The silence in our quad was deafening. It had been like this for hours, ever since the others had left. Rielle and Shara had gone to the library, chasing another dead-end lead about magical containment. Garnexis was with Orivian in the Scriptorium, probably arguing about font choices or the structural integrity of parchment. They wouldn't be back for a while.
Which left me alone. With her.
Aster sat cross-legged on the couch, a book on her lap. She’d pulled her hair into a braid, the end tucked neatly behind one ear, but a few wisps had escaped. She hadn't said a word in ten minutes, but I could feel the tension radiating off her in cold waves. It was a familiar feeling, that icy pressure she carried, but today it felt sharper, laced with a frustration that mirrored my own. We’d spent the entire day chasing whispers and finding nothing.
No answers. No progress. Just circles—cautious meetings, cryptic clues, and too much silence. Halven’s frozen face kept slipping into his thoughts, blue-lipped and wide-eyed beneath the ice. It had been a week since we found him in the Docilis Vault and still, nothing. No new glyphs. No new leads. Just waiting.
I paced the length of the common room. Restless energy coiled in my gut, hot and tight. My magic simmered just under my skin, itching to be released. I wanted to hit something. To burn something. To break down a door and drag the answers out of whoever was hiding them. This quiet, careful waiting was a type of torture designed specifically for me.
We were getting nowhere.
“It’s useless,” I finally bit out, the words scraping my throat. I stopped pacing and slammed my fist against the stone mantelpiece. A flicker of orange heat flared from my knuckles, leaving a small, blackened scorch mark on the stone. “All of this. The notes, the theories. Halven is still in there, and we're out here playing scholar. Where has it gotten us? Nowhere.”
I expected a sharp retort. A cool, cutting remark about my lack of patience.
Instead, she looked up from her book, her violet eyes dark and serious. She didn’t look at the scorch mark. She looked at me.
“I know,” she said, her voice low and tight with an intensity that matched my own.
Her agreement did nothing to soothe the fire in my veins. It only stoked it higher. I started pacing again, running a hand through my hair, feeling the heat lick at my scalp. Over the past month, we had stolen kisses in hallways and empty classrooms. Brief, searing moments that only ever left me wanting more. Each time, just as the heat between us threatened to truly ignite, she would pull back, her control snapping back into place like a shield of ice.
I was sick of it. I was sick of the cold.
I wanted to do more than just kiss her.
“We have the place to ourselves. A couple hours, at least.” My own voice sounded parched.
She raised an eyebrow. “You planning to experiment with glyph combinations again?”
Not exactly.
My eyes dropped to where her fingers brushed her knee, to the sliver of skin above her neckline, to the slow rise and fall of her breath. She was too calm. It infuriated and aroused me in equal measure.
No. I wasn’t thinking about glyphs.
I was thinking about pushing her back onto the couch and tasting every inch of that cool, sharp mouth.
She kept talking, something about ley line convergence and water resonance, but the sound was fading. All I could focus on was the heat curling low in my spine and the vivid, uninvited image of her robes pooling at her feet on the floor of my chamber, the cool, pale skin of her back bare beneath my hands.
I wanted to see her breath catch when I kissed her neck, the sound she would make when my fire finally melted her frost. I wanted to hear her gasp my name when I found the spot just below her navel with my tongue. I wanted—
“Ardorion.”
Her voice, close now, cut through my thoughts. I turned, and she was right there, close enough that I could feel the chill radiating from her skin.
“You’re losing control,” she said softly. A glacier under pressure.
My magic flared in response to her proximity, flames licking up my arms, my hair crackling with uncontrolled heat. The air in the room had grown tight, shimmering. The page of notes pinned to the wall darkened at the corners, the ink starting to run.
“And what good has control gotten us?” I snarled, my voice rough with frustration and a desire I wasn’t trying to hide. “We’re no closer to helping him than we were the day we found him.”
She didn’t argue. She didn’t step back. Instead, she lifted her hands and placed them gently over mine.
Her touch was like diving into a frozen lake on the hottest day of summer. A shocking, all-consuming cold that didn’t extinguish my fire, but… contained it. My flames didn’t recoil. They coiled toward her like they recognized something in her pulse.
I exhaled hard through my nose, willing the heat back down.
She stepped in closer, hands still over mine, letting her magic rise in a fine, invisible mist. The raging inferno inside me quieted, leaving behind only the raw, aching heat of my feelings for her. Aster’s ice didn’t bite. It soothed. It was intentional. Focused. The same way she spoke, the way she fought. I had mocked it once. Now it anchored me.
My eyes locked with hers.
And for a moment, everything went still.
The tension between us wasn’t gone. It had just… changed. Condensed. The air didn’t crackle—it hummed, like something waiting to be touched.
My pulse thundered in my throat.
My voice came low. “You always do that. You calm the part of me no one else touches.”
She didn’t look away. Her violet eyes held mine, deep and searching. “Maybe that’s the part I trust.”
Something in my chest snapped loose at that. It wasn’t a choice. It was magnetism.
Things are heating up, and cooling, down between Ardorion and Aster. Continue the story by choosing how much of their connection you'd like to see:
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