Hedi didn’t know how to answer; she dropped onto the four-poster like a stone into still water.

At first, the bedroom held no sound, a hush laid over it like frost.

The mute stretch kept going, as if the silence wanted to grow roots and live there forever.

Then came a click-clack in the background, like fingertips tapping the windowpane in a slow drizzle.

Right after, she heard—maybe—a breath of a sigh, light as a feather falling.

“Professor.” The Holy Maiden measured her words like a ruler against paper, careful to keep the vow not to speak her name. “If you want to leave, no one will stop you.”

“Just… like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Then… thank you…” Hedi smoothed her temples with unsure hands; she hadn’t expected the Holy Maiden to agree.

Her voice was stiff as ice, flat as a winter lake, and in that flatness she sounded unreal, distant.

“You’re already swept by feeling. Going back fits you,” the Holy Maiden said, like noting a storm already in the sails.

Hedi didn’t answer; she hurried toward the main hall of the Sacred Cathedral.

The air was cool and damp, a wet sleeve against the skin; the sun was gone, the sky sealed behind a sheet of leaden cloud that didn’t stir, promising a hard rain.

In the nave, believers gathered in little knots, like sparrows clumping before a squall.

Selina stood near the doors, speaking low to a nun.

The nun noticed Hedi and almost called out, but the Holy Maiden lifted a hand like a raised lantern, and the nun fell silent at once.

“What are you doing here?” Selina couldn’t hide her delight; she ran to Hedi, voicing the nun’s doubt as well. “You were still under confinement.”

“Me being locked in a room makes you happy?”

“The cell here isn’t what I imagined. It sounds like a spa with scripture.”

Hedi nodded and said plainly she had cleansed her fault by reading the holy texts; what she drew from them had scored itself into her heart like chisel marks.

“Out this fast?” the nun said, folding her arms tight as if against a draft. “The people of Naghtown will complain.”

“I’ll be leaving soon.”

“Hah. If something like this happens again, try picking the smarter way!”

“It depends.” Hedi kept it honest. “If I can’t ensure my own safety, I’ll still use magic.”

The nun glanced at the Holy Maiden, her face a braid of doubt, a silent question: Did she really reflect?

The Holy Maiden only smiled a little and urged Hedi to go, waving her on like sending a boat with the tide.

Hedi took Selina’s hand and sprinted toward the train platform.

They rushed through streets that smelled of rain; Selina threw questions one after another like pebbles into water.

Unlike before, Hedi didn’t answer each one; she just held on, steady and firm, pulling her forward like drawing a kite out of wind.

“Leaving now?” Selina asked again.

This time Hedi gave a low “Mm.”

“I thought you’d go to the cemetery, not the station.”

“Tomorrow’s a workday. You’re still my teaching assistant. Try being a normal adult for once.”

“We could stop by the cemetery first.”

“I don’t know if trains are running. We may need another way.” Hedi glanced at Selina, then added, “I don’t want to owe any more favors.”

“So urgent… is something big tomorrow?”

“A public lecture I have to attend.”

“And then you’ll come back?”

“We’ll see.”

Selina stopped dead; Hedi had to halt with her.

Selina looked straight at her, eyes clouded like a sky before thunder. “If you say it like that, you’re not coming back.”

“We’ll see then.”

“No.”

Hedi flicked a strand of hair, restless. “If I don’t go back, I’ll owe three favors. First, Claire pulled me out of that mess with the police. Then the Holy Maiden took the heat and canceled my punishment, even though people here might talk—I was barely confined. If I skip tomorrow’s public lecture, the Principal will have to cover, and he’ll take a hit. The academy’s name will, too.”

“But you… never went to the cemetery… you only stood at the gate…”

“That’s enough.”

“You say you don’t believe, yet in Naghtown you follow the doctrine more tightly than anyone.”

Worry pooled on Selina’s face like ink. She looked at Hedi the way someone looks at a flower just cut, already losing color.

She’d fallen for Hedi’s free and easy air, but that very ease cut Hedi thin as paper.

Even so, Selina could feel a struggle inside Hedi, something wordless twisting like a current under ice.

It made no sense: a Professor who teaches others, yet can’t speak her own truth.

Right then she saw the flaw in Hedi’s near-perfect surface; as a lover she should accept it, but stubbornness rose in her like a stake in the ground—she had to make the Professor come back.

“When did I follow doctrine?” Hedi asked, careful and precise. “I agreed to confinement to calm the people of Naghtown.”

“Reading Dark Magic kept you from visiting the Priest. The doctrine’s clear: a sinner must not approach a soul about to step into heaven.”

“That wasn’t it.”

“You were a week late and still came back. That mirrors a quiet attachment to the Sacred Cathedral. When it’s Sister Bertha or the Priest, you wave it off with airy lines, but that lightness is a folded kind of escape.”

Hedi’s heart took a bolt of lightning; she looked away from Selina and stared, lost, at the neat rows of houses in Naghtown, like counting tiles to steady herself.

“You stash things in your chest and can’t untie them alone,” Selina went on, calm as a doctor with a lamp. “They float there like grit in the sea of your heart, and in the end they settle into a pebble you can’t shake. That’s no good. You don’t have to act carefree with me. Say it all.”

“I’m not pretending to be carefree.”

“Is it your age, then? You think you should be an example for the young, so when trouble hits, you turn into a proud beast in the hills, and you won’t show your soft side.”

“In the Dark Realm—”

“I know what you want to say,” Selina cut in, sure as a knife. “I once joked, ‘Leave the Dark Realm and you turn back into a mature, reliable big sister.’ I was teasing. But you really stopped showing your feelings. When the pocket watch the Priest gave you broke, your face was so sad. Because the Vice Dean and I were there, you didn’t want others to see it, so you said, ‘It’s a ten-year-old watch; it was bound to fail.’ You keep putting on that easy smile.”

“You remember that clearly?”

“If it’s you, I remember everything.”

Hedi lifted her right arm, urging her on. “If trains aren’t running, we still need another way.”

“I want to stay.”

“You think that’ll make me come back?”

“You said you wouldn’t abandon me—unless that was just empty comfort.”

Hedi lowered her arm and strode for the station, her steps quick as rain.

As she walked, she kept looking back, again and again, at Selina standing rooted, that sweet, sometimes-jealous girl who always stayed by her side—and didn’t follow now.

With each step, the weight in her chest grew, a stone in a riverbed.

When Selina’s figure slipped out of sight, regret hit her like cold water; she almost shouted Selina’s name to the sky.

But she swallowed the urge, as if pressing a lid on boiling water.

Her head still rang from their words; sparks pricked her vision, and a heavy pack sat on her heart, making her curl inward against the load.

Her legs went weak, as if someone had cracked the bone; thoughts bubbled and tumbled, and she couldn’t make sense of what had just happened. Did I really just walk away?

No choice. I have to go back.

She tried to soothe herself, to climb out of the snarl, but her mind felt like tangled thread, and a helplessness pressed against her skull from the inside, packing the chaos into a narrow space she couldn’t escape.