ANNA
Islammed the book shut, my fingers black with ink.
I closed my eyes, the sting burning from sleep deprivation.
I’d looked everywhere, spent hours searching every possible book, scroll and archive I found for a hint of someone called Ryden.
There was nothing.
That’s how I found myself standing in the middle of my Celestial Observations professor’s office. Lady Cressida still hadn’t noticed me after a full minute and I was awkwardly standing there, waiting for her to look up. She was rarely around during our late-night classes in the observatory but when she was, she barely spoke to us, favoring adjusting our telescopes and correcting our diagrams on our star charts.
She could be quite aloof. Along with teaching the astronomy classes in the tower, she practically ran Nightfall. She was from one of the families descended from an original recruit trained at Nightfall many centuries ago.
The door clicked, and Adept Corinya popped her head in. “Finished, Lady Cressida.”
“Thank you, Corinya!” she called without looking up.
Corinya glanced at me with awhat the hell are you doingsort of look before she popped out and shut the door.
Adept Corinya was okay. She was something like a personal assistant to Lady Cressida.
Most of the time, I found her to be entertaining.
Except today.
I opened my mouth, closed it, inched forward, lifted my hand, then lowered it.
Should I interrupt her?
Did she really not have any idea I was there? And why couldn’t I find shit when I was looking for it? And why didn’t this place have a fucking computer?
Growling internally, I waited.
She was tall and willowy, with long pale blonde hair that fell in waves past her shoulders. She would often go on tangents that most of us couldn’t follow when we were stargazing and seemed oblivious to the rest of us. Still, I found her mesmerizing. The cadence of her voice soothed me.
Perhaps a part of why I felt comfortable speaking with her about the strange dream I’d had, which had felt like my mom’s life, was because I didn’t think she’d judge me too harshly but it was also because she seemed to have a connection that the rest of us didn’t understand.
I lingered by my desk waiting to see if she’d notice me. Then she spoke without warning.
“The flame you seek is not the flame of creation you desire,” she said, never looking at me.
“What?” I asked.
“The flame you seek is not the flame of creation you desire,” she repeated.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I wanted to ask if you’d ever heard of Adepts having visions. The kind you write about in your book.”
Her eyes never met mine.
“The flame you seek is not the flame of creation you desire,” she said.
I swallowed, nodded, and fled the room.
I didn’t knowwhat to make of Lady Cressida’s bizarre behavior. On one hand, she was always a little weird. But this was even weirder. None of it made sense and I didn’t want to talk to Roslyn or Isabella about it because I didn’t want to explain what I was doing there in the first place.
I flipped through an album of old student portraits when a loud noise startled me.
“How much longer can you have your face buried in some dusty old book in the library?” Isabella asked, her palms flat on her stack of texts she had smacked down on the table beside me.
