Shiro woke to warmth.
Not the choking heat of fear or the cold sweat of nightmares, but a soft, golden glow spilling through the dormitory window. The sun painted gentle stripes across his blanket, warm and harmless. No storm. No dread. No masks. He stretched, feeling the pleasant ache of a body that had slept deeply. No salt on his tongue. No bruises blooming under his ribs. No echo of a father's voice. Just quiet. Just peace. He breathed in, and for the first time in days, the air didn't feel heavy. It tasted almost sweet.
Kuro didn't cross his mind.
Not once.
It was better that way, he told himself. Better to forget the boy who was two people at once, tormentor in daylight, something else entirely in the shadows. Better to let that confusion fade. Here, he had real people. Real friends. People who didn't twist him into knots or leave him guessing which version of them he'd meet next. Ignorance, he decided, was a kind of mercy.
Kael's droning voice filled the classroom, chalk tapping rhythmically against the board as he traced the Crown approved constellations. The false ones. The edited ones. His posture was impossibly rigid for a man who spent his days hunched over parchment, his severe, high collar a pale fortress against his jaw. Each breath carried a faint, whistling sigh, barely audible beneath the scrape of chalk.
Kael's lesson was a slow, meticulous burial. He didn't just draw the corrected constellations; he dissected them, assigning moral weight to each altered line. His movements were precise, economical, the chalk held not like a scholar's instrument but like a blade in its sheath.
"Observe," he intoned, the word escaping on a soft, wheezing exhale. His chalk circled Cassiopeia's now upright 'M'. "The Tumbling Queen was a myth of instability, of celestial apology. This new orientation reflects the divine stability of our era." He paused, and for a moment his pale eyes flickered….something unreadable, something old, surfacing before being swiftly drowned. "A firm seat, facing the dawn of a renewed Astralon."
The chalk tapped the board with finality. Like a door closing. Like a seal on a tomb.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Each tap felt like a nail being driven into the coffin of the real sky.
Shiro's quill hovered over his parchment. To draw this was to participate in the lie. He glanced sideways. Reo's notes were already a masterpiece of precise, unquestioning transcription. His brow was furrowed not in doubt, but in pure concentration on replicating the false angles perfectly. All around, other nobles nodded along, their faces smooth with acceptance. There was no rebellion here, not even a flicker of curiosity. This was faith.
A cold knot tightened in Shiro's stomach. This was worse than the library's dusty conspiracy. This was the lie, vibrant and unchallenged, being woven into the minds of a generation. He was watching the King's sky become their sky, the truth not just hidden but overwritten in their very understanding. His hand trembled, and a drop of ink fell, a tiny black star on the margin. He quickly smudged it, a guilty erasure.
Reo leaned in, his voice a polite murmur. "The ascension node is five degrees further east on this revised chart. You've placed it in the old position." His finger pointed to Shiro's error, an error of truth. "It's an easy mistake if you're referencing outdated materials." The words were helpful, but Reo's eyes held a new, watchful sharpness. He wasn't just correcting a classmate; he was testing a hypothesis.
Why would the Malkor cousin, sponsored by the Prince's own guardian, cling to obsolete data?
Shiro felt the scrutiny like a physical touch. He murmured thanks and forced his quill to draw the false line, the movement feeling like a betrayal of Aki, of the rooftop, of himself.
Shiro copied them down with the rest of the class, his quill moving automatically. He hated it. Every stroke felt like swallowing poison. But everyone else accepted it. Everyone else nodded along. Everyone else believed. So he pretended. Reo leaned over constantly assessing and offering quiet corrections, pointing out angles, murmuring about declinations. His tone was polite, helpful, even warm, and Shiro forced himself to smile back, to nod, to play along. Inside, he felt sick. But he buried it. He buried everything. Kuro was gone. Valeria was gone. The truth was gone. All that remained was the performance.
Later the training yard buzzed with energy. Without Kuro, the atmosphere was lighter, almost playful. Students greeted Shiro with grins, claps on the back, nods of respect. He had become the top student by default, the absence of a storm leaving room for a new sun to rise. Stratoria noticed the crowd forming around him and barked, "Back to your drills! He's not a shrine idol, he's a student!" The class scattered, laughing.
She turned to Shiro, eyes sharp with interest. "Since you're so popular today, Shiro... how about a duel? Friendly of course. You knock me off my feet, you win. You touch me with your blade, even a graze, you win. I knock you down, I win."
Shiro swallowed. "Yes, Instructor."
"Drop The instructor just call me Toria like everyone, when you call me instructor it makes me feel old, I'm only twenty four!" She said defeated.
Shiro apologised, "Sorry In.. Toria," he corrected himself.
They took their stances. Shiro settled into his ungainly guard, blade high, body squared. Stratoria's expression shifted from professional interest to genuine intrigue. "Malkor's answer to the Veyne riposte," she muttered, almost to herself. "Let's see if it's luck or language."
She didn't attack; she appeared. One moment she was five feet away, the next her practice sword was a silver blur singing toward his ribs. Shiro's high guard crashed down not to parry, but to smash the attack aside, using his entire body's weight. The impact juddered up his arms. She flowed around the deflection, her foot lashing out at his knee. He skipped back, the movement crude but effective, his balance rooted in the low, stable stance Klaus had beaten into him.
It became a brutal conversation. She spoke in the clean, sharp dialect of the academy: a feint lunge disengage combination meant to trap his blade. He replied in the guttural tongue of the streets: a desperate, sweeping block followed by a sudden, forward slam of his shoulder, aiming not for her sword but for her centre of gravity. He didn't fence; he brawled with a blade in hand. Sweat stung his eyes. His breaths came in ragged gasps. He could smell the oiled leather of her glove, the dust of the yard, his own sharp fear.
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Her grin widened, ferocious and alive. She stopped retreating. Now she pressed, her attacks coming faster, a staccato rain of blows that forced him into pure, shaking defence. Then came the feint. It was beautifully blatant, a huge, theatrical overhead swing that screamed dodge left! His instincts, trained on deception far meaner than this, screamed trap. He started to shift right, his eyes darting for the true strike. It never came. While his mind was solving a complex puzzle of violence, her blade simply dropped and tapped, almost gently, against the side of his ankle, hooking it.
The world tilted. He hit the hard packed earth with a grunt, the wind knocked from him, staring up at the vast, mocking sky. The class erupted in cheers.
Stratoria offered him a hand up. "Well fought," she said, genuine pride in her voice. "Remember this: on a battlefield, if you make it to one, no one plays fair. But saying that you fought like someone who already knew that."
Shiro flushed, overwhelmed.
Students swarmed him, praising him, laughing, recounting the duel. "Kuro didn't last five seconds against her!" "You actually pushed her back!" "That footwork, where did you learn that?"
Stratoria shooed them away again. "Give him space! He's not used to this much attention," she teased, laughing.
She was right. He wasn't. And when the yard finally emptied, the silence felt... wrong. Too big. Too hollow. He shook it off and walked to his next class, Harken's back with telescopes, which Shiro weirdly liked but hated at the same time.
The observatory was cold, the brass telescopes gleaming under the skylight. Shiro tried, truly tried, to get the mechanics right this time. He adjusted the fine gears, aligned the lenses, checked the declination. "The sky does not forgive a trembling hand," the skeletal professor wheezed, watching as Shiro fumbled with the telescope's fine adjustment knob. The brass was cold, the mechanism impossibly delicate. His fingers, scarred, strong from hauling and carving, were too much for this work. Every tiny turn was an earthquake. The star he sought, Vega, danced and blurred in the eyepiece, a teasing mirage.
"Your breathing, Malkor," Harken intoned from behind him. "You are breathing like a bellows. You fog the lens with your desperation. Astronomy is the art of stillness."
Shiro tried to still himself, to become a statue. But inside, he was screaming. He knew where Vega was. He had charted it from the rooftop with his naked eye, had felt its place in the true Lyra. But here, trapped in this brass prison, forced to see the sky through the Crown's calibrated, lying instrument, the star felt alien. The telescope wasn't a window; it was a filter, designed to make him doubt his own truth.
To his left, Reo finished his alignment with a soft, satisfied click. He didn't look at Shiro, but his posture was a quiet sermon on competence. When Harken passed, Reo asked a nuanced question about atmospheric refraction, his voice smooth, showcasing his effortless mastery of the system. It was a performance of belonging that Shiro could never replicate. His own hands felt like clumsy hooks, his knowledge a secret heresy that had no place here. He finally got Vega centred, a dim, blurry smudge, seconds before Harken called time. He stepped back, his shoulders aching from tension, feeling more defeated than if he'd never tried at all.
It didn't matter.
He was last again. Reo was second. Kuro, even in absence, remained first on the board. Shiro stared at the ranking slate, feeling a strange twist in his chest. Not jealousy. Not anger. Just... emptiness. He pushed it away.
Reo approached him after class. "Revision tonight?" The invitation hung in the corridor's chill air, polite and pointed. Reo's expression was a masterpiece of neutral concern, but his eyes, always his eyes, were cataloguing. Shiro felt seen in the wrong way, as if Reo were not looking at a person, but at a fascinating, flawed specimen under glass.
"The exam is tomorrow," Reo said, his tone smooth as polished river stone but edged with urgency. "The practical on seasonal refraction... it's not in the standard primers. I've been through my family's old tactical astronomy scrolls. There's a pattern to the problems Kael sets." He said it like a generous offer, but it was a trap. My family's archives. A world of privilege and legacy Shiro could never claim, offered on the eve of the test.
Shiro's mind raced. Accepting meant hours alone with that analytical gaze, every gap in his understanding laid bare under the pressure of a looming deadline. Reo would help, yes, but he would also map the contours of Shiro's ignorance with surgical precision. He'd frame his help with probing questions, "Surely your house's tutors drilled the winter azimuth corrections?", and Shiro would have to fabricate on the spot, his lies brittle under the weight of tomorrow's examination. He saw it clearly: a quiet room, the shared glow of a lamp, Reo's polite dissection under the pretext of crisis tutoring. He might pass the exam, but he'd emerge with a far more dangerous enemy, because Reo wouldn't confront him. He would simply know. And on the other side of tomorrow, that knowledge would be a weapon.
"That's... incredibly kind," Shiro said, forcing genuine sounding regret into his voice. He rubbed his eyes, summoning a fatigue that was only half feigned. "But after Stratoria's drills, my brain is just a pulp. I'd ruin your focus and learn nothing. I... I have some notes to review alone. Basics I need to cement."
Reo's smile didn't waver, but it cooled by degrees. The slight narrowing of his eyes was the only sign he'd heard the refusal for what it was: a rejection of both help and scrutiny. "Of course," he replied, his voice still pleasant but now carrying a hint of frost. "The basics are everything. But don't mistake fundamentals for sufficiency, Malkor. The exam won't care if your brain is a pulp." He paused, then added, almost as an afterthought, "It's a unique position, isn't it? Facing your first trial without Prince Kuro here to... set the curve. Or break the curve. One almost doesn't know what to expect."
The comment was a grenade rolled gently at Shiro's feet. It linked them, implicitly, in Kuro's shadow on the eve of a test that would define their standing. It tested for a reaction: anxiety, loyalty, relief. Shiro kept his face carefully blank, a mirror reflecting nothing back. "I expect it will be fair," he said, the blandest possible answer.
Reo nodded, the calculation in his gaze deepening into something like confirmed suspicion. "Fair," he repeated, as if tasting the word. "Sleep well, then. You'll need it." He turned and walked away, his footsteps echoing with a finality that sounded like a verdict being recorded.
Shiro watched him go, the cold certainty settling in his gut: the borrowed peace was over. The truce was ending. Tomorrow was a battlefield, and Reo had just shown him he would be fighting on two fronts: against the exam, and against the boy studying him. Shiro let out a genuine yawn and he too left.
Shiro walked the corridor away from Reo, feeling the weight of that calculating gaze like a spot of heat between his shoulder blades. The day's borrowed light was fading, and in its place crept the familiar chill of performance. He had smiled when he should have, laughed when expected, accepted praise he didn't feel. He had drawn lies in Kael's class and fumbled with truth in Harken's. He had fought with a style that marked him as 'other' even in victory.
Back in his room, the silence was a physical presence. The echoes of the day's laughter felt hollow, ghosts in the stone. He sat on his bed, the coarse wool of the blanket scratching his palms. He missed Valeria with a sudden, childish ache, for her steadiness, for the way her presence made the world make sense. And then, unbidden, came the memory of a different warmth: the shack's crowded gloom, the sound of a knife on wood, a storm grey gaze, for a moment, unguarded and real. He missed Kuro. Not the Black Prince, but the boy who searched for names with a river stone. The admission was a crack in his carefully built peace, and he swiftly packed it with denial.
Sleep did not take him softly. It stalked him. Exhaustion from the duel dragged him down, but his mind whirred on, replaying Reo's watchful eyes, Stratoria's analytical gaze, the endless, approving nods in Kael's class. He dreamed not of stars, but of charts, endless parchments where he was forced to redraw Cassiopeia over and over, each line wavering, each stroke betraying him, while a faceless crowd of nobles, Reo at the front, watched and took notes.
He slept, but it was not rest.
It was an uneasy surrender, a borrowing of darkness that promised no real refuge.
Are The Friends Shiro made Real?
