"Until the Academy decides whether to accept or reject what it's remembering."
The words should be ominous but somehow feel hopeful. The Academy isn't just testing us—it's testing itself. Remembering what it was before it became what it is.
Love before wickedness.
Creation before destruction.
Unity before betrayal split everything into fragments that pretend to be whole.
Movement.
We're moving, though I can't tell if it's through space or time or something that exists in the angles between both. The sensation is nauseating and comforting simultaneously—progress and stasis occupying the same moment.
Voices continue around me, planning and worrying and theorizing about what's happening.
But I'm drifting deeper, consciousness fragmenting like the stairs we were climbing.
Part of me walks with them, carried but present.
Part of me still falls through endless stairs that exist in every direction except the one that leads anywhere.
Part of me stands in memory that might be history or might be hope, watching two children who don't yet know they'll become one, playing in an Academy that doesn't yet know it will be broken.
"Hold on, Gwenievere."
The voice is multiple—Cassius, Atticus, and Nikolai speaking in unison or maybe just their concern harmonizing into single sound.
"We've got you."
And they do.
Even as reality argues with itself about what's real, even as the Academy remembers trauma it's been trying to forget for centuries, even as consciousness becomes optional rather than required—they hold on.
Was this what Professor Eternalis meant about bonds being strongest.
Not just magical connections but the choice to hold on when letting go would be easier.
The determination to maintain connection even when the connecting medium becomes uncertain.
The faith that together means something even when together exists in multiple dimensions that don't quite touch but desperately want to.
Darkness pulls me deeper, but it's different now.
Not the dark of ending but the dark before beginning.
Like the Academy itself is taking a breath before deciding what comes next.
And in that breath, in that pause between heartbeats of a heart that might be building or breaking?—
I remember/dream/experience something that might be true:
The Academy wasn't created by its builders.
It was created by its heirs…
Us…
The thought follows me into complete unconsciousness, where dreams, memories, and possibilities dance together in space that exists between what was and what might be.
