Each oak table had been decorated with tea candles and a large centerpiece of flowers cast in resin. Once all the noodle dishes, bean stews, curries, quiches, and savory herb pies had been cleared away, the centerpiece served as a dessert board with a variety of fruits and honeyed cakes. Violin music floated on the aether amid the raucous laughter surrounding them, and wine flowed steadily into golden cups.
The hall itself was a massive stone chamber with crisscrossing wooden arches and more stained-glass windows. Long oak tables dominated most of the space, but there were a few smaller ones set around the periphery of the room, and they’d commandeered one of these. Front and center, a wooden dais ornamented with many jewels offered a speaking platform where earlier one of the graduating thespians from their class had given a farewell speech and a toast.
Built to accommodate four hundred angels at a time, the hall was only half full for their graduation celebration, and only half of those present were students. The rest were instructors and guild council members who had been invited to welcome the newly graduated to their disciplines’ ranks.
Lila picked at her cake and tried not to let her apprehension show on her face, though her heart beat wildly in her chest and her stomach wound itself into increasingly uncomfortable knots. This was it—the last thing to be done before she moved in with Castor and spent the rest of her existence as his constant companion. For a long time, it had been all too close, and yet, deceptively far away, but now there was no escaping it.
Lessons had been a buffer that couldn’t last.
If only she could be like Eva and Adrianna, filled with excitement at the prospect of spending eternity with her soulmate. She stole a glance at the couple—Eva was stealing a bite of Adrianna’s cake, and Adrianna was flicking crumbs at her. Both were laughing, the love in their eyes taunting Lila.
A long time ago, upon Castor’s creation, the Creator had decided that Castor would benefit from having a partner, and so his soul had been split into two pieces, and Lila had been fashioned from the second half. There were others like her—products of a soul-split—but not many. Most of Lila’s peers thought she was blessed—how special she was to have a soulmate, to never have to be alone.
Oh, how Lila wanted to be alone. She wanted it even more than she wanted to be an architect, though neither scenario was bound to happen.
Eva and Adrianna were the other soul-split couple in their class, but Lila suspected they would have been joined at the hip regardless. They did annoying things like pass each other supplies before the other asked; they finished each other’s food and each other’s sentences. They’d even submitted the same housing blueprint without knowing what their other half had asked the architects to draw.
Lila and Castor had argued up until the deadline over the matter of housing, not least because his blueprints made no sense; his embellishments were decorous, but not at all functional. Lila had drawn her own blueprints, and she’d done a better job than the architect he’d commissioned. In the end, they’d tried to compromise, and neither of them had gotten anything they truly desired.
Their entire relationship, really, was a lose-lose situation, but Castor was the first half of their collective soul, so it had always been skewed in his favor. Ultimately, everything from the house they lived in to their chosen occupation to how they spent their free time was his decision.
Lila sucked in a deep breath, trying to dislodge the pressure in her chest.Her hands trembled, and she clasped them on her lap beneath the table. To distract herself, she tuned back in to her friends’ conversation.
“No, no, I have to tell the story again. One more time before we graduate,” Adrianna was saying to Beni. She grinned as she twirled her topaz necklace, and the stone twinkled in the light, the same warm brown as her skin. Her straight black hair spilled over her shoulders, glossy and sleek.
She was still the leader of their group, as tall and lean as Eva was short and shapely. But where Eva used flattery and charm to get her way, Adrianna was all bluntness and brute force.
“Again? We’ve only heard it a thousand times already,” Eva complained, sitting between Adrianna and Lila. She picked at a pearl and rose gold pin in her reddish blonde hair—one of Lila’s creations—and Lila cracked a smile at her childish pout. When Eva got cross, she had none of Adrianna’s gravitas. A frown only made her more adorable, the sudden color in her pale, rounded cheeks highlighting her cinnamon freckles.
Unfortunately, Adrianna and Eva had both been sorted into painting instead of woodworking; if she couldn’t be an architect, Lila would have liked to work alongside her friends.
“We already graduated,” Beni shot back, launching a grape at Adrianna. He’d grown into his broad frame, and now he towered over all of them, but this never dissuaded Adrianna from picking on him.
She dodged the grape, and it landed on the floor behind her.
“Not completely. Not totally.”
“What are we talking about?” Lila ventured.
“The Ceramics Chamber.” Adrianna waggled her eyebrows, and Lila regretted asking. If they told that story, the topic of conversation would inevitably turn toward?—
“I still can’t get over the look on Luc’s face.” Adrianna snickered.
“Wait, you have to tell it from the beginning,” Castor demanded, toying with his goblet to Lila’s left. He sat at the end of the table opposite Adrianna. His gold circlet had been straightened over the dark hair that flowed to his waist, and when he frowned, his narrowed brown eyes made his pointed chin and high cheekbones more severe. As pale as the polished marble they tread upon, he could be just as unyielding.
Beni groaned.
“All right, fine, but it’s the last time. Ever,” he conceded.
Adrianna leaned forward, smirking. She pushed aside her dessert plateand rested her elbows on the table, her hands clasped beneath her chin. Then she lowered her voice as much as she could amid the noise in the hall.
“So, once, when we were all supposed to be sleeping, Castor and I snuck out of the dormitories and followed Beni to the Ceramics Chamber in the Lessons Hall. And what do you suppose we found when we got there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I was with Felix.”
“Yes. But that’s not the good part.”
“You think that because you’re not Felix.” Beni scoffed.
