Chapter 77 – Waiting Maidens (Lyra)
I miss him.
I miss him.
I miss him. I love him.
Where is he.
That was the first week after he left.
The words just circled, like a broken spell that never finishes casting. I'd wake up: I miss him. I'd go to class: I miss him. I'd eat, train, breathe: I miss him.
The instructors said he'd "advanced." Special case. Brilliant talent. Of course he had. Of course he left. He always moved forward like the world had to catch up or be crushed.
He wanted to go.
That's the part that hurts the most.
He looked at me, at us, and still chose the road with no guarantee of coming back. So I let him go. My fingers were grabbing his sleeve inside my head, begging out loud, don't, but my mouth said, "Okay. Then I'll wait."
Because if I tried to chain him, he'd just break anyway.
And I don't want my chains broken.
I want him to wear them.
…Only if he wants to.
…It's complicated.
***
Tamara annoyed me first.
Not because she did anything wrong. She was just… there.
Always louder, always brighter, always running at his side with that stubborn, arrogant energy. She grabbed his attention by existing like a small explosion. I tried to be quiet, because quiet things get overlooked and overlooked things survive.
Except he saw me anyway.
I still hate that day. I still love it.
"If you're going to hover," he'd said without even looking up from the notes he was scribbling, "sit down."
Hover.
I'd wanted to disappear.
I sat anyway.
After that, it was over.
He showed me things. How to hold a weapon properly, like it was an extension of my intent, not just a stick with a blade. How to let water magic move around my arm instead of fighting it, how to turn a whip from a messy, flailing toy into something that follows my thoughts like a trained snake.
"Just the whip is stupid," he'd said once. "You're fast with it, but it's too obvious. Pair it. Sword for close, whip for control. Flow between them. You're water, not stone. Stop trying to be Tamara's mirror."
I didn't even know I'd been doing that until he said it.
Tamara is fire and wind and stomping and shouting and swinging that sword like every fight is an argument she refuses to lose.
I… was trying to be that.
Because it looked simple.
He looked at me like he could see the crack in the act and just… poked it.
"Your magic's water," he'd said. "Your aura runs crooked, not straight. You don't shove. You slip. So slip. Cut where they stop seeing you."
So I did.
Now I use both. Sword in one hand, whip in the other. Steel for anyone dumb enough to get close, water for anyone dumb enough to think distance makes them safe.
All because of him.
Always him.
When he left, I thought I would shatter.
The first night, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. My hands kept reaching for where his presence should have been. The dorm felt wrong. The air felt thin.
No one else noticed.
Of course they didn't.
To them he was a prodigy, a Sword campus monster, Noel's saviour, Keith's headache. To me he was…
Everything.
I cried once. Just once. Quietly, into my pillow, so Tamara and Noel wouldn't hear. My chest hurt so much I thought some curse had gone wrong and burned a hole through my ribs.
Then morning came.
And it was still empty.
And I was still here.
So I stopped crying and started moving.
***
Tamara changed next.
She grew into herself. Her legs got longer, her shoulders sharpened, her sword stopped being a noble girl's accessory and became a problem. When we stand side by side now, we look like twins: one blue, one red. Same height, same muscle, same coiled energy.
At first, that made me angry.
He taught me to stop copying her. Now she looks like me instead.
Then she laughed about something stupid and bumped my shoulder, and the anger… just didn't stick.
She's like a loud, annoying reflection. I want to strangle her and braid her hair at the same time.
So I did the only thing that makes sense.
I made her mine.
Not in the same way.
But close.
If we all love him, we're already in the same cage. May as well call it family.
***
Noel changed into Noelle.
That was softer. Slower.
She let her hair grow out just enough that it brushed her neck. Stopped hiding her wrists. Stopped flinching when we said "she" instead of "he," like the word was a trap.
One day she just said it.
"My name is Noelle."
Like it was always supposed to be that, and the world had been wrong the whole time.
I watched her say it. Watched her shoulders shake just a little afterward, like she was bracing for someone to hit her.
No one did.
Good.
I would have killed them.
***
The demon came when we were fourteen.
The Academy still pretends it was "an incident." A "contained event." I still hear it when I close my eyes.
Screams. The wet sound of something tearing where nothing should tear. Light exploding wrong colours against the walls.
I remember the smell first.
Rotten sea-salt and old blood and the stink of magic that doesn't belong.
We rounded the corner and there it was—tall, crooked, too many limbs, skin that wouldn't stop changing. No eyes, but it still looked at us.
For a heartbeat, I froze.
If I die here, I thought, he'll never know.
The idea hurt more than the demon's aura.
I could have run.
I wanted to.
But if I died, Tamara would be alone with that thing, and Noelle would be alone after.
And he would never see any of it.
No.
No, no, no.
I grabbed my sword. Whip. Water. Fire. Anything.
"We hold it," Tamara shouted.
Of course she did.
She ran forward like an idiot.
Of course she did.
Noelle's magic flared, too bright, too fast. Light wrapped the demon's limbs, burned into its flesh. It shrieked; the sound went through my teeth and hammered my spine.
I moved.
I don't even remember drawing my sword. My body just went. Erynd's voice was there in the back of my mind, insultingly calm.
"Don't attack where it can see you," he'd said once, pushing my shoulder down, turning my hips. "Attack where it thinks you can't be."
The demon didn't have eyes.
It still had habits.
It felt for pressure, for noise, for the simple, stupid paths people take when they panic.
So I didn't take those.
I slid sideways into the blind spot no one else would think to use. Water whipped out from my fingers, the magic coiling around my arm like a live thing, extending the blade's path in a second arc.
Steel cut shallow. Water bit deeper.
It noticed me then.
Good.
If something is going to kill us, it should at least know who we are.
We survived.
That's the short version.
Tamara ran faster than anyone I've ever seen, wind screaming around her legs as she sprinted to fetch instructors. Noelle held the demon with light that burned her from the inside. I carved and cut and kept it angry at me instead of at them.
The instructors finished it.
We almost didn't need them.
Almost.
Sometimes I lie awake and imagine that same fight without their help. Me, Tamara, Noelle, demon. No adults. No priests. No safety net.
Would we have won?
I don't know.
I do know this: I didn't want to die.
Not because I love my life that much.
Because I haven't seen him again yet.
***
Boys talk to me.
Of course they do.
Some are just curious. Some are trying to be brave in front of their friends. Some saw the demon fight and want a piece of the "heroine" story.
It's disgusting.
Their eyes aren't his. Their hands aren't his. Their voices don't cut me open and rearrange me like his do.
So I smile.
The soft, shy smile I used to use all the time. The one that says "I'm harmless, I'm sweet, you can ignore me."
Most of them are stupid enough to believe it.
One wasn't.
He grinned and reached out, fingers brushing my arm without permission.
Something in me snapped.
It was so simple.
I took his wrist in my hand. I looked him in the eyes. I smiled wider.
Then I bent his finger backwards until it broke.
The sound was sharp. Bones make such pathetic little noises when they fail.
He screamed.
I kept holding his hand.
"Don't touch me," I said gently.
Later there were lectures. Warnings. A visit from a priest who tried to talk to me about "forgiveness" and "temper."
I nodded. Smiled.
He touched my arm. Just once. Lightly.
He didn't lose any fingers.
But I watched him.
He didn't touch me again.
***
Tamara calls me "possessive."
She says it like she isn't.
We fight every other day now.
Not real fights.
Real enough.
Our blades clash and our auras bite at each other in the training yard until the instructors yell at us to stop before we bring the roof down.
She's faster than me in a straight line. I turn tighter. Her fire is hotter. My water cuts cleaner.
We know each other's rhythms so well that sometimes it feels like dancing.
"Do you think he'd like this?" she asked once, panting, hair stuck to her forehead with sweat, sword resting on her shoulder.
"What, us trying to kill each other?" I said.
"Us not being useless," she said.
My fingers tightened on the hilt.
"He wouldn't call us useless," I said.
"He would if we were," she shot back.
We both went quiet.
Because that's true.
And that's why we can't be.
Noelle is softer, but not weaker.
She spends more time in the chapel now. She prays to Vastriel, talks to priests, argues with old doctrine in that quiet, stubborn way that looks like politeness until you listen to the words.
Sometimes I join her.
Not to pray.
To sit in the back, eyes closed, and imagine what that Goddess must think, watching us run in circles.
If she's real—and after the Duke of Morel and the judgment and the way the air shifted when Erynd said that Command, I think she is—then she knows exactly where he is.
She knows how many times he's died.
How many times he's decided to get back up.
I hate her a little for not telling us.
Then I remember that gods don't think like people and that maybe she's just as trapped in some larger script as we are.
So I don't hate her too much.
Not yet.
***
I don't go to the gate as much as Tamara.
I tried.
I stood there once for hours, watching the road, waiting for the shape of a boy with a too-big sword and tired eyes to crest the hill.
Every traveller that wasn't him felt like a betrayal.
Every carriage that rolled past without stopping felt like an insult.
By the time the sun went down, my hands were shaking.
If I keep doing this, I thought, I'll go insane in the stupid way, not the useful way.
So I stopped.
I don't wait where I can see the road.
I wait on the training grounds.
I wait in the library, reading books he would laugh at and then steal to scribble corrections in the margins.
I wait hunched over my notebooks, writing his name again and again until the ink bleeds through the page.
I have… eighteen of them, I think.
Little books, each filled with messy script.
Plans. Training notes. New spell-circuits I think he might like. Lists of questions I want to ask him. Things I was too shy or too scared or too stupid to say when he was actually here.
The first pages are just his name. Over and over.
Erynd Milton.
Erynd.
Erynd.
I love you.
I don't write that part where anyone else can see.
Some things I'd rather carve into bone.
People call us "the three."
Tamara, Lyra, Noelle.
We didn't decide that. It just happened.
We train together. Eat together. Hunt together when the instructors let us.
We sleep in separate beds, but if someone attacked the dorm at night, they'd find us on our feet in the same instant, blades and magic already in hand.
They think we're close because of shared trauma.
They're half right.
We faced a demon together.
We also faced him together.
That's worse.
Demons want to kill you. It's simple.
He wants you to live.
That's complicated.
He took three broken, twisted, angry girls and pulled us into his orbit without asking permission. He insulted us, helped us, pushed us, left us.
And we stayed.
We're waiting.
We're growing.
We're sharpening ourselves on the edge he left behind.
If he comes back and decides he doesn't want any of us, it will hurt.
If he comes back and chooses one of us, it will hurt.
If he comes back and tries to walk past all of us like we're just old memories, I will break his legs and drag him to a chair and make him look.
…Gently.
Probably.
***
Sometimes, late at night, I imagine it.
The gate opening.
Boot steps.
His voice, rough and tired and annoyed:
"Why are you all staring at me like that?"
Tamara will run first. She can't help it.
Noelle will cry first. She can't help that either.
I'll walk.
Slowly.
Carefully.
Because I know if I move too fast, I'll slam into him hard enough to break ribs and then everyone will yell at me and I'll have to pretend I'm sorry.
I'll stop in front of him. Look up.
He'll look down.
For a second, I'll see his eyes measure me the way they did when he was deciding whether I was worth training.
Then I'll smile.
The real one.
Not the fake shy one. Not the "I'm harmless, please ignore me" one. The one I only ever showed him, and only once or twice, when he said something so unbelievably stupid and kind my mask slipped.
"I waited," I'll say.
Like it was easy.
Like it didn't hurt.
Like my hands don't still itch to grab his sleeves and never let go.
He'll sigh.
He always sighs.
"Of course you did," he'll say.
And he'll be right.
Because that's what I do.
I wait.
I train.
I sharpen my love into something that can cut anything that tries to take him away again.
I miss him.
I miss him.
I miss him. I love him.
Where are you, stupid boy.
Come back.
Before the world breaks again.
Before the next demon.
Before I run out of notebooks.