Veyn’s office was warmer than I expected.

It smelled like peat and wild mint, like the inside of a greenhouse where no one else ever walked. Vines curled along the upper edges of the stone walls, trailing toward a central skylight veiled in moss. Light filtered through it in soft green and gold, falling across a low desk stacked with scrolls and a single, struggling wisteria vine in a ceramic pot, its leaves curled inward as if in pain.

Veyn stood at the desk, arranging scrolls with the absent precision of someone trying to stay busy.

I hovered just inside the threshold, one hand tightening on the strap of my satchel. My feet had led me here, slow and uncertain, until there was nowhere left to turn but inside. After discovering Halven frozen in The Seal, we’ve all been swamped with Midterms while still trying to find out more information before deciding what to do next.

It was my mission to find out Veyn’s role in all of this.

But looking at him now stirred that deep, aching longing I still had for him. My mind tried to remind me that this man was somehow responsible for what happened to Halven, but my body remembered something else: that he was also the source of an overwhelming love that had carried us from childhood innocence into the throes of adult passion and romance.

I missed him. I missed us.

Veyn finally looked up, sensing my presence.

His eyes flickered—surprise first, then a wave of something unreadable and achingly soft. On the corner of his desk, a faculty ID card glinted in the light. His gaze followed mine, subtle tension tightening his shoulders as he instinctively shifted, a fractional movement to obscure it from view.

“Shara.” My name in his voice still landed like a leaf on still water.

He gestured to the empty chair opposite his desk, but I didn’t move.

“I wasn’t sure you’d talk to me again after the Spiral Dance.” His voice was quiet, laced with a weary resignation that twisted something in my chest.

I stepped in and the heavy wooden door click shut behind me, sealing us in with the scent of earth and regret.

“It’s been a few weeks,” I said, more guarded than I meant to sound.

More like a month.

A small, sad smile ghosted across his lips. “I noticed.”

The silence that stretched wasn’t brittle. It held itself carefully between us, like a thread neither wanted to cut.

“I didn’t come here to talk about the dance,” I said, my voice steadier now. The sight of him, the familiar lines of his face shadowed by a new weariness, solidified my resolve. I had to know.

“Your midterm, then?”

The wariness in his brown eyes made me pause. Did he hope that’s all I really wanted from him, the accolades on the work in his class?

“You did very well. You and Rielle work well together. I can’t wait to see what you’ll achieve by the end of the semester.”

I stopped before his desk, my gaze flicking again to his ID card beneath his hand. “I came to tell you I’ve found the tunnels beneath the Library of Seasons, and I found Halven.”

I waited then, hoping he’d show a surprise that meant he hadn’t known, even though he had to know. Instead, his posture went rigid. The faint golden light in his brown eyes sharpened, his full attention locking onto me. He didn't ask how. He just waited.

“Your magic was there, wrapped around him.”

Halven’s fate echoed between us, in the room. The name of our friend before we crossed the threshold into adulthood.

The color drained from his face, and he gripped the edge of his desk, his knuckles white. The living vines woven into his hair and robes trembled, their leaves curling tight.

“Shara, don’t—” he started, his voice strained as if the words themselves were a physical effort.

I didn’t let him finish. I laid out the full truth of what we’d found at his feet, and now I would see what he would do with it. But his silence was telling. It revealed so much. Not just his inability to admit to anything but the fact that he knew I would find out.

The leaf he gave me.

The sigil on the back. He’d been leading me to this discovery the whole time. Whatever bound him hadn’t stopped him from trying to tell me something. From giving me just enough to find out what happened to Halven.

“You already knew we’d go, didn’t you?”

He didn’t answer.

“You wanted us to find it. You just couldn’t say it out loud.”

Still, he was silent.

My voice cracked as I stepped closer. “He’s alive. Frozen by your magic in some type of containment spell. I felt it. There in the ice. With him, like...” Then it hit me. All the lessons he taught us in his class, binding magic to nature. “Like you bound your magic to the ice to keep him trapped.”

That broke him.

He closed his eyes, a shudder running through him. The air in the room grew thick, tight, as if an invisible force was squeezing the space around him. When he opened them again, they were full of a raw, desperate anguish. He couldn’t deny it. But the words to explain were clearly caught behind a barrier I couldn’t see.

“I can’t tell you what happened,” he whispered. “Not because I won’t. Because I can’t.”

He reached across the desk, his hand stopping just short of mine. His voice was thick with unshed emotion, a ragged plea. “Veyshara, please. You have to trust me.”

My True Name was a key turning in a lock I’d thought rusted shut. It was a sound of home, of shared roots, of a time before he’d left. Tears pricked my eyes. Trust him? How could I when he was shrouded in secrets, when his magic was wrapped around our friend like a cage?

But the look on his face wasn’t deception. It was torment. He couldn’t give me words, so he was trying to give me the only truth he had left.

I should have left then.

Instead, I stepped around the desk, closing the final distance, because I recognized the emotion emanating from his whole body. His love for me.

The air grew thick, humming with the contained energy of his office, of him. His scent—peat and wild mint—wrapped around me, a memory made real.

“Then show me.” My trembling whisper was resolute. “Show me something I can believe in. I want something that’s real.”

His breath hitched. That was all the permission he needed.