He hadn't meant to follow.
His legs simply moved.
Her smile just a flicker had cracked something beneath his ribs.
Not pain. Not nostalgia.
Something worse.
Hope.
He remembered her voice, years ago, whispering, "Don't let them make me a monster, Eren."
He had promised.
And failed.
"She smiled like spring once," he whispered to the thorns.
"Now it's frostbite, blooming across my lungs."
He clutched the ribbon she used to wear in her hair. Faded blue.
He kept it buried in a book he never finished reading.
She had smiled today.
But not at him.
Not at anyone.
It wasn't affection. It wasn't triumph.
It was detachment.
The kind of smile worn by something already gone.
"If I love her again," he asked the wind, "does it still count as betrayal?"
Sol Mavren didn't follow her.
He waited.
Then scribbled something in his notebook.
Not words.
Not really.
Just patterns.
Curves. Spirals.
A face repeated again and again.
"Her expression doesn't match the known variables," he whispered.
"It wasn't a smile. It was a pattern failure."
He flipped back through pages older calculations, sketches of faces.
Before-death.
Post-death.
Current.
Something had changed.
"She's collapsed the timeline," he murmured, eyes gleaming.
"She smiled… outside causality."
Where the others saw love, regret, fury
Sol saw mathematics breaking.
The universe folding to accommodate her return.
And he was enchanted.
"They're watching a woman."
"I'm watching a singularity."
And in her chamber, behind the locked door, Elariax stood alone.
No mirrors worked in her presence anymore.
The glass blurred, cracked, refused to reflect.
But she stared anyway.
Not at her face.
At her mouth.
"That smile," she said to no one, "wasn't mine."
It had belonged to someone else.
Someone before.
A flash.
A red room.
A girl in a white dress screaming into a gilded mirror:
"If I die and come back, am I still allowed to feel?"
The mirror had bled.
And the girl had disappeared.
Outside, the bells of the Academy tolled not for a death.
Not for a birth.
For something in between.
Something that had never learned how to be human.