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Every time she reached for a shard, his hand shifted with hers: guiding, never touching, close enough to feel the ghost of contact. His voice, when he spoke, was low and careful, each word seeming to risk revealing more than he intended.

Across the table, Julen had stopped pretending to work. He watched the two of them over the top of his notes, his quill idle, his jaw tightening each time Caelith’s voice dropped low enough that he couldn’t quite catch the words. Once, he cleared his throat pointedly. Neither of them looked up. He tried again, louder, tapping his quill against the table and still the only answer was the careful, murmured exchange between Maia and the Umbralyn, a conversation he had been shut out of without anyone deciding to shut him out.

He slammed his notebook shut.

“I need a break. A long one.” He was already standing. “I’ll leave you two to whatever—” he waved a hand between them “—this is.”

He swept out, muttering under his breath, footsteps eventually fading. He left real silence: heavy, charged, thick as the storm outside. The fragments shimmered, tiny pulses echoing the drum of rain.

Maia exhaled shakily as she looked up at Caelith. “He thinks we’re avoiding each other.”

Caelith didn’t look up, but stared intently at the fragments. “We should be.”

She blinked. “We should?”

His jaw tightened. Shadows shifted along his cheekbones, as if he were biting back something so hard it bordered on pain.

“What happened last night,” he said quietly, “should not have happened. You should never have been there. It could have been a far worse outcome. I should never—”

She leaned closer into him without realising it. “But you were there. And—”

The shards on the table pulsed faintly under her fingertips, a soft, rhythmic echo of her own quickened heartbeat, and whatever she’d been about to say died there instead.

Caelith went utterly still, his eyes on the shards too.

“Maia,” he said, low, warning. “Don’t—”

“Don’t what?” Her voice softened, testing the edges of something delicate and dangerous. “Don’t thank you? Don’t acknowledge that you…” she searched for the right words. “…that you saved me?”

His face changed briefly, only for a moment, before the familiar control returned. The space around them seemed to vanish, leaving only the quiet thunder of tension that had grown since Caelith had entered the room.

“Distraction,” he said at last, his voice low and unsteady, “is dangerous.”

She ought to have moved away. Instead, she stayed. Before she could stop herself, the words tumbled out.

“Maybe,” she whispered, desperately trying to stop a smile, “some distractions are worth the risk.”

Something moved across his face like lightning behind a composed sky. Then he turned away, returning to the shards as if she was not in the room with him.

Heat crept up her neck, caught between hoping he’d heard her and wishing she’d said nothing at all. That she’d never gone down after him that night. That she’d never thought of him in this way.

But the damage was done and the moment had shifted. And neither of them could speak, nor pretend otherwise.

***

Time softened, stretching into a long, quiet closeness that neither acknowledged aloud. Maia kept nearly speaking, then letting the words fade, as though simply sitting beside him was enough.

The shards swirled more than usual in their presence, their pulses quickening with each low rumble of thunder.

After midnight, Maia’s exhaustion finally caught her. She fought it, unwilling to leave Caelith with so much unsaid, but she lost. Her head dipped once, then again. The candlelight blurred. The last thing she was aware of was the faint hum of the shards and the quiet certainty that he was still there, close enough to feel but not close enough to touch.

She woke to grey light and silence.

His candle stood at her elbow, burned down to a stub. She had never taken it back. He must have lit it, and sat with it, while she slept. The shards lay still on the table, their usual restless pulse oddly settled. The rain had eased to a whisper against glass, and thin morning light crept through the Archive windows.

Caelith was gone.

But something else was different. A blanket lay across her shoulders - the one that had been folded in the corner, too far from where she’d fallen asleep to have reached on her own. She pulled it closer without thinking, and caught something: warmth, fading but unmistakable, pressed into the fabric as though someone had held it before placing it there.