[Sept. 1/11] The Dining Hall, Early Evening

[silentsorrow]

Supper at Thrones Academy was always quieter at the end of the year.

At the very beginning of the year, it was different. Older students found their tables—some claimed in years past, others rearranging themselves to suit how friendships had changed over the course of the two month long holiday all returning students had endured—while the newest class, the ninth graders, congregated at the tables set up for them. In the weeks that followed they would realize that they were allowed to move to other tables. And they would realize that no one wished them to do so.

For now, they were thoroughly engrossed in talking to those of their year and the rest of the grades were varying degrees of relieved about it. The new kids did not notice the way that the Headmistress, Lenore Aubrey, did not at them even once for all that their tables were closest to her.

The older students knew why.

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[tomorrowrain]

Raine didn't flinch. He'd been expecting the chill, though he wasn't entirely certain why, and he actually welcomed it. It wasn't an unpleasant coldness, after all. Her hand had been offered in comfort, and he met it with a wry twist of a smile.

"Thank you."

[silentsorrow]

A smile didn't touch her lips and she looked away, like she'd been caught doing something she wasn't supposed to have done. Sarah pulled her fingers away and, with a nod of her head towards him, one that didn't give him a way to see her expression, she gathered her bag in one smooth motion and got up, heading for the doors, even as they began bringing dessert in.

The servants pressed themselves against the wall to avoid touching her and she picked up her pace. Behind her, she could hear the start of whispers about how even Sorrow wanted nothing to do with him.

They were wrong and they weren't and the moment Sarah entered the long hallway that separated the great hall and the other formal rooms from the rest of the school, she paused long enough to unlatch one of the floor length windows. Outside was the crisp briskness of fall, the hint of a storm in the air. She shut the windows behind her, even though she couldn't re-latch them, and stared up at the gathering clouds for a moment.

Wind whipped at her face and Sarah thought it was fitting that the weather would be as unsettled as she was now. A ghost, a young man, with curly hair and a solemn face offered her his hand to help her step down from the flower bed.

She let him. She was the only one they could touch: who was she to deny them that? And better still, as she walked with the ghosts, it gave her something to think about that wasn't a different young man who'd she'd given her book to, or Seth.

[tomorrowrain]

Raine watched her go, ignoring the whispers and pulses that his power tried to feed to him as he focussed on her back. He was trying to ignore the other students, too, but they were speaking far more loudly than his power was, at the moment. They might all have been whispering, but a hundred whispers amounted to a dull roar.

Abandoning his fork and gathering up his bag, he stood and made his way toward the doors. It would be quiet in his room, so long as he didn't sleep. He needed that, right now, more than anything.