"It's an observation."
He shows me card tricks that can't possibly be just sleight of hand—a card I'm thinking of appears in my jacket pocket, another one changes suits three times while I'm holding it. He teaches me the names of the symbols on his deck, which are Tumult sigils for different kinds of probability. The Fracture. The Fork. The Spiral.
"What's that one?" I point to a card with a circle eating its own tail.
"The Ouroboros. It means an outcome that causes itself." He tucks it away before I can look closer. "Bad luck card. You don't want to pull that one."
I don't think much of it at the time.
He asks me questions, too. Not pointed ones—casual, friendly stuff. Where I grew up. What my family's like. How I ended up at Nyxhaven without knowing magic existed.
"My parents can't even hear the word," I tell him. "Their eyes just... glaze over. Like someone hit the skip button in their brains."
"Mundane block. It's a defense mechanism—non-magical people literally can't perceive magic. Their minds just edit it out."He shuffles the deck one-handed. "Must be lonely. Knowing something about yourself that the people closest to you can't understand."
"Yeah," I say. "It is."
And I mean it. And he looks at me like he means it too, and for a second I think maybe I've actually made a friend here. A real one.
My luck goes to shit.
Not in a dramatic, life-threatening way. Just—everything starts going wrong, all the time, in small stupid ways that pile up until I want to scream.
Coffee tips over on my notes. I trip on flat ground and skin my knees. My laptop freezes during a timed exam and I lose twenty minutes. The book I need is alwaysjust checked out, five minutes ago, so sorry. A bookshelf collapses on me in the campus store. The dining hall runs out of food the second I reach the front of the line—three days running.
"Wow," Felix says, watching me stare at the empty trays. "That's brutal."
"This place hates me."
"Nah. You've just got shit luck." He flips a card between his fingers. "Happens to everyone."
"Does it, though? Does everyone's coffee spontaneously launch itself at their homework?"
He laughs. "Fair point. Maybe you're cursed."
"That's not funny."
"Little bit funny."
And it is, the way he says it, all warmth and mischief, and I laugh despite myself. Which is what Felix does—makes terrible things feel survivable. I'm starting to rely on it, and that probably should have been my first warning.
I notice the cards.
Not all at once. It's more like a pattern that assembles itself in the back of my mind over the course of a week, until one afternoon it clicks into focus and I can't unsee it.
Felix fans the cards across the library table. Thirty seconds later, my coffee tips over.
Felix does the one-handed cut—the flashy one, the one he's proud of—and I trip on the stairs.
Felix pulls a card, glances at it, tucks it away. My laptop screen goes black.
Three more days of watching. I keep a mental tally because I'm paranoid now and I can't help it. Every time something goes wrong, I track two things: what happened, and where Felix's hands were right before.
The coffee. He was fanning the deck.
The tripped exam. He'd just done a bridge shuffle at the next table over.
The bookshelf. I didn't see him, but I heard it—that softthwick thwick thwickof cards being riffled, somewhere behind the stacks.
