Chapter 190: 190: The First semester XIII

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Fizz floated closer and bumped his shoulder. "Tell me later," he said. "Tell me when the lamps are out and the room is pretending to be a ship. I will pretend to paddle."

John nodded. "Tomorrow we ride."

"Tomorrow we ride," Fizz echoed, as if the words were a small spell that would keep the morning honest.

They doused the lamp. The dorm breathed around them. Somewhere a student laughed, then tried to swallow it because it was late. Somewhere a teacher paced and planned to terrify a room at dawn. Somewhere, far beyond the walls, the Black Jungle waited the way old places wait: patient, dark, unamused.

John lay back and watched the crooked beam become a finger again. The line in his chest was steady. The M15 hummed in the corner of his mind like a well-tuned promise. The communication stone sat warm in his pocket like a quiet yes. He closed his eyes.

Tomorrow would be work. Tonight was the thin stillness before it. And, just at the edge of sleep, the memory reached up again, tugging him toward the road where Circle Two had become real.

Sleep took him sideways, the way a wave takes a stone—lifting, turning, setting it down where the shore remembers an older shape. John lay on the dormitory cot, breath slow, Fizz curled like an ember near the pillow, and the dark behind his eyes opened onto another night two months old: a thin moon, a scraped field, a road that had once been a river before the empire taught it to hold still.

Wind carried the smell of cold straw and iron. A half-ruined milestone leaned at the ditch’s lip, its numbers sanded away by thumbs and time. Far off, a mill turned once, sighed, and decided not to try again. They had left the caravan at dusk to buy quiet, to stop listening to arguments about salt and axle grease. Fizz had declared that night required a "properly poetic camp" and chose the field’s corner where wild thyme pretended it was brave.

John stacked three flat stones, set the kettle just so, and did not light a fire. The road was busy enough with patrols and thieves who dressed like patrols. Heat drew eyes; cold drew patience. He wrapped the cloak tighter and watched his breath for the count he liked—four in, four out—until numbers felt like a blanket the night could not steal.

Fizz floated backward, upside down, feet toward the moon. "Observation," he said. "We have selected the most haunted patch of dirt in three counties. Congratulations to us."

"It is quiet," John said.

"It is so quiet the quiet is making a noise," Fizz said, but he settled, small sparks at his whiskers for his own comfort. He turned until the tiny glow of him faced John. "You are thinking the thinking face."

John let the line inside him answer. "I am close," he said. "I can feel it."

"Ah." Fizz rolled, suddenly solemn in the particular way he reserved for knives and hunger and the kinds of hard work that make you taller when you stand up again. "Tonight?"

"If I can," John said. "I don’t want to carry it into the city. Too many eyes there."

Fizz nodded. "The city eats attention, and it eats what attention eats. Fine. We do it here. The moon is skinny. Skinny moons are good for starting new arguments with the world."

He drifted down and touched a paw—warm, fizzing—to John’s sleeve. "Do you want me to be quiet or clever?"

"Quiet first," John said, mouth tugging wry. "Clever if I start drowning in my own head."

Fizz nodded like a general. "Quiet it is. I will be the silence of a pastry in a locked box—visible, inspiring, unreachable."

John sat cross-legged on the bare dirt and set the world in order, small to large. Hands on knees. Spine not proud, not slack, just honest. Language folded away. The last light on the road laid a thin blade across the field and went out. He closed his eyes.

Breath. Four in, four out.

He did not chase the mana. He let it hear him. The way water listens to a channel cut with patience. The first circle in him—the one he had carved with months of counting and a boy’s stubbornness—glowed in the dark he could feel but not see. It hummed the way the string of a lute hums when another string is plucked in the next room. He felt the old ring meet the breath and hand it back, steadier.

He let the void come near.

It did not knock. Void never does. It is the idea of a door remembered after the house is gone. The cool of it poured around his ribs, not wet, not cold—just less. Less noise. Less insistence. A hush that made it possible to hear the true noise: his pulse, the scrape of a mouse in the dry roots, the way Fizz held his own breath because he forgot he did not strictly need one.

John followed the hush until the line inside him ran along a new seam. He could taste it like the edge of a coin between the teeth. Where the first circle ended and the space for the second began felt like a cliff with fog at the bottom. He did not step. He lengthened the breath and counted again.

Four in, four out.

A fox coughed somewhere in the stubble. A nightjar flipped its song as if someone turned a page too fast. The road kept secrets with the energy of a gossip trying to reform.

His pulse touched the seam. He traced it. He had tried to do this three nights back and failed, and the night had stung his pride like nettles. Tonight, the seam did not buck him off. It widened a hair, then another, then stopped and waited to see if he meant it.

He meant it.

He eased the void into the seam like a thread into a needle’s eye. Breath, count, let the hush hold.

[System Notification: Threshold condition met.]

The voice arrived the way it always did, without sound and undeniably there: plain, calm, not a friend, exactly, but not an enemy who had learned good manners. It did not interrupt. It was announced. He let the line in him lengthen toward the words and not away.

[System Guidance: Form the second heart circuit. Maintain breath. Do not force the path. Let the path choose the shortest turn.]

He would have smiled if smiling didn’t waste a breath. He had learned this already, from dirt, from wind, from the way bad luck finds the straightest road to your door. He imagined the second circle not as a perfect round but as a river learning the bend of its own bank, wearing the softest route through.

He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth to ground the thought and set the void to a slow, relentless pull around the seam. The first circle hummed in sympathy. He felt the line of himself arc, draw in, arc again — once around the heart, once around the lung, over the old bruised place in his ribs where Divine wind would one day try to live. The circle nearly closed. It wobbled, thin as a soap bubble and just as proud of itself.

Something moved near the ditch.

John did not open his eyes. He did not cut the circle to reach for his knife.

Fizz turned slowly, a quiet ring of light in the corner of John’s vision. The glow showed three shapes at the milepost: men who thought night made them wolves. One laughed, soft; one spat; one said nothing, and the nothing was the only thing that worried John.

Fizz’s fur lifted at the spine, but he did not cry warning. He watched.

The nothing man drew a short bow with leisurely hands. The arrow was blunt—meant to stop a limb, not a life. The quiet of him slid along the road and tried to make a shape like kindness. John kept his eyes closed and finished the breath.

[System Guidance: Pressure spike detected.]

The bow creaked just enough for a mouse to write it in its diary.

John let the second circle close.

It clicked like two coins stacked true. The hush in him deepened until it was a room with a door that would open when he asked. The first circle sang. The second answered, lower. The two notes set his chest thrumming and the air around his skin took notice.

He opened his eyes.

The arrow left the bow. He was on his feet before it understood the distance. He lifted his right hand as if inviting rain, and the black sphere formed where polite men would have kept a blessing: small, dense, certain. He tipped it and the arrow bent its mind, changed allegiance in midair, and vanished into the ball like an idea into sleep.

The man with the bow lowered it, disbelieving. The laughter stopped laughing. The spitter swallowed the rest of his spit.