Solmere Academy emptied out gradually over the last few days before winter recess, the usual crowded noise of its corridors thinning by degrees until, by the morning the last coach departed for the coastal road, only a scattered handful of students and a skeleton staff remained behind. Briar had told the others he simply preferred the quiet. It was not entirely a lie.
He stood at the window of his empty dormitory room, watching the final coach pull away through the gate, Finn's voice still faintly audible somewhere in the departing crowd, over-enthusiastically wishing everyone a good break whether they'd asked for the sentiment or not, and felt the particular strange hollowness that settled into a place once its noise had properly gone. He had written to his mother the week before, explaining, in the careful, measured language he'd learned to use for difficult subjects, that the coach fare home and back would eat considerably into what little coin the family had managed to set aside, and that he thought it wiser, this year, to remain at Solmere and put the break toward his studies instead. She had written back, in her own plain, tired hand, that she understood, and that she loved him, and that his brothers asked after him constantly.
He had not told her about the actual coin his scholarship provided, which would have covered the fare easily enough. He had simply decided, quietly and without much internal debate, that whatever coin existed was better spent on his younger brothers' boots, which had, in his last letter home, been described as more hole than leather. It was easier, he'd found, to let his mother believe the absence was about money rather than choice.
The workshop he'd claimed for his own use sat in a disused corner of the academy's lower science wing, a small, cluttered room that had once served some purpose nobody currently remembered, and Briar had spent the first several days of break filling it with the particular accumulated chaos of genuine, obsessive research, diagrams pinned to every available surface, half-assembled components scattered across two long worktables, a growing stack of increasingly frustrated notes. He worked from sunrise most days, breaking only when hunger or exhaustion finally forced the issue, and by the fourth day of the break, had constructed something he was, cautiously, prepared to call a working prototype.
It was not elegant. It was a tangle of copper wire and carefully carved crystal lensing, powered by a small essence conduit he'd spent considerable time and no small amount of his own limited coin acquiring, and it was meant, in theory, to do something no scholar had ever successfully documented before. He meant it to hold his foresight steady. Longer. Further.
He had never told anyone the full truth of his ability, not even Finn, who knew almost everything else about him. His soul had given him foresight, the strange, disorienting gift of seeing briefly through his own future eyes, but the gift came bound in cruel limitation, never more than two minutes ahead, sustainable only for a handful of seconds at a time, and drainable only once, roughly, each hour, the effort of it leaving him wrung out and shaking whenever he pushed even close to those edges. It was, he had privately decided years ago, a nearly useless gift, dressed up to look like something impressive. He intended to fix that.
Bevan found him on the fifth day, wandering into the workshop with the particular unhurried, unbothered manner he brought to most things, a groundskeeper's tools still slung over one shoulder from whatever winter maintenance had brought him past this wing.
BVN: Didn't know anyone was still using this room.
BRR: Sorry. I should have asked permission.
BVN: Wasn't being used for anything else. No harm in it.
He looked around at the accumulated chaos of diagrams and components with open, unhurried curiosity, the particular easy interest of someone who had likely seen every strange thing a student's ambition could produce across however many decades he'd tended these grounds.
BVN: What's all this in aid of, then?
Briar hesitated, uncertain how much to explain, and found, in the particular quiet warmth of Bevan's patient attention, something that made explaining easier than he'd expected.
BRR: Trying to build something. A device. It's meant to extend a soul ability past its natural limits.
BVN: Can that be done?
BRR: I don't know yet. That's rather the point of trying.
Bevan considered this, nodding slowly, and settled himself onto an overturned crate near the workbench, apparently in no hurry to continue whatever task had originally brought him past this wing.
BVN: My own gift never amounted to much. Bit of resilience to cold, is all. Useful for groundskeeping in winter, not much use for anything grander. Took me a long while to stop resenting it for that.
BRR: Did you stop, eventually?
BVN: Mostly. Realized somewhere along the way that a gift not amounting to much isn't the same as a life not amounting to much. Different things entirely, whatever it feels like at the time.
He said it plainly, without any particular weight behind the words, and Briar, turning the sentiment over, found something in it settling uncomfortably close to a truth he hadn't quite been ready to examine.
BRR: I'm trying to make mine into something. Something that matters.
BVN: Nothing wrong with that. Just don't let the trying eat you whole before you've got anything to show for it. Seen it happen to cleverer folk than either of us.
He rose, gathering his tools back over his shoulder, and paused at the workshop door.
BVN: You eating properly? Sleeping?
BRR: Mostly.
BVN: Mostly's not properly.
He said it with the particular gentle firmness of someone who had clearly delivered this exact reminder to countless students over countless years, and left without waiting for further response, and Briar, alone again in his cluttered workshop, looked at the tangle of copper wire and carved crystal before him, and felt, for the first time since break began, a small flicker of doubt about whether the thing he was building was actually going to work at all. He picked up the prototype anyway, turning it carefully in his hands, and set to work testing the essence conduit's connection points one more time.
Somewhere outside, the winter light was already beginning its early failure toward evening, and Briar, absorbed entirely in his work, did not notice it passing.