Chapter 15: Can I keep the spike after the lobotomy

Kaz began doodling.

Well, he called it doodling. Leonor was pretty sure actual doodles didn’t glow. Or ripple. Or spontaneously correct their own line work like they were deeply offended by the very notion of being drawn badly.

She watched, equal parts horrified and fascinated, as a crude sketch of a fish,a lumpy thing with too many fins and a smile like it had just told a rude joke,shivered on the stone and stretched itself into a proper sea serpent. Scales layered themselves like lacquered armor. Its eye blinked. Twice.

Leonor leaned in.

Kaz was whistling to himself now, utterly unconcerned, as he drew what might have been a crab with self-esteem issues.

She frowned. “What is that chalk?”

He paused, just barely.

Then smiled.

Not his usual cheeky grin, but a slow, slippery smile. The kind you wore when you knew exactly what someone wanted to know, and had decided to be difficult about it.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he said.

Leonor blinked.

There was a pause. Then another. She waited for the answer to come after it.

It didn’t.

“I,” she tried, but her brain simply failed to complete the sentence. Because nobody had ever said that to her before. Not tutors, not maids, not guards, not even the court jester. (He’d once implied something similar, but was promptly reassigned to the royal poultry division.)

Kaz just kept drawing. A squid this time, or possibly an umbrella with ambitions.

Leonor stared at the chalk. It wasn’t getting shorter. Not even a bit. And chalk always got shorter. That was practically the point of chalk. It was like watching someone use a candle that refused to burn down.

More than that, the drawings,the utterly un-magical, ridiculous sea creature doodles, were changing. Sharpening. Improving.

Evolving.

Leonor swallowed.

She had read about sorcery. Once. Twice. Several dozen times. She knew it didn’t behave like standard spellcraft. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t polite. It didn’t follow the proper angles or ask permission first. Sorcery was messy, wild, alive in ways structured spellwork couldn’t be.

But she had never seen it.

Not like this.

She should have been scoffing. Should have been muttering something snide about unsanctioned conjuration or aesthetic integrity.

Instead, she crouched slowly, watching the sea serpent curl lovingly around the edge of the transport sigil.

“…that’s not supposed to happen,” she murmured.

Kaz didn’t even look up. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

Leonor hesitated. Her fingers itched. She reached into her coat and pulled out something wrapped in oilcloth,carefully, like she was revealing a secret.

She unfolded it on her knees.

Inside was her chalk. Not white. A deep, glinting blue-black. Fine as spun glass.

Kaz stopped doodling. His head tilted. “That’s new.”

“It’s mine,” Leonor said, quietly. “I was going to use it for something else. A project. But no one,” She caught herself. “Never mind.”

She started drawing. With the kind of focus usually reserved for brain surgery or needlework done under threat of death.

Kaz peered over her shoulder.

She worked fast, sketching a sigil ring far stronger than the city’s mandated Earth-aligned circles. The lines were tighter. Reinforced. Fluid and solid at once. It was elegant, complicated, breathtaking,and from the angle Kaz was watching, definitely shaped a bit like a waterwheel.

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He leaned in closer.

“You made this?”

Leonor nodded.

“I wanted to use it for the palace grid. I spent weeks on the calculations. Months, actually. But my father said it was unnecessary. Too risky. ‘Good girls don’t gamble with infrastructure,’” she added, mocking his voice almost perfectly.

Kaz gave a low whistle.

Leonor kept drawing. “It’s overengineered,” she admitted. “Borderline obsessive. But if this thing’s going to explode, I’d rather it bounce than blast.”

He considered that.

“Practical,” he said.

“Terrifying ,” she corrected.

“Same hat,” Kaz replied.

He hesitated, then pointed to the growing design. “Can I add a leviathan?”

Leonor’s eyes narrowed. “No.”

Kaz put a hand over his heart. “Please. I’ll draw it small. Modest. Regal, even.”

“No.”

He leaned in a bit, voice dipping into something oddly soft. Oddly sincere.

“You know,” he said, “someone very dear to me once told me, ‘Knowledge is best chewed over with other people’s teeth, not gnawed on by your own.’”

Leonor blinked. “What does that even mean?”

Kaz shrugged. “I think it has something to do with kissing. But don’t ask me how that works.”

Leonor made a sound like a teacup being set down too hard. “That,That’s not something you talk about in front of a,a,”

She flailed, clearly trying to think of any word that wasn’t princess. As if saying it aloud might detonate her cover.

Kaz, naturally, leapt into the pause like it owed him rent.

“Cabbage,” he said brightly. “You’re a cabbage, obviously.”

Leonor blinked. “What?”

“I mean, yes, it would be terribly improper to mention kissing in front of a cabbage. Known to be very sheltered, cabbages. Entire generations grown in silence, only to be harvested and forced to witness dinner-table conversations. It’s traumatic, really.”

He warmed to the subject like a boy discovering his favorite food could also be used as a weapon.

“Course, that’s probably why people practice kissing on them. Poor things. Big, soft, round, lots of layers. Emotional support vegetable and romantic stand-ins.”

Leonor opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again like a fish attempting a royal decree.

Kaz pressed on, delighted.

“’Course they don’t hold up well. You kiss a cabbage once, maybe twice, and suddenly it looks like it’s been politely mauled. Ms. Lorrimore always said if a cabbage came in with bite marks and missing leaves, it either had a passionate suitor or a raccoon problem.”

Leonor made a noise like a kettle trying not to scream. Her entire face had gone crimson, and she turned away so fast her cloak nearly hit a passing pigeon.

“That is not, you cannot, how dare, !”

She didn’t finish the sentence. Possibly because her brain had curled up in protest and was now filing a formal complaint with her dignity.

Kaz leaned back on his heels, beaming like someone who’d just discovered embarrassment was a princess’s critical weak point.

He waited just long enough for her to start recovering.

Then struck.

He gave her the look.

That look.

The “please please please I’ll be happy and like you even more if you let me draw a leviathan on your special secret circle” look.

Weaponized enthusiasm. Patent pending. Possibly illegal in three kingdoms. Certainly banned in emotionally secure environments.

Leonor stared at him.

This was her circle. Her circle. A design she’d been sketching in margins and on pillowcases and once, disastrously, on the back of a diplomatic contract since she was 5 . She had guarded it from tutors, mentors, and one overly curious alchemist who she may or may not have hexed into forgetting his own thesis.

And now this… street-dweller with a grin problem wanted to doodle a sea monster into it.

She could say no.

She should say no.

And yet,

He was looking at her like joy might actually be a real spell, and saying yes might be the only incantation that made it work.

Leonor exhaled, slow and regal.

Then,without turning to look at him, without unclenching so much as a single muscle,she gave one curt, reluctant nod.

“…Fine,” she muttered. “One. Leviathan.”

Kaz lit up like a lantern in a thunderstorm.

Leonor turned away, scowling, arms crossed tight.

If she looked at him again, she’d smile. And then he’d win. And then the world would end, probably.

Internally, she cursed herself.

You’re being ridiculous. He’s a liar in a hat.

But the warmth in her chest didn’t listen.

She hated that.

She hated how stupidly good it felt to make someone happy.

Especially him.

“If the circle explodes,” she added, as coolly as she could manage, “I hope we leave very interesting shadows.”

Kaz was already sketching.

The chalk purred.

A leviathan uncurled in long, graceful loops, stretching through the boundary like it had been waiting for permission all its life.

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And somewhere, far below the cobbled veins of the city, something new stirred.

Something curious.

Something listening.

It had no eyes, not in the usual sense, but it knew the shape of magic by taste, and it had tasted something odd today.

Warm.

Feral.

Unfiled.

It tasted like chalk and laughter and grief swallowed too young. It tasted like a boy pretending not to be afraid.

The old thing paused in its slumber,not quite awake, not quite dreaming. The city shifted around it, unaware.

But it had felt it. A flicker. A rhythm. A note in the song of The system that hadn’t been sung in a very long time.

And more than that,it had felt a kin.

Not fully awakened, to its power . Not yet.

But close.

Familiar in the way old scars recognize new ones. Kindred not by blood, but by damage. The same strange shape carved out by pain, and filled with something half-feral and wholly disobedient.

This other presence this other system ghost , though they didn’t yet know the name for it was up there.

Losing hope.

Fighting, not because they wanted to win, but because losing would be worse.

Desperate to stay sane while their own hands,someone else’s hands,flung punches like a drunken marionette.

A foolish boy, trapped inside his own meat, currently delivering a flying kick to a squirrel with the wild abandon of a goose in a sword fight.

He did not notice the eyes watching him. Sharp eyes. Hungry ones.

But the old thing noticed.

Because the old thing remembered what it was like to be misused.

To be wielded like a tool, a weapon, a vessel.

It remembered what it was like to be alone.

And now… there were two.

The city rumbled, gently. A carriage passed. Somewhere, a chicken laid an egg of ominous significance.

The old thing, for now, only watched.

But it was listening harder.

And it was starting to wonder what might happen if one lost boy found the other.

And what might happen if both stopped running.

Because the two were beginning to realize something,

there was a narrator, overseeing this world, and she couldn't see them.