The marble halls of Helikon University had a way of keeping secrets.
If you spoke too loudly, your words came back to you, softened and warped, as if the stone itself were deciding what to remember.
Elara Vale had learned long ago tried to keep her voice low within these walls.
The morning after the opening debate, she walked the colonnade leading to the Faculty of Letters, her notebook pressed to her chest. Students hurried past, murmuring about the symposium's opening session, about Damon Thales's "electric performance" and "that girl with the impossible arguments."
That girl!!
She had become a name whispered in passing, a curiosity to be discussed between lectures. Elara hated attention almost as much as she hated her own curiosity about the man who had sparked it.
Her mentor, Professor Lycos, stood waiting near the ivy-covered archway, half-hidden behind a copy of The Symposium. His eyes — pale and perpetually amused — lifted as she approached.
"Miss Vale," he greeted. "You made quite the impression last night."
"I didn't mean to," she said, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
He chuckled. "No one ever does. That's the trouble with ideas — they escape the moment you release them."
He gestured for her to follow. "The faculty committee has decided you'll join Dr. Thales for the afternoon panel on 'Eros and Memory.' It seems the crowd liked your fire."
Elara froze mid-step. "With him?"
Lycos gave a wry smile. "Consider it an academic exercise. Iron sharpens iron, yes?"
She managed a nod, though her pulse quickened. The name Damon Thales echoed in her mind like a curse disguised as a compliment.
Her mother's journals had mentioned that name once a fleeting reference, scribbled in anger and wine stains. D.T. and his thesis the death of truth.
Elara had dismissed it as bitterness from a career that had ended too soon. Until now.
The lecture hall smelled faintly of chalk and lemon oil. Rows of students shuffled their papers, and in the front row, a cluster of visiting scholars leaned in, hungry for intellectual blood.
Damon entered moments later, his black jacket draped casually over his arm, his gaze scanning the room before settling briefly, too briefly on Elara.
He nodded once, polite, unreadable.
The moderator introduced them. "Today's discussion: Eros and Memory The Persistence of Love in the Mind. Ms. Vale, Dr. Thales the floor is yours".
Elara took her place at the lectern, her pulse matching the ticking of the wall clock.
"Memory," she began, "is the cruelest of muses. It paints love not as it was, but as we needed it to be."
A murmur of appreciation rippled through the room. Damon smiled faintly, leaning on his desk.
"And yet," he replied, "without memory, love would be weightless a flame with no wick."
The discussion unfolded like a duel disguised as a dance. Words became weapons; logic became seduction.
She challenged his every claim, and he parried with ease, until neither was sure whether they were arguing or confessing.
By the end, applause filled the hall again but this time, it felt different. He lingered as the audience dispersed, watching her gather her papers.
"You quote the heart as if it were an enemy," he said quietly.
She glanced up. "I quote it as it behaves."
He smiled, slow and knowing. "Perhaps it behaves differently when it's seen."
For a moment, neither spoke. The air between them seemed fragile like glass about to fracture under the weight of something unnamed.
Then Damon turned, offering a polite nod. "Until the next panel, Ms. Vale."
As his footsteps faded down the marble corridor, Elara exhaled a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.
Her mother's journal echoed again in her mind:
The man who speaks of love as theory has never felt its consequence.
Elara closed her notebook and whispered under her breath,
"Then neither have I."
For three days, the city held its breath beneath a restless sky.
The Symposia continued lectures bloomed and faded like summer storms, scholars argued over love as though it were a theorem to be solved, and students scribbled notes none of them would ever read again.
Yet, beneath the hum of philosophy and applause, something deeper stirred.
Damon kept to his lectures, precise and brilliant as always, but a faint distraction haunted his cadence. Every time he quoted Plato, he heard her voice under his breath — challenging him, contradicting him, finishing his sentences in silence.
And Elara, for her part, avoided the west wing of the campus entirely — because that's where his office was. Yet the more she avoided him, the more the echo of his words filled her thoughts.
When the storm finally broke, washing the city clean in a torrent of rain, they found themselves once again in the same room not by design, but by the quiet gravity of unfinished conversations.