Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Lucavion stopped with his hand a few inches from the privacy seal.

The silver threads woven through the door continued their slow pulse, brightening beneath his fingers before dimming again when he made no attempt to release them. He stayed that way for a moment, then turned his head over his shoulder, and Elara watched the expression settle across his face with an ease that irritated her almost as much as it impressed her.

A smile.

It was the same one he carried through arguments, accusations, threats, and whatever other situation should have demanded a more sensible expression from him. The curve looked convincing from a distance. Up close, the corner of his mouth twitched once before holding itself still, while the black eyes fixed upon her carried a faint instability that the smile failed to conceal.

Lucavion turned fully.

"Why?"

Elara had expected more resistance than that. The simple question caught her strangely unprepared, and before she found an answer, his gaze travelled over her face with enough leisure to become irritating.

The smile deepened.

"Couldn’t get enough of me?"

Heat touched the tips of her ears.

Elara’s brows drew together almost immediately, though the reaction came a fraction too late to save her from knowing exactly what had happened.

’Idiot.’

Her gaze shifted toward the formation plate. Broken traces of silver mana still lingered across its dark surface, fading one after another where his unfinished channel had collapsed. That helped. Something solid to look at. Something considerably less irritating than the man by the door.

"What?" Lucavion asked, amusement creeping further into his voice. "Was I right?"

Elara looked back at him.

The answer waiting on her tongue would have been satisfying and completely useless.

So she swallowed it.

What exactly was she supposed to say?

She had spent the better part of the evening sorting through his knowledge, changing terminology, adjusting diagrams, watching the movements of his fingers and comparing one response against another. Every alteration had been deliberate. The incomplete formation had been deliberate. Even the section she had made him repeat had existed for one purpose.

To find something beneath the gaps in his memory.

And she had.

His hand had moved toward a structure she had never taught him. His body had recognized the mistake before his conscious mind found it. Then she touched him, and whatever had been lurking beneath those half-remembered movements had surfaced hard enough to send him recoiling from his chair.

Now he wanted to walk through the door.

’After all that?’

Elara’s fingers tightened slightly against the folds of her skirt.

Letting him leave here would turn everything she had done tonight into half-finished work. She had finally reached the first genuine reaction that neither his jokes nor his evasions could smooth over, and instead of understanding it, she was supposed to watch him disappear down the corridor because he had suddenly decided the lesson was finished?

Absurd.

The thought settled more easily the longer she considered it.

Whatever that reaction meant, Lucavion remained Lucavion. The man whose name had been tangled through the worst night of her life. The man whose connection to Isolde still refused to explain itself cleanly. The man who answered questions by turning them sideways until everyone around him forgot what they had originally wanted.

If she had finally found one place where that composure cracked, wasting the opportunity would be stupidity.

His discomfort hardly transformed him into someone she ought to trust.

’I only need to understand what happened.’

That was all.

Lucavion’s smile had begun to fade while she remained silent.

His fingers tapped once against the side of his leg. Then again. The second movement carried more impatience than the first, and when he spoke, the teasing quality had thinned considerably.

"Elowyn."

She lifted her eyes.

A crease had appeared between his brows. His mouth still held the remnants of that usual curve, yet annoyance had begun showing through it plainly now, sharpened further by the strange tension still sitting behind his gaze.

"If you’re going to stop me," he said, "you could at least have the courtesy to explain why."

Elara opened her mouth.

Lucavion waited.

She hesitated.

His jaw shifted.

"Otherwise, I’m leaving."

The hand nearest the door rose again.

Elara watched it approach the seal, remembered how violently those same fingers had curled away from hers only moments earlier, and felt the answer arrange itself with sudden clarity.

"Sit down."

The words left Elara’s mouth before she had properly decided upon them.

For the briefest moment, even she remained still.

’Why did I say that?’

Lucavion seemed to share the question.

His hand paused beside the privacy seal, while the annoyance that had been gathering across his face gave way to something flatter. He looked at her for several seconds, black eyes moving once between her and the chair he had abandoned.

Elara felt the absurdity of the command only after hearing it aloud.

She could hardly tell him that she had spent the entire evening searching for precisely the sort of reaction he had just shown, and that allowing him to disappear now felt rather like watching someone close a book at the exact page where the answer finally began appearing.

Still, there were other reasons.

Perfectly valid ones.

She straightened slightly.

"I am the one teaching you tonight."

Lucavion’s brow shifted.

Elara continued before he could turn that expression into another irritating remark.

"I arranged the room. I prepared the material. I went out of my way to determine what you knew, what you had forgotten, and which parts needed to be rebuilt." Her gaze moved toward the ruined formation plate before returning to him. "You agreed to the lesson. I have yet to say that it is finished."

The explanation came more easily as she spoke, enough that the strange impulse behind her first command began settling into something much more reasonable.

It was true.

She had gone out of her way.

Several hours of preparation, old Lorian terminology, altered diagrams, comparisons between one response and another. He had complained through half of it, teased through the other half, and now that the lesson had finally produced something genuinely useful, he wished to decide by himself that they were done?

Elara folded her arms.

"Is this how you intend to respect my authority as your teacher?"

Lucavion stared at her.

Then his mouth moved.

The smile returned, though it had changed. Less playful now, stretched over something that wanted very little to do with amusement.

"My respect for you isn’t really the issue."

"How fortunate."

"Elowyn."

"What?"

His fingers left the seal. "I respect that you know considerably more about this than I do. I respect the effort you put into teaching me. Right now, however, I don’t—"

"You do not feel like you are in any condition to listen to me."

Lucavion’s eyelashes fluttered.

Only once.

The reaction was so strangely delicate that Elara almost forgot what she had been saying.

He looked tired.

That was the first word that came to her, though it was not quite correct. Lucavion had looked exhausted before. She had seen him bloodied, half-burned, dragged through battles where remaining upright seemed to require an argument with his own body. This was something narrower. His shoulders were still held too carefully, his breathing had mostly settled, and yet the sharpness that usually lived so comfortably behind those black eyes seemed to have pulled farther inward.

For some reason, an image surfaced from Stormhaven.

A white cat sitting upon his shoulder.

Small. Impossibly clean despite everything around them. Watching the world with the same irritating suspicion its owner seemed to reserve for anyone who came too close.

Elara’s gaze lingered on Lucavion.

Black hair. Black eyes. Dark clothes. That guarded stare.

’...A black version?’

Her lips nearly moved.

The thought was ridiculous.

Yet once it appeared, it refused to leave.

Lucavion stood by the door with the same air as some stray animal that had wandered too close to a warm house and abruptly remembered that hands could reach for it.

A particularly troublesome stray.

One that carried an estoc.

And smiled while biting people.

Elara pressed her lips together.

’Enough.’

She should have been thinking about his hand.

That was what mattered.

Her attention dropped.

His fingers rested beside his thigh now. Loose at first glance, though the thumb remained drawn closer toward his palm than before, and once every few breaths his index finger shifted slightly as though testing whether the movement still belonged to him.

Something in Elara pulled her forward.

She took a step.

Lucavion’s eyes sharpened immediately.

Elara stopped.

Interesting.

The distance between them remained several paces, yet his attention had already settled on her movement rather than her face.

She continued more slowly.

The hem of her skirt brushed softly across the floor. One step, then another, each deliberate enough that he could see her coming well before she entered reach. Lucavion remained where he was, though the hand beside his thigh curled slightly before relaxing again.

Elara watched it happen.

’His hand again.’

Everything tonight returned to those fingers.

The old quill grip. The altered stroke. The tremor at the incomplete formation. That sudden movement beneath her touch.

She had finally found something beneath the holes in his knowledge, something his conscious mind seemed unable to reach while his body responded with almost embarrassing honesty.

Letting that disappear would be wasteful.

Yet pushing until he shut down completely would accomplish just as little.

Elara slowed another fraction.

She would have more opportunities.

That realization cooled some of the urgency that had driven her after him.

Two lessons each week. Shared classes. The Academy itself practically delighted in placing them within the same corridors. Lucavion might evade one question, perhaps ten, but the gaps in his memory were already becoming easier to recognize.

She did not need everything tonight.

She needed enough.

Enough to know where to look next.

Her gaze stayed on his hand as she approached the final pace between them.

Lucavion followed her with wary eyes.

"Elowyn."

"I heard you."

"That remains debatable."

"Your complaints are becoming repetitive."

"And you are approaching me very slowly, which is somehow more concerning."

A faint warmth touched Elara’s cheeks again.

"I am looking at your hand."

"I had gathered."

She stopped just outside his reach.

From here, she could see the remaining tension along his fingers clearly.

Elara lifted her eyes to his.

"Then let me look."

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