Juno Ravyn didn't sleep easily.
She never had.
Even before the Academy, before the Tower Trials, before the firemark on her record, her instincts had always whispered at the edge of rest.
Tonight, they screamed.
She sat upright in her cot, staring at the thread of warmth still pulsing faintly across her palm—like a ghost of a glyph, but deeper. Personal.
> He's still awake.
> He's still thinking.
Of course he was.
He always was.
Lyle Greenbottle had that haunted, quiet energy that wasn't loud enough to scare people, but dense enough to unsettle them. Like a sealed door in a burning house. You didn't know why you were afraid—only that something behind it had already burned everything down once before.
She knew because she had the same kind of door.
---
The door to her room knocked once.
No chime. No glyph flash.
Just a knock.
Old-fashioned. Subtle.
Dangerous.
She opened it without a word.
A figure in instructor robes stepped inside.
Tall. Angular. Eyes too calm to be kind.
She recognized him immediately.
> Watcher Thorne.
Veiled Path.
But unofficially.
He didn't introduce himself. Just gestured toward the bed.
"Sit."
"I'll stand."
He nodded, unsurprised.
"I'm here about Greenbottle."
Juno crossed her arms. "You're late."
That made him pause.
"You suspected him before?"
"I observed him," she said carefully. "There's a difference."
Thorne paced slowly.
"Do you know what he is?"
"Do you?"
"No," he admitted. "That's the problem. And people are beginning to notice."
Juno said nothing.
So he pushed harder.
"There are… elements within the Academy that consider him a threat. Some want to study him. Others want to contain him. But there's another option."
Her eyes narrowed. "Me."
"You've seen behind his mask. That makes you valuable. If you maintain proximity, we can track his evolution. Understand his triggers. Prepare for worst-case."
Juno looked him dead in the eye.
"And what happens if I disagree with your 'worst-case'?"
"Then you better be very sure you won't get in the way when he becomes it."
---
After he left, she sat on the edge of her cot for a long time.
No training glyphs. No magic. No movement.
Just her… and the growing ache of awareness.
> They want me to spy on him.
To use our bond to watch him.
To turn his trust into leverage.
And the worst part?
She understood why.
He was dangerous.
But in all her time at the Academy, around monsters in uniforms and instructors who wore fear like perfume—
Lyle was the only one who never tried to manipulate her.
He just existed. Quietly. Brilliantly.
And when she stared into that ruined fog, she hadn't seen ambition or cruelty.
She saw grief.
Something broken. Something old.
Something that survived anyway.
---
She stood.
Moved to her desk.
Opened a blank page of her spell log.
And wrote one sentence:
> "I won't betray him. Not even for the Path."
Then she burned it.
Let the ashes fall into her tea.
And drank them.