that this is difficult not to enjoy."
"I did not start smiling at the wardrobe," Lily muttered.
Samantha lifted a brow. "The mirror," she said, with no mercy whatsoever.
Lily made the mistake of looking up.
There she was indeed: red to the ears, lips traitorously curved, looking every bit like a girl caught in the act of being embarrassed.
She stared at her own reflection as if it had personally betrayed her.
"That," Samantha said mildly, "is one of the clearest expressions of fluster I have ever seen."
Lily lowered her hands just enough to glare over her shoulder. "I am not flustered."
"No?"
"No."
Samantha's smile widened. "And not cute either, I assume."
Lily straightened with as much dignity as a blushing girl could manage. "Certainly not."
That earned a softer laugh, and somehow it was worse for being gentler.
"You are impossible," Samantha said.
"So are you," Lily returned, almost before she had decided to speak.
Samantha blinked once, then smiled as if she had been handed a prize.
"Better," she said. "Much better."
She came a few steps closer, but stopped at Lily's shoulder rather than behind her.
"Very well," Samantha said. "Let us consider the evidence. You are blushing, smiling, refusing to turn around, and denying facts plainly visible in polished glass. It is not a strong case."
Lily folded her arms as though that might help. "I am not embarrassed."
"You said that very quickly."
"I am not cute either."
That made Samantha's eyes flash with amusement.
"There it is," she said.
"There, what is?"
"The offended correction." Samantha nodded as though confirming a theory. "I had wondered when it would arrive. Though now that it has, I am a little tempted to see how much redder you can get."
Lily's eyes narrowed at once.
"It was not a challenge," she said.
"No?" Samantha asked lightly.
"No."
Samantha regarded her for one long, openly amused moment. Then she moved.
There was nothing hurried about it. That was what made it so irritating.
She stepped in close behind Lily, close enough that retreat would have felt uncomfortably like retreat, and lifted a hand. Two fingers slid beneath Lily's chin before Lily had fully understood what she meant to do.
The touch was light.
The presumption of it was not.
Lily stiffened at once. Annoyance flashed through her, clean and immediate, stronger even than embarrassment.
Who did this woman think she was?
They had known each other scarcely an hour.
Samantha tilted Lily's face upward just enough to steal back her attention, guiding her gaze from the floor to the mirror and then to her directly.
"Then look at me," Samantha said, her voice low and maddeningly composed, amusement warm beneath it, "and say it properly."
For one sharp instant, Lily was simply offended.
The sheer familiarity of it. The confidence. The assumption that she would allow it.
"I beg your pardon?" she said, the quietness of her voice doing nothing at all to hide the edge beneath it.
Samantha's mouth curved. "You heard me."
Lily should have stepped away at once. She knew that.
Instead, the moment caught strangely on something old.
Not because Samantha was gentle in the same way. She was not. Ren's touch had never carried this sort of teasing command, this bright and deliberate provocation. And yet there was enough overlap in the shape of it - fingers beneath her chin, the quiet certainty of being made to look up, the sense of someone utterly untroubled by Lily's instinct to retreat - that memory rose before she could stop it.
A different room.
A softer laugh.
A hand no less certain for being kinder.
The old familiarity of being looked at as though silence were only a temporary inconvenience.
Heat struck Lily all over again, but now it tangled embarrassment with irritation so thoroughly that she could scarcely tell one from the other.
Her breath caught.
Samantha, who had likely meant only to tease, seemed to notice the sudden change in her expression. Her own amusement dimmed by a fraction, though her hand remained where it was.
"Lily?" she said, a little less lightly.
That only made the situation worse.
Lily drew herself up as much as she could with someone else's fingers under her chin and fixed Samantha with a narrow, offended stare.
"You are being very familiar," she said.
One of Samantha's brows rose. "Am I?"
"Yes."
"And yet," Samantha said, her tone infuriatingly calm, "you are answering me."
Lily would have liked to deny that. Unfortunately, it was true.
She tried to turn her face aside, meaning to free herself if nothing else, but Samantha's touch adjusted with her - not forceful, not trapping, only certain enough to make the attempt feel conspicuous.
That certainty irritated Lily almost as much as the contact itself.
"Let go," she said.
Samantha studied her for a beat, and Lily saw the exact moment she realised she had pushed too far.
To her credit, she did not laugh.
Instead, her expression shifted, amusement still there but tempered now by attention.
"I will," Samantha said. "In one moment."
Lily stared at her.
The nerve of that answer nearly undid her.
Samantha's mouth twitched. "But first," she said, "you are going to say it properly."
Lily ought to have refused on principle.
She knew that too.
Instead, she heard herself say, with all the dignity she could gather under the circumstances, "I am not embarrassed."
Samantha's smile deepened at once. "That sounds unconvinced."
"I am not."
"And not cute either?" Samantha asked.
Lily's face burned hotter. "Certainly not."
That was enough to break the fragile restraint in Samantha's expression. A soft laugh escaped her, rich and low.
"No," she said, in a tone that plainly meant the opposite. "Of course not. You are terrifying. A menace to flooring, tailoring, and apparently compliments."
Lily's glare sharpened. "You are making fun of me."
"A little," Samantha admitted.
Her thumb shifted very slightly near Lily's jaw, a tiny movement that should not have mattered and somehow did.
"Mostly," Samantha said, "I'm enjoying the fact that you finally look alive."
The words caught Lily off guard.
Before she could decide what to do with that, Samantha added, more teasing again, "Though I admit the expression itself is also very persuasive. You look deeply offended by the possibility of being adorable."
"I am deeply offended by you touching me like that," Lily said before she could stop herself.
Silence.
Not a long one. But enough.
Samantha's eyes sharpened with immediate understanding.
Then, at last, she let go.
The loss of contact was so prompt and unceremonious that Lily almost resented how much she noticed it.
"My mistake," Samantha said.
There was no mockery in her voice now. No defensive pride either. Just a straightforward acknowledgement, which somehow wrong-footed Lily more effectively than another joke would have.
Samantha stepped back half a pace, enough to return space to her without wholly retreating.
"I should have asked first," she said. Then one corner of her mouth lifted again, though much more faintly than before. "The temptation to be insufferable got the better of my judgment."
Lily rubbed lightly at the place beneath her chin, more from unsettled habit than necessity. The skin there still felt warm.
"That much is obvious."
To Lily's annoyance, Samantha looked pleased rather than chastened.
"There," she said softly. "That tone. I knew you had one."
Lily gave her a flat look. "Do not sound so triumphant."
"I am not triumphant."
"You are."
Samantha inclined her head in concession. "A little, perhaps."
That should have been the end of it.
Instead, Lily made the mistake of glancing at the mirror again.
There she was: cheeks still flushed, mouth set in a line too tight to be dignified, one hand lingering traitorously near her face. She looked less offended than flustered, and the realisation was intolerable.
Samantha followed her gaze to the reflection and had the decency to remain quiet for nearly two whole seconds.
Then: "To be fair," she said, "the evidence remains unhelpful to your case."
Lily closed her eyes briefly. "I did not ask for a case."
"No," Samantha said. "You merely presented one."
Lily opened her eyes and gave her a look sharp enough to cut cloth.
Samantha laughed again, but more softly this time.
"I am sorry," she said. "About the touching."
That disarmed Lily enough that she answered honestly.
"I know."
Samantha's expression gentled a little.
"But," Lily added, because she was not about to let her off too easily, "you are still insufferable."
"That," Samantha said, "is completely intentional."
Lily's mouth twitched despite herself.
Samantha saw it at once.
"There it is again," she said.
Lily turned away from the mirror before it could betray her further. "Do not start."
"I haven't said anything yet."
"You are about to."
"I am," Samantha admitted.
The warmth in her voice did something distinctly unhelpful to Lily's composure.
For a moment, the room fell quiet around them. The air no longer felt sharp, only charged in a way Lily did not trust in the least.
When Samantha spoke again, the teasing had thinned to something gentler.
"I mean what I said before," she said. "I would rather see you like this."
Lily looked back at her warily. "Annoyed?"
"Present," Samantha said. "Annoyed, embarrassed, glaring at me if necessary. That is still better than the way you looked when you were somewhere far away."
That landed more cleanly than the teasing had.
Lily lowered her eyes. She did not know how to defend herself against sincerity when it came wrapped in mischief.
"I am not angry with you," she said after a long moment.
The words slipped out too quietly and too honestly.
Samantha's face changed at once - not smug, exactly, but attentive in a way that made Lily wish she could take the sentence back.
So she corrected course immediately.
"But do not do that again," Lily said, and this time the irritation in her tone was real enough to hold.
Samantha's mouth curved, though more carefully now.
"The touching?" she asked.
"Yes."
"The teasing?"
Lily hesitated.
That was answer enough.
A spark of amusement returned to Samantha's eyes. "I see."
"You see nothing."
"I see a great deal, actually."
Lily exhaled through her nose and turned toward her bed before this could deteriorate any further.
This time, she was careful not to leave the mirror in a position to expose her too openly. She crossed to the bed, gathered her nightgown, and changed with brisk efficiency only slightly undermined by the warmth still lingering in her cheeks.
Behind her, Samantha had the wisdom not to comment.
When Lily slipped beneath the blankets and turned onto her side, presenting the room with nothing but a narrow shoulder and a spill of silver hair, she said, "Goodnight."
There was a pause.
Then Samantha answered, her voice lower than before, all the sharper edges smoothed away.
"Goodnight, Lily."
Another pause.
Then, with just enough mischief to prove she had learned restraint without abandoning it entirely:
"I would say sleep well, but I suspect you'd find a way to be offended by that too."
Lily made a quiet, displeased sound into her pillow.
Samantha laughed once, softly.
"Yes," she said. "Exactly like that."
"Go to sleep, Samantha."
"At once."
A moment later came the rustle of fabric, the creak of the other bed, and the small, dimming click of a charm-light being extinguished.
Darkness folded gently through the room.
Lily stared into it for a long while, her face cooling by degrees, though not entirely. The place beneath her chin still seemed absurdly warm. Worse, memory lingered there too - not Samantha's touch alone, but the faint old echo of another hand, another life, another voice she had never entirely learned to stop hearing.
Across the room, Samantha's breathing eventually evened, though Lily suspected she remained awake longer than she pretended.
Lily closed her eyes.
Neither of them spoke again.
ns216.73.217.115da2
and then Add to home screen.