CHAPTER 410: IT IS ALMOST FUNNY (GOLDEN TICKET CHAPTER)

Lilith’s smirk warmed by a breath. "Done."

They moved through the rest of the way, and seasoned players lay out a board: no flourish, no story, only pieces, and where they should stand by morning.

They named three cities where the cults had smiled too widely at festivals. They called two supply hubs where the books had matched too perfectly for too long.

They named one teleport lattice whose anchor had been "repaired" every month for a year. They set quiet watchers, not soldiers.

They assigned whispers to be placed in the right ears at the right hours so that when the hand reached, the hand would land on a switch already waiting to be flipped.

The Matron kept her tone playful and her questions cutting. "What do you do if the weed sits under a friendly window?"

"Close the shade," Lilith said. "And lift the floorboard while they nap."

"What if the weed sings a prayer a sister might enjoy?"

"Change the key," Elowen said. "Make the song too high for their throat."

The Ancestress listened like a river listens to stones, letting the flow speak for itself when it was good and shaping it with a word when it bent wrong.

"Do not make a map that forgets there are children in the house," she said. "This realm and that exam are not separate things to them.

Their morning and our night will share a wall for a while. Keep the wall thick."

"It will hold," Lilith said. "Until someone tells it not to."

Elowen rested her palm against the wood of the table, tiny green veins threading across the grain and then fading.

"We will be there when it opens. We’ll let them be students. But not alone."

The elders accepted that without argument. It was the kind of promise that did not need witnesses.

When the planning thinned and the room took back some of its breathing for itself, the Matron toyed with one last phantom chessman and let it blink away.

"It is almost funny," she said in a tone that meant she did not find it funny. "A god sleeps a hundred years and wakes to a world that built better roofs, then pokes the tiles and snickers when dust falls."

"It is how cowards test if a door is locked," Lilith said again, and this time the words sounded like a stone set down where it belonged.

"It is how weeds test if the hoe has rust," Elowen added, and her voice made the hoe sound very clean.

"Then keep the blade bright," the Ancestress said. "But do not hang it in the window."

They sat with that for a while, letting it settle.

When it was time to end, the decision arrived at the same moment in all four of them, like a bird changing direction without a shouted cue.

The Matron’s form thinned at the edges, light nudging her outline. The Ancestress’s hair caught a soft breeze that had not been there and would not be there once she left. They did not stand.

They did not bow. They faded, not in drama but in purpose, two candles pinched gently between finger and thumb.

Elowen and Lilith remained. The room felt bigger without the elders’ steadiness and safer, as if their absence was its own kind of guard.

They exchanged one last glance, which conveyed the same message both had said many times in other ways: we go together until we do not have to.

Outside, ward torches along the far corridor adjusted their flame as if nodding. Inside, the tea stayed warm longer than it should have. Old houses do that when they approve.

They did not speak again. Words would have tried to label what did not need a label.

The scene turned like a page.

Ethan sat in the suite’s long couch with his back against the corner, one knee up, the other leg stretched, a blanket thrown over his ankle without him noticing.

The holo light from his phone washed his face in soft blue. On his left, Evelyn leaned her shoulder into his as if it were a habit she did not plan to break.

On his right, Everly had tucked her feet under her and claimed the pillow behind him with shameless entitlement.

Both girls held their own screens. Three glows, three calm faces. The room’s lights were low, the kind that belong to late hours and easy company.

A tray with half-eaten fruit and two empty cups sat forgotten on the table. Someone had left a book open to the middle, like it had tried to argue with the phone and lost.

No one spoke. The silence was not strained. It was the quiet of people who know they do not need to fill it to be together.

The screens told the same story to three different minds at once. The Academy crest at the top of the message looked almost proud of itself.

Midterm Examination: Realm Access Authorization and Pre-Deployment Briefing. Mandatory attendance. Gate assignments updated.

New safety protocols are in effect. Advisory: travel nodes may be intermittently throttled due to Association activity. Do not panic.

Follow your proctors’ instructions. Additional notice: certain "legacy" constructs have been flagged for performance reassessment. Your courage honors Astralis.

The words scrolled for a long time. There were details about muster points, emergency pulls, new color codes, old trails closed, new trails opened, and the polite lie every school puts in writing when danger and training choose to share a room.

The three read it like people read weather: looking for wind inside the forecast.

Ethan hovered his thumb over a line and then moved past it. He felt the shape of the message more than he read it.

The timing. Who signed it? Which numbers were missing? The tone became very careful for exactly three sentences and then pretended it had not.

Evelyn tilted her phone a few degrees and caught Everly’s eye. Everly didn’t look up. She didn’t need to.

The two of them shared the same quiet thought anyway and went back to the glow.

Ethan breathed in slowly, held it, and let it go. He did not smile. He did not frown.

The room’s small sounds—a distant chime in the hallway, the heater clicking softly, a neighbor’s laughter fading—went on around them like proof that the world could still be ordinary for another hour.

No one said "Are you ready." No one said, "It will be fine." The three screens did not blink. They held the message steady as if they knew hands would need to read it twice.