They didn’t have a lot of time left before the semester started, but— they had fun. She didn’t even regret not keeping up with Mr. Leng’s worksheets as much as she used to, that’s how much fun they had— testing new talismans, talking about all the stuff they’d learned, occasionally even just dreaming, together, about what the future would look like once they were disciples of the Bloody Saffron Sect.

She’d never really had a friend before, not like this— not someone who understood— and she was finding the whole experience amazing. Her formations were the highlight of those weeks, but there were plenty of other shenanigans they got up to in that time, too. Once, Avyr challenged her to a tree climbing competition, only for her to get utterly touched by his effortless grace as he bounded up the oak’s outstretched boughs— so she in turn challenged him to a race, finally winning after three hours of exhausting running. Even Avyr’s cultivation wasn’t quite able to match up against her natural ability in that regard.

Both of them had enjoyed the inane challenges, though, and that was all that mattered.

They spent a lot of the time in the library, too— working on her formations, yes, but also everything else too. She’d not had someone who’d been able to keep up with her like Avyr was, before— any doubts as to the cat’s intelligence had been thoroughly dispelled by the end of the first week as both of them set to making sure they were ready for the coming semester with a burning drive.

He had a few areas that needed some work— local history, Sect

history as a whole, economics and the metaeconomics of cultivator-mortal interactions, and so on, but for someone who hadn’t been raised in a big city like she had, he was remarkably well informed. Given he’d only come over not just to Ca Cao, but to the northern continent as a whole only a few years back…

He had the most interesting stories, and of all of it, that friendship, those weeks of suffusing joy, that might have been her favorite part.

She leaned back against the rugged bark of the pine, faint acrid scent of sap and pine-needles’ loam redolent in the late-afternoon air around them. “Two more days. Are you ready?” A hazy head had settled over East Saffron, late summer’s last hurrah before the cool hand of autumn reached out to cull the trees and whisper the first words of fall color— setting the whole park almost aglow, as the sun set over the cityscape and cast eerie shadows around them.

Avyr lay curled around her, part of him pressed up against the tree, and part laid out in the last shafts of sunlight. “Maybe. I’d like to think that I am…” for a long moment, he was not-quite quiet, rumbling softly— a faint vibration where his fur brushed up against her skin. Purring, she realized. He was purring.

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That was way too cute. Quietly, she fished out her dataslate and captured a picture of cat as he stared off into the sunset, content. Enshrined in that scarlet last hand of light, a slice of sunlit paradise just for them.

It was for a breath, utterly perfect.

Then Avyr noticed what she was doing and mewled in protest, batting his forepaw at her and knocking her dataslate onto the pine needles. She giggled and batted right back, and then— well, it devolved into the two of them tussling with each other for a moment before they just… laid there, staring up at the sunset so vibrant. She knew that the sect was called what it was for a complex mixture of historical and sociocultural reasons, but, seeing that scarlet smear the skies, she could not help but imagine the cultivator who’d founded the sect had looked up at that, and seen it, and decided to immortalize even a single droplet of its magnificence.

It was a truly grand sight. “I can’t wait.”

Avyr rolled over, staring at her from where he lay a foot and a bit away. “To go back to school?”

“No. To get into the sect, obviously.”

Avyr huffed a hint of laugh, his hot breath ruffling her hair. It smelled like mint, funnily enough. “We’ve got to graduate top of the class first. I can’t imagine that’s going to be easy.”

She was quiet for a moment, but for the slight frown that marred her face. She knew that it wasn’t going to be easy. Had always known that… but there was a difference between what it’d been like a few years back, when it had been a distant problem, and now, when it was so close as to be all but physically tangible. As though all she needed to do was reach out and grasp it. She knew she was one of the very best in her entire class even without her formations practice, and as a Shedding cultivator, Avyr was automatically amongst the best in their year.

Among the best, though. That was the crux of it. She knew their competition. Raya, Urmaphara Il, Yuo Guandong… and, perhaps most damningly of all— and of those, the only one she’d talked about with Avyr— Qin Xinshi, the other Shedding cultivator. The greatest challenge to be overcome. “We’ll make it.” They would make it. Challenges to overcome were just that— something for them to win. And they would win. “For our futures. For each other. And…” Then, quieter— because she didn’t know much about Avyr’s past other than that he’d come to the northern continent alone.

In that, they were alike.

“For the ones who gave their futures for ours.” A paw pressed against her hand, heavy and warm and comforting, and—

As the sun set, scarlet over East Saffron, on summer and those idyllic, ageless weeks—

She sat in silence with a friend and remembered two figures, half forgotten.