Lucian woke up because Tomas dropped a boot.
Not on purpose. Tomas didn't do things on purpose before eight in the morning. He moved through the world in a fog, bumping into furniture, generating noise the way a furnace generates heat. The boot hit the stone floor with a flat sound, and Lucian opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling and thought, with the resignation of three years of shared living: again.
"Sorry," Tomas whispered. He was not whispering. Tomas's version of whispering was just talking at normal volume with his mouth partly closed.
"It's fine." Lucian sat up. The light through the dormitory window was thin, the color of weak tea. 6:47, according to the clock on the wall. The 14th of Ashara. A Tuesday. Pattern Theory with Davos at eight, free period, then a practical in the afternoon.
"Have you seen my other boot?" Tomas asked.
"Under your bed. Left side."
"How do you always know where my stuff is?"
"Because you always put it in the same three places."
Tomas found the boot and started talking about a girl in his Warding seminar. Pella something. She had apparently looked at him during yesterday's practical exercise. Lucian washed his face, pulled on his student robes, and let Tomas's voice fill the room. The left sleeve was fraying at the cuff. He should fix that.
"She definitely looked at me," Tomas said.
"She was probably looking at the wall behind you."
"The wall is not that interesting."
"More interesting than your technique."
Tomas threw a sock at him. Lucian caught it, tossed it back. Something in his chest loosened. This was the part of the morning he liked. The stupid, pointless back-and-forth. It didn't ask anything of him.
They left the room and headed down the east stairwell. The Athenaeum of Veranthos was enormous. Nine towers, twenty acres, fifteen thousand people living and studying and arguing about Thread theory in a sprawl of buildings that ranged from ancient granite to modern glass. Lucian had been here three years and still got turned around in the older sections, where the corridors branched at strange angles and the staircases seemed designed by someone with a grudge against straight lines.
On the way to breakfast, he noticed a metallic taste at the back of his mouth. Sharp, like licking a copper coin. He ran his tongue along his teeth.
Old pipes. The dormitory plumbing did this sometimes. The building was four hundred years old. Things tasted like metal when the water ran funny.
He forgot about it by the time they reached the dining hall.
Breakfast was porridge and tea. Tomas got porridge, tea, eggs, sausage, bread, and an apple, and worked through it all with the focused intensity of someone fueling a machine. Lucian ate his porridge. It was fine. Athenaeum porridge was always fine, the way institutional food is fine: warm, present, tasting like nothing in particular.
The lecture hall was a tiered amphitheater, half-full. Eight AM Pattern Theory was not a popular time slot. Lucian took his usual seat, fourth row near the aisle, and opened his textbook to chapter fourteen. Resonance dampening.
Professor Davos entered at 7:58, two minutes early, as always. Compact, gray-haired, with the expression of someone who had long ago accepted that her students would not share her enthusiasm for coefficient analysis.
She was a decent teacher. Clear. Fast. Lucian followed the math and felt the familiar friction of material he understood in principle but couldn't execute in practice. He could see how the dampening coefficient interacted with Thread-density thresholds. He could explain it on paper. But Second-Order Patterns required a steadiness of control that kept slipping out of his grip.
Halfway through, he raised his hand. "Professor, in the third derivation, wouldn't the dampening coefficient change if the resonance frequency exceeded the Thread-density threshold?"
Davos paused. Looked at him. "Good question, Vael. Yes, it would. We'll cover that next week, but you're ahead of the reading." A small nod. "Keep it up."
He wrote something in his notebook and felt a quiet satisfaction. Not pride. More like confirmation that the hours he put in were worth something. He filed the coefficient in the same place he always filed it: the long corridor outside this lecture hall, the third pillar from the door, the specific quality of morning light in that spot. He had never thought about why certain information lived in certain places. It just did. He wasn't the best student in the room. He wasn't the worst. The gap between where he was and where he wanted to be felt crossable, most days.
After the lecture he cut through the courtyard. The sun had come through the morning haze, and the Athenaeum looked the way it did on good days, golden stone and old towers. Students sat on the low walls. A group of fourth-years was practicing Threadwork near the fountain.
He had come around the courtyard's east side, past the maintenance outbuildings, the longer way to the lecture halls by forty seconds. He always came this way. The shorter route cut through the space behind the Thread-materials annex, where his Threadsight sometimes picked up old Pattern-residue wound into the stone, experiments that still hadn't fully faded. He had walked the long way for three years. He had never decided to start.
Lucian watched them for a moment, then wished he hadn't. His Threadsight tended to activate reflexively when he watched Threadwork up close, and it always came with a headache. A dull pressure behind his eyes, like staring at a screen too long. He blinked it away and kept walking.
Sera was crossing from the Chirothurgy tower, bag over her shoulder. His cousin. Nineteen, dark-haired, quick. Fourth year, Chirothurgy track, better at practical work than he would probably ever be.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey." She looked him over in that way she had. "You look tired."
"Tomas dropped a boot at six in the morning."
"Classic Tomas. Are you coming to Uncle Ithrin's dinner next week?"
"Probably." He would go. He always went to family things, the way you always go to the dentist.
"He's going to ask about your marks."
"My marks are fine."
"He's going to ask anyway." She was already moving. "And start that dampening essay. I know you haven't."
"I've started it," he lied.
She didn't believe him. He could tell by the way she waved without turning around, a quick over-the-shoulder gesture, dismissive without being unkind.
He watched her cross toward the east buildings. The gesture was his mother's. He looked away. They weren't close, not really. The age gap had kept them in different orbits growing up. But she was family, and she checked on him in her way, and he appreciated it in his. That was enough.
He went to the library for his free period, the east reading room, third floor, where he'd been coming since his first year when the dormitory got too quiet in the evenings. He got through half a page of notes on the dampening essay, stared out the window for a while, and then headed to his afternoon practical.
The Third-Order Pattern workshop met in a ground-floor classroom in the east wing. Stone walls, heavy tables, the faintly burned smell that every practical space in the Athenaeum carried. Lucian was working through a basic two-Thread interaction when the first tone sounded.
Low. Resonant. A single sustained note that came from the Thread-monitors mounted at every major intersection of the campus. Thread instability alert. It happened a few times a semester, usually on high-activity days when the Confluence was cycling up. Standard response: continue class and wait for the all-clear.
Professor Maren, who was running the practical, paused and glanced at the ceiling. "Nothing to worry about. Keep working."
Lucian kept working. The two-Thread interaction (Scarlet and Bright, a simple healing warmth Pattern) was giving him the same trouble it always did. He could hold the first Thread steady or the second, but holding both at once was like trying to write with both hands. The student to his left, a girl named Kira, was doing it effortlessly. He tried not to watch her.
The taste was back. That copper-metal taste. Stronger than this morning. He took a sip of water from his flask and tried to wash it away.
It was 3:02 PM. He noted the time on the wall clock because the practical was supposed to end at 3:30 and he was counting down. Half an hour. He could get through half an hour.
At 3:14, the second tone sounded.
It was different. Higher. Urgent. A two-note pattern that climbed and held, and Lucian had never heard it before. He looked at Professor Maren. She had stopped talking. She was staring at the ceiling, and her hands, which had been folded behind her back, were now at her sides. Flat. Like she was bracing for something.
"Students, please stay in your seats."
Nobody had moved. But the fact that she said it changed the temperature of the room. A few people looked at each other. Kira set down her practice materials. Someone in the back row said, too loudly, "What does that one mean?"
Professor Maren didn't answer. Lucian realized it was because she didn't know.
3:20 PM. The floor moved.
It wasn't a shake, exactly. It was a vibration, deep and wrong, like the building was a tuning fork that someone had struck. The windows rattled in their frames. A glass flask on the table nearest the door slid to the edge and fell and shattered on the stone floor, and nobody laughed, and nobody moved to clean it up.
Lucian's hands were flat on the table. He could feel the vibration through his palms, through his wrists, through the bones of his arms. The lights overhead flickered. Not the electric lights in the newer sections, but the Thread-fed lamps in the old stone classrooms, the ones that were supposed to be the most stable system in the building.
Someone said "What's happening?" and their voice cracked on the second word.
3:21 PM. The windows went.
They didn't shatter. Lucian was looking right at them and they didn't shatter. The glass just stopped being glass. It went cloudy, then grainy, then it was sand, pouring out of the frames and hissing onto the floor in a pale cascade. The frames held for a second with nothing in them, empty rectangles of stone, and then the outside air came in and it was hot and tasted like a mouthful of pennies and something else, something electrical, something that made his tongue go numb.
Professor Maren shouted something. Get down. Get under the tables. Her voice was steady and her hands were shaking and Lucian could see both of those things at the same time.
He got under the table. His body did it before his mind caught up. He was on his knees on the stone floor with his hands over his head and the table above him and the room was full of noise now, a deep structural groan that he could feel in his teeth, and someone was screaming, and the sand from the windows was blowing through the room in a fine grit that got in his eyes.
The ceiling cracked.
He saw it happen. A line ran across the plaster, fast, like a crack spreading across ice. Then another. Then the plaster fell in chunks, revealing the stone underneath, and the stone was wrong. The stone was moving. Not falling. Moving. The surface of it was rippling, the way water ripples when you drop a pebble, except this was granite and it was rippling like liquid and pieces of it were coming loose and drifting upward, floating, defying every physical law Lucian had ever been taught.
The student next to him was a boy named Edric. Second year. Brown hair. Big ears. He was under the adjacent table, curled up, and he was looking at Lucian with an expression that Lucian would remember for a very long time. Then the wall behind Edric dissolved. It didn't fall. It lost itself, stone going soft and then transparent and then gone, and the space where the wall had been opened onto a hallway that was no longer a hallway, it was a canyon of broken floors and hanging wreckage, and Edric was there and then the table he was under folded sideways as the floor buckled and Edric went with it and Lucian heard a sound that might have been a voice and then there was dust and Edric was gone.
Lucian ran.
He was not brave about it. He did not help anyone. He did not check on Professor Maren. He did not look for Kira or the boy in the back row who had asked what the tone meant. He ran, on his hands and knees first and then upright, over rubble that had been a floor, through a doorway that was half its original height because the lintel was sagging like warm wax. The hallway outside was people. Running, falling, screaming. A woman in professor's robes was pressed against a wall that was still solid, holding her hands up, and there was light coming from her palms, a ward, a barrier, Thread-light flickering and popping around her fingers as she tried to hold something together. She was crying while she did it. The ward was failing. He could see the light stuttering.
He kept running. He didn't know where. Away. Just away. Stairs. He needed stairs, needed to get down, get out. The east stairwell was fifty feet ahead and he ran for it and the floor held, it held, every step he expected it to give way and it held, and he made it to the stairwell door and pulled it open and the stairs were there, stone, solid, descending.
He went down. Two steps at a time. Below him, someone was crying. Above him, the building was making sounds that buildings should not make. Wet sounds. Tearing sounds. The sounds of solid things coming undone.
He made it down one flight. The landing between floors was intact. He kept going. Second flight. The steps were shaking under his feet. He could feel them vibrating, a faster vibration now, almost a hum.
Third step from the bottom of the second flight.
The stone turned to powder under his right foot.
He felt it go. The step just ceased to be a step. His foot went through it, and then his ankle, and then his weight followed and he was falling and the staircase was coming apart around him, stones dissolving, railing twisting, and he hit something hard with his left side and heard a crack that he understood, with terrible clarity, was a rib breaking. Maybe two. The pain was instant and enormous and it whited out his vision for a second and when he could see again he was on his back on a pile of rubble that had been a stairwell, and above him, the ceiling was coming down.
He could not move. The pain in his side locked his whole body. He tried to roll, tried to get his arms up, tried to do anything, and his body would not listen. The ceiling descended. Not fast. Not slow. Just steadily, the stone separating from itself, chunks and slabs and clouds of powder, and it fell on him the way weather falls on you, and there was nothing he could do.
The first piece hit his legs. He felt the weight and then he felt nothing below his knees. The second piece hit his chest and the broken ribs moved and he tried to scream and there was dust in his mouth and throat and lungs and the scream came out as a sound he didn't recognize as his own.
The weight increased. His chest compressed. He could not breathe in. He could get a small amount of air out, and then no air in, and the weight was still coming, and his arms were pinned and his legs were gone and he could see a shrinking rectangle of gray light above him, the last gap in the rubble, and it closed.
Dark.
Pressure. Pressure on every part of him. His ribs grinding against something inside. His lungs flat. His heart beating hard, then harder, then wrong, skipping, stuttering. Pain was everywhere and then it started to thin, not because it was leaving but because he was.
He was seventeen years old. He had a half-finished essay in his dormitory. He had not started the dampening paper. Tomas owed him four silver for a bet about the Warding exam. Sera had told him to eat more. His mother had been dead for five years and he was going to die in a building the same way she did.
Four seconds. Maybe five. His heart stopped doing whatever it was trying to do and just stopped.
The last thing was dark and pressure and then the dark was all there was.
Nothing.
Not sleep. Not dreaming. Nothing. An absence that had no duration because there was no one left to measure it.
Light.
Sound. A voice. Familiar. Close.
"...going to be brutal. Davos assigns more reading than any two professors combined, and then the exam is all practical application, so what's even the point of..."
Ceiling. A ceiling he knew. A crack in the plaster that started near the window frame and wandered northeast, splitting once, like a river on a map.
Morning light. Thin. The color of weak tea.
Tomas was sitting on his bed across the room, pulling on a sock, talking about the Warding Theory exam. He was wearing the same shirt he'd been wearing this morning. The same shirt. The clock on the wall read 6:47.
Lucian sat bolt upright.
His body did it before his mind did, lurching vertical, because his body knew, somewhere in whatever memory muscles hold, that lying flat was how you died. His hands went to his chest. To his ribs, the left side, where the bone had broken and the stone had pressed and his lungs had gone flat and his heart had finally, terribly stopped. He clawed at his shirt, pulling it up, pressing his fingers into the skin between his ribs. Whole. Smooth. No bruise, no break, no wound.
He breathed in.
His lungs filled past the point where filling had stopped, past where the stone had stopped it, and he kept inhaling, waiting for the ceiling, waiting for the resistance that didn't come. His body couldn't process it. He inhaled again. Again. His lungs were fine, they were fine, and his body didn't believe it, kept bracing for the compression that wasn't there. He was gasping, huge desperate pulls of air, not because he lacked oxygen but because some animal part of him was still under the stone and hadn't been told it could stop yet. His throat was clean, no dust, and he kept swallowing because it should have been full of dust.
His hands were clean. He looked at them. Clean.
"Whoa." Tomas was staring at him. "You okay?"
Lucian's hands wouldn't stop moving, chest, stomach, legs, checking. Whole. Everything whole. He was sitting in his bed and the sun was coming through the window and Tomas was alive and the building was intact. He couldn't get enough air. Not because there wasn't any. Because his lungs had learned, in the last four seconds of stone and darkness, that air ran out, and they were still learning that lesson.
"Lucian. Hey. Are you okay?"
He looked at Tomas. Tomas's face was concerned. Open. Normal. Alive.
"What day is it?" Lucian's voice came out wrong. Scraped. Like he'd been screaming.
Tomas frowned. "The fourteenth. Ashara fourteenth. Are you sick? You look really pale."
The fourteenth.
6:47 AM.
Lucian sat in his bed with his hands pressed flat against his unbroken ribs and stared at the clock on the wall and did not understand what was happening to him and could not stop shaking.
Tomas was still talking. Something about the exam. The same words. The exact same words from this morning, from the morning that already happened, from the morning before the building came apart and the boy named Edric disappeared and the stone turned to powder under his foot and he died.
He died.
"Lucian?" Tomas's voice was careful now. "Seriously. What's wrong?"
Lucian opened his mouth. Closed it. He didn't have words for this. He didn't have a framework. He had woken up, gone to class, eaten porridge, talked to his cousin, and then the world ended and he died under a building and now it was morning again and Tomas was asking about the Warding exam.
"Bad dream," he said. His voice was barely a whisper.
Tomas watched him for a long moment. Then he nodded, the way you nod when you've decided not to push.
"Must have been a hell of a dream," Tomas said, and went back to looking for his other boot.
Lucian sat in his bed. His hands were on his ribs. The sun was coming through the window. It was 6:47 AM on the 14th of Ashara, and he was alive, and the building was intact, and he could still feel the weight of the stone on his chest, could still taste the dust in his throat, could still feel the exact moment when his heart decided to stop.
His hands would not stop shaking.