Perhaps if I could at least talk to Alar, hear his voice, it would ease the pain, but even if I had access to a phone, which I didn't, I wouldn't know how to contact him.
He could call me, though.
It was an absurd thing to crave. We didn't have a phone in the apartment. Cadets weren't permitted them, and the few lines in the Citadel ran through the command floors and were monitored, but Alar was a prince. He could call from anywhere. From a station along the road, from an inn, or an outpost. He had the rank to demand a line, and for one wishful moment, I allowed myself to imagine the luxury of hearing his voice come down a wire from however many hundreds of kilometers now lay between us.
But perhaps it was a mercy that a phone call wasn't possible unless it was an emergency.
If I heard his voice, I would shatter. The numbness could hold against his empty chair, the half-empty wardrobe, and the stack of his portraits pinned to my wall, but it would not hold against the actual sound of his voice.
Letters I could survive because they were slow to arrive and didn't demand an immediate response. I could take my time andarmor up before reading them. An actual conversation would wreck me, breaking through every shield I'd managed to erect.
After breakfast, we headed out to our first class, which was history. Usually, I enjoyed analyzing old battles, but that was when I'd still found things like that fascinating. Now I just wanted to sit in my room and sketch because it was the only activity that brought me solace.
Regrettably, skipping classes was not an option, not even for the Hero of Elucia.
The instructor was a visiting officer from the infantry, a weathered man who'd been brought in to teach us how the war looked from the ground, where the people we were entrusted to protect fought. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his legs planted like fence posts, and he described massacres in the same flat tone he described armored transport vehicles.
He was walking us through another Shedun raid when the door opened.
A second-year cadet slipped in, and I recognized him. Desin, Saphir's aide. He crossed to the front, murmured something, and handed the major a folded note.
Reading it, the man's flat expression didn't change. Then he looked up and scanned the room until he found me.
"Cadet Strom. You're wanted in the shaman's office," the major said. "You should take your things. I doubt you'll be back before the class is over."
I gathered my notebook and my pencils, aware of the murmurs behind me. Everyone knew Alar was gone, but they didn't know why or how. I hadn't volunteered the information, and neither had my friends, and the rumor mill was working overtime, with everyone floating theories about why Alar had been expelled and whether it was my fault because I no longer wanted him.
I kept my chin up and walked out.
I'd thought Saphir had forgotten about me.
A week had passed since Alar left, and in all that time the shaman hadn't come to comfort me or offer some words of wisdom as I'd foolishly expected. I'd thought he cared about me, the one who was supposed to become his apprentice, the future shaman of Elucia. I'd listened for the knock that first awful day, certain he would appear in the doorway with Moki on his shoulder, that twinkle in his eye that made him look perpetually amused, and some platitude meant to comfort me.
He hadn't come, and it stung, one more small thing on top of the much larger thing.
The others had done what they could. Shovia had been a lifesaver. She'd come to my room to talk about Zarathen, about Codric, about some idiotic thing a cadet had said at dinner, anything to give my mind a different track to run on. She wasn't gentle about it because she didn't do gentle. But she'd shown up, she'd been there for me, and that was what mattered.
Ravel wasn't much help either, but not for lack of empathy. We just didn't have any opportunities to talk privately because I no longer sat behind him or in front of him on Onyx's back. Nowadays we practiced flying in formation on the backs of our own dragons, and Ravel just supervised.
He'd asked how I was doing, and I'd said fine, and that had been all.
The biggest help was Morgateth, not because he offered any words of comfort or pushed warmth at me the way Onyx used to do, but because he was there, vast and full of power that I could siphon whenever I needed it. So far, though, I had not drawn on it for anything other than regular maintenance.
Thankfully, I hadn't had any prophetic dreams, not about Alar and not about anyone or anything else, not even after resuming the tea.
Perhaps my grief, and later my numbness, had been in the way. Perhaps the universe didn't speak to people whose minds were full of dark clouds.
I had been pouring my desolation into my sketchbook, filling page after page with depictions of Alar in different poses and situations, but that had been its own kind of torture. I'd sketched and cried, my tears smudging the lines.
What I hated most were the empty moments when my mind was not engaged, my hands were idle, and my thoughts could run in circles. Climbing eleven flights of stairs to the command level left plenty of time for that.
Morgateth stirred at the edge of my mind as I went, a vast banked warmth, not intruding, just there. He must have felt my hollowness and pressed a little strength into me.
As Desin showed me in and shut the door behind me, I took a moment to take in the shaman's large office with its huge windows and the view of Elucia's rugged beauty beyond them.
I hadn't been there in a while, but everything was the same as the last time I had been summoned. I don't know why I kept being surprised by things staying the same while my world had been so irrevocably altered.
The bookcases were still sagging under books and scrolls that were stacked with no regard for any particular order, and Moki was lounging on the desk in a patch of sunlight, his silver-white fur turned gold at the tips.
