Baz thought it was the most wonderful place in the world. Then again, he never did mind the broken and forgotten things. But it was an empty place, lonely since Kai had left, and that Baz could not quite stand.
Once, he would have given anything to be here alone, with no other Eclipse student to disrupt his peace. His first year at Aldryn, Obscura Hall had housed three students: himself and two upperclassmen on their last year of undergrad, one of whom had been so impossibly chatty, Baz could never step out of his room without having his ear talked clean off, and the other so completely immersed in her studies, she wanted nothing to do with either of them except to yell at them to shut up—even though Baz was rarely ever the one doing the talking. Suffice to say he’d looked forward to his sophomore year without them, hoping there wouldn’t be any new Eclipse students to take their place.
Nothing could have prepared him for Kai Salonga.
It had been apparent from the very beginning they were as different as night and day. Where Baz was soft light in a dusty library, made up of a muted assortment of cozy old sweaters and shirts that fit awkwardly on his lanky frame, Kai was piercing starlight, with the kind of presence that commanded attention even when he said nothing at all, the way the night sky drew such fascination from poets and artists. With supple black hair he kept in a low bun, a broad nose and high cheekbones and angular eyes that were coldly calculating, Kai was handsome in a way that made Baz all too aware of his own awkward appearance—ears that stuck out and messy hair that wouldn’t cooperate and a freckled, pink-tinged complexion that always betrayed how flustered he was.
More than that, Baz had never been so conscious of his own sheltered existence. While he’d never strayed far from home, preferring to discover new worlds through books rather than any real experiences, Kai had lived all over, from his native Luagua, the largest island within the Constellation Isles in the south, all the way to Trevel in the east. He spoke several languages he’d picked up while traveling with his parents, wealthy merchants who dealt in the trade of precious metals, and had attended one of the world’s finest magical prep schools in Trevel—where he’d been an insufferable menace, apparently, testing the limits of every magical rule there was just for the fun of it.
And therein lay the starkest difference between them: Baz had long abstained from using any real sort of magic, feeling uneasy about being Eclipse-born, but Kai… Kai was completely at ease in his identity. As if the Eclipse sigil on his hand wasn’t enough, it also adorned his neck, where a delicate sunflower-and-moon-in-eclipse pendant hung from one of the fine golden chains he always wore, complementing his tawny beige skin. Even the tattoos on his collarbone, which Kai had once told him were traditional to his Luaguan culture, referred to the eclipse and the Shadow.
Unlike Baz, Kai was not one to shy away from his magic.
He was a Nightmare Weaver, his particular strand of Eclipse magic a dark variation of what Dreamers could do. It let him walk into people’s nightmares, conjure their worst fears, and make them real—or at least, make them feel real, even if they were mere illusions. One time, he’d produced a horde of furious bees pulled from Baz’s subconscious as he napped in the commons. Baz had had to use his own magic to make them disappear, winding the clock back to a time where they did not exist, all while Kai laughed darkly in a corner.
“I’d love to see you have your nightmares come to life like that,” Baz had mumbled furiously.
“That’s the thing about dealing in fears and nightmares: I’m immune to it all.”
“Please. Everyone fears something.”
Kai had tracked the motion of a stray bee as it landed on the windowsill. “This didn’t even scratch the surface of what you truly fear, Brysden. Most people suppress their worst ones. Bad memories, traumas, childhood wounds. They bury them so deep they aren’t even aware of them anymore.” His dark eyes had slid to Baz. “It’s always the quietest minds that hide the worst sort of violence.”
Something about the way he’d said it—almost fondly, his voice a midnight breeze—had made Baz shift uncomfortably in his seat. He remembered the dwindling light gilding the side of Kai’s handsome face, the supple strands of jet-black hair that fell from his bun to kiss his jawline. Baz had hoped Kai wouldn’t notice the flush creeping up his neck, mortified at the thought of him seeing the horrors that lived in his mind. It wasn’t the first time the Nightmare Weaver had found himself in Baz’s nightmares—something about their proximity, he’d explained, that called to his mind more than most. The thought was horrifying in its intimacy.
Kai’s cologne lingered now in the commons, a scent at once upsetting and oddly comforting. Baz could almost picture him coming into the room and draping himself over the chaise longue by the fireplace, imagined him unscrewing the lid of his trusty flask with that sardonic smile of his.
It felt like only yesterday he was here, but now Kai was gone and never coming back.
Baz knew more than most how unpredictable and dangerous those of their house were when their powers went unchecked. Unlike those of other lunar houses, whose magic lay dormant in their blood, slowly building until their moon phase came around again, their own magic didn’t follow such a cycle. It flowed freely in their veins at all times, power that seemed to want to be used, building to dangerous levels in their blood until they released it.
The danger was in letting it consume them.
One slip was all it took to take that power away from Kai. One feat of magic that pushed him too far past that precarious line between small magic and big magic, a line Baz himself was always keenly aware of.
There was a difference, he knew. Small magic was innocuous, safe. It went unnoticed by the world. It was the time he slowed by a fraction of a second, all so that a minute could turn into a minute and a half, allowing him to get a bit more reading done in a night. It was the seconds he sped up to brew a pot of coffee in half the time it usually took, all so he could hit the Decrescens library before anyone was even awake. It was the thread he pulled to see a lock unlocked so he could hold the fabled manuscript of his favorite book in his hands.
Small things that took the edge off. Inoffensive bursts of magical release. That was all Baz would allow himself.
Big magic, on the other hand, was the sort he dared not touch—the kind he wasn’t entirely sure he could wield, even if he tried. At least not without deadly consequences. Not without Collapsing.
“Magic sustains us like air,” his father had taught him long ago. “Go without it and you suffocate. Keep too much in your lungs and you’ll burst. The key,” he’d said, “is taking carefully measured breaths.”
The lesson was deeply ingrained in Baz. It sounded easy enough, but even his father, Eclipse-born like him, had ended up slipping. Baz remembered all too well how Theodore Brysden’s face had been plastered in every newspaper and shop window around the city of Threnody after his Collapsing. How the other children Baz’s age had stopped wanting to play with him because of it, seeing all Eclipse magic as dangerous, perverse. Evil.
The sins of the Shadow, theirs to carry on.
Even then, Baz couldn’t fault those kids for how they’d acted. He couldn’t blame Romie for distancing herself from him either; his sister wasn’t Eclipse-born and therefore didn’t need to shoulder the weight of what their father had done as Baz did. The other kids still wanted to include her so long as Baz kept his distance. And he understood, truly. No one was as shaken as he was by the deaths his father’s Collapsing had left in its wake, because all he kept thinking was how that might happen to him one day. So he retreated into himself, doing everything he could not to be contrary.