Chapter Three: A Flame Too Young to Burn (Part Four)
The Lyceum nights were colder than they should've been.
Not in temperature.
In rhythm.
They didn't hold warmth the way the outer roads did.
They measured their silence.
Regulated it.
As if stillness was part of the doctrine.
Zephryn didn't sleep in full cycles.
He rested in fragments.
One eye always listening.
Sometimes he hummed—quiet, buried in breath.
Other times… he didn't.
And that was when the room shifted.
Not physically.
Emotionally.
The tone dipped.
The pressure between walls tightened.
Even the glyph-inscribed windows seemed to dim in glow,
as if the absence of his hum stole resonance from the stone.
Selka noticed it first.
She didn't speak.
Didn't point it out.
She just started humming in his direction whenever the silence got too sharp.
Never loud.
Just enough to balance.
Kaelen didn't react.
But the stiffness in his shoulder when Zephryn walked by had begun to fade.
He stopped leaning against the wall.
Now he sat.
Feet flat.
Shoulders squared like he had nothing to prove—
and didn't trust that feeling.
Yolti never looked directly at him.
But she took notes.
She logged his breath cycles.
The way his glyph pulses flickered during meal silence.
The pattern of when he blinked during morning formations.
She wasn't studying him.
She was tracking symmetry.
But none of them noticed it first.
None of them felt the pull in the walls when Zephryn sat alone in the middle of the dorm floor, cross-legged, staring at the glyphmark beneath his own hand.
None of them heard it yet.
Except the one that was always listening.
Bubbalor didn't hum at first.
Not the way Solara described it.
There was no song.
No note.
No warning.
Just presence.
He didn't sit next to Zephryn.
Didn't approach from behind.
He was already there.
As if he'd been in the corner of the room the entire time,
and the dorm had just now remembered how to show him.
Zephryn looked left.
He didn't smile.
Didn't flinch.
Didn't whisper.
Just blinked.
Then—
"You're late," he said.
First words of the night.
Maybe the first in days.
Bubbalor didn't respond.
Not verbally.
But the light beneath his mask flickered once—slow and soft.
Like agreement.
Zephryn reached into his satchel.
Pulled out a folded cloth.
Opened it slowly.
One sheet of resonance paper—creases worn, edges fading.
He laid it on the floor.
No words written.
Just a single pulse spiral drawn in finger-ink.
Bubbalor watched.
Head slightly tilted.
The hum began.
Soft.
Steady.
Not vibrating the room.
Not changing the air.
But anchoring it.
The other students stirred in their sleep.
Selka shifted in her bed.
Yolti turned without waking.
Kaelen's hand curled slightly over the edge of his pillow.
None of them knew why.
But their breathing aligned.
For once.
Zephryn pressed his palm to the spiral.
The glyph shimmered.
Not active.
Not triggered.
Just seen.
Bubbalor moved closer.
Still silent.
Still humming.
He reached forward—barely a motion—
and tapped one claw-tip against the page.
The resonance deepened.
The spiral lit briefly—just enough to frame their hands.
The paper curled at the edges.
Then calmed.
They didn't speak again.
But the bond—if you could call it that—
wasn't made.
It was remembered.
This wasn't the first time Bubbalor had been called by Zephryn.
Not technically.
Because Zephryn had never stopped calling.
Even when he didn't know it.
Even when the world tried to silence it.
Bubbalor had just been waiting for the room to get quiet enough
to hear it back.
That night, the Lyceum's resonance grid logged a brief fluctuation in Dorm Unit Echo.
No alarms triggered.
No instability recorded.
Just a single note—
Subject: Zephryn
Resonance drift: stabilizing.
The log entry was never reviewed.
Not until years later.
But by then, it would be far too late.