The first sign that something was wrong with Lira was how quiet the bond became.
Not silent. Just… muffled. Like hearing someone speak from behind a closed door.
Days passed after the Festival of Constellations. Classes resumed. Training schedules reappeared like nothing had changed. Students gossiped about lantern games and who danced with whom under which constellation.
For us, everything had changed.
The triad bond had settled into something almost natural—three presences in constant low-level awareness of each other. If I focused, I could feel Lira studying in the library, Seris arguing with a tutor over a rune interpretation, both of them unconsciously shifting closer to wherever I was on the grounds.
But somewhere midweek, Lira's presence shifted.
She didn't vanish. She didn't withdraw completely. It was subtler than that.
She became… distant.
Her emotional tone lost its usual texture. Where there had been gentle currents of thought—calm determination, curiosity, the occasional flicker of quiet joy—there was now a smooth surface. Carefully held.
Too carefully.
In person, she acted almost normal.
Almost.
She answered questions in class with her usual precision. She trained with us, her spells clean, controlled, effective. She spoke with us in the courtyard at lunch, offering small smiles, measured words.
But the bond told a different story.
It was like standing on the shore of a lake you knew had depth, and seeing it frozen over. Clear enough to see the darkness below, but hard and cold at the surface.
Seris noticed too.
We were leaving the alchemy wing one afternoon when she said, lightly, "Our resident river's been awfully icy lately, don't you think?"
I didn't pretend not to understand. "She's stressed. The Council's watching. The shrine's still active. Our bond keeps changing."
Seris nodded, but her eyes were sharper than her tone. "Yeah. That's what she'd say too. But that's not it."
"What is it then?" I asked.
She shrugged one shoulder, looking up at the academy towers. "Ask her. Before the ice cracks."
The bond shifted as she spoke, a faint echo of her worry brushing against my ribs.
That night, I told myself I'd talk to Lira the next day.
That night, the bond made that decision for me.
---
It was sometime past midnight when I jerked awake.
The dorm room was dark, save for the faint light from the corridor slipping under the door. My heart hammered. My mark burned.
Not the usual soft glow.
This was sharp, urgent, like hot metal pressed too close to skin.
I sat up, breathing hard.
"Lira?" I whispered into the dark, instinctively reaching for the bond.
For a second, there was nothing.
Then it hit.
Fear.
Guilt.
A desperate, spiraling panic that wasn't mine.
It slammed through the link hard enough to make my vision blur.
I swung my legs off the bed.
Across the bond, Seris's energy flickered awake too—confusion first, then alarm. Arin? Lira? What's—
I didn't wait to answer.
I grabbed my boots with shaking hands, didn't bother with the laces, and bolted for the door.
---
The corridors were nearly empty at this hour.
Moonlight painted long rectangles on the floor where it slipped through high windows. The torches had burned low, their flames small and tired. My footsteps echoed louder than they should have.
The bond tugged me like a compass.
East wing.
Training hall.
Each turn I took, the sensation sharpened. The air grew heavier, the way it did before a storm. Magic pressed against my skin, prickling.
When I pushed open the doors to the east practice hall, the first thing I noticed was the temperature.
It was freezing.
My breath fogged immediately. Frost clung to the pillars, creeping along the carved grooves like living veins. The training circles on the floor were laced with thin sheets of ice, glimmering faintly in the moonlight pouring through the high windows.
And in the center of the main circle, Lira knelt.
She wasn't wearing a cloak.
Her hair hung loose around her, strands sticking to her cheeks. The thin fabric of her sleep shirt clung to her shoulders, visibly shivering. Her hands braced on the stone, fingers splayed, and from each palm, thin channels of ice spiderwebbed outward in jagged lines.
"Lira," I breathed.
She didn't look up.
Her magic did.
The air around her shimmered with condensed moisture, droplets freezing midair before hitting the ground. Her mark burned bright on her wrist, visible even from here, light pulsing too fast, too hard.
The bond screamed with her emotions.
I stepped forward. "Lira!"
Her head snapped up.
Her eyes glowed faintly—not a color they should ever be. The calm brown I knew so well was gone, replaced by something bright and fractured, reflecting the frost around her.
"Don't," she said, voice raw. "Stay back."
I ignored that and closed the distance anyway, boots slipping slightly on the ice. "What are you doing? You're going to injure yourself—"
"I am the injury," she snapped. Her voice cracked on the last word.
The bond surged—fear, self-disgust, anger—all churning beneath a thin layer of control.
"You're not—"
"Don't tell me what I am," she whispered.
Her hands clenched.
The ice responded.
A jagged pillar shot up from the floor between us.
I barely stopped in time.
Shards scattered, slicing the air. One cut a thin line across my cheek.
I raised a hand to it, feeling the sting. "Lira—"
She flinched. The glow in her eyes faltered for a heartbeat. "I didn't mean— I didn't—"
The bond convulsed.
Her carefully flattened emotions buckled, and for the first time since I'd known her, I felt Lira completely unshielded.
It was like standing under a collapsed dam.
The pressure hit me full force—years of held-back fear, of always being the calm one, the stable one, the one others leaned on. The terror of being anything else. The quiet grief of never being allowed to fall apart. And beneath it all, a new fear, raw and ugly:
Of being replaced.
Of being left behind as the bond expanded.
Of being useful, but not chosen.
My knees almost gave out.
"Lira," I said softly, forcing my legs to move again. "You're hurting yourself."
"I have to control it," she said through clenched teeth. Frost formed with every breath. "If I don't, it breaks everything. Everyone."
Her voice shook, but her hands pressed harder into the floor. The ice thickened, crawling up her forearms now, spidering across her skin like a spreading crack.
The bond throbbed painfully.
> [Warning: emotional output exceeding safe threshold]
[Primary channel: LIRA THALEN]
[Risk of psychic destabilization: HIGH]
I gritted my teeth. "This isn't control. This is collapse."
She laughed then.
It was a horrible sound—brittle and tired and nothing like her usual quiet humor.
"What do you know about control, Arin?" she whispered. "You're the center. Everything bends around you. You get to fall apart and we hold you together. That's how it works, isn't it?"
The words stung more than the cut on my face.
I stepped around the cracked pillar slowly, hands open and empty. "Is that really what you think?"
"What I feel doesn't matter," she said. "What I am is what matters. I am the stable one. The calm one. The one who doesn't break." Her voice wavered. "If I break, then everything does."
She squeezed her eyes shut.
A ring of ice exploded outward.
I barely had time to brace. The force slammed into my chest, sending me sliding back across the floor. My shoulder smashed into a pillar, sending a jolt of pain down my arm.
"Lira, stop!" I gasped.
"I tried!" Her eyes flew open, and the glow was fiercer now, almost painful to look at. "I tried to stay steady. Tried to accept it. You and Seris, this… bond. The Council. The shrine. All of it. I tried to hold it so you wouldn't have to."
Her voice broke fully.
"But I can't," she whispered. "I can't hold all of this. I'm not a lake. I'm drowning."
Something shattered in the bond.
Not the link.
My idea of her.
Lira, who always had the right answer. Lira, who moved like a quiet river around my fire and Seris's lightning. Lira, who smiled softly and said we'll figure it out and meant it.
She was shaking.
Her knuckles were white.
The ice had climbed past her elbows now, thin cracks running along it like veins. Her skin beneath looked too pale.
She wasn't a still lake.
She was a dam about to burst.
And she had never been allowed to.
A familiar spark jolted through the bond.
Arin—? Where are you—what's happening—
Seris.
She felt it too.
Her fear shot through me like electricity. She was moving now, running through the corridors toward us; I could feel every footfall like small impacts along my ribs.
I pushed myself off the pillar. "Lira. Look at me."
She did.
For a heartbeat, I saw her.
Not the glow. Not the ice.
Her.
Tired. Terrified. Desperate.
I stepped into the circle fully.
The temperature dropped another few degrees.
"Don't come closer," she whispered.
I kept walking.
Her fingers twitched. Ice cracked ominously.
"I'll hurt you," she said.
"I know," I replied.
"Then stop—"
"I'm not leaving you alone with this."
Her breath hitched.
The bond roared, a storm of fear and longing and rage and something else she'd buried so deep she didn't even recognize it herself.
I crossed the last bit of frozen floor and sank to my knees in front of her.
Her hands were still pressed to the ice.
Mine covered them.
Her eyes went wide.
My skin burned against the freezing surface. Pain knifed up my arms as the cold bit into my palms, but I didn't pull away.
"Let go," I said.
"I can't," she whispered. "If I let go, it wins. I lose control. I'm afraid of what I'll do. To you. To her. To everyone."
"You already are losing control," I said, voice low. "But you're doing it alone. That's what's killing you."
Frost crept along my fingers.
The bond surged.
I let it.
I stopped trying to shield myself from her and opened up completely in return.
I let her feel everything:
My fear—for her, not of her.
My confusion.
My frustration with the Council.
My guilt for standing in the center of something I never asked for.
My desperate, stubborn refusal to let either her or Seris bear this weight alone.
I let her feel how much I valued her steadiness.
And how much I hated that she thought that was all she was allowed to be.
"You're not just the calm one," I said, voice shaking with the effort of holding the connection open. "You're not my anchor because you never break, Lira. You're my anchor because you choose to stay, even when everything else is chaos. That doesn't mean you're not allowed to fall apart."
Her eyes blurred with tears.
"Don't say things like that," she whispered. "I won't be able to hold it if you say things like that."
"Then don't," I said.
The ice cracked again.
Not outward.
Inward.
Her whole body shuddered.
For a terrifying second, I thought the magic would explode, ripping the hall apart.
Then another energy rushed in.
Bright. Wild. Hot.
Seris.
"Move and I swear I'll set this entire circle on fire," she panted from behind me.
I didn't turn, but the bond showed me everything:
Seris at the edge of the ring, hair disheveled, half-dressed in whatever she'd grabbed in her panic. Her eyes wide, frantic, taking in the frost, the cracks, Lira on her knees, me with my hands fused to the ice.
She swore under her breath. "You two can't even have a meltdown at a normal hour, can you?"
"Seris—" Lira whispered.
Her voice broke on the name.
The glow in her eyes flickered.
Seris stepped into the circle.
Her boots slid on the frost, but she caught herself, hands lifted. Sparks danced along her fingers, tiny arcs of light.
"Don't you dare apologize," she said, words sharp and shaking. "Not tonight."
Lira's shoulders shook. "I— I couldn't— it was too much—"
"Of course it was too much," Seris said, moving closer. "You're human, not a containment rune."
The bond shivered as Seris's energy brushed against ours fully—an unruly current slamming into a frozen river.
"We're going to blow something," I gritted out.
"Not if we guide it," Seris shot back.
She dropped to the floor beside us, forming a triangle around the center of the circle—Lira in front, me and Seris at either side.
She reached forward.
Her hand landed over Lira's wrist.
Mine tightened over Lira's other hand.
The bond flared white-hot.
> [TRIAD LINK MAX OUTPUT]
[Stability at critical edge]
[Override protocol available]
The System's voice boomed through my head, but for once, I didn't care about the warnings.
"Lira," Seris said, and there was nothing playful in her tone now. Only raw honesty. "You don't get to decide that you're the only one who has to be strong. That's not how this works. That's not how we work."
Lira's tears spilled over, freezing almost as soon as they fell, tiny crystals on her cheeks.
"I don't know how to not hold everything in," she choked. "If I let go, it feels like I'll disappear."
"You won't," I said.
"How do you know?" she whispered.
"Because," Seris said, leaning in so their foreheads almost touched, "we're holding you now."
She closed her eyes.
I did the same.
Together, we pulled.
Not on Lira.
On the magic.
On the wild, out-of-control frost surging through her channels. On the resonance spinning her thoughts into chaos. On the storm that wasn't meant for one person to carry alone.
It hurt.
It felt like grabbing a live wire with bare hands.
Seris took the brunt of the excess, her internal magic flaring to meet it, redirect it, bleed off the worst of the spikes through her own channels.
I stabilized the structure, weaving what I could into something resembling a braid instead of a snarl.
Lira, at the center, shook as the pressure slowly, painfully eased.
Ice cracked.
Not in explosive bursts this time.
In long, slow fractures that signaled thaw.
Moonlight poured through the high windows, catching in the falling shards like broken glass.
My lungs burned. Seris's breath came ragged.
Lira's voice, when it finally emerged again, was small.
"I'm afraid," she whispered. "I'm so tired of pretending I'm not. I'm afraid you'll outgrow me. That she'll be better for you. That the bond will change and I'll just—fade."
"Absolutely not," Seris said immediately.
Her tone left no room for argument.
Lira let out a choked laugh that was almost a sob. "You don't understand—"
"I understand more than you think," Seris snapped. "You think I don't see it? How you look at him when you think no one's watching? How you look at us when we're together? Like we're something you're not allowed to want as much as we do?"
The bond twisted with her words, dredging up things none of us had said out loud.
"You two keep acting like you're side characters in each other's story," Seris continued, breathing hard. "News flash: you're both wrong. You're main to me. To this. To him."
Her hand tightened on Lira's wrist.
"Let us prove it," she said softly.
The frost along Lira's arms shimmered.
Long cracks formed, running down to her fingertips.
Then, slowly, it began to fall away in thin, glittering slivers.
The air warmed by a fraction.
The glow in Lira's eyes dimmed, revealing brown again—bloodshot, wet, but hers.
She sagged forward.
If I hadn't been there, she would've hit the ice.
I caught her.
Her weight collapsed against my chest, all the rigid self-control gone, leaving only exhaustion and trembling muscles.
Her hands, freed from the frozen prison, clutched weakly at my coat.
"Arin…" she whispered.
"I'm here," I said, throat tight. "I'm not going anywhere."
On her other side, Seris's hand slid to the back of her head, fingers tangling gently in her hair as she bent close, pressing her forehead against Lira's temple.
"We're both here," she murmured. "You don't get to be alone in this anymore. That era is over."
The bond quivered—no longer a stretched wire, but a rope pulled taut and then finally allowed to slacken just enough to be safe.
> [TRIAD RESONANCE: STABILIZING]
[Overload risk: decreasing]
[Emotional threshold exceeded, new baseline set.]
We stayed like that for a long time.
Lira's sobs came in small, broken bursts at first, then slowly tapered off. Her breathing evened. The last of the ice melted, leaving only damp patches on the floor and thin trails of frost on the pillars.
By the time she went limp against me, the bond had quieted to a low, steady hum.
"Is she—?" Seris began.
"Asleep," I said, feeling the slow, heavy rhythm of her breathing. "Or as close as she can get after that."
"Good," Seris muttered. "She needs it."
My arms ached. My fingers still felt half-frozen. Seris looked drained, dark circles smudged under her eyes, stray sparks still dancing occasionally over her skin as her magic settled.
"We should get her to the infirmary," I said.
"They'll ask questions," Seris replied.
"They already have questions," I said. "At least this way, she'll be warm. And watched."
Seris hesitated.
The bond showed me what she didn't say: fear that the Council would use this as an excuse to force a separation. To declare the bond too dangerous. To isolate one of us "for everyone's good."
"We're not hiding this," I said softly.
She looked at me, jaw tight. "You're sure that's wise?"
"No," I admitted. "But I'm sure that hiding it isn't. They already know we're unstable. Let them see we're also capable of repairing ourselves."
Seris huffed. "You're getting good at optimistic speeches."
"I had good teachers," I said.
She glanced down at Lira, then back at me. "Fine. Let's go. Before I change my mind and smuggle her into my room instead."
"Please don't," I said.
"Oh, relax. I'd at least give her the bed and sleep on the floor," Seris muttered.
I adjusted my grip under Lira's knees and shoulders and lifted her, grunting slightly at the effort. She was lighter than she should have been.
Had she been sleeping this badly for days?
Seris walked beside me, one hand hovering near Lira's back as if ready to catch her if I faltered.
We left the shattered, frost-cracked hall behind.
---
The infirmary attendant on night duty was too tired to ask many questions.
He took one look at Lira's pale face, listened to the word "resonance overload," and muttered something about "Council experiments" under his breath before directing us to a cot near the back.
We laid her down together.
Seris pulled the blanket up to her shoulders, tucking it in more carefully than I'd expected. Her usual carelessness was gone, replaced by something almost… gentle.
"We should tell them in the morning," I said quietly. "The Council. Or at least Dareth. Before they hear it from someone else."
Seris made a face. "I hate that you're right."
"Doesn't make it less true," I said.
She sighed. "Fine. Tomorrow we face the old men. Tonight, we stand guard."
"You don't have to stay," I said. "You look like you're about to fall over."
"So do you," she shot back.
We stared at each other for a second.
Then we both looked at Lira.
And that was that.
We stayed.
I sat on the chair beside the cot. Seris took the one against the wall, propping her boots on the edge of my seat, like she needed contact to prove we were all still here.
The infirmary lights were dim, a soft golden glow. Outside, the sky was beginning to pale toward gray.
Lira slept.
Her face, without the tension she always held in it, looked younger.
Smaller.
Human.
Seris rested her chin on her hand, eyes fixed on her. "I didn't think she could break like that," she whispered.
"No one can hold that much forever," I said. "Not alone."
Seris glanced at me. "You know this'll happen to you too, right? Eventually?"
"Probably," I said.
"And me," she added.
"Yes."
She leaned back, closing her eyes briefly. "We're a disaster."
"Maybe," I said. "But we're a disaster together."
The bond pulsed once—soft, steady, a quiet agreement.
For the first time since it formed, it didn't feel like a chain pulled taut.
It felt like a promise.
I watched Lira's slow, even breathing.
I listened to Seris's, slightly rougher but relaxing bit by bit.
I felt the three of us linked even in sleep and exhaustion.
"Don't worry," I said under my breath, not sure which of them I was talking to. "I'm not letting either of you drown. Not now. Not ever."
The System's response drifted faintly at the edge of my awareness:
> [New emotional parameter registered: mutual safeguard]
[Triad resilience: increased]
I let my eyes close, just for a moment.
When the Council came tomorrow, we'd face them.
When the shrine's resonance called again, we'd answer.
When the bond overloaded next time, we'd handle it better.
Because now, the ice had cracked.
And in the fractures, something new was growing.
Not stillness.
Not chaos.
Connection.