The bell's last tremor hung in the frozen air as Lyra leaned into the oak door.
It gave with a groan, shutting behind her and cutting off the roar of the hall, the distant murmur of lessons.
What took its place wasn't true quiet.
It was a thick, listening silence, broken by the rasp of a last dry leaf on a branch, the steady plink… plink… of meltwater from a clogged gutter, the shallow cloud of her own breath.
The gravel of the path crunched under her boots, a sound too loud.
The garden in winter wasn't made for beauty.
It was a skeletal place.
A maze of iron frames and glass panes fogged with rime, sheltering what could endure: leathery ferns, fungus that glowed a sickly green on rotting logs, the lunar plants.
Academy treasures.
Their petals were the colour of tarnished silver, and they kept themselves tight as fists under the sun, waiting for a moon that wouldn't rise for hours.
She found him between two of those glass tombs, by a bench that seemed more a relic than a piece of furniture.
Kael.
He was sitting wrong—slumped forward, elbows on his knees, a book propped open in his hands.
Not standing guard. Not performing.
Just reading.
The sight was so dissonant it stopped her.
He had on the standard-issue Beta overcoat, brown and coarse, but his scarf was wound loose, the end trailing.
It looked like comfort.
It looked like a secret.
He felt her. He always did.
His head came up, not with a jerk, but slow.
No false surprise, no trained smile.
His eyes, dark enough to be black in this light, found hers, and something in his face just… settled. Unclenched.
The knot in her own chest loosened a fraction.
"Figured Alaric had you entranced with his Hierarchy Wars," he said.
His voice was different out here. Lower, flatter, with a dry thread running through it he kept sheathed indoors.
He closed the book. The leather cover was worn soft.
"Nearly," she said.
The word came out easier than anything had all day.
She moved to the bench, sat not beside him but at an angle, close enough to feel a whisper of his warmth against the chill.
The stone bit through her skirts.
"He went on for forty minutes about familial decay. I'm fairly sure Denholm in the back was actually snoring."
A sound escaped him, not quite a laugh.
More an acknowledgement of a shared truth.
"Man's a fossil. Here."
He bent, rummaged in a worn canvas satchel, and pulled out another book.
Smaller. Cloth-bound, a faded moss green.
Mystical Botany of the Northern Frontiers. Elara Vance.
"The one with the original plates. Thought you'd want to see the root structures."
She took it. Her hands knew how to handle precious things.
She opened it carefully, the spine crackling, to where a flat, papery daisy served as a bookmark.
A simple thing. Earthly.
Its white petals were tinged with the brown of years, pressed forever atop an intricate drawing of roots that twisted into shapes like forgotten letters.
"This from her travels?" Lyra asked.
Her finger didn't touch the flower. It hovered.
"A place with shorter winters," he said.
There was a pause. A slight change in the quality of his silence.
"Vance was Beta. They say she walked the ridges for seven seasons, cataloguing alone. Then she got an 'invitation.' To publish under an Alpha seal."
He glanced toward the lunar plants behind glass.
"The work is solid. But you can see the seams. Where she had to sand down the edges of her thinking to make it fit their shelves."
Lyra turned a few pages.
The paper was thick, textured under her thumb.
Here was a world built on observation, not dominance.
A world that lived beside the other one, ignored by it.
"Sometimes," she heard herself say, the words soft, "I get lost in this and it all… fades. The High Table. The evening bell. All of it. It feels like there could be a room somewhere. Just a room. Where the only thing that matters is the pattern of sap in a stem, or the way a particular moss holds water. Where a Beta with a workbench and too many books isn't… a joke."
Kael watched her.
He had a way of listening that was almost physical, like he was catching the words before they hit the ground.
He didn't speak until she was done.
"It's not a joke." Simple. Direct. "It's just a different geography. This flower's from another country. Our hierarchy… it's a paved road. Getting off it isn't a matter of stepping over a curb. You need a path. And the paths have grown over."
He tapped the cover of his own book.
"I've been reading about the old Artificers' Guilds. Pre-Consolidation. Betas had their own codes. Apprenticeships. Standards. It wasn't freedom, not as we'd think of it. But it was a shape. Something to build on."
"What happened to them?"
"Eaten," he said.
The word was neutral. A fact of nature.
"One clan offered security. Another, resources. The guilds became departments. Autonomy became contract work. The road widens. The forest gets pushed back."
He leaned back, the bench cold against his spine.
"But knowing the forest was there… it matters. It means the road isn't the only land. It's just the easiest to walk."
Silence again, but a companionable one. The feeble sun did nothing.
Lyra felt the weight of the book, the ghost-shape of the daisy.
For these minutes, the Omega title was a cloak she'd shrugged onto her shoulders.
It wasn't her.
She was just Lyra. He was just Kael.
The thought was a deep, aching breath.
He moved first, pulling a brass watch from his pocket. The snap of the case was a sharp sound.
"I'm required. The Director has a… discrepancy in the old lineage charts. Needs 'clarification.'"
The dryness was back, edged now.
He stood, unfolding his height. She rose too, clutching the botany book to her chest like a shield.
"Thank you," she said.
A nod. That was all.
"Next time, I'll show you the irrigation schematics for the Lyr hanging gardens. Brilliant work. Over-engineered, but brilliant."
His eyes held hers for a beat too long, and in that space was something solid and wordless, an anchor in frozen ground.
"The east path is iced over. Walk where the gravel's thick."
Be careful, in his language. Don't fall.
He turned and walked away, his figure dissolving into the grey afternoon haze before he'd even reached the main path.
Lyra stayed.
Holding the quiet.
Letting the warmth of the exchange settle into memory.
Her gaze drifted, unfocused, over the jumble of glass and shadow.
Then it caught. Stopped.
High up, on the cliff-face of the administrative wing, the long windows stared.
The Headmaster's office.
A silhouette stood in the largest pane, a cut-out of pure shadow against the dull glow within.
She knew the posture. Everyone did.
Shoulders like a mantle, head set with an unwavering, sovereign stillness.
Sion. Black Moon heir. The apex.
He wasn't moving.
He was looking down.
At the garden. At the maze. At this bench.
The certainty entered her not as a thought, but as a physical truth, cold and sharp in the marrow of her spine.
He was looking at her.
The distance didn't matter. The glass didn't matter.
She felt the focus of it, a pressure between her shoulder blades.
The book in her arms became suddenly foolish, a child's prop.
The conversation she'd just had felt naive, a tiny, brightly-lit room he could see straight into.
No wave. No gesture.
Just observation.
The light shifted then.
The low sun found a final gap in the clouds.
A lance of pallid, heatless light speared across the grounds and flashed against the high window.
For an instant, the frost on the glass burned away, and it was not a barrier but a lens.
She didn't see his face.
She saw the twin gleam of reflected light where his eyes would be.
Fixed. Unblinking.
A cold that had nothing to do with the air washed over her, root-deep, primal.
The chill of a mouse that feels the shadow of the owl.
Her breath left her in a short, soundless gasp.
She blinked.
The light moved on.
The silhouette turned away, swallowed by the interior dark.
The winter garden was no longer a refuge.
It was an expanse, terribly exposed.
The silence now hummed with a new, menacing frequency.
The pulse in her clavicle, which had quieted to a background rhythm, awoke with a low, insistent thud.
Dusk was coming.
The shadows of the ironwork stretched long and skeletal across the scarred snow.
The ceremony was no longer an event on a schedule.
It was a tide, coming in.
And Lyra, standing alone with the ghost of a summer flower pressed in a book, understood with a heavy, final clarity that she had never forgotten what she was, not really.
The Gatherer had only been resting.
And something on the cliff had felt the moment her eyes opened.