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Always that damn heart.

Reaching for the door, I jump when my multi-slate dings.

Are you home safe? I'm leaving the bar soon

Relief washes through me. He's all right. He always is. I should head back to bed and sleep. Tomorrow's a big night with the Legacy Gala and all that.

But I don't dare get back under the sheets, afraid of my own thoughts. Always afraid of my own thoughts.

Sometimes it feels like my whole life has been built from wrong turns and bad timing.

Not even burning the music erased the certainty that something had followed me here. Lately, I started noticing patterns where I used to dismiss things as coincidence.

Caervast was supposed to make me feel safe. Instead, every strange encounter, every impossible appearance, seems to reinforce the same unsettling truth: whatever was watching me back home didn't stay there.

The Black Chapel. The party from my first week at Caervast. The same names appearing whenever I search afterward—old families, private donor circles, academy patrons whose influence seems to reach into everything on Sero if you dig deep enough. And now Halvern wants me performing at another one tomorrow night, another polished gathering filled with the exact same kind of people.

My stomach twists as I cross the hall.

Because the more research I've done on Sero, the harder it becomes to ignore the possibility that Sola didn't simply pass through these places by accident. The photo from the Black Chapel keeps circling back in my head, the glimpse of her pendant beneath those gold lights, and every new connection I uncover only makes the question worse.

What the hell does that say about Ciaran Virel constantly pulling me closer to him?

And…here we go again.

Annoyed with myself, I head out of our dorm and into the sleeping halls of Caervast, where the vaulted stone ceilings and narrow stained-glass windows turn the passage into something ancient and watchful at night.

The practice room is dark except for the low amber wall lamps burning along the stone arches, their light catching against the black lacquered body of the Noctis waiting in the center of the floor like it already knew I was coming.

After everything I've been thinking about, my body is already wound too tight.

My vision fractures at the edges, my heartbeat stuttering hard enough to make my chest tighten, that old instinctive feeling creeping up my spine again like it did when I was young, when every shadow outside our apartment felt like something waiting for me.

But the moment I see the Noctis, something inside me loosens.

The polished frame presses against my chest, solid and familiar and real beneath my hands, and for the first time tonight, my thoughts stop clawing at each other long enough for me to breathe properly.

I draw the bow slowly across the strings, the first note unfolding low and deep through the empty room until the sound climbs the vaulted ceiling and comes back changed, softer now, almost human in the way it lingers around me.

This is the only place where my mind ever truly goes quiet. And like always, my hands find the same opening sequence first.

The notes rise familiar beneath my hands, the same melody I always come back to.

I draw the bow slower across the final held note and let the sound stretch through the practice room until the resonance shivers softly against the stone walls and settles deep in my chest like something alive trying to answer back.

I close my eyes as the last note lingers through the dark and think of Sola. Of her hands adjusting mine over a battered cello when we were younger, of the way she used to laugh whenever I got frustrated and tried to rush through the difficult parts instead of listening properly.

The grief hits. Not just because she's gone, but because I still don't understand any of it. I still remember standing beside her at the market all those years ago, the strange merchant woman pressing the music into my hands while the horns began to blare. And I remember Sola afterward, making me promise to keep it safe, like she understood something about that day I still don't.

Could she really be on Sero? Does she know I'm here? And if she does, why hasn't she come for me?

I play. I play badly, distracted too often by thoughts that have nothing to do with the music, but by the time the final note fades into the stone walls around me, the pressure in my chest has loosened enough for me to breathe again.

Better. Enough to sleep, at least.

I set the Noctis carefully back into its stand, straighten the sheets beside it, and adjust the bench back into place, leaving the practice room exactly the way Professor Halvern expects to find it in the morning. Then I switch off the lamp and head back toward the dormitories.

The thought lingers under my skin afterward, because Halvern notices everything inside these rooms, from shifted benches to wrong notes hanging too long in the air. Sometimes it feels less like he's teaching the Noctis and more like he's guarding something hidden inside it.