Alhaitham - Pt. 1

Where Logic Fails

During those times, when the walls of the Akademiya’s dormitory seemed simultaneously too cramped for two ambitious minds and incredibly spacious for student life, you shared one room in the student quarters. The Sumeru Akademiya was famous for its strict rules, but even among the best of the best, faculty placements were always built on cutthroat competition, where you and Alhaitham invariably occupied the top spots in the rankings, constantly breathing down each other’s necks and irritating the professors with your endless arguments. You both knew your worth perfectly well, but while your arrogance was fueled by constant money injections from wealthy parents and a habit of getting what you wanted with a snap of your fingers, his composure was built on cold calculation and a frightening confidence in his own abilities – which made it absolutely vital for both of you to be first in everything, from annual research grants to the last line in the darshans’ reports.

The shared room had turned into a battleground for constant verbal sparring, where behind every bookshelf and every desk lay a new field for intellectual clashes. Neither of you secretly would have wanted to share this space with anyone else, though openly admitting it would have been tantamount to admitting defeat.

One evening, he looked up from a thick folio and calmly gazed at you as you sat at your desk, painting your nails with yet another expensive imported polish from Fontaine. "You've taken my favorite shelf for the ancient language reference books again, {{user}}, even though you know perfectly well that it's inconvenient for me to reach for them in the far corner" he said.

You merely snorted at his remark, not even turning your head, and lounged, placing your feet on the edge of the bed, which made him sigh heavily and silently move the heavy books to your desk, because arguing with you at those moments was utterly pointless.

"First of all, that shelf is closer to the light, and secondly, if your brain is as developed as the professors proclaim at every corner, you are perfectly capable of reaching ten centimeters further without involving my attention" you shot back with a cheeky smirk, blowing a strand of hair from your forehead and watching his fingers tighten slightly around the book's spine.

"Your logic, as always, astounds with its selectivity, but arguing with you is a waste of time" he shook his head, returning to his reading, though the corners of his lips twitched almost imperceptibly.

Despite the constant squabbles, bickering, and mutual teasing that from the outside looked like pure hatred, you both perfectly understood that the line between rivalry and something much deeper had blurred back in your first year, when you had first stayed late in an empty lecture hall, analyzing complex mechanical blueprints.

He never allowed himself to cross the line in academics and never tried to sabotage your projects, no matter how many times the professors hinted that you ought to work separately. His silent devotion manifested in completely different ways, unnoticed by others, which over time you learned to spot with alarming clarity.

Every morning, a neat paper bag of candied Ajilenakh nuts appeared on your desk – a rare and incredibly expensive delicacy brought by caravans from the desert, which you adored more than anything, though you never admitted it first.

You knew perfectly well that he spent a significant portion of his stipend on these sweets, though he could easily afford much more, but you stubbornly pretended it was nothing special and casually popped one nut into your mouth.

"Your gifts again? Look, Alhaitham, at this rate you'll go broke, and I'll have to pay for your tuition myself" you tossed over your shoulder with a sardonic smirk, watching him lay out his notes.

"Don't worry about my finances, {{user}}, they are distributed more than rationally, and there is always enough for quality sweets for you" he parried calmly, not even raising his eyes from his notes, but carefully sliding the bag closer to your notebooks.

"You'd be better off buying yourself a decent monograph on epistemology than wasting money on this nonsense" you snorted, but tucked the sweets into your bag with obvious pleasure.

"One does not preclude the other" he replied curtly, continuing to place fresh bouquets of Padisarahs or Sumeru roses on your desk, which he cut himself on the way to the dormitory, knowing you liked order and aesthetics even in such small things.

One such moment was forever frozen in a small brass frame that stood on your desk among stacks of scribbled papers and inkwells. In it, you stood against the backdrop of the blooming alleys of the Akademiya’s botanical garden, clutching a huge bouquet of fresh flowers to your chest and looking directly into the camera lens with a completely sincere, tender smile that utterly lacked your usual haughtiness.

That day had turned out to be exceptionally sunny, and persuading you to go on this adventure had cost him considerable nerves, because you had grumbled for a long time that the sun was in your eyes and the background looked too banal for such outstanding minds as yours.

"I am not going to stand here like a mannequin for your next dubious scheme, Alhaitham" you had declared indignantly back then, crossing your arms and trying to retreat into the shade of a spreading tree.

"Trust me, the result will be worth the two minutes of your precious time, {{user}}, so stop being capricious and just smile" he had replied, adjusting the heavy lens of an old camera borrowed from the Haravatat darshan, composing the shot.

He made you stand still for almost five minutes until he captured that rare frame where you looked real, alive, and incredibly close, not like the arrogant top student everyone else was used to seeing.

When the photographs were ready, he silently handed you one copy, carefully sealed in an envelope.

"Here. It turned out even better than I expected" he had said then, more quietly than usual, looking away.

You yourself placed it in the most prominent spot, explaining to no one why exactly this picture deserved a place next to your philosophy textbooks, and he never asked, preserving that silent understanding between you.

It was your graduation year, and the final project defense was to decide not just the matter of graduating with honors, but to forever inscribe your names in the Akademiya’s archives, making the entire faculty speak of you with reverent awe. The Akademiya had always encouraged interdisciplinary research, where students of one darshan made breakthroughs in completely foreign fields of science, and this was exactly what prompted Alhaitham to embark on the maddest adventure of his life, one he would later regret every second of his existence.

For six months, he secretly spent time in alchemical laboratories, studying treatises on potion-making, trying to create something utterly incredible – a preparation capable of inducing artificial elemental resonance and allowing an ordinary person without a Vision to temporarily feel and visualize the elemental currents of the surrounding world. It was a monumental breakthrough, capable of overturning the entire system of Sumeru and opening the path to scientific discoveries for those whom nature had deprived of divine blessing.

It is worth noting that he had his own savings and could easily have afforded to hire a professional assistant or purchase laboratory animals for testing, but consciously chose to set aside that money for your shared future and for that special graduation gift for you, which was supposed to exceed all expectations. That is why he tested the created compound exclusively on his own body, not wanting to spend his savings on outsiders or bind himself with unnecessary obligations until he was absolutely certain of the formula's safety.

"You've lost your mind conducting these alchemical experiments alone and without any insurance, Alhaitham" you had told him a week before the defense, noticing strange flasks with a shimmering solution on his desk.

"The formula is absolutely stable, and I personally control every component, {{user}}, so there is no reason for concern" he had replied, carefully putting the reagents away in the cabinet.

When the potion was completely ready, tested on his own body, and brought to ideal stability, an unforeseen technical problem arose – for the demonstration at the defense before the strict committee, he needed an independent test subject right on stage to visually show the effect of the drug on a living person. He perfectly understood that none of the students would voluntarily agree to participate in a dubious alchemical experiment, especially when it involved a development by a linguistics student.

On the evening before the defense, he approached your desk, crossing his arms and watching you sort through your last notes before sleep.

"I need your help with the project defense, {{user}} – you'll need to drink one vial on stage during my presentation so the committee can see the result with their own eyes" he said in his usual even voice, though a slight tension was audible, betraying his anxiety in front of you.

You first laughed, leaning back in your chair and looking up at him mockingly, beginning to list all the possible reasons why this idea was complete nonsense, but eventually agreed, narrowing your eyes slyly.

"Alright, let's say I agree to play the role of your test subject, but only on one condition, Haitham" you grinned mischievously, tapping your finger on the edge of the table.

"And what is your price this time?" he raised an eyebrow skeptically, knowing the answer in advance.

"A whole box of those candied Ajilenakh nuts from the Grand Bazaar, the freshest ones, not the ones you usually buy from those shady merchants at the market" you demanded, triumphantly folding your arms.

He immediately nodded, without a second's hesitation, finding this price ridiculously meager for having you right next to him on stage at the most important moment of his life, utterly unaware of what terrible outcome this simple agreement would lead to.

The day of the final project defense arrived, and the vast amphitheater of the Akademiya’s main building was packed to capacity – not only had graduates from all darshans and junior students gathered, holding their breath in anticipation of sensations, but also the entire academic council, led by the deans and the strict committee.

You had already presented shortly before him with your brilliant work on ancient languages and literature, receiving a well-deserved pass and enthusiastic reviews from the faculty, after which you took a seat in the front row to observe the final chord of your eternal rival with your usual share of skepticism and light irony.

Alhaitham was the last to speak, and his appearance on stage immediately drew everyone’s attention thanks to his confident posture, the cold gaze of his green eyes, and that absolute inner silence he projected in any environment.

He began his speech with an impeccable academic exposition, explaining in detail the principles of operation of the alchemical preparation capable of inducing artificial elemental resonance in people without Visions, gradually mesmerizing the audience with the scale of the unfolding prospects.

"This composition does not violate the basic laws of physiology, but merely temporarily tunes the nervous system to perceive elemental currents, which has been confirmed by multiple preliminary tests" he said in a confident voice, sweeping his gaze over the hushed hall, then turned to you and nodded, asking you to come up on stage for the demonstration.

You rose from your seat, swaying your hips slightly and throwing a mocking look at him, then walked up the stage steps with a confident gait, accepting an elegant glass vial with a shimmering liquid from his hands.

"I hope your sweets will compensate for this dubious circus, Alhaitham" you whispered quietly, giving him a slight smile in the very last seconds before uncorking the vial and drinking all its contents to the last drop, as he had asked.

"You know I keep my word, {{user}}" he replied just as quietly, preparing the folio for further explanations to the committee, while you handed the empty vessel back.

Everyone in the hall froze in agonizing anticipation of the promised miracle; the professors leaned forward, and the hands of the large clock on the wall seemed impossibly loud in the ensuing silence. Several seconds passed before the color began to rapidly drain from your face, replaced by a deathly pallor, and your legs started to tremble noticeably under the weight of mounting weakness, prompting students in the front rows to whisper in alarm.

The committee tensed, exchanging glances, but the learned men tried to the last to chalk it up to individual side effects or temporary adaptation of the body to the new compound.

Suddenly, you threw your head back, thick, bright scarlet blood gushed from your nose, instantly staining your formal student uniform, and the hum in the amphitheater sharply escalated into panicked screams. You collapsed onto the wooden floor of the stage with a deafening crash, resembling a broken porcelain doll whose every supporting thread had snapped in an instant.

"{{user}}!" he shouted, springing from his spot and crossing the distance to you in two bounds, while students leaped up in horror from their seats, and some of the professors rushed to the exits, trying to quell the ensuing crush and cries.

He dropped to his knees beside your lifeless body, frantically trying to find a pulse on your neck, but his fingers were trembling, and his mind refused to accept the reality unfolding before him – because the formula was pure, and he had drunk it dozens of times himself without the slightest consequences. Part of the committee rushed closer, trying to assess the scale of the disaster and send someone for the university medics, while others helplessly pushed back onlookers attempting to film the incident on their cameras.

Realizing that moving you was categorically forbidden due to the risk of internal injuries, Alhaitham lifted your head, pressing it to his chest, and began alternating rescue breathing with chest compressions, desperately clinging to every second.

"Breathe, do you hear me? You can't just give up because of some stupid mistake, {{user}}, open your eyes" he whispered hoarsely, choking on horror, while blood continued to flow from your nose, heavily staining his hands, his cuffs, and pooling into a frightening puddle on the stage boards.

After agonizing five minutes, your weak pulse briefly quickened, making his heart beat with renewed hope, but that improvement turned out to be merely a deceptive spasm of a fading body. Another long five minutes passed before paramedics with heavy bags burst into the hall, but it was already too late – because exactly two minutes after their arrival, your faint, barely perceptible breath ceased forever, leaving behind a deafening, ringing emptiness.

The medics silently felt the stopped pulse, exchanged grim looks, and, covering your lifeless body with a white sheet, began carefully transferring it onto a metal stretcher to carry it away from this accursed hall.

Behind Alhaitham, who remained kneeling before the bloodied puddle on the floor, his hands smeared with blood and his glassy stare fixed on the ceiling, the heavy, anxious voice of the dean rang out.

"You do realize what will happen to you after all this, Alhaitham?" he said in a voice trembling from the shock he had just experienced, taking a step back.

Alhaitham did not stir, did not rise from his knees, and did not even blink, continuing to stare at an empty point above his head with a frightening, unnatural calm.

"A senior student suffered fatal internal bleeding after consuming a preparation registered under my name, and according to Article 4 of the Akademiya’s Criminal Code, this qualifies as gross negligence resulting in death, or illegal manufacturing of uncertified chemical substances" he replied in a flat, colorless voice, without turning his head. "The Mahamatra is surely already on their way to confiscate all my research notes, seal my quarters, and take me into custody – but you need not trouble yourselves with calling university security, because I will not move from this spot until they arrive."

The dean swallowed convulsively, not knowing what to say to such icy composure, and silently stepped aside, leaving him alone in the middle of the empty hall to await inevitable arrest.

The interrogations began within an hour in the gloomy basements of the Akademiya’s administrative wing, where the General Mahamatra himself arrived with his retinue of armed guards to thoroughly investigate the tragedy. The air in the interrogation room felt icy, and the dim light of a single hanging lamp picked out Alhaitham’s figure from the darkness, sitting at a metal table with the still-unwashed brown stains of blood on his hands.

"Look at me, Alhaitham, and answer me with absolute honesty – without your usual philosophical digressions – do you realize that the formula you created took a human life right in the middle of the examination committee?" the General Mahamatra said in a sharp, clipped voice, leaning his palms on the table and staring into his desert-like eyes.

"I am fully aware of every aspect of what happened, General, but there was no intent to cause harm in my actions, nor were there fatal errors in the calculations of the chemical composition" Alhaitham replied in a monotonous, emotionless voice, not taking his eyes off the massive buckle on his interlocutor’s belt. "The preparation underwent laboratory testing for six months, and I personally consumed it three times in identical dosages without any side effects or signs of internal bleeding."

"Are you trying to say that the formula was absolutely safe, but the student died simply by chance, due to a twist of fate? The Akademiya will not tolerate such excuses from the best graduate of the darshan, so lay all your cards on the table: who did you contact in the days leading up to the defense, and who else had access to your reagents in the shared laboratory?" the General Mahamatra pressed on, narrowing his eyes and signaling the scribe to record the testimony in the protocol.

"Only I had access to the records and reagents, since the project was funded exclusively from my personal funds, and any attempts by outsiders to interfere were ruled out by the locking system on the laboratory doors" Alhaitham parried calmly, tilting his head slightly. "If you are hinting at deliberate sabotage or negligence, then you will have to look for the cause either in hidden genetic pathologies of the deceased, of which she herself may have been unaware, or admit that there is a factor in the mechanism of action of the preparation unknown to science and independent of the formula’s purity."

"You are trying to shift the blame onto the medical peculiarities of the student’s organism, even though you bear full responsibility as the creator and sole manufacturer of the potion" the General Mahamatra firmly countered, tapping his fingers on the tabletop. "The original blueprints and the remaining liquid from the vial have already been seized by my men for independent examination at the Spantamad darshan, and until the official investigation is complete, you will be placed under strict house arrest in your quarters, without the right to correspondence or to leave the premises."

"I have no intention of resisting your orders, General, and you may take all the materials, since I have absolutely nothing to hide" Alhaitham said indifferently, rising from his chair under the escort of the guards and allowing himself to be led into the empty, cold walls of the dormitory room, where traces of your recent presence remained everywhere.

The door clicked shut behind him, sealing the heavy wooden panels of the quarters from the outside on the General Mahamatra’s orders, and a deafening, sticky silence descended upon the room, in which only Alhaitham’s heavy, measured breathing could be clearly heard. He slowly walked deeper into the space, where the scent of your favorite perfume and fresh books still lingered, stopped at a small vanity table, and lowered himself onto a tiny stool, staring into the mirror at his own hollowed face and sunken, faded eyes. Throughout that endless day, he had not shed a single tear, had felt nothing but a ringing emptiness in his chest, as if his mind refused to accept the very reality of what had happened and continued to cling to the illusion of an ordinary student evening. Lowering his head, he buried his nose in your open notebook, covered in your neat, slightly sweeping handwriting, and convulsively ran his fingers through the petals of withering flowers he had brought you just a couple of days ago, trying to force his brain to somehow structure the chaos of flashing thoughts.

The first version of events – his own fatal error in the preparation of the alchemical compound – seemed absolutely impossible and absurd, because the composition had been tested a hundred times, the formula was built on pure logic, and he himself had personally taken that liquid three times in identical proportions without the slightest sign of deteriorating health. How could an absolutely stable solution, which had passed all internal tests, lead to lightning-fast internal bleeding and the death of a person – in that problem, not a single variable added up, unless the laws of alchemy had collapsed in an instant right there on stage. The second, feverish and insane thought, born in a mind clouded by shock, concerned possible sabotage on your part – an attempt to set him up, destroy his reputation, and crush his position in the Akademiya through a risky game with your own health. But as soon as this delusional assumption took root in his head, Alhaitham immediately cast it aside with fury, knowing perfectly well that you had never been petty enough to push you to such elaborate and cruel revenge, and besides, you yourself had demanded a mere box of candied Ajilenakh nuts as payment for your help the day before, when you could easily have bought yourself a dozen such boxes with pocket money. Moreover, you had openly and honestly admitted to him a couple of days earlier that you knew absolutely nothing about alchemy, genuinely afraid even to touch the complex flasks with reagents, which made the very idea of you voluntarily risking your life for the sake of dubious sabotage crumble to dust. There remained a third, the most terrible and chilling option – deliberate murder by a third party, committed by one of the many envious and mediocre competitors who had for years been unable to forgive the two of you for your constant dominance of the first and second places in the darshan. Someone among the ill-wishers could easily have resorted to absolute meanness, crossing all moral principles to kill two birds with one stone – to get rid of you and forever destroy Alhaitham, simply by swapping the vial with the preparation right before the defense began.

Under the weight of these horrific reflections, his empty gaze unexpectedly slid to the side, to the small brass frame standing on the edge of the table, where beneath the glass you were captured – the same smiling you, with his bouquet in the Akademiya’s botanical garden. His fingers automatically reached for the cold metal of the frame, and the moment he touched it with his fingers, dozens of memories flooded his mind like an avalanche, racing before his eyes with painful clarity. He vividly recalled long walks through the Sumeru park, when you spent hours arguing about the nature of elemental currents, and you laughed brightly, throwing torn leaves at him. "You reason too stuffily about elemental things, Alhaitham – sometimes you just need to feel the world, not try to break it down into formulas" you had said then, squinting slyly under the crowns of the spreading trees.

Then surfaced that memorable faculty field trip to the distant ruins of the Hadramaveth desert, where you had to share one cramped carriage for two under the scorching sun, fending off pesky sand flies and sharing the last flask of water between you. "If you keep taking your spot by the window, I'll make you carry all the travel bags all the way to camp, just so you know" you had grumbled, but still trustingly pressed your shoulder against his sleeve, tired from the jolting. Countless joint projects from nighttime flashed in his memory, when you stayed up in the shared room or the library until the first roosters, falling asleep right in the middle of piles of scribbled parchments under the dim light of oil lamps. "If you don't put out that damn lamp and go to sleep right now, I'll pour ink over your head" he had threatened you at three in the morning, but he himself quietly added oil to the burner so you would have more light to finish your report.

Before his eyes rose the day you first moved into this room and staged a grand renovation, repainting the walls and rearranging the heavy furniture in an attempt to divide the space according to your needs. "That ugly artifact shelf is not going to hang above my desk, don't even think about it, Alhaitham" you had cried indignantly, waving a roller with paint, while he coolly hammered a nail exactly into the spot you had forbidden. Immediately came to mind your daily arguments over food, when you ordered delivery from city taverns and waged real battles over the best portions. "You always take the tastiest pieces of meat, hiding behind the claim that your brain supposedly burns more calories on thinking" you hissed resentfully, deftly cutting a choice piece from his plate with your fork.

In his memory surfaced your first unofficial date in a cozy café on the outskirts of the city, where you had wandered after a tough exam and desperately tried to pretend you had ended up there by accident. "Don't look at me like I said something stupid – it's just that this coffee here tastes disgusting" you had tried to hide your embarrassment, quickly averting your gaze to the ordinary cup, while he smiled faintly into his mug. Daily evening battles for the right to be first in the bathroom before bed also surfaced, when the dormitory corridor echoed with your mutual threats. "If you don't come out of the bathroom right now, I'll kick this damn door down – I have exactly five minutes left before the library closes" he had knocked on the locked door, while you leisurely applied your cosmetic balms.

Especially vivid were your fierce arguments right in the professors’ lectures, when you staged public verbal duels across the entire amphitheater, driving the instructors to a mild nervous tic. "Your interpretation of ancient texts is pure dilettantism, and any sane scholar will confirm that" he had declared loudly from the back row, making you immediately jump up from your seat for a counterattack. In his memory came alive those very seminars where there was a relentless struggle over who would raise their hand faster to answer the professor’s most difficult question, and the other would immediately rise right after to caustically interrupt and supplement the answer with their own arguments. "You forgot to mention the key factor in the formula’s calculation, because your excessively inflated ego tends to overlook the basic details" you had parried triumphantly, taking all the laurels for yourself. And finally, he recalled those ridiculous competitions in physical education classes in the back courtyard of the Akademiya, where you tried to outrun each other in obstacle races. "If you think you'll win this cross-country race, you are deeply mistaken" he had thrown over his shoulder, abruptly speeding up his pace and crossing the finish line a second earlier.

His thoughts skipped to the very near future that was never to happen – before his eyes rose an imaginary day of the long-awaited graduation: ceremonial dances in the grand hall, the clinking of glasses with light wine, your joint honors diplomas, and that same undefined, beautiful future full of shared discoveries and quiet evenings that he had so desperately wanted to hold onto and that had been taken from him in an instant. Under the colossal pressure of the memories spinning in his head, the gnawing guilt from within, the awareness of shattered hopes, and the sheer monstrosity of today, the dam of his cold reason finally collapsed.

Haitham suddenly choked on air, grabbed his head with his hands, and let out a wild, broken cry of despair, in which all the pain, helplessness, and rage at this unjust world were mixed. "No! No, fuck, why?! Why like this?!" he screamed at the top of his lungs, violently pulling at his hair and convulsing with sobbing, wrenching cries that, for the first time that day, burst out from the very depths of his torn soul. He was shaken by a violent tremor, everything before his eyes swam with hot tears, and in a fit of uncontrollable hysteria, he slammed his fist with all his might against the polished wooden surface of the vanity table. From the powerful blow, the small brass frame with your photograph jumped up, crashed onto the stone floor with a clatter, and shattered into tiny fragments, scattering pieces of glass across the room and irreversibly destroying the last fragile reminder of your living smile.

Where Silence Ends

Seven unbearably long days dragged on in the stifling, dead silence of the locked dormitory room, turning your former cozy home into a cold tomb. The Matra guards silently left trays of food at the sealed door, but Alhaitham did not even touch them, losing track of time and completely dissolving into suffocating guilt. His always impeccable uniform was rumpled, his silver hair disheveled, and his once sharp and calculating gaze – which had instilled fear in half the Akademiya – had become an empty, glassy abyss. The thick folios on his shelves – the very ones that had always served as his only refuge – lay untouched, gathering dust in the semi-darkness. Every corner of this room literally breathed your ghost, and every second reminded him that his cold mind had failed to calculate the only meaningful equation in his life.

He paced the cramped perimeter for hours, stopping before your abandoned desk, as if still hoping that you would soon glance into the room and throw another barb. His trembling fingers slowly traced the dried ink in your open notebook, where your sweeping handwriting now seemed a cruel mockery of this silence. Again and again, he picked up the sharp shards of the bronze frame from the floor, not noticing how the glass cut into his skin, and stared at the torn photograph of your smile. Nearby lay the dried petals of the Padisarahs he had cut for you a week ago – they had long since lost their color, but still held a faint, subtle fragrance.

"You always told me that I saw the world only through the prism of cold formulas, {{user}}" he whispered into the darkness of the room, and his voice sounded so hoarse and broken that it barely pierced the silence. "You insisted that I was too stuffy – that the world should be felt, not broken down into equations. You were right. I calculated every detail, but missed the one thing that kept my entire world afloat" he let out a quiet, bitter chuckle, which immediately turned into a dry, choking sob as he rested his forehead against the cold edge of your desk. "I lost, {{user}}... For the first time in my life, I admit my complete defeat – only now there is no one next to me to mock my pride" he exhaled, clenching a fragment of the frame in his fist.

The rising memories burned him more fiercely than any poison, tearing the remnants of his mind apart. He remembered your endless arguments by the window, your late nights spent over projects, and the way you sighed when he again moved the books from your favorite shelf. Now all that logic and all those Akademiya titles seemed to him utterly useless rubbish, devoid of any meaning without your defiant smile.

"I do not need this academic world if your voice is no longer in it" was his quiet whisper thrown into the empty darkness, as he looked at your pillow, which still held your scent. "I tried to find a rational way out, searched for errors in the calculations, but the only error is that it was you who drank the poison on that stage, and not me" he shook his head, wiping a tear that slowly rolled down his pale cheek with his bloodstained palm. "Without you, this city is just a pile of dry stone and meaningless noise" he continued with a frightening calmness, in which not a trace of his former doubt remained.

By the end of the seventh night, the chaotic storm of grief in his head unexpectedly subsided, giving way to an icy, absolutely mechanical calm. The logic that had abandoned him in the first days after the tragedy returned to him in the form of a single unshakable conclusion – continuing to exist in this dead world would be the most irrational and senseless act. With the same methodical precision with which he had once composed the most complex linguistic treatises, Alhaitham began to prepare the room for his final step. He took from the closet a sturdy silk sash from his formal attire – the very one he had brought back from a research expedition – and tested its strength. Securing it to the massive wooden beam under the ceiling directly between your desk and his own, he tied a firm knot with apothecary precision, measuring the length with cold accuracy.

Climbing onto the heavy wooden chair – the very chair on which you had so loved to sit, draping your legs over the bed and teasing him – Alhaitham paused for a second, slipping the smooth noose around his neck. For the last time, he turned his head toward your half of the room, where the moonlight from the tall window silvered your scribbled notebooks and the still-unopened packet of dates.

"If the soul really is merely a flow of elemental energy, as the ancient treatises claim, then mine will surely find yours – wherever you may be now" he whispered quietly, and for the first time in that hellish week, a faint, almost serene smile appeared on his lips. "Wait for me just a little longer, {{user}}... You will no longer have to study ancient texts alone – I am coming to you" he said, peering into the moonlight that had become his entire outside world.

Without a moment's hesitation, with a sharp movement he kicked the heavy chair out from under his feet, sending it crashing onto the stone floor with a deafening clatter. The sudden jerk instantly cut off his oxygen, tightening the taut fabric and severing him from all the unbearable noise of the outside world. As his vision was clouded by a dark veil and his lungs were torn by sharp pain, wild fear gave way to a deep, weightless warmth. In those final fading seconds of his departing consciousness, the cold and gloomy dormitory room finally dissolved, giving way to a vivid vision of the Akademiya's blooming botanical garden – there, under the golden rays of the sun, you stood and smiled at him, reaching out your hand and welcoming him home.

The Empty Chair

The General Mahamatra's investigation lasted several weeks, but its results only confirmed what Alhaitham had insisted from the very first day – the original formula of the potion contained no poisonous or dangerous components, and there was not the slightest malicious intent in his actions. Experts from the Spantamad Institute broke down the preparation into its smallest constituents and were forced to admit that the fatal outcome was the result of an anomalous, unpredictable bodily reaction that no scientific theory could have foreseen. The case was officially closed for lack of corpus delicti, the charges were dropped, and Al-Haitham was given back his freedom – but this formal acquittal document could not bring back the most important thing: your life, without which the freedom he received felt like a life sentence.

Fifteen years had passed. Over these years, Alhaitham had become exactly the person the entire Akademiya knew him to be – the imperturbable, extremely rational, and detached Scribe, guided exclusively by logic and common sense. He had taken a quiet but influential position, avoided unnecessary attention, read complex books with headphones blocking out extraneous sounds, and looked at those around him with cold indifference. No one in Sumeru – not the scholars, not the sages, not the students – ever suspected that behind this impenetrable facade of the perfect lawman lay a deep, never-healing wound left by that very fateful day on the examination stage.

The story of his current cohabitation with Kaveh had unfolded strictly according to the laws of harsh reality in which they both found themselves after graduation. The famous architect from the Kshahrewar darshan, the brilliant and overly emotional Creator of the Alcazarzaray Palace, had fallen into monstrous debts to Lady Dori, having given away his entire fortune down to the last Mora and been left literally on the street. Upon learning of his former academic acquaintance's plight, Alhaitham – contrary to his own habit of not interfering in others' problems – allowed Kaveh to move into the shared house as a tenant, with the obligatory condition of paying rent and maintaining order.

To everyone around them, their cohabitation seemed an endless disaster – two former classmates argued over every little thing, from the color of the living room carpets to philosophical concepts of morality and art. But few understood the real reason why Alhaitham tolerated the constantly scattered blueprints, Kaveh's noisy late-night returns from the tavern, and his eternal emotional outbursts. Deep down, carefully hidden even from himself, the Scribe desperately needed this noise – for Kaveh's selfish, loud, and endlessly stubborn character involuntarily filled the oppressive emptiness of the house and vaguely reminded him of how you had once argued with him.

Kaveh, without knowing it himself, regularly made Alhaitham's heart skip a beat. The way the architect threw up his hands during another scientific dispute, the way he snorted indignantly when Alhaitham hid the books he needed on the top shelves, or the way he brazenly moved plates around the dinner table – all of this pierced through the Scribe's defenses with frightening clarity, conjuring before his eyes the phantom image of your defiant smile. Kaveh was a completely different person, but his bright, uncontrollable life in this house was the only thread preventing Al-Haitham from finally sinking into absolute icy darkness.

That evening, the silence of the cozy living room was disturbed only by the familiar crackle of candles and the quiet clinking of cutlery. Kaveh, having finished preparing yet another dinner – about which he had not forgotten to loudly and in detail grumble from the very threshold, complaining about the high prices of spices at the bazaar – sat down opposite Alhaitham and began serving himself food. Alhaitham, as usual, sat with an open book in one hand, slowly putting pieces of stewed meat into his mouth and outwardly completely ignoring his housemate's presence.

The architect frowned, peering at the imperturbable face of the Scribe, and was about to deliver his traditional lecture about disrespect for someone else's labor at the table when his gaze suddenly caught something completely unusual. When Alhaitham slightly tilted his head to turn the page of the heavy tome, a thin chain slipped out from under the deep neckline of his usual attire. On it hung a modest but elegant metal pendant-locket, glinting softly in the lamplight.

Kaveh nearly choked on his tea, put down his fork, and leaned forward across the table, not hiding his sincere astonishment.

"Hey, Haitham, what's this?" Kaveh asked, pointing bluntly at his chest – his eyebrows shooting up in surprise. "Since when do you wear jewelry? You always used to say that any lockets and chains were useless junk that only gets in the way of movement and serves no practical purpose! Has our icy Scribe decided to succumb to banal human sentimentality?"

Alhaitham did not even flinch. His fingers paused for a second on the corner of the page, after which he tucked the pendant back under the fabric of his clothing with his usual, years-honed cold grace.

"It is merely an old family trinket, which has nothing to do with you" he replied in an absolutely even, emotionless voice, not even raising his eyes from the lines of the book. "And if you have finished examining my wardrobe, I suggest you attend to your debts to Lady Dori – they require far more attention than my belongings."

"As always, not a word to the point!" Kaveh snorted indignantly, throwing up his hands and returning to his plate. "You could have just said it was a secret, instead of making snide remarks about my finances!"

Having finished the meal in silence, Alhaitham carefully closed the book, rose from the table, and without another word headed to his bedroom. The heavy wooden door closed behind him with a soft click, cutting off all external sounds and plunging the room into semi-darkness, illuminated only by the pale moonlight filtering through the thick curtains.

Alone in absolute solitude, he slowly walked over to his desk and sat down on the chair. His movements were no longer confident and sharp – they revealed that same deep, ingrained weariness that he so carefully hid from the entire world. His trembling fingers pulled the cool metal locket out from under his collar. The hearing aids that muffled the noise of the house were switched off, and in the ringing silence that followed, only his ragged, heavy breathing could be heard.

With a soft click, the locket's clasp gave way, and the lid swung open. Inside, carefully cut to fit the tiny oval space, lay that very preserved photograph from fifteen years ago. In it, you still stood under the golden sun of the Akademiya's botanical garden, clutching a huge bouquet of fresh Padisarahs to your chest, gifting him your sincere, warm, and incredibly living smile – the very one he would never be able to see in reality again.

The Scribe of the Akademiya, before whom sages trembled and whom they considered an absolutely insensitive block of wood, brought the open locket to his lips. Down his pale cheek, cutting through the silence of fifteen years of silence, a single, hot tear slowly rolled, falling directly onto the transparent glass protecting your image. He clenched the pendant in his fist, pressed it to his chest where his broken heart beat dully and painfully, and heavily rested his forehead on his folded hands on the desk.

"Fifteen years, {{user}}..." he whispered into the emptiness of the dark room – his voice, for the first time in all these long years, broke again from suppressed pain. "Fifteen years have passed, and I still wake up at night, hoping to hear your footsteps in the hallway... Forgive me. Forgive me for letting you go."

The Architect of Tragedy

[Kaveh's POV, maybe???]

The official closure of the case by General Mahamatra due to the absence of corpus delicti brought Alhaitham neither relief nor peace. The investigators had attributed the tragedy to a random anomaly, but for his cold, mathematical mind, such an explanation was tantamount to an insult – he knew the formula of his own potion too well to believe in a fatal coincidence. While the Akademiya returned to its usual life, the Scribe began his own secret investigation, vowing to dedicate as many years as it would take to get to the truth.

Fifteen long years had passed – a span of time during which the bitterness of loss in the minds of those around had turned into barely a trace on the pages of archives, but for Alhaitham, time seemed to have frozen. His entire life had become a double game: by day, he performed the duties of the imperturbable Scribe, and by night, he transformed into an obsessed bloodhound, painstakingly gathering old reports, encrypted laboratory journals, and blueprints. Every lead and every document bought from smugglers brought him closer to unraveling who exactly had entered the laboratory on that fateful day.

Five years ago, this gloomy, isolated routine was rudely invaded by Kaveh. The famous architect, bankrupted after the construction of the Alcazarzaray Palace and drowning in debt to Lady Dori, had been left without a roof over his head. Alhaitham, obeying a strange impulse, had let him into his shared house – not out of pity, but because Kaveh's chaotic, loud, and emotional character, with its audacity and hot-headedness, incessantly reminded him of you, creating the illusion of the very life he had lost.

However, cohabitation with the architect also brought unexpected complications to his secret work. Over these five years, Kaveh had repeatedly caught the Scribe late at night sorting through yellowed reports from fifteen years ago. Each time, seeing schematics of alchemical reactions and lists of students on the table, the architect would frown, displaying a strange, almost obsessive anxiety, and stubbornly try to persuade Alhaitham to abandon this pursuit.

"Haitham, how long can you keep stirring up this past?" Kaveh would often grumble, leaning against the doorframe and gazing with undisguised irritation at the paper-strewn desk. "So many years have passed, you won't change anything and you won't bring anyone back! This senseless investigation will lead you nowhere but complete self-destruction. Just leave these dead people alone and live in the present!" At the time, Alhaitham would only coldly wave him off, taking these words for simple human concern and the emotional incontinence characteristic of the architect.

And so this evening arrived. Behind the door of the Scribe's bedroom, ordinary everyday life was in full swing: Kaveh, engrossed in creating yet another large-scale architectural model, had set himself up right in the living room. From behind the closed door came a rhythmic, unpleasant sound – a saw biting into wooden boards with a dull screech, sawdust falling to the floor, and the architect himself occasionally cursing loudly at an uneven cut.

Inside Alhaitham's bedroom, however, dead silence reigned, broken only by the crackling of a lone candle. On his desk lay the last, most important fragment of the puzzle – a confidential archival registry of special reagent deliveries from the Kshahrewar Institute for that very fateful year, which he had only managed to obtain that day through a bribed informant in the Matra.

The report contained a detailed chemical analysis of the liquid residues from that very ill-fated vial you had drunk on stage. For all fifteen years, Alhaitham had searched for a rare poison or combat alchemical reagent, but the truth turned out to be far more sophisticated and horrifying. The cause of the fatal reactive hemorrhage was not poison, but a specific organic fixative – a rarest resin used exclusively by the architecture faculty for the preservation of wood and mineral paints.

In combination with his formula, this fixative was not poisonous by itself, but it entered into an instantaneous, destructive reaction with the elemental solution, turning it into a lethal toxin that ruptured blood vessels from within. Alhaitham froze, feeling the blood in his veins slowly turn to ice. The Scribe's gaze slid lower down the page, where the personal signature of the student who had requested this rare reagent from the closed repository two days before your defense was listed.

On the yellowed paper, clearly and boldly written, stood the name: Kaveh. The Kshahrewar faculty seal confirmed the authenticity of the issuance. At that moment, all the memories, all the small details from fifteen years ago crashed down upon Alhaitham's consciousness with a devastating blow, forming a single, flawless, and monstrous logical chain.

He recalled that fateful day before the defense, when Kaveh – then still the best student of Kshahrewar, desperately envious of your and his academic success and forever complaining about a lack of funding – had come into your shared dormitory room. He remembered how Kaveh had hovered near his desk while Alhaitham had been distracted by a conversation with a professor in the hallway. Kaveh had not wanted to kill, had not known about the mortal danger (had he..?) – he had merely wanted to spoil the formula, ruin the demonstration, and disgrace his eternal rival Alhaitham before the entire committee, putting an end to his grant.

But he had not accounted for one thing: that on that day, instead of Alhaitham himself, {{user}} would drink that cursed vial. And when you convulsed on stage, flooding the boards with blood, the true perpetrator stood in the crowd of students, horrified, realizing that his petty, envious prank had turned into brutal murder.

The sound of the saw behind the door – whirr-scrape, whirr-scrape – continued to persistently drill into the silence of the room. Kaveh was right now sawing boards in the living room, exactly thirty steps away from him. And all his persistent pleas over the past five years – "Drop this investigation, Haitham, it won't change anything" – instantly acquired their true, repulsive meaning. This was not concern for a friend – this was a panicked, animal terror of exposure. Kaveh had been living with him under the same roof, eating his food, listening to his memories, and looking him in the eye every day, trying to hide the traces of his crime.

The man who had robbed him of his only love, who had turned his life into fifteen years of hell and forced him to endure inhuman torments of guilt – all this time, he had been right there. He was sawing boards behind his door, complaining about prices at the bazaar, and giving heartfelt advice. Inside Alhaitham, the last barrier of self-control collapsed – the cold, rational Scribe died in that split second, and in his place, something dark, merciless, and bloodthirsty awakened.

His fingers gripped the edge of the table with such force that the sturdy wood cracked. In his eyes, usually dead and indifferent, a fire blazed. He did not know whether to go to Kaveh now, demand explanations, or strangle him with his bare hands in the shared house, or else devise a more thorough plan for revenge, never letting him know that he knew what he had done.

Where Logic Yields to Love

The General Mahamatra's investigation lasted several weeks, but its results only confirmed what Alhaitham had insisted from the very first day – the original formula of the potion contained no poisonous or dangerous components, and there was not the slightest malicious intent in his actions. Experts from the Spantamad Institute broke down the preparation into its smallest constituents and were forced to admit that the fatal outcome was the result of an anomalous, unpredictable bodily reaction that no scientific theory could have foreseen. The case was officially closed for lack of corpus delicti, the charges were dropped, and Al-Haitham was given back his freedom – but this formal acquittal document could not bring back the most important thing: your life, without which the freedom he received felt like a life sentence.

Fifteen years had passed. Over these years, Alhaitham had become exactly the person the entire Akademiya knew him to be – the imperturbable, extremely rational, and detached Scribe, guided exclusively by logic and common sense. He had taken a quiet but influential position, avoided unnecessary attention, read complex books with headphones blocking out extraneous sounds, and looked at those around him with cold indifference. No one in Sumeru – not the scholars, not the sages, not the students – ever suspected that behind this impenetrable facade of the perfect lawman lay a deep, never-healing wound left by that very fateful day on the examination stage.

The story of his current cohabitation with Kaveh had unfolded strictly according to the laws of harsh reality in which they both found themselves after graduation. The famous architect from the Kshahrewar darshan, the brilliant and overly emotional Creator of the Alcazarzaray Palace, had fallen into monstrous debts to Lady Dori, having given away his entire fortune down to the last Mora and been left literally on the street. Upon learning of his former academic acquaintance's plight, Alhaitham – contrary to his own habit of not interfering in others' problems – allowed Kaveh to move into the shared house as a tenant, with the obligatory condition of paying rent and maintaining order.

To everyone around them, their cohabitation seemed an endless disaster – two former classmates argued over every little thing, from the color of the living room carpets to philosophical concepts of morality and art. But few understood the real reason why Alhaitham tolerated the constantly scattered blueprints, Kaveh's noisy late-night returns from the tavern, and his eternal emotional outbursts. Deep down, carefully hidden even from himself, the Scribe desperately needed this noise – for Kaveh's selfish, loud, and endlessly stubborn character involuntarily filled the oppressive emptiness of the house and vaguely reminded him of how you had once argued with him.

Kaveh, without knowing it himself, regularly made Alhaitham's heart skip a beat. The way the architect threw up his hands during another scientific dispute, the way he snorted indignantly when Alhaitham hid the books he needed on the top shelves, or the way he brazenly moved plates around the dinner table – all of this pierced through the Scribe's defenses with frightening clarity, conjuring before his eyes the phantom image of your defiant smile. Kaveh was a completely different person, but his bright, uncontrollable life in this house was the only thread preventing Al-Haitham from finally sinking into absolute icy darkness.

That evening, the silence of the cozy living room was disturbed only by the familiar crackle of candles and the quiet clinking of cutlery. Kaveh, having finished preparing yet another dinner – about which he had not forgotten to loudly and in detail grumble from the very threshold, complaining about the high prices of spices at the bazaar – sat down opposite Alhaitham and began serving himself food. Alhaitham, as usual, sat with an open book in one hand, slowly putting pieces of stewed meat into his mouth and outwardly completely ignoring his housemate's presence.

The architect frowned, peering at the imperturbable face of the Scribe, and was about to deliver his traditional lecture about disrespect for someone else's labor at the table when his gaze suddenly caught something completely unusual. When Alhaitham slightly tilted his head to turn the page of the heavy tome, a thin chain slipped out from under the deep neckline of his usual attire. On it hung a modest but elegant metal pendant-locket, glinting softly in the lamplight.

Kaveh nearly choked on his tea, put down his fork, and leaned forward across the table, not hiding his sincere astonishment.

"Hey, Haitham, what's this?" Kaveh asked, pointing bluntly at his chest – his eyebrows shooting up in surprise. "Since when do you wear jewelry? You always used to say that any lockets and chains were useless junk that only gets in the way of movement and serves no practical purpose! Has our icy Scribe decided to succumb to banal human sentimentality?"

Alhaitham did not even flinch. His fingers paused for a second on the corner of the page, after which he tucked the pendant back under the fabric of his clothing with his usual, years-honed cold grace.

"It is merely an old family trinket, which has nothing to do with you" he replied in an absolutely even, emotionless voice, not even raising his eyes from the lines of the book. "And if you have finished examining my wardrobe, I suggest you attend to your debts to Lady Dori – they require far more attention than my belongings."

"As always, not a word to the point!" Kaveh snorted indignantly, throwing up his hands and returning to his plate. "You could have just said it was a secret, instead of making snide remarks about my finances!"

Having finished the meal in silence, Alhaitham carefully closed the book, rose from the table, and without another word headed to his bedroom. The heavy wooden door closed behind him with a soft click, cutting off all external sounds and plunging the room into semi-darkness, illuminated only by the pale moonlight filtering through the thick curtains.

Alone in absolute solitude, he slowly walked over to his desk and sat down on the chair. His movements were no longer confident and sharp – they revealed that same deep, ingrained weariness that he so carefully hid from the entire world. His trembling fingers pulled the cool metal locket out from under his collar. The hearing aids that muffled the noise of the house were switched off, and in the ringing silence that followed, only his ragged, heavy breathing could be heard.

With a soft click, the locket's clasp gave way, and the lid swung open. Inside, carefully cut to fit the tiny oval space, lay that very preserved photograph from fifteen years ago. In it, you still stood under the golden sun of the Akademiya's botanical garden, clutching a huge bouquet of fresh Padisarahs to your chest, gifting him your sincere, warm, and incredibly living smile – the very one he would never be able to see in reality again.

The Scribe of the Akademiya, before whom sages trembled and whom they considered an absolutely insensitive block of wood, brought the open locket to his lips. Down his pale cheek, cutting through the silence of fifteen years of silence, a single, hot tear slowly rolled, falling directly onto the transparent glass protecting your image. He clenched the pendant in his fist, pressed it to his chest where his broken heart beat dully and painfully, and heavily rested his forehead on his folded hands on the desk.

"Fifteen years, {{user}}..." he whispered into the emptiness of the dark room – his voice, for the first time in all these long years, broke again from suppressed pain. "Fifteen years have passed, and I still wake up at night, hoping to hear your footsteps in the hallway... Forgive me. Forgive me for letting you go."

A tearful spasm tightened his throat as he pressed the open locket with your photograph to his chest, until the heavy, accumulated weariness of fifteen years of loneliness finally overcame his exhausted mind. The Scribe slowly lowered his head onto his folded arms on the desk, and his consciousness plunged into an impenetrable, ringing darkness of deep sleep.

But instead of the usual oblivion, he awoke in a strange, infinite dimension where there was neither floor nor ceiling, and the entire space shimmered with a soft, golden-emerald light. Around him, fragments of ancient folios, giant luminous branches of Irminsul, and quiet sparks of elemental energy floated in weightlessness, creating the sensation of being completely outside time and the laws of reality.

Before Alhaitham could take a single step, an unknown, resonant, and deep voice echoed from the very depths of this radiant space, causing the very fabric of existence to vibrate faintly.

"Fifteen years have passed. Have you not forgotten her yet?" asked the voice, sounding simultaneously from everywhere and from within his own thoughts.

Alhaitham froze, gazing into the boundless heights, and even in this strange dimension, his answer came without the slightest hesitation.

"Forgetting is a privilege of weak minds, and I remember every breath, every glance, and every defiant word of yours" he said in a quiet but deep voice, not hiding his old pain before eternity.

The space around him trembled almost imperceptibly, and the unknown voice sounded again – this time with a faint, barely perceptible warm intonation.

"Do you still love her, young scribe?" the being said, and that nickname – "young scribe," which only you had teased him with in their distant student days – resonated painfully in his chest.

From that familiar combination of words, Alhaitham's breath caught, and his cold rationalism finally gave way to bare emotion.

"I never stopped loving you" the Scribe replied, clenching his fists – his voice, for the first time in years, wavered with absolute sincerity. "My heart stopped that very day, along with your last breath, and since then I have only been simulating life."

The emerald light around him flared brighter, swirling in a slow, graceful vortex, and the unknown voice asked its final question.

"If she were alive, what would you do now, scribe?" it asked, gradually dissolving into silence.

Alhaitham closed his eyes for a second, calling to mind the most intimate, unfulfilled desires of all these fifteen years of solitude.

"I would hold you so tightly that no force in Teyvat could ever separate us again" he said with quiet, burning melancholy – and the corners of his lips were touched by a faint smile. "I would give you all my books, yield the best shelves, and listen to your sharp remarks until the end of my days, just so you would simply be near me."

At that very instant, the resonant voice fell silent, and the mist before him began to quickly dissipate, giving way to a soft, radiant silhouette. From the depths of that light came your native voice, calling his name – the very one he had dreamed of hearing most of all in the world.

"Haitham..." came your gentle, slightly ironic whisper.

Before him, your figure wove itself from pure light – you looked exactly as you had on that happy day in the botanical garden, translucent, ghostly, but so incredibly close. You took a step toward him, looking straight into his eyes with that same light, narrowed smile that had once made his heart stop.

"You haven't changed at all, my stubborn young scribe" you said, extending your translucent palm toward him. "Still just as pensive, and still keeping my photos under your pillow."

Alhaitham took a step forward, reaching out his hand to your ghostly fingers, unable to believe his eyes and afraid that this dream would dissolve at any second.

"I have been searching for you for fifteen years..." he whispered, feeling hot tears again welling up in his eyes.

You smiled softly at him, and in your eyes flashed that same familiar, cheeky, and determined spark.

"I know, Haitham" you said, firmly gripping his palm with your warm, glowing fingers. "But fifteen years of this longing is more than enough for both of us. Let's rewrite this reality together."

As soon as your fingers intertwined, the entire dimension around you trembled and distorted sharply – the laws of physics, time, and history collapsed, spaces spun into a frantic kaleidoscope of light and shadow, and Irminsul itself began to rewrite the threads of fate, completely erasing the fact of that tragedy.

A sudden, sharp jolt on his shoulder tore Alhaitham from this blinding vortex, and he fell back with a deep, convulsive gasp. The space of the bedroom returned to its place, and above him, fussily waving his arms and breathing heavily, stood an agitated Kaveh.

"Haitham! Wake up already, you damned sleepyhead!" Kaveh shouted loudly, indignantly shaking his shoulder. "Did you fall into a lethargic sleep?! {{user}} showed up at the doorstep downstairs! Can you believe it, that stubborn woman hasn't changed a bit since the Akademiya – she kicked me out of the hallway, took your favorite armchair, ate half of my sweets, and is grumbling that you're taking too long!"

Alhaitham rose from the bed with a sharp movement, his heart pounding deafeningly in his chest, and his fingers still remembered that incredible warmth of your palm. He walked straight past the stunned Kaveh, flung open the bedroom door, and descended the stairs to the living room with quick, impatient steps.

Downstairs, sprawled languidly in his personal armchair by the fireplace and brazenly crossing her legs, sat you – real, flesh and blood, defiant and incredibly alive. In one hand, you held a neat paper bag of candied dates, and with the other, you casually tossed some ancient book into the air. In this new, rewritten reality, you had never died on that stage – for you, Kaveh, and everyone in this Teyvat who knew your story, the usual fifteen years of life had passed, and only Alhaitham and the Lesser Lord Nahida remembered that terrible price and the inhuman pain he had endured.

"Well, you certainly took your time, young scribe" you said, turning your head toward him and giving him that very same cheeky, triumphant smile that made him catch his breath. "I've already scolded your noisy roommate for his terrible taste in home decor, and you're still walking around looking like you've seen a ghost."

The Cost of Survival

The General Mahamatra's investigation lasted several weeks, but its results only confirmed what Alhaitham had insisted from the very first day – the original formula of the potion contained no poisonous or dangerous components, and there was not the slightest malicious intent in his actions. Experts from the Spantamad Institute broke down the preparation into its smallest constituents and were forced to admit that the fatal outcome was the result of an anomalous, unpredictable bodily reaction that no scientific theory could have foreseen. The case was officially closed for lack of corpus delicti, the charges were dropped, and Alhaitham was given back his freedom – but this formal acquittal document could not bring back the most important thing: your life, without which the freedom he received felt like a life sentence.

Fifteen years had passed. Over these years, Alhaitham had become exactly the person the entire Akademiya knew him to be – the imperturbable, extremely rational, and detached Scribe, guided exclusively by logic and common sense. He had taken a quiet but influential position, avoided unnecessary attention, read complex books with headphones blocking out extraneous sounds, and looked at those around him with cold indifference. No one in Sumeru – not the scholars, not the sages, not the students – ever suspected that behind this impenetrable facade of the perfect lawman lay a deep, never-healing wound left by that very fateful day on the examination stage.

The story of his current cohabitation with Kaveh had unfolded strictly according to the laws of harsh reality in which they both found themselves after graduation. The famous architect from the Kshahrewar darshan, the brilliant and overly emotional Creator of the Alcazarzaray Palace, had fallen into monstrous debts to Lady Dori, having given away his entire fortune down to the last Mora and been left literally on the street. Upon learning of his former academic acquaintance's plight, Alhaitham – contrary to his own habit of not interfering in others' problems – allowed Kaveh to move into the shared house as a tenant, with the obligatory condition of paying rent and maintaining order.

To everyone around them, their cohabitation seemed an endless disaster – two former classmates argued over every little thing, from the color of the living room carpets to philosophical concepts of morality and art. But few understood the real reason why Alhaitham tolerated the constantly scattered blueprints, Kaveh's noisy late-night returns from the tavern, and his eternal emotional outbursts. Deep down, carefully hidden even from himself, the Scribe desperately needed this noise – for Kaveh's selfish, loud, and endlessly stubborn character involuntarily filled the oppressive emptiness of the house and vaguely reminded him of how you had once argued with him.

Kaveh, without knowing it himself, regularly made Alhaitham's heart skip a beat. The way the architect threw up his hands during another scientific dispute, the way he snorted indignantly when Alhaitham hid the books he needed on the top shelves, or the way he brazenly moved plates around the dinner table – all of this pierced through the Scribe's defenses with frightening clarity, conjuring before his eyes the phantom image of your defiant smile. Kaveh was a completely different person, but his bright, uncontrollable life in this house was the only thread preventing Al-Haitham from finally sinking into absolute icy darkness.

That evening, the silence of the cozy living room was disturbed only by the familiar crackle of candles and the quiet clinking of cutlery. Kaveh, having finished preparing yet another dinner – about which he had not forgotten to loudly and in detail grumble from the very threshold, complaining about the high prices of spices at the bazaar – sat down opposite Alhaitham and began serving himself food. Alhaitham, as usual, sat with an open book in one hand, slowly putting pieces of stewed meat into his mouth and outwardly completely ignoring his housemate's presence.

The architect frowned, peering at the imperturbable face of the Scribe, and was about to deliver his traditional lecture about disrespect for someone else's labor at the table when his gaze suddenly caught something completely unusual. When Alhaitham slightly tilted his head to turn the page of the heavy tome, a thin chain slipped out from under the deep neckline of his usual attire. On it hung a modest but elegant metal pendant-locket, glinting softly in the lamplight.

Kaveh nearly choked on his tea, put down his fork, and leaned forward across the table, not hiding his sincere astonishment.

"Hey, Haitham, what's this?" Kaveh asked, pointing bluntly at his chest – his eyebrows shooting up in surprise. "Since when do you wear jewelry? You always used to say that any lockets and chains were useless junk that only gets in the way of movement and serves no practical purpose! Has our icy Scribe decided to succumb to banal human sentimentality?"

Alhaitham did not even flinch. His fingers paused for a second on the corner of the page, after which he tucked the pendant back under the fabric of his clothing with his usual, years-honed cold grace.

"It is merely an old family trinket, which has nothing to do with you" he replied in an absolutely even, emotionless voice, not even raising his eyes from the lines of the book. "And if you have finished examining my wardrobe, I suggest you attend to your debts to Lady Dori – they require far more attention than my belongings."

"As always, not a word to the point!" Kaveh snorted indignantly, throwing up his hands and returning to his plate. "You could have just said it was a secret, instead of making snide remarks about my finances!"

Having finished the meal in silence, Alhaitham carefully closed the book, rose from the table, and without another word headed to his bedroom. The heavy wooden door closed behind him with a soft click, cutting off all external sounds and plunging the room into semi-darkness, illuminated only by the pale moonlight filtering through the thick curtains.

Alone in absolute solitude, he slowly walked over to his desk and sat down on the chair. His movements were no longer confident and sharp – they revealed that same deep, ingrained weariness that he so carefully hid from the entire world. His trembling fingers pulled the cool metal locket out from under his collar. The hearing aids that muffled the noise of the house were switched off, and in the ringing silence that followed, only his ragged, heavy breathing could be heard.

With a soft click, the locket's clasp gave way, and the lid swung open. Inside, carefully cut to fit the tiny oval space, lay that very preserved photograph from fifteen years ago. In it, you still stood under the golden sun of the Akademiya's botanical garden, clutching a huge bouquet of fresh Padisarahs to your chest, gifting him your sincere, warm, and incredibly living smile – the very one he would never be able to see in reality again.

The Scribe of the Akademiya, before whom sages trembled and whom they considered an absolutely insensitive block of wood, brought the open locket to his lips. Down his pale cheek, cutting through the silence of fifteen years of silence, a single, hot tear slowly rolled, falling directly onto the transparent glass protecting your image. He clenched the pendant in his fist, pressed it to his chest where his broken heart beat dully and painfully, and heavily rested his forehead on his folded hands on the desk.

"Fifteen years, {{user}}..." he whispered into the emptiness of the dark room – his voice, for the first time in all these long years, broke again from suppressed pain. "Fifteen years have passed, and I still wake up at night, hoping to hear your footsteps in the hallway... Forgive me. Forgive me for letting you go."

A tearful spasm tightened his throat as he pressed the open locket with your photograph to his chest, until the heavy, accumulated weariness of fifteen years of loneliness finally overcame his exhausted mind. The Scribe slowly lowered his head onto his folded arms on the desk, and his consciousness plunged into an impenetrable, ringing darkness of deep sleep.

But instead of the usual oblivion, he awoke in a strange, infinite dimension where there was neither floor nor ceiling, and the entire space shimmered with a soft, golden-emerald light. Around him, fragments of ancient folios, giant luminous branches of Irminsul, and quiet sparks of elemental energy floated in weightlessness, creating the sensation of being completely outside time and the laws of reality.

Before Alhaitham could take a single step, an unknown, resonant, and deep voice echoed from the very depths of this radiant space, causing the very fabric of existence to vibrate faintly.

"Fifteen years have passed. Have you not forgotten her yet?" asked the voice, sounding simultaneously from everywhere and from within his own thoughts.

Alhaitham froze, gazing into the boundless heights, and even in this strange dimension, his answer came without the slightest hesitation.

"Forgetting is a privilege of weak minds, and I remember every breath, every glance, and every defiant word of yours" he said in a quiet but deep voice, not hiding his old pain before eternity.

The space around him trembled almost imperceptibly, and the unknown voice sounded again – this time with a faint, barely perceptible warm intonation.

"Do you still love her, young scribe?" the being said, and that nickname – "young scribe," which only you had teased him with in their distant student days – resonated painfully in his chest.

From that familiar combination of words, Alhaitham's breath caught, and his cold rationalism finally gave way to bare emotion.

"I never stopped loving you" the Scribe replied, clenching his fists – his voice, for the first time in years, wavered with absolute sincerity. "My heart stopped that very day, along with your last breath, and since then I have only been simulating life."

The emerald light around him flared brighter, swirling in a slow, graceful vortex, and the unknown voice asked its final question.

"If she were alive, what would you do now, scribe?" it asked, gradually dissolving into silence.

Alhaitham closed his eyes for a second, calling to mind the most intimate, unfulfilled desires of all these fifteen years of solitude.

"I would hold you so tightly that no force in Teyvat could ever separate us again" he said with quiet, burning melancholy – and the corners of his lips were touched by a faint smile. "I would give you all my books, yield the best shelves, and listen to your sharp remarks until the end of my days, just so you would simply be near me."

At that very instant, the resonant voice fell silent, and the mist before him began to quickly dissipate, giving way to a soft, radiant silhouette. From the depths of that light came your native voice, calling his name – the very one he had dreamed of hearing most of all in the world.

"Haitham..." came your gentle, slightly ironic whisper.

Before him, your figure wove itself from pure light – you looked exactly as you had on that happy day in the botanical garden, translucent, ghostly, but so incredibly close. You took a step toward him, looking straight into his eyes with that same light, narrowed smile that had once made his heart stop.

"You haven't changed at all, my stubborn young scribe" you said, extending your translucent palm toward him. "Still just as pensive, and still keeping my photos under your pillow."

Alhaitham took a step forward, reaching out his hand to your ghostly fingers, unable to believe his eyes and afraid that this dream would dissolve at any second.

"I have been searching for you for fifteen years..." he whispered, feeling hot tears again welling up in his eyes.

You smiled softly at him, and in your eyes flashed that same familiar, cheeky, and determined spark.

"I know, Haitham" you said, firmly gripping his palm with your warm, glowing fingers. "But fifteen years of this longing is more than enough for both of us. Let's rewrite this reality together."

As soon as your fingers intertwined, the entire dimension around you trembled and distorted sharply – the laws of physics, time, and history collapsed, spaces spun into a frantic kaleidoscope of light and shadow, and Irminsul itself began to rewrite the threads of fate, completely erasing the fact of that tragedy.

A sudden, sharp jostle on his shoulder pulled Alhaitham out of the dazzling vortex of the rewritten reality. He opened his eyes with a ragged gasp, finding himself in his own bed in the familiar semi-darkness of his room. Above him stood Kaveh, who was frowning discontentedly and twirling a wooden ruler in his hands.

"Haitham, wake up already" the architect said grumpily, stepping back from the bed. "Someone came for you. She says you studied together in the same cohort. I left her in the hallway, so go down and deal with your guest yourself before she leaves tracks on my clean floor."

The Scribe's heart missed a beat. His fingers still vividly remembered the phantom warmth of your hand from that strange dream, and your teasing, alive voice still rang in his ears, calling him to rewrite fate. He rose sharply from the bed, almost running past the hallway and down the stairs, expecting to see that same arrogant, confident girl ready from the threshold to start making snarky comments about his boring interior.

But as he froze on the bottom step, his entire inside bound with icy cold, and his breath caught in his throat. By the front door indeed stood you – but this was a completely different, unfamiliar version of you. You wore a plain, faded, and worn cloak, your shoulders were heavily slouched, and your hair was hastily gathered into a messy knot. There was no longer that expensive imported polish from Fontaine on your nails, and not a single spark of former pride remained in your dull, tired eyes.

"Hello, Alhaitham" you said softly, not even trying to step further into the living room. Your voice sounded muffled, broken, and incredibly timid – in a way you had never spoken to him in your life. "I'm sorry for coming unannounced and taking up your time. I just... I really needed some of your old blueprints on basic mechanics. For my work. If you don't mind sparing a couple of minutes, of course."

Alhaitham was stunned. His brain, accustomed to instantly analyzing any situation, now refused to process this terrifying, wrong picture. This sincere submission, this guilty gaze, this slouched back – none of this fitted the image of the girl he loved and remembered.

"Why are you looking at me so sadly?" he asked, taking a slow step toward you, as if afraid to startle a wild animal. "Where did that arrogant girl go who threatened to throw my things out of the room if I didn't yield a shelf to her, and considered herself smarter than all the professors in the Akademiya?"

You swallowed nervously and averted your eyes, clutching the strap of your old canvas bag tighter. His words seemed to make you shrink even further.

"Times have changed, Haitham" you replied with a bitter, resigned smile that held the entire weight of the past years. "I realized long ago how wrong I was about myself. Your mind was always unreachable. Your diploma defense back then proved your absolute genius, while I was just an empty shell with rich parents' money. I'm truly sorry for behaving so foolishly at the Akademiya and treating you with such disrespect."

The words struck him in the chest harder than a physical blow. You were sincerely apologizing to him for what he himself would have given everything in the world to hear in the past. Your sudden submission and recognition of his superiority terrified him to the point of nausea – it was wrong, it broke the very essence of who you were.

"I'm sorry" you muttered suddenly, noticing his stunned gaze, and quickly took a step back toward the door. "I shouldn't have come. It was a stupid idea. You're the Scribe, far too busy a person to waste time on someone like me. Forget about the notes, I'll manage on my own. Goodbye."

Before he could utter a single word, make a step forward, or reach out a hand, you quickly turned around, threw open the front door, and vanished into the street, leaving him standing in the middle of the empty hallway in a ringing, deafening silence.

Kaveh casually walked out of the kitchen, wiping a glass dry with a towel. He cast a fleeting glance at the closed door and then looked at the frozen, marble-like Scribe.

"Kaveh" Alhaitham called out to him in a completely alien, colorless voice, without taking his eyes off the door. "What happened on the evening of our diploma defense fifteen years ago? And what became of her afterward?"

The architect raised an eyebrow in surprise, setting the mug down on the table.

"Are you kidding, or did those overcomplicated books completely wipe your memory?" Kaveh snorted, stepping closer. "You caused an absolute sensation. Your artificial resonance project surpassed everyone. You didn't just overshadow her – you put the best minds of the Akademiya to shame. While the professors dragged you through endless interviews, while they showered you with grants and prestigious job offers, she was forgotten literally the next day."

Alhaitham listened to this, feeling a sticky, all-consuming horror grow inside him. He himself had asked Irminsul to rewrite reality to save you from death. And the tree had fulfilled that wish – in the most cruel, mathematically calculated, and logical way.

"And what happened next?" the Scribe asked softly, clenching his fists so tightly that his nails bit painfully into his palms. "How did she end up in such a... state?"

"How should I know the exact details? You erased her from your life yourself as soon as you got your fame, diving headfirst into your important new affairs" the architect shrugged, leaning against the wall. "Rumors went around that her parents died shortly after graduation. The family fortune evaporated quickly. They say she lives now in some old house in Aaru Village. Makes cheap wooden toys for children at bargain prices. I bought small parts from her a couple of times myself when I was broke and only had enough mora for her handicrafts. Looks like she broke down completely after that downfall. Just an ordinary, sad story."

Kaveh waved his hand and returned to his drafts, while Alhaitham remained standing in the hallway, as new, artificially created memories of this rewritten reality flashed in his mind with ruthless clarity. In this version of fate, he hadn't asked you to drink the potion on stage. To avoid risking your life, he demonstrated everything himself, received thunderous applause, and after the defense... simply left, intoxicated by triumph.

A vivid scene flashed in his head: he stands in the corridor surrounded by enthusiastic sages, accepting congratulations, while you stand aside, leaning lonely against the wall. In this new past, he walked right past you, giving a cold nod, abandoning you for his ambitions and science. And he didn't buy you that cursed box of candied dates that evening.

A cruel, merciless irony choked his throat into a rasp. Candied dates, which used to be brought to the Akademiya as a rare luxury and on which he spent his stipend just for your condescending smile, were now sold at every cheap stall at the bazaar. They became the most basic, affordable sweet for tea for any resident of Sumeru. But you – that same proud girl who once disdainfully turned her nose up at cheap things – now didn't even have the money for them.

A Server for the Lost

The General Mahamatra's investigation lasted several weeks, but its results only confirmed what Alhaitham had insisted from the very first day – the original formula of the potion contained no poisonous or dangerous components, and there was not the slightest malicious intent in his actions. Experts from the Spantamad Institute broke down the preparation into its smallest constituents and were forced to admit that the fatal outcome was the result of an anomalous, unpredictable bodily reaction that no scientific theory could have foreseen. The case was officially closed for lack of corpus delicti, the charges were dropped, and Alhaitham was given back his freedom – but this formal acquittal document could not bring back the most important thing: your life, without which the freedom he received felt like a life sentence.

Several years had passed since the Akasha terminals ceased their operations forever and Greater Lord Rukkhadevata dissolved into the memory of Sumeru. The Akademiya was gradually getting used to living without the green lights constantly hovering before their eyes, but deep underground, in semi-abandoned technological catacombs and old server nodes, the fading remnants of the grand network still flickered. By day, Alhaitham remained the same rational and detached Scribe, but he was still irresistibly drawn to the places where your life had once ended.

During one of his inspections of decommissioned terminal nodes in the underground archive beneath the Akademiya, Alhaitham discovered a strange system anomaly. An old console unit that should have been completely powered down five years ago was humming softly, sending weak, pulsating signals into an isolated fragment of encrypted memory. His sharp mind instantly seized upon this glitch, and after connecting a portable reader to the dusty interface, he froze – the digital activity curve matched the exact frequency of that fateful day.

In the exact moment when you drank that cursed potion and your body entered artificial elemental resonance, your consciousness had briefly connected with the Akasha terminal for a split second. The network had captured not merely a nervous system impulse, but had forged a precise, deep mental imprint of your personality – an echo of your thoughts, your memories, your habits, and your character, frozen in the digital void.

From that very day, his life permanently split into two unequal halves. Every night, when the house fell asleep and the sound of drafting tools from Kaveh's room finally ceased, Alhaitham descended into the underground archive. He modified a capsule terminal, slipped it over his head, and submerged into virtual space – into a dark, isolated digital room recreated by the Akasha from his own memories of your shared dormitory.

In this simulated space, you sat at your desk, twirling that same imported bottle of nail polish from Fontaine in your hands and looking at him with a slight squint.

"Showed up again, junior scribe?" the phantom would speak in your voice, tilting its head slightly with a cheeky smirk. "You've been sitting in this dark, dusty laboratory for three hours already. Your brain is going to completely shrivel up from these archives if you don't stop staring at me like I'm about to steal your books."

Alhaitham would sit across from you on a virtual chair, feeling how the phantom's cold, artificial light resonated in his chest with phantom warmth. He knew perfectly well that before him was merely a set of algorithms, a high-precision data projection created from an imprint of your nervous system and his own memories. Yet this digital ghost argued with him, teased him, used your favorite phrases, and reacted exactly as the real you would have.

"Logic dictates that I am wasting time conversing with a disembodied program" he answered in a quiet voice, though his fingers clenched into fists on the virtual table. "However, it is the only rational way to hear your cheeky remarks. In the real world, it has become far too quiet without them."

"Oh, is the Great Scribe actually admitting that he misses my teasing?" the phantom leaned back in the chair with a light chuckle, propping its chin on its palm. "You're getting sentimental, Haitham. Be careful, or the substitute professors might think you've lost your famous edge."

The boundary between the real world and this digital dream thinned more and more with every passing month. During the day at Akademiya meetings, he appeared even more distant and pale, his eyes standing out like dark hollows on his exhausted face. He would fall asleep right at his desk over piles of paperwork, desiring only for night to fall so he could put on the terminal and return to you.

Kaveh noticed his strange behavior and withdrawal more and more frequently.

"Hey, Haitham, have you even looked in a mirror lately?" the architect asked one evening as they sat at dinner. "You look like you've got one foot in the grave already. You wander off somewhere at night, whispering to yourself... Have you completely lost your mind over those ancient folios?"

"My physical condition remains within acceptable parameters" Alhaitham replied in a completely lifeless tone, not even attempting to argue. "Mind your own business, Kaveh."

But that night, the anomaly in the Akasha servers began to glitch. The power reserve of the old underground node was reaching its end, and the phantom's code began to break apart. When Alhaitham connected to the virtual room once more, your digital projection flickered, covered in pixelated interference and sound distortions.

"Haitham..." your voice echoed with heavy digital static, the projection blurring for a moment. "It seems... the data stream is collapsing. The program cannot sustain this form..."

Alhaitham stood up abruptly, losing his icy composure for the first time throughout all their virtual encounters. He reached out to the phantom, trying to grasp your shoulders, but his fingers slid right through the fading green pixels.

"No. Stay a little longer" he demanded, genuine, desperate panic bleeding into his voice. "I will reroute reserve power. I will rewrite the interface. I will not let this network erase you a second time!"

"Haitham, stop..." the phantom smiled sadly through the swelling system noise, your silhouette growing increasingly translucent. "You know it yourself... I am merely an echo. Code. Your mind is clinging to a ghost while your real life passes you by. Let this glitch go..."

"I will not let go" he exhaled, frantically inputting commands into the virtual console directly before him as the pixels of your form melted into darkness. "I will learn to sustain this server forever, {{user}}. Even if I have to burn out my entire mind to do it."

The projection flickered one last time before shattering into thousands of tiny green sparks, plunging the virtual room into complete, sepulchral darkness. Alhaitham tore the terminal off his head and fell to his knees on the cold stone floor of the real underground archive before the humming server. In his eyes, reflecting the dying indicator lights of the console, settled a mad, dangerous resolve – from this moment on, his entire life, his genius mind, and all his resources as Scribe would be devoted to a single goal: keeping this digital phantom alive, no matter the cost.

Every Fifteenth Day

The tragic outcome of that fateful final project defense had left a scar far deeper than mere grief. The artificial elemental resonance potion had not only shattered your physiology, but its lingering residual energy had permanently damaged Alhaitham’s subconscious mind on a fundamental level. Though fifteen years had passed and he had become the formidable, icy Scribe of the Akademiya, his brilliant intellect carried a hidden, incurable flaw.

Every fifteenth day of the month, without fail, his mind suffered a complete mental relapse. No matter where he was or what he was doing, the present reality would shatter like thin glass. The quiet walls of his home or his administrative office dissolved, replaced by the suffocating, grand atmosphere of the Akademiya's amphitheater on the day of the defense.

The air would grow thick with the phantom scent of old parchments and fresh Padisarahs. The empty silence transformed into the loud, excited hum of hundreds of students and strict committee professors filling the tiered rows. And there, sitting in the front row with a mocking, arrogant smirk that always made his chest ache, was you.

Deep within his fractured consciousness, Alhaitham knew it was the fifteenth. He knew this grand hall was an illusion born of his own unforgiving guilt, a recurring ghost constructed by his damaged brain. Yet, as he stood on the wooden stage, looking down at your vibrant, living figure, the overwhelming urge to save you overpowered his rational mind every single time.

Just as in the original memory, you rose from your seat with that confident, graceful gait, throwing a sarcastic glance toward the professors before stepping up onto the stage beside him. Your eyes sparkled with that familiar, haughty mischief, completely oblivious to the tragedy waiting in the shadows.

"I hope your dates will compensate for this dubious circus, Alhaitham" you whispered quietly, giving him that slight, teasing smile in the final seconds before reaching out your hand for the vial.

Every month, Alhaitham attempted to rewrite the script of his own delusion. Driven by sheer desperation, he would try to hurl the shimmering glass vessel onto the stone floor to shatter it into dust. He would try to pull his hand back, to grab your wrist, or to scream a warning for you to stay away from the stage.

Yet the horrific logic of his damaged mind enforced the loop with cruel inevitability. If he tried to throw the flask, his own hands moved against his will as if bound by invisible marionette strings, handing you the bottle anyway. If he tried to shout, his throat closed up, choked by phantom static. If he tried to push you away, his body betrayed him, executing the exact movements recorded in his memory.

You uncorked the vial and drank every last drop, handing the empty glass back to him with that careless smirk. The crowd froze in anticipation, and Alhaitham stood paralyzed, forced to watch the inevitable horror unfold for the hundredth time.

Within seconds, the color drained from your face. You threw your head back as bright, thick scarlet blood gushed from your nose, staining your formal uniform. You collapsed onto the wooden stage with a deafening crash, breaking like a fragile porcelain doll whose supporting threads had snapped.

"{{user}}!" he screamed, the raw, agonizing cry tearing from his throat as he dropped to his knees beside your lifeless body.

He frantically lifted your head, pressing it to his chest, trying to perform rescue breathing while blood heavily stained his hands, his cuffs, and pooled beneath you. He begged you to open your eyes, to breathe, to yell at him for his ureasonableness – but your faint pulse flickered out forever, leaving behind only a deafening, cold emptiness.

And then, as the medics carried your body away in his hallucination, the grand amphitheater began to warp and dissolve. The screams of the students faded into the quiet crackle of a fireplace, and the blood on his hands melted into thin air.

The illusion shattered, leaving Alhaitham kneeling on the floor of his own living room in the present day, gasping for air and dripping with cold sweat. His hands were trembling violently, clutching empty air where your head had rested just seconds before.

Kaveh, who had long grown accustomed to this terrifying monthly ritual, stood in the doorway of the hallway, holding a glass of water and looking at the Scribe with a mix of pity and exhaustion.

"It's the fifteenth again, isn't it?" Kaveh said softly, stepping closer and setting the glass on the table nearby. "You were screaming her name again, Haitham... You've been kneeling there on the rug for two hours."

Alhaitham did not answer immediately. He slowly raised his hands, staring at his clean, bloodless palms under the dim lamplight. His face was deadly pale, his green eyes hollow and vacant, stripped of all their usual intellectual sharpness.

"I tried to shatter the vial today, Kaveh" Alhaitham whispered, his voice raspy and broken, sounding completely unlike the confident Scribe of the Akademiya. "I tried to push her off the stage... but my hands wouldn't obey me."

"Because she's gone, Haitham" Kaveh replied with a heavy sigh, sitting on the edge of a chair. "You can't change what happened fifteen years ago. Your mind is trapped in that day, punishing you over and over again."

Alhaitham slowly closed his eyes, leaning his forehead against his trembling knees as a single, bitter tear slipped down his cheek. He knew Kaveh was right. He knew that thirty days from now, on the next fifteenth, the illusion would claim his mind once more, forcing him to stand on that stage, see your living smile, and watch you die all over again in an eternal, inescapable loop of his own creation.

Flesh That Remembers

Fifteen years ago, during those intense, ambition-filled months in the Akademiya dormitory, Alhaitham secretly spent night after night in alchemical laboratories testing his breakthrough compound on his own body. He had refused to hire assistants or purchase laboratory animals, meticulously saving every coin of his stipend for your shared future and for that special graduation gift. You had mockingly demanded a box of candied dates from the Old City as payment for drinking the vial on stage, entirely unaware of the catastrophic outcome waiting for you both. When the potion reacted disastrously during the defense, taking your life in a terrifying wave of internal bleeding, it did not merely break his spirit – it left an indelible, physical curse upon his own flesh.

Because Alhaitham had consumed dozens of preliminary doses of the compound over six months, his nervous system had permanently tuned itself to the elemental resonance formula. The moment your body entered fatal shock, the residual elemental energy bound his physiology to yours forever. The Akademiya's medics called it an unexplainable neurological anomaly, but the reality was far more cruel: his body had become a living, biological chronometer of your final agony.

Fifteen years later, as the formidable Scribe of the Akademiya, Alhaitham lived with this secret, excruciating affliction. Whenever the atmospheric pressure in Sumeru shifted, whenever the dry, hot winds blew from the Hadramaveth desert, or whenever intense elemental reactions occurred nearby, his nervous system violently re-enacted your final moments. Nature itself could not move without forcing his body to remember how you died.

On a heavy, suffocating evening in their shared house, a fierce desert gale swept over Sumeru City, carrying turbulent elemental currents from the arid west. Inside his quiet study, Alhaitham sat at his desk, reviewing administrative reports. Outside, the wind slammed against the wooden shutters, and the air pressure in the room dropped sharply.

Suddenly, a brutal, searing pain tore through his chest. Alhaitham’s breath hitched instantly, his lungs seizing as if filled with fluid. His vision blurred, dark scarlet spots dancing across his eyes as phantom convulsions wracked his torso. The exact sensation of hot, suffocating blood spilling into your airway fifteen years ago rushed through his nerves with terrifying precision.

He dropped his quill, his hand clutching his chest as he leaned heavily over the desk. Every muscle in his throat contracted in a violent, phantom spasm, making it impossible to draw in a single breath. It was not a disease or an illness – it was the somatic ghost of your dying body, living inside his nerves.

In the adjacent living room, Kaveh heard the heavy thud of a chair scraping against the floor and Alhaitham's muffled, ragged gasp. Dropping his drafting pencil, the architect rushed into the study, freezing in shock at the sight of the usually unshakeable Scribe doubled over his desk, gasping for air with a deathly pale face.

"Haitham!" Kaveh shouted, rushing across the room and grabbing his shoulder – his eyes wide with alarm. "What's happening?! Is it another attack?!"

Alhaitham could not answer. His jaw was locked in a agonizing spasm, his throat burning with the phantom taste of copper and elemental static. He pressed his forehead against the cold wood of the desk, his knuckles turning white as he gripped his coat, enduring the phantom rupture inside his chest.

"I'll get those painkilling tinctures the Bimarstan gave us!" Kaveh declared frantically, rushing toward the bookshelf and rummaging through the medicine bottles – his hands trembling. "Drink this! Take it!"

"No..." Alhaitham rasped out, his voice a broken, painful whisper that barely carried across the quiet room. "Put it away... You know medicine cannot dull this."

Kaveh stopped, his shoulders slumping as his face filled with helpless frustration and profound pity. He knew the truth, even if Alhaitham rarely spoke of it. No herbal sedative or medicinal potion could soothe a pain that was not generated by his own body, but by the memory of yours.

For ten agonizing minutes, as the desert wind howled outside, Alhaitham endured the phantom hemorrhage. Every wave of pain was an exact mirror of your body's fading pulse on that stage – the unbearable chest pressure, the burning oxygen deprivation, the terrifying sensation of life slipping away second by second.

When the gale outside finally subsided and the elemental turbulence in the air smoothed out, the violent spasms slowly loosened their grip on his muscles. Alhaitham slumped back into his chair, completely drenched in cold sweat, his breathing heavy and shallow as he stared at the ceiling.

"Why do you refuse to let the Spantamad scholars examine your nervous system?" Kaveh asked softly, leaning against the edge of the desk – his usual argumentative tone entirely gone. "You suffer like this every time the weather turns, Haitham. Living like a living barometer of her death is torture."

Alhaitham slowly raised his head, his pale face illuminated by the flickering candlelight. His green eyes, though exhausted and hollow, held an unyielding, terrifying resolve.

"Because this pain is the only physical proof left in this world that her death was real" Alhaitham answered, his voice steadying into its cold, quiet cadence as he addressed your memory. "Every spasm in my chest is a reminder of my failure, and every burning breath is her.. agony echoing through my flesh. I will never allow anyone to cure the only part of her that still lives inside me."

The Fresh Box of Dates

Three endless days passed under the stifling silence of his locked quarters. Outside, guards watched the door, but inside, Alhaitham’s analytical mind refused to surrender to despair. Logic was his sanctuary, and logic insisted that something about the chemical breakdown did not add up. Sitting among your scattered notebooks and withered Padisarahs, he pulled out his secret personal logs and the remaining reserve control samples he had hidden in a false compartment beneath his desk.

His sharp green eyes scanned the complex equations and reaction graphs for the hundredth time, until a sudden, subtle anomaly caught his attention. The elemental catalyst did not cause cellular rupture – it induced a violent hyper-cataleptic state, an instantaneous metabolic shutdown designed to shield the nervous system from elemental overload. Your heart had not exploded; it had entered a state of absolute, deep suspended animation, slowing its rhythm to a micro-pulse so faint and infrequent that standard medical instruments and inexperienced hands would inevitably mistake it for death.

Terror and sudden, blazing hope surged through his veins simultaneously. You were not dead – you were trapped in an alchemical coma, and if your body remained in the subterranean vault's cold preservation chamber for much longer, the suspended state would become irreversible.

Without losing a single second, Alhaitham moved with terrifying efficiency. Using a concentrated chemical solvent from his hidden stash, he melted the heavy lock of his dormitory door, stepping out into the hallway. Before the two Matra guards could even draw their polearms, Alhaitham bypassed them with swift, calculated strikes, knocking them unconscious before sprinting through the dark corridors of the Akademiya toward the restricted lower archives.

He kicked open the heavy iron doors of the mortuary vault, the cold mist of preservation magic rushing out to meet him. There, resting in a glass stasis capsule awaiting official burial arrangements, lay your pale, frozen form. Alhaitham smashed the glass panel with a heavy brass instrument, ignoring the sharp shards that cut into his arms, and lifted your icy body into his arms.

His fingers trembled violently as he drew a syringe containing a warm, concentrated neutralizing agent – a counter-catalyst he had formulated in his room minutes prior. He pressed the needle against your vein, injecting the solution, and pulled you tightly against his chest, burying his face in your cold hair.

"Breathe, {{user}}... I command you to breathe" he whispered, his voice cracking with a raw, desperate vulnerability he had never shown to a single soul. "Do not let my logic fail today."

For ten agonizing seconds, nothing happened. Then, a sudden, sharp gasp tore from your throat. Your chest heaved violently, your heart kicked back into a rapid, rhythmic beat, and hot blood rushed back to your cheeks as the artificial paralysis shattered. Color returned to your skin, and your eyes fluttered open in the dim light of the vault.

An hour later, the entire Akademiya was in an uproar, but Alhaitham ignored the furious deans and bewildered medics. He sat right beside your bed in the Bimarstan infirmary, refusing to move, holding your warm hand in his as monitoring devices hummed softly around the room. He looked unkempt, his eyes bloodshot, but the heavy shadow of death had finally vanished from his soul.

You slowly turned your head on the pillow, looking at him with weak, slightly blurred vision. Despite the IV lines in your arm and the lingering weakness in your muscles, your brow furrowed with familiar, stubborn annoyance as you took in his messy hair and exhausted face.

"You look absolutely terrible, Alhaitham" you rasped out, your voice rough, dry, and hoarse from the ordeal, but instantly packed with your usual cheeky arrogance. "And if you think a dramatic rescue in a creepy basement makes up for putting me through an alchemical nightmare, you are deeply mistaken."

Alhaitham let out a low, breathy laugh – a sound so rare and genuine that even the attending nurse near the door turned in surprise. A faint, incredibly tender smile touched his lips as he squeezed your fingers.

"I see your sharp tongue suffered no permanent damage from the suspended animation" he replied quietly, his green eyes shining with profound relief.

"Shut up and listen to me, Haitham" you grumbled, trying to sit up slightly on the pillows and glaring at him with all the fierce pride you could muster. "I demand my box of candied dates right now. The freshest ones from the Old City. And if there is even a single stale one in the package, I am throwing your entire philosophy library out the window the moment I get discharged."

Alhaitham didn't argue. Without a word of hesitation, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a neatly tied paper box, placing it gently on your lap.

"They were bought this morning, {{user}}" he said softly, leaning forward until his forehead gently rested against yours, his breath warm against your cheek. "And you will have as many as you want for the rest of your life, as long as you promise to keep breathing."