Page 45 of At the Mercy of Midnight
She glanced up. “This is…” Amelia trailed off, eyes leaving him to wander around the enormous room again. “I don’t know why, but I thought that you would be a veritable neat freak. Though, after seeing the state of your tent in the Rift…this shouldn’t be surprising.”
Silas leaned against the worktable and focused downwards to the glass vials filled with a copper liquid that gave off a faint spicy scent. He shifted his jaw, working to control the desire to smile.
“Perhaps we can establish that you don’t know me very well at all,” he said, fingers tapping against the tabletop.
When he looked up, Amelia watched him curiously, standing before his large chalkboard that stretched across one wall. It was home to his detailed notes on magical equilibrium, outlining his theory on a possible connection between the Monolith’s that no scientist had yet figured out. Certain phrases had been aggressively underlined, while other words were smudged where he had erased entire sections in his frustration, only to rewrite it again.
His research on the Monoliths had been his most challenging venture to date.
Four arcane lamps hung from the ceiling, their crystals resolutely glowing. Though recently, they had been flickering more often, a worrying nod to the weakening magic.
Silas unslung his pack, removing the covered blades. Amelia wandered back over as he carefully unwrapped them, holding his breath.
They lay innocently, the golden blade catching the light, while the dark blade seemed to absorb light.
Amelia shifted closer to observe them, her shoulder nudging his. He found his gaze drifting from the daggers that had changed the course of their lives to glance quietly at her, sure that she had never willingly stood so close to him.
“So small to cause such a large disaster,” she said with an equal measure of lingering fear and awe as she took in the delicate design of the blades.
He lifted a corner of his mouth. “Sounds a bit like you.”
She met his eyes, mischief in her expression. “Well, I am a storm, right?”
His half-smile grew. “Undoubtedly.”
The moment drew on, gazes held. Silas’ hand curled atop the table, curiosity mounting to know what she was thinking. Her eyes dipped to his mouth before darting back to the blades, and he felt it. A swooping sensation across his stomach, one that wasn’t his.
He swallowed, wrenching his eyes away. Experiencing an echo of her feelings felt invasive, yet he was fascinated by the peek behind the curtain of Amelia Winslow, a shield which she kept firmly drawn.
She got to work, not asking for permission or direction. Gathering a series of items, she laid them out along an edge of the worktable for material testing. They would ascertain if the blades reacted differently when cutting through distinctive materials.
Silas labelled each metal, incapable of not shooting quick glances at her as they worked. He wondered if she’d had any snapshots of his feelings.
It was a bizarre notion, that if he had an overwhelming emotion, Amelia might experience a version of it.
Ever the diligent scientist, Silas schemed an experiment for the hypothesis. Asking was an option he had ruled out, fearing her reaction if she had no awareness of the unwilling invasion of her privacy.
“Encumbrance boxes are made from composite metal, right?” She pulled a small box closer, inspecting the sides.
“Mm-hm,” Silas confirmed, pointing to a shelf where the material for the box was stored. “It’s a carbon fibre reinforced resin, runed by a mage for strength, resonance and containment.”
She nodded and moved to it, pulling pieces of the resin out before returning, adding them to the line-up of materials. “We’ll test the blades’ ability to cut it, and we could think of keeping them in a box, see if it dulls or nullifies their magical signature.”
He nodded, watching her set each item in rigidly spaced sequences.
Distracted as she was, now was the moment for his experiment.
Silas pictured the moment he had first seen her.
Visiting the Lux Spire for the first time, he prepared to marvel at the elegance and enormity of the grandest university hosting the most prestigious library in Aethrial. It had been built up in his head as somewhere he wanted to visit for his entire life, a place boasted by all scholars he had ever met.
While it had been grand and undeniably beautiful, Silas had been underwhelmed.
Whathadtaken him by surprise, was the serious-faced and dark-eyed brunette sitting by a window in the library, straight-backed with one leg crossed demurely over the other. A book propped in her lap, she read with the steady diligence of one who had been a reader and researcher their entire life. Her gaze didn’t waver from her text in the time that Silas had toured the library, his attention straying to her an alarming number of occasions.
He couldn’t say, after all these years, what had drawn him in so rapidly. It might have been that half her dark hair sat in an untidy yet elegant bun upon her head, a series of loose curls spilling around her shoulders, a single tendril brushing her cheekbone. It could have been how her fingers, delicate and graceful, turned the pages before returning to a curled position on her knee. Or the way she donned a pair of riding boots with her slacks and red blouse, leaving him to postulate she was not only an indoor, nose-in-her-book scholar.
Whatever it was, Silas felt compelled to stray from the tour, intent to introduce himself, to hear her voice and likely fuel the budding obsession.
