Slant

It was past eleven. The semester had come to an end, and Ashburne University of Magical Arts had quietly emptied itself over the course of a week – students leaving in clusters, corridors growing still, libraries suddenly generous with their seats. By now, only a few remained: those whose homes were too far to reach, those preparing for resit exams, and a small number of teachers who stayed behind for research or work that simply couldn’t be left unfinished.

Neve was one of the first kind, though she had stopped explaining that to people.

She had not expected Professor Aldric Vane to still be around. His Invisible Forms course had finished before the semester even formally closed. That had been almost a month ago now. She had loved those lessons – the way they kept opening new worlds to her, or even new ways of moving through the one she already inhabited.

She had given him reason, perhaps, to notice her final essay, weaving in relevant quotations from authors she loved – lines that said more about her than she ever could; the ones she thought – or quietly hoped – he might recognize, in the fragile way one hopes to be seen and understood. She hadn’t thought it would come to anything - at most, an echo. And yet, the note slipped beneath her room door read:

Your essay raises some interesting questions. I’d like to hear more about your thoughts.

I’ll be in my study at 11:30 p.m., if you’d like to come by.

P.S. A Sylt may be waiting for you, somewhere, curled like a breath.

– Aldric –

So, something had caught his attention after all – so much so that he responded.

But if he had picked up on that trace, what else had slipped through? The thought settled in, and Neve was uncertain whether to feel relieved or exposed.

The note was written in a hurried, strong forward slant, each letter formed with the intensity of a man who thinks faster than he writes. She had read it innumerable times. There was a limit to how many times a person could read a thing before the reading became something else entirely. And she, lingering there, read it over and over again to stretch the moment. She could almost hear his voice – low, velvety, faintly melancholic – threading softly through the lines, just as it had in his lectures. With it, his image came into focus: his eyes, hands, his crooked smile.

She went back to certain moments, as she often did – those small, suspended things. Across twenty lectures; a conversation outside the library; the time he looked at her, turning back toward the room; the brief touch of their fingers as he handed back assignments; through the way he sometimes paused, mid-lecture, on a sentence when she answered a question, as though it had arrived somewhere it was not entirely expected.

Or had she read too much into it – found patterns where there were none?

And still, she couldn’t quite let go of the sense that they shared a frequency and that, on it, a kind of language had taken shape.

Neve forced her attention back to the note.

A Sylt. A Sylt?

She pressed the paper closer. Sylt. Waiting for me. Right.

Silk? No – there’s a Y. Sylph? That’s almost poetic enough to be him. His N’s look like S’s and U’s and sometimes just a row of humps with no real beginning or end, so this could be something else entirely.

A Sylt waiting for me. Unless he means a place – a meeting point he expects me to recognise. Of course he’d do that. He always assumes you’ll keep up.

Oh God, what if he asks if I know “Sylts”… whatever that is. Should I just nod and pretend? No, that’s risky – what if he keeps talking about it and I have no clue? I’ll look like an idiot. Ugh. Okay, no lying. I’ll see what happens.

She had stopped consulting the clock with any pretence of practicality.

It was now twenty past eleven. Feeling itself had taken wing – that vertiginous feeling of a thing long imagined arriving at last in three dimensions, solid and slightly terrifying, so much more specific than the version she had carried around for months in the privacy of her own chest.

The imagined thing is always manageable. It lives where you put it, stays when you leave, asks nothing. The real thing was waiting for her in the Department of Ars, Verbum, et Magia at 11:30 p.m.

Professor Vane. She had always called him that – always referred to him so, even in her own thoughts, even here, sitting on the edge of her bed with the note in her hands, reading it one final time before making her way to the meeting. Aldric. He had signed it simply Aldric in that same urgent slant. This made her heart lift with foolish pleasure; she found she could not read it without gravity loosening its hold.

Neve took a deep breath, put the note in the pocket of her jeans, and made her way through the passageways of the university building. She climbed one staircase, then another. She walked past the Temporal Distortion classroom, where three butterflies were stilled in the midst of a wingbeat, as they had been, presumably, since the last lesson.

What happens to the butterfly while it waits? Someone had written on the blackboard.

She walked the length of the last long corridor; the cold came up through the stone, and the high windows showed nothing but dark blue sky. Then, at the very end, there it was – his study. From behind it, barely audible, something slow and electric on vinyl, dragging its way through the quiet.

Neve lifted her hand and knocked. “Alright - here we go,” she thought.

“Please, come in”, said a voice from inside.

She stepped in, closing the heavy door behind her.