Quiet Confessions

Isadora:

Sleep never came.

I lay in bed until the candle at my nightstand drowned in its own wax and the shadows along the ceiling grew restless. They moved like ink across water—sliding, stretching—until I couldn’t tell where the room ended and the dark began. The nightmare from last night still clawed at the edges of my thoughts, a silent fire licking at my ribs. Every time I closed my eyes I felt it waiting, patient and merciless.

By the hour before dawn I gave up.

The corridor outside my room was silent but for the soft moan of the wind through the arrow-slit windows. Ashywick never slept; it only shifted, dreaming with its stone bones. I couldn't lay there anymore. I crawled out of bed, in my nightgown, lantern in hand. My boots whispered against the ancient floor as I slipped into the hallway. The air smelled of rain-damp stone and candle soot, as though the storm that had battered the castle had seeped into the walls and refused to leave.

I wandered past classrooms locked tight with iron sigils, past portraits that pretended to sleep but followed me with half-lidded eyes. My breath ghosted in the cold. On the other side of the stained glass window pane, water dripped in a slow, steady rhythm, like the heartbeat of the Academy itself.

The library drew me in.

Its great double doors yielded with a reluctant groan. Inside, the scent of old paper and ink wrapped around me—comfort and menace in equal measure. Chandeliers filled with candles floated along the vaulted ceiling, their faint blue glow spilling across endless shelves. Here, time felt less like a river and more like a labyrinth. If answers existed, they would be buried in these aisles.

I moved between the stacks, fingertips grazing cracked leather spines: On Dream Divination, The Veil Between, Bloodlines of the Forgotten Courts. Each title was a quiet dare. I gathered a few to the reading table and opened them one by one, chasing some thread that might explain why the Academy whispered to me in sleep, why flames stalked me in dreams.

The hours blurred. Outside, dawn crept toward the horizon, but the library kept its eternal twilight. I bent over a book of astral lore, translating a passage about “souls stitched to the Shadow Realm,” when a faint sound broke the silence.

A soft thud. Then another.

Not the settling of wood. Footsteps.

I froze, breath caught halfway. The lantern above my table flickered as if it, too, sensed something. Slowly, I rose. The sound came again—measured, unhurried, yet deliberate. Someone else was here.

I followed the noise through a narrow aisle of shelves, heart beating in the hollow of my throat. The lanterns overhead swayed though no wind stirred them. Every shadow seemed to lean closer, listening.

At the end of the row, a lone figure stood with his back to me.

Kai.

The sight of him rooted me to the spot.

His usually unruly hair was even wilder, a golden halo of curls catching the lanternlight. His shirt hung untucked, sleeves pushed to the elbows as if he’d been wrestling with something unseen. There was no trace of his usual grin, no glint of the trickster in his posture. He looked almost… humanly tired. Haunted.

As if sensing me, he turned.

Our eyes met.

For once there was no mischief in those opal irises—only something quiet and raw, like the moment before a confession. Relief flickered across his face, startling in its sincerity.

“Isadora,” he said, voice rough with sleeplessness.

I stepped forward, careful, like approaching a wild creature that might vanish. “Kai. What are you doing here?”

His gaze softened, and the tension in his shoulders eased the smallest fraction. “Could ask you the same.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” I admitted. My words seemed to echo through the rows of books. “Nightmares.”

A muscle worked along his jaw. “Yeah,” he murmured. “The Academy has a talent for those.”

We stood in the hush, two shadows framed by endless shelves. He looked different in this light—lantern glow gilding the edges of his hair, deepening the hollows beneath his eyes. Vulnerable wasn’t a word I’d ever have given to Kai, yet it hovered there between us.

“What’s all the studying about?” I asked finally, nodding to the scattered tomes on the table behind him.

His eyes never left mine. “You.”

The single syllable landed like a spark on dry tinder.

I blinked. “Me?”

“Just you.” His voice was low, stripped of its usual tease, each word deliberate. “Every strange pull in this place leads back to you. The pull. The… chaos. I needed answers.”

Something in my chest tightened. The trickster I’d come to expect—the sly grin, the mocking bow—was gone. In his place stood someone unnervingly honest, and it shook me more than any of his games.

“Why?” My whisper barely reached the space between us.

“Because you’re under my skin.” His eyes glinted, not with his usual mischief but with something heavier, darker. “And I can’t decide if it’s curiosity or…” He trailed off, a breath caught on the edge of confession. “Or something worse.”

The lanternlight wove gold into the softness of his hair. The scent of him—cedar, rain, a trace of wild magic—wrapped around me until the library itself faded to a blur. I took another step, the old floorboards creaking in quiet betrayal.

“Kai…” My name for him felt fragile, an incantation I wasn’t sure I should speak.

He tilted his head, studying me as though I were the riddle and the answer all at once. “You should stay away from me,” he said, but the words lacked conviction. “I’m not the kind of trouble you want.”

I almost laughed—soft, bitter. “And what makes you think I don’t already know that?”

His mouth curved, not into a smile but something darker, a flicker of hunger quickly shuttered. “You should,” he said, voice a rasp of velvet and warning.

The air between us tightened, heavy with something I couldn’t name. The rows of books seemed to lean closer, eavesdropping. For a heartbeat the only sound was the uneven rhythm of our breathing.

“You look…” I began, then stopped, unsure.

“Like hell?” he offered.

“I was going to say tired.”

“That too.” He stepped closer, the lantern casting shadows that tangled across his face. “But it’s more than that. You—” He exhaled sharply, as if the words cost him. “You make it hard to breathe.”

The confession stole the cold from the room.

I should have turned away. I should have remembered every warning the Academy had whispered since my arrival. Instead I held his gaze and felt something uncoil inside me, a slow surrender.

The lantern above flickered, casting brief darkness before flaring again. In that pulse of shadow, I thought I saw the faint shimmer of his magic—the wild, restless energy that always seemed barely contained. It reached for me like a tide.

I reached back.

Neither of us moved further, yet the space between us felt perilously thin, like a single step would undo us both. His eyes searched mine, quiet and endless, until the sound of the great library clock shattered the spell.

Kai exhaled, a low, rough sound. “You should go before the others wake,” he said, though he didn’t move aside.

“Will you be here?” I asked.

His expression softened, weary and something else—something almost tender. “Probably. Trying to figure out the impossible.”

“What’s that?”

“You.” A ghost of a smile. “Always you.”

I turned then, because if I didn’t I wasn’t sure I ever would. The aisle stretched long and dim before me. Behind, his presence lingered like a phantom heartbeat.

Outside, the first light of dawn bled through the stained glass, pale and uncertain. The nightmares still waited, but so did something else—something alive and hungry, threaded now through the quiet rhythm of my own pulse.

And I knew, with a certainty that chilled and thrilled in equal measure, that neither of us would stay away.