The door finished swinging open, and for a moment nobody in the room moved at all.
Sylas stood frozen mid-gesture, one hand still half-raised from whatever point he'd been making before the footsteps outside had gone quiet. Lorian's eyes had gone wide and fixed, his usual composure nowhere in evidence, arms hovering awkwardly over the shirt he'd been folding. Standing in the doorway were two young men whose faces half the academy had already spent the morning whispering about.
The silver-haired one shifted his weight slightly, looking almost apologetic about the silence he'd walked into. Beside him, the second newcomer adjusted his grip on his travel bag, glancing between Sylas and Lorian with the faint, patient awkwardness of someone who'd clearly lived through this exact moment more than once already.
Azraeth broke the silence first, rising from the edge of his bed with the same unhurried calm he brought to most things.
"Hi, I'm Azraeth," he said. "And you are?"
The silver-haired boy's shoulders eased visibly at the ordinary question, and a polite smile crossed his face. "I'm Kaelion. Kaelion Storme. Nice to meet you."
That seemed to break whatever spell had held the room still. Sylas's grin snapped back into place, all trace of his earlier shock swallowed by open enthusiasm. "Nice to meet you too! I'm Sylas Aerwyn."
"I'm Eryndor Greymont," the second newcomer added, dipping his head. "Nice to meet you."
Lorian, still quietly reassembling his composure, spoke last, his voice flat and economical as ever. "I'm Lorian."
With introductions handled, Kaelion and Eryndor carried their bags toward the two remaining lockers, settling into the same familiar rhythm of unpacking the other three had gone through an hour earlier. Both of them shed their travel clothes without much ceremony, pulling the folded academy robes from their bags and changing into them right there between the lockers — charcoal-grey settling over Kaelion's shoulders first, then Eryndor's, the sapphire trim catching the afternoon light for a moment before dulling to match the rest of the fabric.
Kaelion rolled his shoulders once the robe settled into place, a small, satisfied sound escaping him. "Huh. Nobody warned me these were this comfortable."
"Told you," Sylas called over, not even looking up from his own bed.
Unable to stay quiet for long, drifted over to lean against the locker frame while Kaelion sorted through a neat stack of folded shirts.
"So," Sylas said, feigning casualness so poorly it was almost endearing, "are you two the sons of the two members of the famous Six Mega Wizards?"
Kaelion and Eryndor exchanged a brief, weary glance before both nodding.
Sylas let out a low, theatrical whistle before breaking into laughter. "Well, aren't you guys popular with the girls?" He grinned wider. "Do you know anyone? Any girls you could introduce us to?"
"Not interested," Azraeth said, without looking up from the shirt he was folding.
"No," Lorian added, equally unbothered.
Sylas clutched his chest as though genuinely wounded. "What!? Traitors, both of you."
Kaelion laughed, something loosening in his shoulders that had probably stayed tight since the moment he'd walked through the academy gates that morning. "Unfortunately, I don't know any girls in this academy yet," he said, "but maybe Eryndor does. He's the popular one, after all."
"I'm not popular," Eryndor said evenly, not even glancing up from his locker, "and I don't know any girls."
"Yet," Kaelion said, grinning, and Sylas laughed right along with him.
Sylas's attention swung immediately toward Azraeth, delight practically radiating off him. "Maybe Azraeth knows some girls. He's good-looking, after all."
The room erupted into laughter.
Azraeth shook his head, entirely unbothered. "No, I'm not good-looking or anything. And I don't know any girls."
He said it plainly, without false modesty dressing it up — the honest answer of someone who genuinely hadn't spent much time considering his own appearance one way or another.
"Well," Sylas said, undeterred, "I guess he already has a girlfriend, then." He turned toward the others with mock solemnity. "I wish I had that kind of face. Your parents must be geniuses, Azraeth."
"I don't have a girlfriend," Azraeth said, calm and sincere.
Kaelion tucked the last of his shirts into the locker and turned, something more genuine slipping into his tone. "Why don't you use that face of yours to attract a few girls? Might take some of the staring off us, at least. Being the sons of Mega Wizards gets pretty annoying sometimes."
Eryndor nodded, closing his own locker. "Yeah... we're just students like everyone else."
Something in the way he said it made clear the sentiment ran deeper than a passing complaint, and Azraeth understood it easily enough — the particular exhaustion of being seen first as a name and only much later as a person.
Kaelion shook off the moment quickly, turning toward Sylas with mischief creeping back into his expression. "Hey, Sylas. Do you have a girlfriend?"
Sylas answered with a perfectly straight face. "Why? You wanna be my girlfriend? No thanks. I'm good."
The room burst into laughter again, and this time even Lorian laughed properly — a short, surprised sound that seemed to catch him as off guard as everyone else.
"If you don't have a girlfriend," Kaelion said, still grinning, "you can just say you don't."
"You're talking like you actually have one," Eryndor said, a faint smirk tugging at his mouth.
Sylas straightened with sudden confidence. "Actually... I do."
Everyone went still.
"Who?" Kaelion asked immediately, leaning forward with gleeful suspicion. "Is she here? In this academy?"
Sylas shook his head. "She's in a different nation."
"What nation is she from, then?"
Sylas let the pause stretch just long enough to be unbearable.
"My imagination."
The room dissolved into laughter, loud and unguarded, the kind of laughter that only happened once strangers had already started becoming something closer to friends. Kaelion had to lean against the wall to keep from losing his balance, Eryndor covered his mouth with one hand, still shaking, and even Lorian doubled over slightly, bracing himself against his own locker.
It was somewhere in the middle of that wave of laughter that everything went abruptly, catastrophically wrong.
A sound cut through the room — low, prolonged, unmistakable — and every head turned at once, the laughter dying as fast as it had risen. A beat of stunned silence followed, thick enough to feel.
Kaelion was the first to speak, pinching his nose, eyes watering. "...Wow." He waved a hand weakly in front of his face. "Who planted a bomb in here? That's unbelievably strong."
The room exploded into fresh laughter, louder than before, five bodies scrambling for the door in an undignified rush, the unnamed culprit sprinting alongside everyone else without a shred of hesitation.
They spilled out into the corridor gasping, half from the smell and half from laughing too hard to breathe properly. Eryndor, still wiping his eyes, managed to compose himself first.
"Alright," he said, grinning. "If whoever did that admits it, I'll introduce him to a girl I know."
Sylas's hand shot straight up. "It was me!" He beamed. "So — where's the girl?"
The corridor erupted all over again.
Eryndor shook his head, thoroughly delighted with himself. "I already told you earlier. I don't know any girls."
Sylas's face fell so dramatically that Kaelion nearly doubled over a second time, and even Azraeth found himself laughing openly now, the sound easy and unguarded in a way it rarely was around people he'd known for less than an hour.
Once the laughter finally wound down enough for anyone to breathe properly, they filtered back inside — and the smell, stubborn and undiminished, greeted them the moment they crossed the threshold.
Lorian wrinkled his nose immediately. "Hey, Sylas." He gestured vaguely at the air. "Use your wind. Get rid of that smell. It stinks."
Sylas heaved a long-suffering sigh, as though the request were a great personal sacrifice, before lifting both hands. A gentle current stirred to life around his fingers, swirling lazily through the room and gathering the stale air into a slow, deliberate spiral that carried it out through the half-open window, fresh air sweeping in behind it in a clean, cool breath that smelled faintly of the courtyard outside. Within moments, the room had cleared entirely, curtains stirring once more with nothing more than ordinary afternoon air.
"Better?" Sylas asked, looking rather pleased with himself.
"Much," Lorian said, and this time there was something almost warm in it.
The five of them settled back into their respective corners of the room, the earlier chaos folding easily into a comfortable, companionable quiet. Sunlight had shifted further across the floor while they'd been outside, gilding the edge of Sylas's messy hair and catching the dust drifting above the half-unpacked lockers, and beneath the last of the fading laughter, Azraeth found himself quietly grateful — for the ordinary, ridiculous warmth of strangers slowly becoming something else entirely.
It was in that quiet that his hand brushed against his pocket and remembered the small device the Enrollment Officer had pressed into his palm that morning.
He pulled it out, turning its smooth, crest-etched surface over once in his fingers, curiosity settling in behind his still-lingering smile. The others had already drifted into their own conversation again, Sylas attempting, unsuccessfully, to give his imaginary girlfriend a name, leaving Azraeth a small pocket of quiet in which to study the thing properly for the first time.
I almost forgot about this.
He turned it over once more, studying the faint etchings along its edge, and found himself wondering exactly what it was meant to do — and what, if anything, it might reveal about the academy he'd just agreed to call home.