Free Web NovelChapter 40: Chapter 40. Before The Storm
The next morning, Necrotize emerged from his sleep as usual.
Sleep wasn’t quite the right word for what he did each night, he had no natural need for it. What he did was manufacture unconsciousness deliberately, a deliberate suspension of awareness, because the alternative was existing through every hour of every night with nothing particular to do. It served the same purpose.
He summoned a cup of coffee and drank it with his full attention. This particular thing, coffee, he genuinely liked. He drank it slowly, the way it deserved.
Across the room, Simon was beginning to stir. Necrotize noticed but said nothing. He watched the gradual return of consciousness with quiet interest, waiting.
Simon came back to the world slowly. But unlike the previous morning, he didn’t surface in a fog, he had processed enough overnight to remember exactly who his roommate was before he opened his eyes completely. He gave himself a moment, oriented himself properly, and then turned to look at Necrotize, who was sitting there with that strange drink again.
"Good morning, my lord. Such a lovely morning we have today."
"Ah, yes." Necrotize met his eyes with an entirely normal expression. "Good morning, Simon. Indeed, a very lovely morning."
He returned his attention to his coffee. Simon got up, made himself presentable, changed into his academy uniform, and then stepped outside the room briefly, returning with a covered tray. Two portions.
The academy delivered breakfast and dinner to each room every morning and evening, kept warm with a heat-retaining enchantment woven into the containers, so that it didn’t matter when you actually got around to eating it.
Simon set the tray down but didn’t ask Necrotize whether he wanted any. He’d learned that yesterday. Without something sweet involved, breakfast held no appeal for his roommate, and the academy’s standard morning meal contained nothing sweet at all.
He lifted the cover and assessed his own portion. Two bread rolls. An egg on toast. A side of beans. A wedge of cheese. Two sausages. Four bananas. Apple juice. The same as every other student in the academy received, regardless of whether you were a prince or the child of a farmer. One of the academy’s principles, apparently, was equality at the table.
It was what Necrotize had gathered that principle that drove a significant number of the more aristocratic students to withdraw before their first year was half over. They found the uniformity intolerable.
Simon, by contrast, had started eating with an expression approaching genuine happiness. And observing his thoughts, Necrotize understood why, at home, a typical morning for Simon’s family had meant cheap bread and milk, stretched from breakfast into lunch out of necessity. What was sitting on this tray represented something considerably better than what he was used to.
He ate with the same careful, quiet politeness he maintained for most things, and finished without hurry.
When they were both done, the two of them left the room together and headed toward their first class of the day.
***
For the third day running, Necrotize chose the Magic Department again.
He had decided, at least until the class test was over, he would stay here and learn what he could. The other departments could wait. He’d get to them eventually. For now, he walked in with both hands in his pockets, the same as always, and found the room in roughly the state he expected.
Everyone was frightened. New reason, same result. Yesterday’s clouds were sitting in the back of every mind in the room, and the fear that had come with them hadn’t fully cleared overnight. Necrotize pretended not to notice any of it and went to his seat.
Lyra wasn’t there yet.
He didn’t have to wait long.
She came in a few minutes later, and when Necrotize looked at her, he kept his expression entirely neutral through considerable internal effort.
Her face was the colour of old paper. Her hair had given up entirely. The skin beneath her eyes had gone dark in the way that only happens after a night of genuine, comprehensive sleeplessness. Her body had the quality of something that had been asked to continue operating past the point of reasonable expectation.
She made her way to the seat beside him and offered a greeting. freёwebnovel.com
"Hello."
That single word appeared to have cost her something.
"Hello, Lyra." Necrotize looked at her with an expression of mild interest. "You seem very energetic today. What happened?"
She gave him a small smile that faded almost immediately, and then began explaining in the tone of someone recounting a catalogue of grievances.
"After my Dantian formed, all of my senses became significantly stronger. Which is useful, in principle, I can see further, hear more clearly, my sensitivity to touch has increased considerably." She paused. "But it’s also created a problem. I’m now experiencing everything at much higher intensity. Everything. Good and bad equally."
She took a long breath. Something in her expression suggested the memory was not pleasant.
"When I tried to sleep last night, the small sounds, the ambient noise, tiny particles moving in the air, everything, I couldn’t shut any of it out. Every time I started to drift off, something would pull me back. I could hear my roommate breathing. I could hear her heartbeat." She said this with the flat affect of someone still processing a genuine injustice. "These things are practical during the day. At night, they are a curse."
Necrotize laughed.
He had anticipated something like this might happen. He hadn’t been certain it would. But here it was.
Lyra heard the laugh and her expression shifted, not into distress, but into a small, contained irritation. She pressed her lips together slightly and looked away from him with her chin lifted just a fraction.
He noticed.
And he found, quietly, that he liked it, not the discomfort she was in, but the fact that she was letting it show at all. She wasn’t suppressing it. She wasn’t folding it away neatly and pretending it wasn’t there. She was expressing something, in her small way, and that was different from how she had been even two days ago.
He didn’t know the specifics of what her life had looked like before this, not from her directly. But he knew enough to understand that whatever it had been, it hadn’t given her much practice at simply being herself around other people. Small frustrations. Small smiles. These were things she was only beginning to allow.
He considered that an improvement.
Before he could say anything further, the classroom door opened and a professor walked in.
Necrotize settled into his seat and gave the lesson his full attention.
What he didn’t know was that these quiet, unremarkable class days were among the last he was going to get for some time. Something was approaching that would take the relative calm of this academy life and dismantle it entirely. freēwebnovel.com
But that was still some days away.
For now, there was just the classroom, the morning light, and Lyra sitting beside him looking like she’d lost an argument with the concept of sleep.
