After opening the door of his room, Alex’s eyes widened. In the centre of the floor was a large fabric square, patterned with dozens of sigils, and on-top of it were around forty small stones, each with sigils carved into their surface, each stained with dried blood. As soon as he saw that, Alex understood immediately that Reno wasn’t just a brute-force fighter. He was also a knowledgeable arcanist with a foundation in sigils.

“Ah, sorry about this, I’ll clean it up shortly.” Reno apologized, looking up as Alex entered.

“No. Don’t mind me. Have they returned?”

Reno smiled slightly, his face showing clear surprise that Alex knew what he was doing. “No, but it shouldn’t be much longer.”

“That’s a sigil map of the continent of glass isn’t it? Where’s the information that the spirits are gathering coming from? …if you don’t mind my asking.”

“You can tell that much? That’s pretty amazing Alexander. My father’s war room is where the other map and pieces are. He should be there too, so he’ll be sending his own spirits if there’s any other messages.”

If sigils were in plain sight, spirits could read and memorize them, though the spirits had no way of recreating those sigils in the human world. Magisters would compensate for this problem by using heat-responsive inks, sigil stones, or by simply receiving all information in the spirit language, which had many words for relative positions, sizes and shapes.

As Alex watched, on the mat before Reno, the stones started moving, aligning with another set of stones at that far-away location.

“How are we doing?” Alex asked.

“Mmm…we’ve pushed them back and retaken two towns.”

“Well there’s some good news.”

“Not really. At the moment, their forces and ours on the front are fairly even. If we’re making headway it means that they’re gathering-up for a major manoeuvre or already moving against us in a place unseen. Those towns that we took back won’t give us soldiers, supplies, or any of the civilian lives that were lost, nor will their defences be strong enough to hold-off an assault against the Ashai. The smart move would be to pull those soldiers back.”

“Then why take the towns at all?”

“Politics, most likely. Maybe the refugees heading North are bothering some country, or the money that the nobles are pouring into the war isn’t changing the situation as much as they’d have liked, or maybe it was because Aisnet knights took a town last season but ours didn’t.”

“That’s ridiculous. That kind of thinking has no place on the frontline.”

“Don’t mind it too much; the Southern margraves aren’t stupid enough to man those villages with anything more than a skeleton force, and those soldiers will have some very fast horses.”

“Smart move. That’s one way to deal with the political pressure, I guess.”

“We used the trick a few years back and it worked-out,” Reno looked up at him with a serious expression, “but, unlike humans you can’t use the same trick on Ashai twice. Remember that Alex: they learn from everything.”

Alex looked at the map. “I’ve no intention of going South, so that doesn’t really worry me.”

Watching his face, Reno’s eyes narrowed slightly. “I’ve seen that look a few times, Alexander, but you can’t let that fear hold you back. You know far more than most of the first-years, and from what you showed against Scarlet the other day, you know how to take advantage of your opponent’s weaknesses. With some training, and some support from a few strong spirits you’d be a great asset to the South.”

Alex shrugged. “I don’t think that’ll work-out. It’s like you said: it scares me. I admit it. It scares me so much that I’ll never set foot on that continent for the rest of my life.”

Reno nodded, still watching him. “Those who survive their first skirmish often have that same fear inside them. They experience something terrible beyond words, and they’re completely overwhelmed by their fear. Many of them transfer away immediately…”

“…and those who stay manage to overcome it and become stronger right? I get what you’re saying, but I just don’t think it matters. The way I see it, they can’t win. Nobody can…” Alex stopped and took a breath. His exhaustion was having an effect on his thinking, and his emotions. He shook his head, speaking more softly “Sorry. I can’t. It’s just not something that I can do.”

Reno nodded again. “No, I saw that you had been through something, but I pushed anyway. I’m the one who should apologise.”

“You’re just doing what you feel is best for us all. I certainly wouldn’t hold that against you.” Then, feeling a little awkward at the silence, Alexander looked at the map and asked, because he couldn’t see any sigils that formed the name that he was looking for: “Where is Amhorren?”

“About here,” Reno said, frowning and pointing at a blank part of the map. “The third-city-lost is too far behind enemy lines, and we have no information on the number of enemy forces there, so it would be a waste to relay its location. Why do you ask?”

Alex lay down on his bed and faced away. “Just curious. Thanks Reno.” With that said, Alex closed his eyes and waited so that he could get his sword.

Three hours had passed by her estimation, and now Serah sat awake on a chair looking at the university in the moonlight. It was like a different world.

Unlike Alex, Serah had no roommate, nor was she in a room facing the forest. Her room was likely the very best room occupied by a single commoner on the campus. It was on the top floor of the building, taking up an area almost twice as large as the others, and she hated it with a passion. Her dreams of Etheret had included a messy roommate who she would laugh with, and yell at, as they encroached upon one-another’s territory and used each other’s things. Without this fictional roommate, her room felt like a cell, and it was for this reason that Alaya and Scarlet were both now wrapped up in their bedding, asleep on her floor. This, and one other reason.

“Alex,” she whispered the shortened name, neither infusing it with magic nor saying it loud enough that her friends could hear it. She wouldn’t let another person hear her say that name out loud, because he’d never once given her permission to call him “Alex” instead.

For her it was significant. The day he allowed her to call him Alex was the day he allowed her into his world, and into his life. As someone who called herself his friend, she desperately wanted that day to come; she needed that day to come. Her heart would one day break if that day did not come: this was how Serah felt, but she never once thought it was love.

If he fell in-love with her she would be happy, and if mutual love bloomed between them she would be happy; just earlier that day, she had even wanted to make him fall for her, but she didn’t love him.

The cool autumn wind toyed with her shoulder-length blonde hair and turned the skin of her face to ice. For the first time since coming to the institute, she’d let her hair down from the ponytail. Her hair had been long before she’d come to Etheret, and she would only ever tie it up when practicing. Now she missed that long hair; she missed her old self. She wanted to feel like the real Serah, not the one in-hiding. She felt lost here, and she knew her emotions were a mess.

Looking at the nobles’ dorm, and through it to where the central courtyard of the institute was, she remembered that afternoon only a few days prior when they’d first arrived. It was there that she had first approached him, though in-truth, for Serah it was more like it was predetermined that she would approach him.

Serah’s mother dealt in jewellery when she wasn’t taking care of her two girls, but she hadn’t always done-so. Before Serah had been born, her mother had fought on the frontlines in the South. It was her mother’s strict training that had been drilled into her and her sister for hours every day since they were six years old, and it was her mother that Serah took-after. Not only had she learned the fundamentals of combat and polished those fundamentals to near-perfection because of her mother’s lessons, Serah had also inherited her mother’s ability to read every movement of her enemy’s heart: to know instinctively when they would attack, when they would defend, when they were enraged and when they were accepting of their loss.

It was because of this knack for reading people that Serah had come face-to-face with Alexander. Looking across the courtyard that day, she’d seen a great kindness in him, and great despair: the kind of despair that rendered all things hopeless. He appeared to her to be a person shouldering a great burden, who had already considered his battle lost, and this impression of his character was only made clearer as the days went on.

Alexander would help her with whatever she asked, treat her and her friends nicely, and even risk revealing himself as a scholarship student to teach them about what they might face: it was clear that he cared for others. On the other hand, he wanted to hide himself and his problems from them and deal with everything on his own, fighting all his battles alone, not involving them because he would not want them to suffer: he was self-sacrificing. She had figured this out early-on, and she had seen evidence of it when he had followed the two men earlier that day. She worried. She worried that these traits existed because Alex was someone who had accepted his death, and kept walking every-day, only to meet it.

For Serah, who wanted to become a chevalier to try to save people who were crushed by terror, and driven to despair, it hurt just to look at him. For the first time in her life she had felt a dire need to protect and save someone right in-front of her, and at the same time she had felt a horrible fear that she would fail, and worse, that fear crept into the rest of her mind. About everything that she had been so sure, she now started to feel doubts. She began to worry that she may be inadequate; that she would fail and disappoint her family; and that she would go South only to die, without ever helping anyone or achieving anything. For now it was only a small doubt eating at the edges of her thoughts, but she felt it growing day-by-day.

Serah needed to save him and protect him, not because she had feelings for him, but because she felt that to be a chevalier of a Southern order it was something that she had to do. ‘If he fell for me, that would be for the best,’ she thought, ‘because at-least then he would have something to live for, and something to be happy about. If he fell for me, he could tell me his problems too, and then I could help him… and even if we parted ways afterwards, at least he would be saved.’

The wind whipped up her hair again, and the chilly breeze wrapped around her, but she couldn’t pull herself away from the window. What kept her there was the deal that she had made with Alex. It was a deal that tied her hands; a deal that had seemed like an excellent idea at the time, but now scared her.

“Alex. Wake up.” Star’s soft voice roused him from his sleep.

It was a familiar experience. She had whispered like that almost every night in the beginning, always saving him from the worst of his nightmares after his family had been killed. She had stopped his screams from ever escaping his throat when he’d become afraid in the night, forced him to eat when he could not, and talked to him for months on-end, pulling him back from the madness that had threatened to take him. The nightmares didn’t come as often now, but he still felt better whenever she woke him.

“Are we surrounded?” Alex asked quietly, his mood quickly darkening. He hadn’t intended to fall asleep.

“No”

“What’s the time?”

“Around midnight. I decided to let you rest a little. You were exhausted.”

He sat up. For a moment he felt like arguing, but then he thought better of it. They could reach the centre of Zephyr in an hour or two and attack while the enemy was most likely to be asleep. His energy had mostly returned. He hadn’t intended to sleep, but everything was in his favour. Now all he had to do was slip away and take care of business.

“Thanks.” Getting to his feet, he collected Zero from the cupboard, still wrapped in a cloth, then silently exited the room.

Etheret was not quiet. A stiff breeze moved over the roof and windows, and the noises of nocturnal creatures could be heard from the forest to the North. It was noisy enough, that the slow passage of a single person through the halls could easily go unnoticed.

The grounds beyond were much harder to navigate. Moonlight streamed down and lit the long pathway and surrounding grass all the way from the commoners’ dorms to the front gate. Save for a small section where that path passed under the buildings around the central courtyard everything was in clear view.

Alex considered his options for a few seconds, then shrugged and walked out into the light with a stride that declared that he was going about business as-per-usual. Keeping his head down and his features out of the light, he continued this forced march all the way to the gate without anyone challenging him, then with a little help from Star and some free-floating carrion, went over. If anyone had tried to confront him at this point, he’d have just run away. It was getting into such a place, not breaking out, that was difficult.

As he hit the ground, he whispered , .

She had seen him walk out of the door, and immediately moved from her chair to the window-sill, her fingers wrapping tightly around the wood. Nobody would have realised that it was him but her, and on seeing the wrapped weapon in his hand, even she had doubts: his travel-bag had not been big enough to hold something that size.

She wanted to stop him or to go with him. She didn’t know where he was going, but with a weapon in his hand she felt that this might be her last chance; that he could be throwing his life away tonight. She was scared that he might die; that this might be her last opportunity to stop him; and that she would regret this moment for the rest of her life. Serah was also very tired, and her already fragile emotions were starting to get the better of her.

Looking down at him she considered her options. She knew that she could whisper, and he would hear her, but she’d already told him that she wouldn’t bother him anymore, and Serah would never go back on her word. Having witnessed his battle with Scarlet, Serah also knew that she didn’t have the kind of power required to protect him yet, or even participate in battles that utilized arcane forces, so even if she went with him she could do nothing. Furthermore, she didn’t think that there was anything that she could do, short of raising the alarm, to stop him if he was seriously going to fight, so instead she just stood there, lost.

Then suddenly, looking at the wrapped weapon, she realized there was one thing that she could do. If he was going in to battle, that meant that he had his spirits with him, and earlier that day she had heard him say one of their names. She thought to herself ‘I said that I wouldn’t bother him, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t talk to them.’

She didn’t need to struggle to remember the name. She had treated that name like a treasure the moment that he had revealed it. It was the name of one of his “secret weapons,” and also likely one of his closest and few trusted friends after-all, and friends were very important to Serah.

“Star” she whispered, calling the infused name just soft enough that it wouldn’t reach his ears. She struggled to keep her emotions from spilling out in her voice. “Please protect him. Please, please don’t let him die.”

There was no answer, and Alex walked past the nobles’ dormitory, under the arches of the school building and out of sight. Her chest tightened, and she couldn’t breathe. Her legs were growing weak and her thoughts were in a frenzy as the worst of all possible outcomes flashed before her eyes.

She suddenly reeled back from the windowsill. To the left of her face she had just seen a little flicker. It took her a moment to realize that it was the flicker that carrion showed to reveal their presence, and then it flickered again. It was Melty she realized, from behaviour alone. Floating right in-front of her, Melty mumbled something in the spirit language that she couldn’t understand then began to speak, softly relaying a message. It was something that Melty should never have done for another person. The spirit was bound to her, so it should have been impossible for someone else to use it, but still it spoke.

“Everything is okay. Don’t worry, I will definitely bring him back, so please Serah, get some sleep. You’ve done enough today.”

Her lip quivered, and she felt tears prick her eyes.

“Who’s that?” Scarlet asked from behind her, drowsily.

Serah jumped in surprise, then turned around smiling “Nobody.”

The redhead blinked at her happy, tearful face in confusion. “Does that grin mean you and your boyfriend are all-good now?”

She stomped her foot. “I told you, It’s not like that!”

“Shhhh. Don’t wake Aya, she’s really scary when she’s tired you know? … and hurry up and get some sleep already.” Scarlet completely ignored her denial.

“Y-yeah, alright.” Serah whispered with a slight pout and closed the window quietly before climbing into her bedding on the floor between her two friends.

“He’s still getting a punch from me for keeping you up.” Scarlet muttered stubbornly, facing away from Serah. “I’m just telling you now, so you don’t get angry at me.”

Serah smiled up at the ceiling, and finally let her eyes close.

“Serah?”

She was asleep.