Moonlight broke the gallery floor into neat rectangles, sharp-edged and deliberate, like something measured rather than natural.

The girl stepped into one square of light. She paused, then moved to the next.

Her pace was careful. Her bare feet never touched shadow.

She muttered the rule aloud, the way she always did when she played alone. It came out as confirmation that it still existed, rather than reassurance.

She stopped mid-step when she realized she was being watched.

The boy sat on the floor near the shelves, cross-legged in the loose way of someone too young for chairs to feel necessary, a book open in front of him.

He was reading nothing.

He spoke first, casually, as if continuing a conversation that had never started. "You're avoiding the dark parts."

She glanced at her feet, then back to him.

"Is that part of the game?" he asked.

"It's a rule," she said.

"Who decided it?"

"It applies until a mistake happens." She moved to the next square. "The rule ends when the mistake happens."

He repeated her words back to her, slightly altered. "So the rule ends when you break it."

"When someone breaks it," she corrected.

"What does it protect?"

She looked down at the light under her feet. Then toward the darkness. Then back again.

"If I mess up, they won't come back," she said. She recited it the way one might recite a date or the name of a capital city.

The boy nodded. He seemed to find this workable.

"So the rule isn't about light," he said. "It's about staying on one side of something."

"It is about the light."

He shrugged. "All right. It's about the light."

He returned his attention to the book. "Tools and intentions aren't the same thing. People mix them up all the time."

"What are you doing with the book?"

Instead of answering, he tore a narrow strip from the edge of the page.

He did it carefully, avoiding the text.

He watched her reaction instead of the paper.

She reacted instantly. "That wasn't allowed."

It was the kind of rule adults made and forgot to explain.

"It wasn't mine?"

"It wasn't yours."

He aligned the torn strip back against the page, almost fitting it where it came from. "Does it look the same?"

"It doesn't count."

"Why?"

"Books don't feel things."

"People say that about places, too." He pressed the strip back into place anyway. "Look. The story hasn't changed."

She watched his hands rather than his face. "The warning applied to the wrong part."

"Maybe," he said.

She stepped to the next square of light and sat down, folding into herself without leaving the boundary.

"What are you actually checking?" she asked.

He answered plainly. "I want to know if rules protect what matters. Or if they make damage easier to notice."

"What happens if someone breaks the wrong part?"

"Then the person who made the rule made a mistake," he said.

"Who decides which part was wrong?"

He looked at her for the first time since she had sat down. "Pretending nothing changed only works until someone names it."

He closed the book slowly.

He closed it wrong. The misaligned page forced the cover to sit crooked.

He pressed it down anyway.

"Accidents can be corrected," he said. "Choices demand acknowledgment."

She shifted where she sat.

Her foot slipped into shadow.

She froze. Her breath went shallow.

Nothing happened.

"I broke the rule," she said.

"You didn't break it," he said. "You found where it stops working."

He stood. He placed the crooked book on the floor between the shelves, somewhere visible, somewhere it had no business being.

"If someone fixes it, they'll misunderstand what failed," he said. "If someone hides it, the test becomes pointless."

He left without ceremony. His footsteps were careful, measured, like hers had been.

She remained seated, half in light, half in shadow.

She watched the book until the moonlight shifted and the rectangles disappeared.

The rule had held no power.

The people it was meant to protect had never returned.

But nothing else had collapsed.

Seris woke with her cheek pressed to the page.

The words beneath her face were smudged where her breath had dampened the paper, the ink faintly blurred. Her neck ached from the angle. The dream slipped away in pieces, leaving behind a sense of rules half remembered and something left unfinished.

Lucian's voice reached her from the far side of the table, low and carefully placed.

"My lady."

She lifted her head, slow, and straightened without comment. The room was unchanged. The window shutters stood at their usual angle. The clock on the sideboard marked the hour with a patience she resented.

"How long?" she asked.

"Less than a quarter hour," he said. "You fell asleep during the third passage."

She closed the book with one hand. "You should have woken me."

"You instructed me not to interrupt unless asked."

She studied him, weighing the answer. His posture was correct. His eyes stayed where they belonged. He had learned quickly.

"That will be all for today," she said.

Lucian inclined his head and gathered his things. The formality did not slip as he turned to leave, which was a small irritation.

"Next week," she added, watching his reflection in the glass-fronted shelves. "Do not come."

He paused this time.

"My schedule is flexible," he said. "If there is another—"

"There will not be," she said. "I will be unavailable."

He looked at her then, properly, the question clear behind his eyes.

"May I ask the reason," he said, phrased as courtesy rather than challenge.

She met his gaze without shifting.

"You may ask," she said. "I will not answer."

A corner of his mouth twitched and then settled.

"As you wish, my lady."

He bowed and moved toward the door.

Her voice stopped him once more.

"Lucian."

He turned.

"Use the time well," she said. "It is rarer than people think."

He studied her face, searching for something she had already put away.

"I will," he said.

The door closed behind him, the latch soft, final.

Seris leaned back and closed her eyes.

There is very little left, she thought, and let the words sit as she tried to replay the memories in her dream once more.

Vencian walked the narrow street with Lucian's posture, shoulders set to invite no attention, boots marking a path he had walked often enough to forget.

Four days had passed since the engagement night, and Ralan had returned to its habits.

The city smelled of damp stone and bread ovens, ordinary things pressing in around a memory that refused to settle.

The hall, the lights, the moment when everything tilted without warning.

He replayed it without meaning to. The shock still sat with him, unspent.

Duke Hadethon's words had landed cleanly, without warning, and he had not yet found where they truly hurt. An engagement arranged with the same ease as a seal pressed into warm wax, and the certainty of it unsettled him more than the match itself.

Quenya drifted at his side, visible only to him, perched near his shoulder as if the air itself were a ledge.

"You are thinking in circles again," she said.

"I know," he said.

She swung her legs once, then twice, watching the street pass beneath them.

"May I ask a question," she said, her voice unusually careful.

"You already did."

She ignored that.

"If the duke is powerful," she said, "and strong, and respected, why would he arrange a marriage for his second daughter with you, when his first daughter married the crown prince."

Vencian kept walking, eyes forward.

"That assumes marriage is only about rank," he said.

"Is it not," Quenya asked.

He exhaled.

"It is," he said. "And it is also about timing, leverage, and what people think they can afford to risk."

She frowned, considering this.

"That sounds complicated."

"It is not," he said. "It is interesting."

— — —

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