Chapter 7—The Garden II

Elara's POV

Nobody had ever done that before.

That was the first coherent thought I had after Ravin dropped his hand from my cheek and stepped back, like the whole thing had been completely ordinary and he had not just made my brain stop working for a full three seconds. I stood there in the corridor and watched him tilt his head slightly toward the direction of the garden, a quiet invitation, and I followed him because apparently that was something I was doing now.

The garden was quieter than I expected.

Most students had cleared out toward the dormitories and the east side of the school had settled into that particular after-class stillness where the day felt officially over. We reached the old oak and I sat on the low stone bench and Ravin sat beside me, not too close, and for a moment neither of us said anything and it was not the awkward kind of silence, more like two people deciding where to start.

Ravin broke it first. "How long ago did you shift?"

I looked at him. "That's where we're starting?"

"I'm curious." His eyes were steady on mine. "You carry yourself like someone who has been doing this for years. But something about it still feels new to you."

I was not sure if I liked how accurately he had read that. "Two months ago," I said. "At the camping trip."

"Late shift."

"You could say that." I looked down at my hands. "My birthday was two months before that. I was supposed to shift then. I didn't." I said it the way I had learned to say it, flat and matter of fact, because giving it too much weight in my voice only made it worse. "So yes. Late. Very late by Velthorn standards."

Ravin was quiet for a moment. "That must have been difficult. Especially with a name like Moonfall."

"It was not the most comfortable two months of my life," I said. "People at this school are not exactly subtle when they think someone does not belong."

"Kael included?"

I glanced at him. "Kael ignored me completely until the week after my shift. Then suddenly he had a lot to say." I heard the edge in my own voice and softened it slightly. "He is not a bad person. He just pays attention to strength and I was not showing any for a while."

"And now that you are he pays a different kind of attention," Ravin said.

"Apparently."

He did not say anything to that but something shifted in his expression, small and brief, and then it was gone.

"What about you," I said, turning it around before he could ask anything else. "You transferred mid year, you don't talk about where you came from, you sit in every room like you already own it. That's not normal transfer student behaviour."

Ravin almost smiled. "What does normal transfer student behaviour look like."

"Nervous. Lost. Asking where the bathrooms are."

"I found the bathrooms on my own."

"That's exactly what I mean," I said, and he did smile then, properly, and it changed his whole face in a way that I was not entirely prepared for.

"I moved around a lot," he said after a moment, easy enough that it did not sound like a lie but vague enough that it was not exactly the full truth either. "I am used to new places. They stop feeling new quickly."

I looked at him. "Where did you come from before here?"

"Far from here," he said simply, and the way he said it closed the door on that particular line of conversation without being rude about it.

I let it go. Partly because pushing felt like the wrong move and partly because something about sitting here with him in the quiet of the garden felt too easy to risk breaking with the wrong question.

That was the strange part. I had known him for less than two days and the conversation moved like we had been doing this for much longer, like the silences between sentences were comfortable rather than awkward and neither of us had to perform anything.

I did not know what to do with that feeling. I was not used to it. Most conversations at Draven required a version of me that was always slightly on guard, always aware of how I was being perceived, always waiting for the moment someone decided to remind me of something I already knew about myself. This was not that. This was just two people talking in a garden and it felt unreasonably easy.

I was not sure if that made it better or more unsettling.

"The bullying," Ravin said after a while, his voice quieter now. "During the months you didn't shift. Was it bad."

I looked at the ground. "Bad enough."

"But you still came to school every day."

"What else was I going to do," I said. "Hide?" I looked up. "My parents didn't raise me to hide. Even when hiding would have been easier."

He was watching me with that expression again, the one I still could not fully read, like I was something he was in the process of figuring out and was not yet finished.

"Your friends helped," he said. It was not really a question.

"Leo, Freya and Nyx," I said. "Yes. They were the only reason some of those days were survivable." I paused. "Do you have people like that?"

Something moved through his eyes. "I have people who are loyal to me," he said. "It is a different thing."

I thought about that for a moment and did not push it further.

The light in the garden had shifted while we were talking, the afternoon warmth giving way to the cooler blue of early evening, and I realised with mild surprise that we had been sitting here for well over an hour without it feeling like any time at all.

Ravin stood first, and I stood with him, and we faced each other in the fading light and I was very aware of how close we were standing and not doing anything about it.

"Same time tomorrow," he said.

I looked up at him. "You want to do this again."

"Don't you?"

I did not answer that because the answer was too easy and giving easy answers to boys I barely knew was not something I had any practice with.

Ravin looked at me for a moment, then leaned forward and pressed his lips briefly to my forehead, warm and unhurried, and then stepped back like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Tomorrow," he said quietly, and turned and walked away through the garden, leaving me standing under the old oak with my heart doing something I had absolutely no language for.