Julian woke to the usual hush of Ra Yellow's morning, quieter than the usual weekday rush, but filled with an excitement of possibility on the first weekend at the academy. Sunlight pushed through the blinds in thin, orderly slats and laid stripes across the little table he'd claimed as a desk. His deck was there already, squared and re-squared until the corners all faced the same way. The DuelPad lay beside it, screen dark, reflecting the narrow band of his eyes.
He didn't reach for the cards first. He reached for the notebook.
He flipped to a fresh page and dated it, Sunday, then wrote two words at the top line and boxed them.
Ba and Ka.
He stared at the box as if it might argue with him. It didn't. He added smaller letters beneath.
Ba is the inner essence, the fuel within' that expresses an individual's unique personality and psyche. Ka is the reflection of that essence in another body, an echo of its Ba turned into another life. If the Ba was the substantive of the essence, Ka was the verb. It's the means to turn determination into actions.
The tip of the pen hovered, waiting for a thesis that would make the box neat and complete. None came. He drew a short arrow down to a blank space and left it blank on purpose, a place for proof that didn't exist yet.
Only then did he press his thumb to the DuelPad. The screen flickered to life with the last thing he'd watched before falling asleep: his duel against Daigo frozen on a frame where Snatch Steal gleamed like a picked lock. The video's timestamp pulsed in the corner. He tapped back to the start and let the runplay roll, sound low.
The first hand appeared on screen. He'd mapped these sequences until he could see their skeletons without looking. He paused on his first set, let his finger hover over the little ghost of a trap icon, then resumed. The next two turns, more of the same. Extraction by inches. Wait, answer, thin the margins. It should have worked, and would continue to work, so long as probability stayed on its leash.
Julian scrubbed forward to the moment he had memorized on gut alone. Levianeer once again slid into his grasp from the top like a tide finding shore. Even in playback he felt the shift in his chest, the relief and the sting together. He watched his own face in the little reflection in the DuelPad glass and saw the way his shoulders had dropped for a breath, a man stepping into shade after walking in heat.
The boss monster hit the field. The crowd noise in the recording turned warm. He watched his line of play from above, as if judging another duelists' choices, and marked each choice with an invisible tick. Correct. Correct. Tight. Denko Sekka to smother the backrow: tidy, almost elegant; keep the turn window clean for once. He could still hear Zane from last night, a cool iron voice at his back: Plan for luck, not against it.
He had planned for a lot of luck. He hadn't planned for that kind specifically.
He let the video reach its end. Daigo drew. Snatch Steal glinted like a cheap miracle. The crowd made a noise that lived somewhere between laughter and pain. On the pad, his dragon moved to Daigo's side and the math changed sign. He watched his own field drain in four motions, each one as correct as the ones before. Correct didn't matter. His hand, in the corner of the screen, looked small.
He stopped the replay.
The room's quiet returned. Outside, gulls heckled each other over the water with the rude confidence of island life. He sat back and wrote under the boxed words: "Opening distributions skew low. Not variance alone. Something in me?", "Deck feels like a conversation I keep conducting in a language I only half know.", "Levianeer answers. The rest often doesn't. Would a blind choice for an archetype be enough to solve the issue?".
He wrote Syrus and circled it once, not too dark. The card had been a gift. It had meant a hundred little things that weren't text in a box. It was the one thing in the list that felt like hand to hand, not theory to table.
He heard movement in the hallway and the careful polite knock that only came from someone who belonged to Ra and had the temperament to prove it.
"Come in." he said.
Bastion opened the door with a stack of binders tucked to his ribs like bricks. His hair was impossible as always. He took in the notebook, the DuelPad, the squared deck, and gave a nod that could have been approval or the acceptance of a familiar ritual.
"You're up early." Bastion said. "Or late, for your usual."
"Both… I was up until late last night. And today is Sunday, a man can relax if he wishes so." Julian answered.
Bastion set the binders on the clean corner of the table. "I brought the standard deviation sheets we discussed. The more runs we do, the less thrilling the conclusion, but the data still feels good in the hands." He glanced at the DuelPad and then away as if the glow might be rude to look at too long. "That topdeck was… unfortunate."
Julian allowed himself a thin smile. "That's one word."
"There are others." Bastion said. "But we will go with unfortunate in mixed company. How are you feeling?"
"Like I'm trying to make a violin play a piano piece that was never rewritten." Julian compared. "It can be done with enough stubbornness and clever fingers. It's never quite the same thing. Good enough for accompaniment, not for a solo."
Bastion's expression warmed. "That is a better metaphor than anything in my binders." He tapped the topmost one with a knuckle. "I have a thought. You remember Zane's comment?"
"Plan for luck." Julian said.
"Close. He said plan for luck, not against it. Those two words are a bridge. You've built most of a castle on the wrong hill."
"I know." Julian said. He didn't say 'I can feel that now in places numbers don't touch'. "I'm going to the library. There's something I want to check."
"On a Sunday." Bastion said, not surprised. "And you call me a bookworm. You'll have it to yourself, at least. I'll be in the lab if you need a second mind."
"Thanks, man." Julian said. "For the data."
"Anytime." Bastion smiled and took his leave with the same efficient grace he'd entered.
Alone again, Julian closed the DuelPad and put it aside. He fanned the top of the deck and let the cards flutter against his thumb, not shuffling, just listening to the friction. When he re-squared them he did it by feel, letting the corners find each other without looking.
He thought of yesterday's end. The walk back under evening lamps. The talk with Zane. The quiet that followed, not hollow but puzzled. And, woven through all of it, the old words he'd written at the top of the page like a dare. Ba. Ka. In another life those words had been subtitles under a scene he'd watched on a screen. Now they were a set of scales on his desk, and he didn't know what they were meant to weigh, not truly.
He put the notebook in his bag and the deck in its box. He hesitated over Levianeer, thumb on the card's ridge, then slid the dragon into the stack like every other card. No wards. No talismans. If there was a language to learn, superstition wasn't it.
The corridor outside carried Ra Yellow in its ordinary state: quiet, rinsed in clean light, the scent of detergent and ocean. A couple of second-years drifted past in conversation about budget points for the week. Someone down the hall laughed, then remembered it was Sunday and shut the door to do it properly in private. He took the stairs instead of the lift and stepped into the campus morning.
Slifer Red's roofs were bright across the green, their paint always a little sunburned. He could see two figures walking the long path from the shore, one tall and loose in his joints and the other shorter and intent. Even at a distance, Jaden looked like he walked in time with music he hadn't told anyone else about. Syrus matched his step when he remembered to and trotted when he didn't.
They saw him seeing them and angled over, cutting across the lawn in that carefree rule-breaking Slifer way that never quite counted as breaking anything.
"G'morning, man!" Jaden said. It came out like a promise. Syrus echoed it with a small wave.
"Morning." Julian answered, a tired smile on his expression.
"You looked like you were doing math at the window until late." Jaden said, tapping his temple. "So I brought coffee to fight back." He produced a paper cup from somewhere impossible and offered it like an offering to a tired god. Syrus had a second cup and failed to hide it.
Julian took one gratefully. "Thanks, man." he said. "I was doing math, in a sense. The math fought first."
Syrus made a sympathetic face. "You'll get him next time. Daigo's deck is scary when it gets legs under it."
"It's good. Next time he won't have a chance." Jaden said. "Everyone can get a lucky draw."
Julian blew across the coffee. It steamed with the honest bitterness of cafeteria beans. Small talk was traded between them as they walked through the road directed to the academy. "I'm going to the library..." he said. "Check out some things that were stuck in my head."
Syrus glanced toward the main building with theatrical dread. "On a Sunday?"
"Is this that surprising?" Julian laughed. "Books don't know what day it is. Also, I'll have my shot at the blue dorm in a couple weeks, need to be ready."
Jaden's smile thinned in a curious way, thoughtful instead of bright. "What are you looking for? Like, specifically."
"A word for a thing I can feel but can't name." Julian said. He didn't add other words that would have made the sentence too long and too true.
"Then you need a place that knows how to properly answer." Jaden said. He looked at the trees, at the path, at the campus breathing. His gaze slipped toward the island's back like a bird's. "Sometimes places know things better than books do."
Julian met that look and filed it exactly where it belonged, somewhere between useless advice and the key to a locked door. "I'll start with the books…" he said. "If they fail me, I'll ask the trees and the river."
"Deal." Jaden smiled, as if Julian had promised him a show. "We're heading back to the dorm. We've got a morning ritual. It involves toast. If you end up needing help carrying all the knowledge you find, shout."
Syrus saluted with his coffee. "Good luck!"
They went. Julian watched them cross back toward the Slifer path and felt the odd small gravity Jaden carried wherever he went, like a pocket planet. The cup still warmed Julian's palm. He finished it as he walked.
The Academy library rose from the quad in hard lines of glass and stone, the kind of place that expected you to explain yourself. Inside, light fell in clean planes over long tables, and the air smelled faintly of toner and freshener. KaibaCorp plaques were everywhere: by the doors, over the terminals, stamped on the metal spines of rolling ladders, reminders that this was a house raised by a man who believed problems belonged to numbers.
He signed his name at the front desk. The librarian, half-hidden behind a monitor and a mug that said 'Property of Reference' glanced up, surprised to see anyone on a Sunday, and even more when she saw that it was a first-week student. Her eyebrows made a small ledger entry of him, then she went back to her screen, the stamp thudding once as if to mark the moment anyway. Before Julian could ask, she pointed sideways to a row of tablet screens that were used as an index for the place.
Before resorting to technology, Julian moved into the front stacks that wore the school's face: Holographic Field Stability; Applied Probability in Competitive Dueling; Latency Mitigation in Real-Time Projection Systems; Psychophysiology of Performance. The engineering rows were tidy as teeth. He took what he was supposed to take from those and started the sensible way: searching the tablet for words that had begun to mean more to him in the last twenty-four hours than they ever had before.
Spirit. Nothing, unless you counted a brochure on "team spirit" for intramurals. Soul. Absent, unless you meant the "soul" of a campus initiative in a dean's letter. Metaphysics. Redirected to "metaprogramming" once and to "metagame" six times. He tried phenomenology and got a citation about headset ergonomics.
He closed the last search screen with a wide gesture and let the silence sit. Of course a library founded by Seto Kaiba would not house a chapter on things he would have called parlor tricks. If the island had a section for ghosts, Kaiba would have renovated it into a lab.
Julian slid the tech stack back into alignment and turned his cart toward the part of the building where the carpet remembered other donors. The lighting warmed. The shelf labels lost their corporate font and drifted toward serif. History bled into Classics, then Archaeology, then Mythologies that had earned their plural.
He found what he didn't know he had come for only when he set his hand on an Egyptology spine and felt the cloth binding give a little, like an old jacket that still fit. A museum catalog with plates of funerary stelae. A survey of religion from an old empire. A thin reader with translations of pyramid texts and margin notes from a professor who had been generous with a pencil years ago.
He cleared a table by the window and opened the books into a single quiet. These weren't about Duel Monsters. They weren't about cards at all. That was the point.
He wrote what he knew he could stand behind: about Ba, Ka, Akh, Ren e Sheut.
He sketched the Ka arms twice until the motion lived in his wrist. These words were older than holograms and didn't owe anything to a duel disk. They didn't know what a tournament was. They still made more sense for what he'd felt since last night than any flowchart he'd traced.
If Ba is the part of me that looks out, and Ka what the world has to feed back so any looking means anything, then maybe the blank box at the top of his page wasn't ignorance. Maybe it was a scale waiting on a weight he hadn't learned how to place.
He flipped the catalog and let plates of limestone and paint lecture him without hurry. Bird-headed Bas hovered over wrapped bodies: little, stubborn shapes that refused to be just pictures. Ka arms repeated on lintels like a breath cast in stone. None of the captions mentioned spirits of cards or living monsters or wells under schools. They didn't need to. They gave him a grammar that didn't ask him to lie.
He checked the index for akh again and read a paragraph about effectiveness, about a person becoming akh when things were in their right places and offerings had been properly set out. No metaphysics a Kaiba would sign. Still… It was effective, landing better than anything he'd pulled from the tech shelf.
He closed the last book and left his DuelPad unlocked. Ba and Ka sat boxed at the top, not as trivia he'd cribbed from a show he loved, but as a vocabulary older than every card in his deck. He stared at the blank beneath and didn't try to force a thesis into it. Let the scale wait. Let the weight come when it was ready.
That was when he heard it: the small, exact sound that didn't belong to HVAC or pages, a patient drip that kept its own time. He looked up. The window at the far end faced a cut of rock where rainwater learned to sketch. Mineral stains crossed and, if he softened his gaze, wanted to be a circle. He blinked, and it was only runoff and stone again.
The books wouldn't have the next page he needed. The island would. He stacked his finds, rewrote the call numbers that needed rewriting, and slid everything back where it belonged: not because the librarian would care, but because order felt like an offering for him as well. Then he took his bag, let the doors hush behind him, and followed the sound the Academy hadn't cataloged.
The sound followed him out of the library: three slow drops, a pause, another. It was patient, exact, almost intentional. By the time he reached the outer steps, he could tell it wasn't in his ears; it was in his memory. Somewhere in the back of his mind, that rhythm had played before.
He stopped halfway down the path, the late sunlight washing over the campus roofs, and let his thoughts unspool. The island had only so many places where water talked like that. Then it came to him, not as a revelation but as something embarrassingly obvious: the Reject Well.
He almost laughed at himself. The place was canon, tucked in the middle of the show's first year: something he'd half-dismissed when the episodes blurred together in his memory. But of course it existed here, like every other detail the world had chosen to make real. A stone pit where abandoned cards gathered and grew restless; the quiet end of every student's mistake.
He had been circling the idea of Ba and Ka all morning, looking for a safe door to push open. The well, for all its reputation, was safer than most. It wasn't haunted by malice or sealed behind rules, just by neglect. If there was any place where spirits might still listen without testing him to destruction, it would be there.
The notion settled in neatly, a small equation clicking closed. If the campus was a body, the Reject Well was its scar. A place where discarded energy pooled instead of healing over. A scar still belonged to the body, still felt, still tried to make sense of pain.
He had forgotten the site because he'd been thinking in sequence, trying to locate solutions in his recollection of events instead of in the world as it stood. The well came much later in the show, yes… But the show's calendar didn't matter here. He was living the world's present, not its script.
He adjusted the strap of his bag and looked toward the eastern treeline where the old paths vanished into shade. The cards lying there wouldn't be strong; he knew that. They wouldn't be rare, or shining, or capable of ending duels in one swing. But the power of the place wasn't measured that way. Even the weakest echoes were still echoes, and a single true connection, no matter how humble, would be a better beginning than trying to manufacture one.
He didn't want to just use them. That word had the wrong gravity. He wanted to meet them halfway, to build something that let them breathe again while maybe helping him breathe, too. If that made him selfish, he could live with that kind of selfishness.
Julian followed the sound along paths that seemed to remember him before he remembered them. The campus fell away behind him, replaced by the slow climb of roots and uneven stone. There was no signpost for a place like this, no label on the academy map, but between the rough geography he had studied in the library and the half-formed images still stored from the anime, he could triangulate it well enough. The Reject Well lay somewhere near the training grounds' edge, where the forest dipped toward the cliffs and the sea began to taste the air.
As the trees thinned, the ground turned rocky and cold beneath his shoes. The air carried that still, mineral scent of water that had been waiting a long time to move. And then he saw it. Smaller than he had remembered, simpler too. Nothing but a rough square of heavy stones fitted together by hand, sitting slightly crooked in the dirt. No fence. No warning sign. No trace of a cover. Just the open mouth of a forgotten place, old enough that moss had started to write its own alphabet across the edges. He had seen this image before, flattened in two dimensions on a screen years ago. Seeing it here, rendered in texture and silence, was another thing entirely.
He stepped closer and looked down. Darkness pooled inside, swallowing the weak light. The soft drip he'd heard since the library echoed from somewhere deep below, steady and patient. A rope ladder hung from an iron hook driven into one corner of the stone rim, its rungs made of old planks, smoothed by time and by too many hands. He gave the first rung a testing press; it held. The second creaked but didn't splinter. Good enough.
Julian adjusted the strap of his bag and drew a slow breath. The air smelled of damp stone and paper left to rot. It wasn't danger that filled the hollow below, it was abandonment, condensed into a place. Whatever waited there was weak, yes, but also real, unhidden by theory or by denial. And for what he needed now, that might be better than power.
He gripped the sides of the ladder and began to descend, one measured step after another. The light narrowed above him until only a rim remained, and the echo of his breath mixed with the rhythmic drip of water. When his boots touched stone, they didn't meet clean ground. The floor was carpeted in cards: hundreds of them, maybe thousands — scattered like fallen leaves, their corners a bit curled by damp air and time. Some still shimmered faintly with duel holographic gloss, others had their faces bleached to ghosts of color.
The images stared up through grime: warriors half-faded, monsters without outlines, spell circles broken where the ink had peeled. Duel disks and card sleeves lay tangled among them like shed skin. The sight stopped him for a moment. It wasn't a room anymore; it was a grave made of memory, every discarded card a confession that someone, somewhere, had stopped believing.
The space below opened wider than the mouth promised. The wall stones near the bottom were ordinary. The kind a person could have lifted and placed. The mortar between them had cracked and healed and cracked again in little white lines like old scars that reminded him of its inhabitants. Cards in this world were made of tougher material, so they were not beyond repair, but certainly would need a careful restoration.
Julian stepped carefully, trying to not interfere with the cards on the ground. He did not speak at first, doing what he did before duels and worse things. Stay still and let the room tell him how it wanted to be stood in.
As he walked among the open area the little hairs along his arms lifted, then stood down. The walls wore shadow that was not only shadow. If he stared straight, stains. If he softened his eyes, the not-shadows moved in ways stains do not. They pressed and hovered, like small animals judging the distance to a stranger's hand.
"I'm here to look," he said, neutrally. "If there's anything to be seen, I'll see it. If not, I'll sit."
The sound rose first, the suggestion of voices under a blanket. Syllables too thin to carry meaning. The rhythm of speaking was there even when the words slid away like rain refusing glass. The water's skin trembled, trembled again, and then drew itself into a deeper circle at the center.
It did not rise, it occupied. The circle took depth until it felt like an eye across a small distance. No white. No lash. Only attention arranged into a shape he could meet.
His body's first answer was the old animal flinch. He set it aside. What came from the center wasn't a word. It was a picture with feeling attached, an imprint that found the place in his head that made images when words failed.
The same area, empty. Time counted by someone who had no clock. The metal taste of long patience. A ring of nothings that were not nothing, small quick lives trying to stay warm without heat.
He did not force speech through that. He sent back what he could honest. His desk at Ra, the deck squared by feel, the two words boxed at the top of a page, the blank he had not filled because he respected it.
The depth in the circle shifted. The not-shadows rustled. One flattened itself to the stone at his ankle, brave a heartbeat, then sprang back. Another quivered on the wall and made a sound like laughter heard from inside a cupboard. He could tell their voices apart the way a person can tell friends by footfall. He could not catch a single piece of content from any of them.
The air in front of him thickened. Not fog, not shadow, something denser, as if the space itself was folding inward to make room for a shape too large to belong. The darkness swelled and drew lines in itself: a curve here, a glint there, pieces assembling with the patience of a memory returning to focus.
And then it was simply there.
The creature floated above the stone ring, its form both skeletal and mechanical, as if built from the idea of something that had once been alive. Its body was a lattice of dark cerulean armor threaded with white ribs of chitin, its lower half tapering into a spiral drill that spun without moving. The arms were long and jointed, ending in claws too sharp to have been made for holding. Where its face should have been, there was only a single, enormous eye: the Eye of Anubis also known as the millenium symbol by the fanbase, golden and ancient, framed by the faint echo of black wings folded tight behind its body. The thing's gaze fixed on Julian like it was measuring the outline of his soul.
He didn't flinch. His heartbeat stumbled once, but his mind, wired for observation, caught the name before fear could take root. "Relinquished." he whispered, the word leaving his mouth before he'd even decided to say it. He knew that card. The ritual monster Maximillion Pegasus had wielded in Duelist Kingdom, the one that could consume its opponent's monsters and make them part of itself. He remembered watching it as a kid, back in the world he'd left behind, a symbol of the uncanny power Pegasus had drawn from something beyond logic.
Now it was hovering less than ten feet from him, not as a hologram, not as light projected from a disk, but as presence: weight in the air, reflection caught on stone. Its surface rippled faintly, as if light couldn't decide where to land. It didn't breathe, but Julian could feel its rhythm all the same, a low hum under the skin of reality.
The smaller shadows, the indistinct spirits he couldn't quite see fluttered around it like children around a parent's legs. Relinquished extended one long arm and drew them closer, its clawed fingers opening not to seize but to shield. The motion confirmed what the image had already told him. "You guard them." The gesture wasn't command, but caretaking.
The great eye blinked once, or perhaps the world did. The pupil narrowed and widened again, and Julian felt the faintest tug somewhere in his chest, as if something in him recognized something in it. The air grew colder, but not hostile: the kind of chill that asks for quiet.
An image burst behind his eyes: a card tossed carelessly, spinning through the air, falling into darkness. The sense of weight discarded. Then the silence afterward. Not anger, but endurance. He understood.
"I'm sorry." Julian said softly. "For what people did. I can't speak for them. I can still be sorry."
Relinquished did not answer in words, it had none. But the faint glow of its eye softened, the oppressive chill in the air loosening its hold, only his curiosity remaining. Around them, the smaller spirits whispered like wind against paper, and for the first time, Julian felt the strange certainty that he wasn't intruding.
He was being acknowledged.
The air in the well settled into a fragile calm. Relinquished hovered above the stone, its massive eye dimmed to a low, watchful glow. The smaller spirits, those shifting outlines that flickered just beyond definition clustered closer, their whispering now something like breathing. Julian didn't move. For a moment, the silence itself felt mutual, an understanding drawn in negative space.
Then the rope ladder creaked.
Once. Twice. A rhythm of wooden rungs bearing weight. Julian's head turned instinctively toward the sound; Relinquished did the same, its claws rising slightly as though to protect the cluster of smaller spirits behind it. The noise grew louder: boots scraping, breath echoing — until a shape dropped the final few feet and landed hard on the card-covered floor with a dull thump.
"Man, that's a long way down!"
Jaden Yuki straightened, brushing dust from his jacket, completely unbothered by the chill that pressed against every other surface of the chamber. His duel disk hung loose at his side, and his usual grin sat somewhere between sheepish and defiant. The spirits reacted before Julian could speak.
A surge of energy rippled through the room. Faint light and movement, a collective gasp that wasn't made of air. The indistinct forms that had stayed cautious around Julian rushed toward Jaden in a flurry of sound and motion. They surrounded him like a cloud of children reuniting with an older brother. The pressure that had filled the well moments ago dissolved into something alive, almost joyful. Even Relinquished's posture shifted: the massive frame unwound slightly, its eye widening with something that looked like recognition.
Julian blinked, the sudden shift almost dizzying. "They're… happy to see you." he said quietly, more to himself than to Jaden.
Jaden tilted his head, a little thrown by the attention. "Yeah, I'm getting that. That happens sometimes." he said, laughing under his breath. One of the shadows brushed past him, a soft hum against the air, and he turned his head, listening. "They've been stuck here a long time. I can feel it."
Julian studied him. The answer was casual, but something deeper moved under the words, like a current that didn't belong to the surface. "Sometimes?"
"Yeah." Jaden said, glancing at the fluttering spirits around him. "Ever since I was little. I used to see them all the time: at the park, at school, everywhere. Koyo-sensei used to say they were drawn to me. Guess he wasn't wrong." His eyes softened. "Winged Kuriboh was his partner before he was mine. When he gave me the card, he said Kuriboh chose me instead of the other way around."
Julian followed Jaden's gaze as it flicked to his shoulder. There, half visible against the dark, floated a faint, winged outline: small, round, glowing at the edges like a star seen through fog. The tiny spirit hovered with visible affection, its energy playful but steady, grounding.
"Winged Kuriboh." Julian murmured. "I kinda knew it, but to see it myself…"
Jaden chuckled. "Yeah. Been with me since day one." Then his brow furrowed slightly. "Wait… you can actually see him?"
Julian hesitated, searching for words precise enough. "Partially. He's… there, but not fully. Like the outline of light on glass. I can tell where he is, but I can't make out his face."
Jaden blinked at that, the playfulness fading into genuine surprise. "That's… weird. I've never heard of that before. Usually people either can't see them at all, or they see them the way we do cards, clear as day. Not halfway like that."
"Relinquished." Julian said, nodding toward the hovering guardian. "He's the only one I can see perfectly. The others are like silhouettes."
The admission made Jaden's expression flicker from curiosity to wonder. "Just him?"
"Just him." Julian confirmed. "The rest are… there, but distant. Their voices too. Recognizable, but impossible to understand."
Jaden looked back toward Relinquished, whose massive eye blinked once, slow and deliberate. The creature's gaze moved between the two duelists, pausing longer on Julian before returning to Jaden. The smaller spirits clustered closer, whispering among themselves in voices Julian couldn't decipher, but Jaden tilted his head slightly as if listening to a conversation he didn't need words for.
"They're saying they're glad someone finally came." Jaden said. "They've been waiting. It's been forever since anyone looked at them without fear or pity." His tone changed then: anger flickering at the edge of empathy. "Banner told me about this place. About how the students dump their cards down here when they think they're useless. I had to see it myself. I couldn't believe it."
Julian's gaze followed the floor, a carpet of ruined paper and fading ink. "It's a cruel kind of forgetting…" he said. "The kind that doesn't even realize it's cruelty."
"Yeah." Jaden crouched and picked up a scuffed Normal Monster, its face almost rubbed away. "These used to mean something to somebody. And now…" He shook his head. "This isn't what dueling's supposed to be."
Julian watched the sincerity in his voice, the way the spirits leaned toward him as he spoke. Even the faint light around Kuriboh seemed to pulse with agreement. "You're different." he said, half to himself. "They react to you like you're sunlight."
Jaden laughed softly. "I don't know about that. I just… I don't like seeing anyone left behind. Not people, not spirits."
Relinquished floated closer again, its huge form passing through the dim light. The smaller spirits followed in orbit, like moons attending a planet. Jaden stood as it approached, unflinching, the energy between them steady, recognition without fear.
The creature stopped an arm's length away, its enormous eye turning briefly toward Julian, then back to Jaden. The shift made Julian's chest tighten. He didn't need translation to feel the message: This one understands us. This one can hear what you cannot.
Jaden didn't answer aloud but nodded, as if responding to a question only he'd heard. Then he looked back at Julian. "They say they trust you, though. That's rare. Spirits are careful about people who can't hear them. You've got their attention already, even if you can't see them all."
Julian folded his arms, thoughtful. "Then maybe we can make something of that trust."
The words drew another low ripple through the crowd of spirits, their whispers flickering into a hum. For the first time, Julian felt their emotions clearly: curiosity… and hope. The faint spark of expectation.
"Good." Jaden said, eyes brightening. "Because I didn't come down here just to feel bad about it. We can fix this. Somehow."
Relinquished's eye glowed faintly in response, and the shadows stirred like a breeze through paper. The air no longer felt cold. The well was listening.
And for Julian, that was enough to know the conversation had just begun.
Julian's gaze flicked to the bowl. The eye's depth changed, a blink without lids. A tracing lay across the water for a breath, a suggestion of a chain from nowhere to nowhere, and then it was gone. The small figures on the walls rippled like minnows in a shallow.
Jaden leaned in slightly, still with his hands open. "They want to know what you want to do." he said. "About the cards. About all of this."
Julian looked at the ground littered around them. The sight had hit him like a blow when he arrived. Now it pressed with a weight that asked to be carried rather than fought.
"What do you want to do?" he asked back, not to defer, but to know what Jaden's instinct did with a problem like this.
"Take them out, obviously." Jaden said. The words landed clean. "All of them. Today. Take them to the shop on campus and clean them and put them in sleeves and let them be cards again. They don't belong on the floor of a cave."
Julian thought of the kind of answer that would be polite and wrong and did not reach for it. "They wouldn't accept it, the cards need a proper restoration first. And even then…" he said. "Then they'll be sold randomly. Pulled by students who need fodder or a body to meet a rule. Half of them will end in the trash by next week. The other half will be brought back here in a month when the novelty is over. This place will only be bigger by a layer."
Jaden took that in without bristle. He nodded once, slow. "You think there's a different way."
"I think there is a problem of fit." Julian said. He gestured lightly at the scatter. "Each of these was made to answer something. They were thrown here because they didn't answer the thing the person wanted them to answer. If we haul them out and throw them into more hands that aren't asking the right question, we are staging the same thing over and over."
The murmur along the stone walls changed tempo. Julian could not parse the language, but his body knew the sound of a classroom leaning forward.
Jaden glanced at him. "So what's the right question?"
"What do you want?" Julian asked the room. He meant the spirits. He meant the eye at the center. He meant the paper dead at their feet. He meant himself.
Silence came that had content. It gathered like breath before speech, a cacophony of voices unintelligible to him. Jaden's eyes flicked left, right, then centered. He answered for them in a voice that sounded like he had been translated into human shape for this.
"Some of them want out anyway." Jaden said, eyes half-lidded like he was reading wind. "Out is better than down. They want sleeves again. The shuffle. Even if it's just a little while. The city shop runs those kid decks, starter piles for beginners. I used to go to one, nice place. We could bring a load there. Give them a chance to move through a lot of small hands instead of staying stuck here."
Julian let the notion stand between them for a breath. He watched the littered floor and tried to see it the way the small voices might. A station. A waiting room. A place where time didn't pass so much as pile.
"No." he said, then softened it. "Not like that."
Jaden tilted his head. "Because…?"
"That wouldn't fix it, Jaden. The shops would keep the decks, sure, but to what end? They'd be borrowed, played for a week, then replaced when some kid decided what their real deck was. These spirits would spend their lives as someone's first experiment: handled, discarded, passed along a hundred times. Not hated, but forgotten over and over again. You'd just be giving them a new kind of loneliness: being loved for five minutes at a time."
The murmur changed. Even without language, he felt the room stiffen like a group of kids at a door that a grown-up had closed.
Jaden crouched and touched the edge of a bent sleeve with his fingertips. "Some of them don't mind." he said quietly. "They told me that. What hurts is hope. A place like the city shop. They'd never expect to be chosen for forever. They'd learn a tiny game, move along, and in between there'd be hands on them and laughter close by. Company is a kind of mercy."
Julian looked at the walls where the not-shadows hung like breath. He kept his voice level.
"And what about watching those hands leave you behind, again and again." Julian asked, harsh, but merciful. Like a quick tear on a band-aid. "And hearing the reason given is that you aren't strong enough to stay? Because that will be the story. You didn't make the cut. Not 'we didn't need you today.' Not 'you fit somewhere else.' It will be 'you weren't enough'."
The sound that ran the ring then was sharp as a hiss and small as a wince. Several of the near shapes pulled back like minnows from fingers. Others stayed, stubborn, their whispering continuing at the exact same volume, as if choosing to be content had become a practice that did not yield to a single hard sentence.
Jaden's mouth folded in something like agreement and something like refusal. He listened harder and then nodded to no one visible. "Some still want it." he said. "They say any time spent in the game is worth the cost at the end of the day. They say new eyes see them for real for a second. They say company makes a day feel like a day."
Julian let that truth find its shelf. "Then we respect that." he said. "Not the way I first pictured, though." He stopped, drew the plan out of the tangle and laid it in front of himself so he could check the seams. "We won't be able to properly restore them ourselves, but we can do a preliminary job. Then we sleeve it and send it to that shop of yours, the post mail here will send it by ship."
The hushed chorus tilted, a rustle like cloth set right. Jaden breathed in through his nose, eyes slanting toward the bowl. "Yeah." he said, almost smiling. "Let's do it."
Julian looked down at the wrecked field. "At least those who made this choice will do it while informed. No matter the outcome, at least they choose their fate."
Jaden rocked back on his heels. He knew the hinge was coming before Julian named it; the room seemed to know too, air holding tight in expectation.
"What about the ones who want more?" Jaden asked, gentle but direct. "Not hands for a day, not a lesson and a goodbye. The ones who want a job. A family. A table that remembers them tomorrow."
The eye in the bowl deepened. He felt the room pivot a degree, alignment shifting around a center.
"I think we build for them." Julian said, and did not apologize for how much of Bastion there was in the sentence. "Not one pile that pretends to be everything. Six decks. Six small engines. Each with a point of view. Each with purpose. We tune them for each other so they can play and the play means something. We set them aside, labeled, for a while. We let them face each other in our free time. The two of us and all of our friends. The little ones will practice, learn and wait in a nurturing environment. When someone who really fits one of them arrives, the deck will know. The person will know. We will know."
He did not realize he was holding his breath until he had to let it go.
Jaden looked delighted in a way that did not shine outward. It warmed inward. "Six." he said. "Because Bastion got into your head. Do you have names yet or are we letting them tell us?"
"Let them tell us." Julian answered. "We can sketch the skeletons. One that stacks small numbers until they sing. One that refuses entry and wins by existing. One that turns sideways early and refuses to stop. One that watches the graveyard like a cat at a mouse hole. One that draws circles until the opponent gets tired and steps in the wrong one. One that borrows and gives back better."
Jaden gave a soft whoop that somehow didn't echo. "They're laughing," he said. "At you, not at the list. A good laugh."
"Fair enough." Julian smiled, raising his shoulders.
"Okay." Jaden went on, glancing at the floor again as if the scatter had started making lanes only he could see. "But we're not leaving them here one more night. We box what wants the city in one case and what wants the six in the other and we take them with us now. A few hours of cardboard in a Ra dorm beats another dark that feels like waiting."
He was right. The word night had weight in this room. Julian turned his palm up. "All right." he said. "We pack gently. You ask them and I'll separate the piles into two deck boxes."
Jaden nodded and answered the walls in a string of easy syllables. The replies came back layered and quick. Julian tried, as he had been trying all afternoon, to parse even a sliver, but the sense slid sideways each time. Relinquished help a bit with the translation, sending images of deck boxes or a room full of children, but it was still much slower than the proper conversation Jaden was able to do. At least he could still feel the shape of consent, and that was enough.
They worked. It became a ritual without effort. Jaden crouched and moved through the field with the grace of someone collecting sleeping birds. He greeted cards as if each had a face only he could see: sometimes he snorted, sometimes he murmured a reassurance. Sometimes he winced and said an apology that made the sussur around them soften. Julian followed, not blind, just new, learning to feel the yes that came off the paper when the choice was right. He did not touch what recoiled. He did not argue when a card wanted to be last. He stacked neat, squared corners, making a superficial cleaning at each one and separating them into two small piles that understood their fate for now.
They found two usable boxes, thick plastic cases with broken clasps that still held and cleaned them with a cloth from Julian's bag until the inside didn't smell like the well. One box took what Jaden called the anywhere kids: cards that agreed to the city shop and its long, kind drift. The other took the builders: the ones who hummed when placed next to their future neighbors, even if those neighbors were still ideas.
Everything left on the ground they crept around like it was sleeping. When Julian reached for a scuffed common and the sound around his hand went thin, he withdrew, when he passed over an unassuming spell and felt a small rush of want, he took it and the rush settled. Jaden and Relinquished still helped occasionally, pleased at how quickly Julian picked up the pattern (even if he still was unable to properly hear them).
"Is that one…" Jaden tilted his chin at a bent normal monster with impossible eyes and a crown made of bones.
Julian had no name to put to the face; the art fuzzed at the edges like it had tried very hard to escape being looked at. The murmur when he neared it had the tempo of an old story told by someone with a cough. He set it down beside two small traps that no one loved at the shop and felt the air braid warmer.
"That one belongs." he said, surprised at the certainty.
"Yeah." Jaden breathed, delighted. "The tiny bone-king likes the little funeral bells. And the miserly draw spell thinks he's hysterical. Good table talk."
They worked until the light at the well's mouth had moved from gray to the yellow that floats late afternoon. As the boxes filled, the room's sound thinned to the content quiet of a space after guests have left happy. The bowl held its circle, depth patient and present. When Julian risked a look at it, a single sensation reached him: night curving over a cluster and not quite touching. Shelter. He let that image find a place on the shelf with Ba and Ka, not as an answer but as a third object that made the other two make more sense.
They stood when there was nothing left they had permission to lift. The anywhere box was three-quarters full, the builder box a little less than half. A third one ended up being necessary for the unsure ones. That felt right, not everyone had to choose a house on the first day.
Jaden hefted both by testing weight with his hands under the corners. "Let me carry the one that we'll send to the city." he said. "I know the address, can send them tomorrow."
"You know that the boat will still take a couple days to get to shore, right? And one or two more for the postal office to deliver. They will have to wait a bit anyway." Julian noted, gauging the sky from the limited point of view in the well.
"I know." Jaden said. "But it would be best for them if they arrive as soon as possible. The sooner the best."
Julian nodded. "Good. The little ones will be less hungry if they can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel."
They did a last pass with their eyes. The cards left on the ground looked less like trash and more like sleepers who had pulled blankets up to their chins. The not-shadows along the wall crowded near enough to give the impression of faces where there were none.
Jaden spoke one long sentence to them. The reply came in layers. Julian caught nothing of content and everything of tone: farewell, promise, approval, mischief.
"Ready?" Jaden asked.
"Yes." Julian said. He looked once more at the bowl. The circle at its center brightened a fraction and then flattened to water. "I'll take the others. Restore them a bit more, gather my collection and Bastion's and make the six lists supplementing their capabilities. We can make they dance later this week, it'll be good for Syrus."
They climbed with care. The boxes shifted only when they told them to. The ladder's creak counted rungs without complaint. At the lip, the day met them with the wide, ordinary sound of wind in leaves and ocean working rock. They stepped the fence and the path offered itself.
Halfway to the dorms, Jaden broke their easy quiet. "Just to say it out loud." he said, "I still think the shop will be a good home for them."
"I know." Julian nodded. He adjusted his grip on the builder box and imagined six small tables and six small egos arguing. "And I think we can give the ones who do want forever an honest chance at it. Not the kind of forever that means being the best. The kind that means being right somewhere."
"That's better." Jaden said, satisfied. "Words like 'right' make better oaths than words like 'best'."
"You make a lot of oaths?" Julian asked.
Jaden's mouth went mischievous, no answer leaving his lips.
They cut behind the practice fields to avoid the midday drift of students. A pair of gulls argued above the gym like critics who had missed the point of the play. At the Ra steps, Julian paused to set his box on the stone and rub his fingers where the plastic had pressed lines into them. Jaden set his down next to it and rotated his wrists with a grimace that didn't reach his eyes.
Inside, the common room accepted the boxes like it had always meant to be a harbor. Julian carried the builder set to the low table near the window and opened the lid. He didn't spread the cards yet. He let the open box be an invitation rather than a display. Jaden did the same with the anywhere set and covered it with a clean towel like a baker letting dough rest. The air in the room shifted. It might have been only his body reading into nothing. It didn't feel like nothing.
"Tomorrow." Jaden said, tapping the anywhere box with two fingers. "At first hour."
"Postal opens at 9AM, we'll be in class. We'll do it at lunch." Julian corrected.
He looked once again at the six empty spaces he could almost see on the table: walls, sideways, stackers, watchers, circles, lenders. He could already feel three or four cards in the room lean toward one shape or another, leaving their friends in the box but peeking.
Jaden listened to the far wall, then to the ceiling, then to nothing. "They like the window." he reported. "They say they'll count clouds."
"It will be temporary, though." the place got a lot more heavy with those words. "The view will be much better at the Obelisk dorm."
Jaden laughed softly. "I still say Slifer is unbeatable. We're near the beach, you can't beat that."
They stood without moving for a long minute, both of them letting the new occupants learn their new home. Outside, the light took on the late tone that makes glass think about becoming gold. Somewhere below, a door closed, and a kettle made its first uncertain sound.
"Well, that's it. Tomorrow." Jaden said again, not because he needed to but because the word felt good to say to a promise. He lifted the anywhere box and tucked it close as if it might shiver. "I'll get out of here before I lower your GPA by being seen too long in Ra."
"That wouldn't be a problem if you didn't flunk your test. To be in Slifer even after beating Crowler's personal deck… You take down the average simply by existing."
"Don't tell Crowler that." Jaden scratched his head and smiled. "He'll make a speech and then I'll have to write an essay to get out of it."
He paused in the doorway and looked back once, that particular Jaden look that managed to be light and old at the same time. "You did good work back there…" he said. "Not with the plan. Anyone can make a plan. With the way you stood in the room, how you got their confidence even with limited capability to interact."
Julian felt the sentence land more deeply than praise for play ever had. "Thank you. And Jaden?" he said, his tone steady enough to make the other turn around. "You know Syrus has been studying hard lately. He's taking this seriously. Next exam, he'll trade his red for yellow, I'm sure of it. And if the Academy's structure stays fair, he and Bastion will move to blue to join me before long. That's how it should go. Progress."
Jaden blinked, a little caught off guard by the change in tone. Julian went on. "I know you've got a thing for red. It was Koyo's color. He wore it when he went pro, when he made his mark and on his three world titles. But that red meant drive, not comfort. It meant climbing, not staying put. Keep scraping the bottom of the dorm ladder, and you're not honoring what he taught you… you're burying it. Koyo wouldn't have wanted that for you."
He let the words sit a moment before adding, quieter but no less direct: "And you know his sister teaches here. She's on assignment at another campus right now, but she'll come back eventually. When she does, what do you want her to see? A student coasting on talent or someone proving her brother's legacy meant something?"
Jaden's grin faltered, replaced by that rare look of genuine thought.
Julian nodded once. "If we move up, and you don't, you'll be stuck down there alone when you could be with us. We'll not abandon you, but why stay in a shared dorm on parse conditions without your friends when you can join us? Red has its pride, I get that. But it's time to stop wearing it like a flag. When you go pro, you can choose whatever color you want. At the academy, the shade of your uniform should be your last priority."
Jaden didn't fire back a joke. He stood there with the deck box in both hands, the easy grin gone, eyes flicking past Julian to the two open cases on the table: the indecisive and the ones who wanted a family. You could almost see him weighing himself against the idea of Koyo in the red jacket, the old lessons that sounded simple until you tried to live them without the man who taught them.
"Yeah." he said at last, not loud. "You're right."
He looked down at the box again and lifted it to his chest like it might try to wriggle free. "If Syrus moves up, I'm not letting him do it alone. And I'm not going to make Midori-san think I treat red like a hammock." A flash of the grin came back, small and honest. "Don't tell Crowler I said hammock. He'll assign reading."
"Wouldn't dream of it." Julian grinned.
Jaden angled toward the hall. "Well, thanks for the heads up, but I really should be going."
"Tomorrow, then." Julian said.
"Tomorrow." Jaden echoed. He left before Julian could say anything else, footsteps light, voice already greeting someone in the corridor with the kind of warmth that made rooms turn toward it.
The quiet that followed wasn't the well's quiet. It was the good kind, the kind a space makes when it wants to pay attention. Julian closed the door, set the latch gently, and turned back to the table. The builder box waited with its lid half off like a held breath.
He laid a clean cloth across the surface and lifted a small stack from the box the way you lift old photographs: from the edges, thumbs soft, letting the weight of the paper tell you how far it will go without complaint. The first card was scuffed into fog, the varnish crazed along one corner where it had tried to peel itself free of its own face. He set it down and took out what he had: cotton swabs, a microfiber cloth, a tiny bottle of isopropyl alcohol used for lenses and equipment, a narrow bone folder he'd bought once to crease notebook covers and now pressed into service as an iron.
He didn't intend to erase history. This wasn't surgery and he wasn't a conservator. Bringing them to mint condition would be impossible, but he could still make small things better.
A fine mist, the cloth folded twice to keep from biting, the gentlest wipe across a line of grime that had been dirt and became shadow. The card sighed in a way only he could hear. He didn't chase every stain. He chased the ones that would catch a sleeve and fray into worse. For corners that had started to curl he worked heat from his thumb through the cloth and then flattened the point with the bone folder, no pressure, only time. For a crease that broke the art at a diagonal, he teased the fibers back into near-plumb and left the rest for tomorrow and the day after when the paper had learned his patience.
He made a rhythm of it. Lift, look, listen with his fingers, decide. The scraps of varnish that had bubbled away he trimmed with the side of a blade so dull it would have offended a hobbyist and then touched the area with the smallest smear of archival gloss that would dry to nearly nothing. He worked from the middle out, because Bastion had taught him that systems are less likely to lie to you when you start from center.
Some cards protested even the idea of care and he respected that, sliding them back into the box with a sleeve ready and a promise to return when the air had softened them. Others drank attention like water.
He wasn't alone. He'd known that at the well and he knew it now, not because the temperature dropped or the light changed, but because the space behind his shoulder became a boundary he could feel. He didn't turn around. He spoke without lifting his eyes from the common he was coaxing back into shape.
"Evening." Julian said softly, because not saying it would have felt ungracious.
The air answered by moving across the fine hair at his neck. He saw it then anyway because he chose to see it: Relinquished, almost too large for the room, not touching anything and touching everything. The great eye's glow dialed low to fit the space. The long, jointed arms folded back at an angle that almost looked like rest. In the glass of the framed Ra pennant across the room, he saw the faintest impression of that impossible silhouette and decided not to be troubled by what physics had to do to cooperate.
No words. Just the shape of a sense set gently in his head: the well, the children, the way sound gathers at night when no one is talking because everyone is asleep. Then the image shifted to this room: the table, the boxes, the window with its narrow band of sky. The feeling under both was the same. Kept.
"I might not be a walking sunshine like Jaden that calms your folk at a glance, but I made a promise, you know." Julian muttered, trimming a dented corner with precision. "And I keep my word."
He kept working. It was slower with company because he found himself narrating choices in his own chest, careful not to make a mess of the ritual by saying them aloud. When a card's art had been abraded so badly the face had gone, he did not try to paint it back with memory. He smoothed the paper until it wanted to be touched again and let that be enough. When a corner had turned down from chronic damp, he slipped it into a sleeve while he sorted the next ten and then pulled it free to see whether the curl had relaxed. For scuffs along edges he ran the cloth in tiny ovals until the raised fibers lay flatter. A good sleeve would do the rest.
At some point he realized he was organizing piles without having planned to. One stack hummed even before you looked at it: little things that wanted to stack in the graveyard until they were not little anymore. Another made a low, stubborn promise: the wall. A third carried the impatient slant of cards that wanted to turn sideways the second they were allowed to and earlier if they weren't. The fourth coalesced out of nothing and told jokes to the others while pretending it wasn't listening. He smiled without meaning to. "We'll see which house you belong to." he said, and the air stirred as if amused.
Relinquished drifted a fraction closer. The image that arrived this time was smaller: fingers that could have been its claws if claws were made for holding, hovering over a cluster of tiny shapes that tried very hard to be brave. He pictured the well again, the press of little lives against the dark, and the way the guardian had curved its huge body as if night could be bent away from them by will alone.
"You don't just guard." he said softly. "You nurture."
The eye brightened by a measure, then dimmed, like a muscle that had flexed for the pleasure of being named correctly.
He worked until his shoulders told him he was leaning wrong and his eyes suggested the room might like fewer lines in it. He stood, rolled his neck, and looked at what he'd done without counting how many cards it was. Enough to make a difference. Not enough to make the work visible to anyone who only believed in work if it came with applause.
He ate something quick in the kitchenette, not because he was hungry but because the body keeps promises better when you don't ask it to do them on fumes. When he returned, Relinquished had rotated half a degree to keep the table in view. The small not-sounds at the edge of hearing had become a faint thread through the space, like someone humming with their mouth closed in the next room.
"I'll leave the lid off." he said. He laid six sleeves in a column again, the placeholder for houses that would become themselves by being used. "You can watch. They'll behave if you watch."
The answering sensation was not ownership. It was agreement between equals.
He washed his hands, killed the overhead light, and left the desk lamp on its lowest setting. He didn't want the room bright. He wanted it aware. He brushed his teeth, pointedly didn't look at the DuelPad, and lay down with his back to the wall and his face to the table so he could see the not-quite-visible movement without trying.
Sleep found him the way it finds people who have earned it: directly. The room's breathing settled into his. The thin thread of whisper moved closer, then diffused into something like weather. The room went very still. The kind of still that has movement inside it.
In the drift just before dreams, shapes approached and retreated along the edge of his sense. The littlest spirits, who had failed so earnestly at being statues earlier, began to drift. A curl of light settled on the corner of the table near the builder box and pressed its face against the lid the way a child presses a cheek to glass. Two more slid along the curtain and made it ripple without wind. Another peered over the edge of the couch and then dropped like a leaf and forgot to make a sound on landing. They radiated the kind of mischief that precedes sleep in a roomful of cousins.
Relinquished kept watch and did not interfere. The great eye flicked from one small motion to another and then back to the figure on the bed. When one particularly bold flicker of light tried to climb onto Julian's chest, the guardian tipped its head a fraction, and the little one changed course without complaint, settling instead into the hollow between pillow and shoulder, where the warmth would not disturb the sleeper's breath.
If there was a moment when anything like a bond happened, there was nothing in it for an observer to point at. No flash. No chord. Only the way the littles learned the shape of his outline and arranged themselves around it, the way birds on a wire leave an even number of gaps because balance feels better that way. Only the way the guardian relaxed by degrees as the room's collectives decided that this person, in this bed, could be a place to put their small, insistent wanting.
Outside, the campus lights thinned. The sea wore its dark without argument. Inside, a softness gathered that had nothing to do with blankets. The night held.
Julian woke to the sound of movement. Not footsteps, not pipes. Voices.
Soft, high, overlapping voices that didn't belong to people.
"Careful, careful, don't step on him!" a tiny, musical voice hissed near his ear.
"I'm not stepping, I'm floating!" another replied indignantly.
His eyes opened. The ceiling swam with color. Petit Dragon hung there, wings beating fast enough to stir the curtains, while Happy Lover darted around it like a spark chasing its own reflection. Near the desk, Watapon bounced in slow, weightless arcs, each landing punctuated by a delighted squeak. And on his pillow, bold as sunlight, Mokey Mokey was sitting cross-legged, head tilted, smiling at him with the blank serenity of a creature that had never known stress.
"Mokey!" it declared proudly.
Julian blinked, dazed. "Morning…?"
"Mokey!" the square creature said again, patting his cheek with a stubby hand as if confirming that he was, in fact, alive.
Happy Lover twirled higher, giggling in a voice like glass bells. "He's awake! I told you he'd wake up!"
Petit Dragon swooped lower, puffing a tiny coil of steam. "We were supposed to wait for him to open his eyes first!"
"Supposed by who?" Happy Lover countered. "You don't even sleep!"
"I rest my wings! That counts!"
Julian sat up slowly, and they all scattered back a few inches, then immediately swarmed forward again, trying to talk at once. Every sound overlapped: the fluttering of tiny wings, the hum of stray energy, the childish tumble of words and half-words.
From the edge of the table, a new voice chimed in: calm, soft, the tone of someone trying to impose order on a playground. The Unhappy Maiden, her pale form almost translucent in the light, hovered just above the cards Julian had restored the night before. "Please, give him space." she said, hands folded at her chest. "He just woke up. You'll frighten him."
Happy Lover scoffed, twirling midair. "He's not frightened! Look, he's smiling!"
Julian realized she was right. He was.
"I'm not frightened." he admitted, voice still low from sleep. "Just… surprised."
Watapon bounced into his lap like a soft ball of cloud. "Wata!" it chirped, rubbing against his palm until static flickered.
He laughed despite himself and brushed a thumb across its fuzzy surface. "You're softer than I expected."
"Mokey mokey!" Mokey Mokey insisted from his shoulder, as if taking credit.
Julian looked around at all of them, feeling his chest tighten with the quiet, implausible joy of seeing something that shouldn't exist and yet did. The air shimmered faintly with their energy. He could feel emotion in it: excitement, curiosity, pride.
"So…" he said slowly, "You can all talk now. Or I can finally hear you. I'm not sure which."
Petit Dragon puffed a tiny flame, grinning. "Both!"
"Mostly you!" added Happy Lover, zipping upside down.
The Unhappy Maiden gave a small, patient sigh that sounded centuries older than the others. "It's always loud on the first morning." she said. "They've been waiting to be heard for a long time."
"I can tell." Julian murmured.
He looked toward the far wall. Relinquished was there, hovering in its silent vigil. The guardian's great eye was dim but steady, watching the scene without interrupting. It didn't need to. The air around it pulsed faintly, like approval.
Julian turned back to the little ones. "All right," he said, holding up his hands. "One at a time. Who wants to introduce themselves first?"
That was, in hindsight, a mistake.
Every spirit in the room shouted, squeaked, trilled, or hummed their name at once.
"Petit Dragon!"
"Watapon!"
"Mokey mokey!"
"Bzzzt."
"Happy Lover!"
"Meow!"
"Skelengel!"
"Fluffal Cat!"
And then the non-verbal ones joined in: sparkles, chirps, hums, and bursts of colored light, an avalanche of joy and static and sheer noise. The air practically vibrated with it. Julian tried to say "Wait, wait!" but it only made them louder, because now they thought it was a game.
One of the Skelengels flew into his hair. Cat's Ear Tribe clambered onto the back of his chair, tail flicking happily. Watapon had somehow gotten inside his blanket. Even Mystical Shine Ball, dignified a moment ago, was spinning lazy circles above his head like a halo trying to keep up with the conversation.
Julian laughed helplessly, holding up both hands in surrender. "All right! All right, I hear you! I promise I'll remember every name… just not all at once!"
They didn't slow down, they only laughed harder, overlapping voices like children chasing each other through a hallway.
And in the middle of the noise, he caught it. The feeling that had been missing since he first stepped into this world: connection, genuine and alive. The kind that made logic and mystery feel like the same language.
He leaned back, still laughing, and let the chaos fill the room.
Somewhere behind the laughter, the guardian's single golden eye glowed faintly brighter. A silent acknowledgment, or maybe a smile of its own.
Julian didn't notice. He was too busy being overwhelmed by his new companions, every one of them talking at once, demanding to be seen, heard, loved.
And for the first time since arriving at Duel Academy, he didn't feel like a guest in this world.
He felt home.