Light - I meant the Sunset

Nox didn’t answer right away.

He never did. That was something I had learned early — that questions asked to Nox didn’t land the way questions asked to other people did. They sank. Settled somewhere deep. And if an answer came at all, it came in its own time, in its own shape, and almost never resembling the question that had started it.

I had stopped minding.

“Do you ever think about it?” I said, more to the sky than to him.

“How long we’ve been doing this. Whether it’s going somewhere.”

The grass moved around us. The wind here was different from inside the Tower — it didn’t cut, didn’t carry the particular cold that lived in stone corridors and candlelit rooms and pages that hadn’t been touched in decades. This wind was something else. Warm, almost. Like it was trying to say something before the light ran out.

I liked it here. I always forgot how much, until we were back.

“The Tower feels smaller every time I leave it,” I said. “Or maybe I just feel larger. I can never tell which.”

Nothing from Nox.

I turned my head slightly — not enough to look at him directly, just enough to catch the edge of him in my peripheral vision. He was lying the same way he always lay when he’d gone somewhere inside himself: hands behind his head, eyes toward the sky, the particular stillness that wasn’t sleep but wasn’t quite wakefulness either.

Somewhere between.

I had a theory that Nox did his best thinking when he looked like he wasn’t thinking at all.

“I wish we could stay,” I said. “Not forever. Just — a little longer than we’re allowed to.”

The sun was lower now. I could feel it changing the quality of the light without looking directly at it — the way everything had gone from gold to something deeper, something that sat heavier on the chest. Beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when they’re almost over.

I exhaled slowly.

“Do you ever get tired, Nox?”

The grass moved. Somewhere far off, a bird.

“— Never mind,” I said, and almost smiled. “Forget I asked.”

That was the other thing about Nox. Sometimes his silences were answers. I just hadn’t always learned to read which kind.

I looked back up at the sky — at the last of the light spreading itself thin across the horizon, the way it always seemed to give more of itself right before it disappeared.

Like it knew.

Like it wanted to be remembered.

I wish time would stop, I thought, not for the first time.

“Beautiful,” Nox said.

“You really did breathe in someone else’s seal, didn’t you,” I said, glancing sideways at him.

He didn’t deny it. He didn’t say anything at all.

I turned my head back, keeping my eyes on the sunset.

“It really is.”

I was almost certain I meant the sunset.

Then my chest went warm — the specific warmth I had learned to recognize, the kind that started just left of center and spread outward before the smoke came.

Faint. Almost translucent.

The kind that meant someone needed me back.

I sat up.

“Nox — “ I was already moving, already calculating the distance to the Tower, already sorting through which urgency this might be. “There’s something at the Scholar’s Tower. We have to go.”

I stood. The grass was tall enough that for a moment I couldn’t see past it — just the gold, just the wind, just the last of the light on everything.

I ran.

I didn’t look back. I almost never looked back — there was always somewhere to be, always something that needed doing, always the next thing pulling me forward like a current.

It didn’t occur to me, not then, that some things are only understood in the looking back.