Elarion spent the rest of the day avoiding people.
It was easier than expected. The College had a rhythm—students flowed between classes at predictable intervals, gathered in common areas during specific hours, retreated to dormitories after dinner. Understanding the rhythm meant moving through its gaps.
He attended his other classes like a ghost passing through walls. Quantum Resonance Studies with Doctor Vael—a woman who lectured with the intensity of someone personally offended by uncertainty principles. Combat Practicals with Master Sergeant Kole—a scarred veteran who made Elarion think of his own military trainers, the ones who'd taught him that efficiency mattered more than elegance. Historical Analysis with Professor Mirelle—an elderly scholar who spoke about the Silent War with the careful distance of someone who'd lost people in it.
That last class made his jaw tight. She mentioned battles he'd been in, causality numbers he'd contributed to, strategic decisions that had shaped outcomes. Spoke about them like history, ancient and settled.
But they didn't feel ancient to him. They felt like yesterday.
By evening, Elarion had successfully attended four classes without speaking to anyone, eating in a corner of the dining hall where the acoustics naturally dampened conversation, and returning to his room without incident.
He was closing his door, already calculating tomorrow's routes, when a voice spoke from down the hallway.
"You're very good at that."
He turned. Froze.
The girl from Thorne's class stood three doors down, leaning against her doorframe with her arms crossed. Up close, she looked tired—shadows under those storm-colored eyes, tension in her shoulders that spoke of someone carrying weight they couldn't set down.
"Good at what?" Elarion kept his voice neutral.
"Disappearing." She tilted her head slightly, studying him with an directness that felt like being x-rayed. "I counted twenty-three people in class this morning. By lunchtime, if you'd asked anyone how many students were there, they'd have said twenty-two. You're the one they forgot."
Elarion's hand tightened on his doorknob. "I'm just quiet."
"No." She pushed off from the doorframe but didn't come closer. "Quiet is different. Quiet is a choice about volume. What you do is... something else. It's like you teach people's attention to slide past you without them realizing they're doing it."
This was dangerous. Being noticed by someone perceptive enough to articulate exactly what he was doing—that destroyed the whole point.
"I think you're reading too much into someone having a shy personality," he said.
"Maybe." But she didn't sound convinced. "I'm Lira, by the way. Lira Ashwin. Since we're neighbors and all." She gestured vaguely at the doors between them.
Elarion said nothing. Naming himself felt like giving something away.
But she waited, patient, until the silence became more awkward than the alternative.
"Elarion Voss."
"I know. Professor Thorne called on you after class." Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Or rather, he asked you to stay. That was interesting."
"Was it?"
"Thorne never talks to students individually on the first day. Certainly not for ten minutes." She paused. "What did he want?"
"To welcome me to the College."
"For ten minutes."
"He's very thorough."
Lira almost smiled—just a flicker at the corner of her mouth that suggested she recognized bullshit when she heard it but appreciated the effort. "Right. Well, Elarion Voss, if you ever want to be less invisible, I'm in room 45. We could study together. Compare notes. Discuss why Professor Thorne is obsessed with wave mechanics when every other theoretical mage in Eldoria is focused on particle manipulation."
That caught his attention despite himself. "You think it's strange?"
"I think everything about this place is strange." The almost-smile faded. "But I'm probably just paranoid. War does that to people."
The word landed between them like a stone dropped in still water.
War.
She'd said it casually, but Elarion heard the weight underneath. The way someone only spoke that lightly about heavy things when the alternative was not speaking at all.
"You served?" he asked before he could stop himself.
"Field medic. Northern front. Ended three years ago for me when a building collapsed and took most of my squad with it." She said it matter-of-factly, like reading from a casualty report. "I was the only one they pulled out alive. Funny how that works."
It wasn't funny. They both knew it.
"I'm sorry," Elarion said, and meant it.
"Don't be. I'm alive. They're not. Mathematics." But her voice had gone flat, and her hands had disappeared into her pockets—a defensive gesture, hiding tremors or clenched fists or both.
Elarion recognized the signs. He'd lived with them for sixteen years. The guilt of surviving. The hypervigilance. The way certain sounds or smells or random moments could transport you back to places you'd spent years trying to leave.
She'd been a medic. Which meant she'd seen the damage, touched the wounds, felt the lives slip away under her hands. Probably blamed herself for every one she couldn't save.
He understood that intimately.
"The war's over," he said quietly. Not because he believed it would help, but because sometimes people needed to hear it out loud.
"Is it?" Lira looked at him directly then, and there was something sharp and knowing in her gaze. "Because standing here, looking at you, seeing how hard you're trying not to exist... I don't think the war's over for you either."
The observation hit too close. Elarion felt his defenses snap up like shields.
"You don't know anything about me."
"No," she agreed. "But I know what running looks like. And you're running so hard you've almost disappeared completely." She turned back toward her door. "Anyway. The offer stands. If you want to study together, or just... not be alone while pretending you are. Room 45."
She opened her door.
"Lira."
She paused, glanced back.
"Why tell me this? About the war, about noticing me." He needed to understand. "What do you want?"
For a long moment, she just looked at him. Then, softly: "Maybe I'm tired of being the only person who remembers. Maybe seeing someone else who's trying to forget makes me feel less alone." She shrugged. "Or maybe I'm just curious about the guy who can make twenty-two people forget he exists."
She stepped into her room and closed the door gently.
Elarion stood in the hallway, staring at her closed door like it was a puzzle he couldn't solve.
She'd seen him. Actually seen him, through all his carefully constructed invisibility. Worse, she'd articulated exactly what he was doing in terms that suggested she understood not just the effect but the mechanism.
That made her dangerous.
Or valuable.
He couldn't decide which.
He retreated to his own room and locked the door, then stood at the window staring out at nothing in particular.
I don't think the war's over for you either.
She was right. The war had never ended—not for him. It had just changed theaters. Became internal. Became about staying hidden, staying safe, staying alive in a world that wanted to use people like him until there was nothing left but ash and regret.
But hearing someone else say it out loud...
That was different.
That was someone holding up a mirror and showing him what he looked like from the outside.
And he didn't like what he saw.
Sleep came hard that night, fractured by half-dreams where buildings collapsed and ash fell like snow and voices called his name from very far away.
He woke at 3 AM to the sound of footsteps in the hallway outside—too quiet, too deliberate. The footsteps of someone trying not to be heard.
Elarion rose silently, pressed his ear to the door, and listened.
One person. Moving slowly. Stopped outside room 45.
Lira's room.
He heard the soft scrape of a lock being picked—an amateur job, too much metal-on-metal friction. Heard the door open with a barely-audible creak.
Heard nothing after that.
Silence manipulation.
Professional-grade, better than the lock-picking. Someone knew what they were doing.
Elarion's mind raced through scenarios. Robbery. Assault. Kidnapping. Or something else entirely—some test, some message, some move in a game he didn't fully understand yet.
He could stay here. Safe in his room. Let whatever happened happen. It wasn't his problem. Lira was just a neighbor, someone he'd spoken to once, someone who'd made the mistake of noticing him.
Not his problem.
He was at his door before he'd consciously decided to move.
The lock turned soundlessly under his practiced hands. The hallway was dark except for the faint glow of safety lamps at each end. Lira's door stood half-open, spilling slightly more darkness into the already dark corridor.
Elarion moved without sound—not just quiet, but completely silent. He'd dropped the friction under his feet to near-zero, allowing his steps to glide. The air around him was manipulated to prevent pressure changes that might alert sensitive ears.
He reached her door, paused, listened.
Two breathing patterns inside. One slow and controlled—the intruder. One faster, muffled—Lira, probably gagged or held.
Elarion didn't think. Thinking took time, and time allowed things to get worse.
He stepped through the door like smoke.
The room's layout was identical to his—bed to the right, desk to the left, window straight ahead. Two figures near the window: one standing, one sitting on the floor against the wall. The standing figure wore dark clothes and a featureless mask. The sitting figure—Lira—had her hands bound, a cloth in her mouth, eyes wide with a fear she was trying very hard to control.
The intruder hadn't heard him enter. Was focused entirely on Lira, holding a knife casually, not threatening yet but present. Speaking in a low voice Elarion couldn't quite make out through his own silence effect.
He recalculated the approach. The intruder had a weapon, had position, had surprise. But Elarion had something better.
Physics.
He focused on the floor beneath the intruder's feet, reducing the coefficient of friction to nearly nothing—imagining ice, then imagining something even more frictionless. Graphene layers sliding past each other. Molecules that couldn't grip.
The intruder shifted weight, preparing to crouch down closer to Lira.
And went down hard.
The fall was spectacular—feet flying out, body rotating backward, head narrowly missing the desk corner before hitting the floor with a muted thump. The knife skittered away across the suddenly-slick floor.
Elarion was moving before the intruder finished falling. Three steps, all silent. He dropped friction further, sent the knife sliding toward the far corner, then restored normal friction everywhere except directly under the intruder—who struggled to rise, hands scrabbling uselessly against a floor that wouldn't provide purchase.
"Don't," Elarion said quietly, and the word carried a weight that suggested consequences beyond the immediate situation.
The intruder tried anyway—managed to get to hands and knees, started crawling toward the door with the awkward desperation of someone on ice. Elarion let him get almost to the threshold before restoring friction completely.
The sudden traction threw the intruder off balance. He sprawled forward into the hallway, and Elarion was there, knee pressing into the small of his back, hand finding the pressure point at the base of his skull that would cause unconsciousness in five seconds.
Four.
Three.
The intruder went limp.
Elarion checked his breathing—steady, regular, not dying—then pulled him fully into the hallway and closed Lira's door.
Then he turned.
Lira was staring at him with an expression that cycled through shock, confusion, and something that might have been vindication.
He crossed to her, pulled the gag free, started working on the bindings. They were professional-grade restraints, the kind that tightened when pulled. He reversed the mechanism with the practiced ease of someone who'd been on both sides of similar situations.
"Are you hurt?" His voice was barely a whisper.
She shook her head, rubbing her wrists as circulation returned. "What did you do?" Her voice was rough. "He just... fell. And then couldn't get up. Like the floor turned to ice."
"Later," Elarion said. "Did he say anything? What did he want?"
"He asked—" She stopped, swallowed. "He asked about you. About the person in room 47. Whether I'd talked to you, what you'd said, whether you'd told me anything about why you're here."
Ice settled in Elarion's chest. "What did you tell him?"
"That we'd met in class. That you seemed quiet. That we'd barely spoken." She met his eyes. "I didn't tell him about the hallway conversation. I don't know why, I just... didn't trust him."
Smart. Lira was smart. That would either keep her alive or get her killed, and Elarion wasn't sure which yet.
"You need to report this," he said.
"To who? Campus security? And tell them what—that someone broke in, asked about my neighbor, and then mysteriously fell over and knocked himself unconscious?" She stood up, steadier than he expected. "That's going to raise questions I don't think either of us wants to answer."
She was right. Reporting it meant attention, investigation, explanations about how the intruder was subdued. Which would lead to questions about Elarion, his abilities, his presence here.
Exactly what he'd been trying to avoid.
"So what do we do?" Lira asked.
Elarion looked at the closed door, behind which an unconscious intruder lay in the hallway. Looked at Lira, who'd been targeted because someone thought she might know something about him. Looked at the window, at the campus beyond, at the trap he'd walked into that was getting tighter by the hour.
"We find out who sent him," Elarion said quietly. "Before they send someone better."
Lira stared at him for a long moment. Then nodded once, sharp and decisive.
"Okay," she said. "But first, you're going to tell me what you did to that floor. Because that wasn't normal magic, and I'm not working with someone I don't understand."
Elarion almost smiled. Almost.
"Fair," he said. "But not here. Walls are thin, and I don't know who else is listening."
"Where then?"
He thought for a moment. "Roof. In an hour. There's an access door at the end of the west wing—unlock it from inside, prop it open. We'll talk there."
"Why an hour?"
"Because I need to deal with him first." Elarion gestured toward the door. "And you need time to decide if trusting me is stupider than staying in a room someone just broke into."
He moved toward the door, paused with his hand on the handle.
"Lira."
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. For not telling him about our conversation."
She wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly looking younger and more vulnerable than her composure suggested. "I told you. I know what running looks like." A pause. "And I think maybe you're running from the same people I am."
Elarion didn't confirm or deny. Just opened the door, stepped over the unconscious intruder, and disappeared down the hallway like he'd never been there at all.
But as he reached his own room, he felt something unfamiliar stirring in his chest.
Not quite trust.
Not quite hope.
But something adjacent to both.
Someone had seen him. Actually seen him. And instead of exposing him, she'd protected him.
That changed things.
He wasn't sure how yet.
But it changed things.