CHAPTER SIX: THE DORMS THAT REMEMBER (Part Four)
The pulse mark dimmed again, fading into Zephryn's skin like it had never appeared.
But the feeling remained.
A low warmth in his chest, like a name spoken by someone he hadn't seen in years—
familiar, weightless, dangerous.
Kaelen stood now too, crossing the room slowly.
His eyes weren't on Zephryn.
They were on the floor.
"Do you feel it?" he asked.
Yolti frowned. "Feel what?"
Kaelen lowered himself to one knee, ran his fingers over a spot in the wood near Zephryn's bedframe.
There was something scratched there.
Something old.
The edges of it glinted faintly under the room's soft resonance glow.
He blew the dust away.
Four words. Barely carved.
"He was always flame."
Zephryn knelt beside him.
He didn't speak.
Didn't breathe.
Because he remembered that night.
Not the one where Solara died.
The one before it.
Where they stayed up too late, arguing about pulse theory and glyph classifications.
Kaelen had joked, "You're all spark, no structure."
And Yolti had added, "Yeah, he's got more fire than sense."
Zephryn had laughed.
Then picked up Yolti's chalk shard and carved those same four words into the wood.
He was always flame.
Not as a truth.
As a joke.
But now it sat there like prophecy.
Selka crouched beside them.
She didn't say anything.
She just reached out,
touched the edge of the carving with her fingertips,
and closed her eyes.
Zephryn watched her.
The way her brow furrowed.
The way her fingers trembled.
Like touching that line felt like touching someone who wasn't gone.
Bubbalor hummed again.
Just once.
Low. Protective.
Like it remembered, too.
And in the rafters, just above the dorm's central beam,
the shimmer from earlier pulsed once—
A spiral of faint resonance dust
glowing briefly in the exact same shape
as Zephryn's mark.
They hadn't just returned to their dorm.
The dorm had returned to them.