Chapter 3: The Weight of Months

ADMISSIONS WAS BRUTAL.

I’d expected that. The Arcanum has never been kind to students who disappear. But I hadn’t expected Hemme’s smile.

It was the smile of a man who had been sharpening something for months. Who had practiced this moment in mirrors.

“Eight months,” he said, flipping through papers with theatrical slowness. “Eight months absent. No word. No correspondence. And now you simply… walk back in and expect to resume your studies?”

“I was on sanctioned leave, Master Hemme. Arranged before my departure.”

“Yes, for three months. Not eight.” He set the papers down. “The additional time is unaccounted for. Unexplained. One might wonder what a young man could possibly be doing for five months that he couldn’t be bothered to send word.”

The other masters watched me with varying degrees of interest. Kilvin’s eyes were neutral but attentive. Lorren’s face was its usual stone mask. Elodin sat at the end of the table, apparently fascinated by something he’d found beneath his fingernail.

“I was delayed by circumstances beyond my control,” I said carefully. “The nature of those circumstances is difficult to explain.”

“Try.”

I considered my options. The truth—that I’d spent weeks in the Fae, that time had moved differently there, that I’d bedded Felurian and spoken with the Cthaeh—would sound like madness or lies. But evasion would only feed Hemme’s suspicions.

“I traveled through places where time moves differently than it does here,” I said finally. “What felt like weeks to me was months in the mortal world. I returned as quickly as I could.”

Hemme’s laugh was sharp and ugly. “Places where time moves differently. How convenient. I suppose next you’ll claim you were in the Fae, dancing with spirits and dining on moonlight.”

I very nearly said among other things, but the Lethani counseled restraint. So I said nothing.

The silence stretched.

Then Lorren spoke. “Re’lar Kvothe. During your time in Vintas, did you encounter any information regarding the Amyr, the Chandrian, or the historical events surrounding the fall of Myr Tariniel?”

The chamber went very still.

I felt the weight of every eye in the room. Hemme was leaning forward, eager. Kilvin was watching with concern. The Chancellor’s expression had gone carefully blank.

And Elodin—

Elodin was shaking his head. A tiny movement. Almost imperceptible. But I caught it, and I understood.

Don’t answer that honestly.

“I encountered many things in Vintas,” I said carefully. “Historical records, local folklore, fragmented accounts of varying reliability. Nothing that I would characterize as definitive.”

Lorren held my gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and looked away.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

Elodin looked up from his fingernails. “He’s telling the truth. About the Fae.”

Every eye in the room turned to him. Even Hemme seemed taken aback.

“Excuse me?”

“I said he’s telling the truth.” Elodin waved a hand vaguely. “Look at him. Really look. He’s got the residue all over him. The Fae leaves marks, if you know what to look for.”

“This is ridiculous—”

“Then test him.” Elodin’s eyes locked on mine. “Tell me what the wind is doing right now. In this room.”

I closed my eyes.

The sleeping mind stirred. Not the desperate grasping I’d felt in crisis, not the wild surge of power that came with fear or fury. Just a quiet opening, like a door swinging wide on well-oiled hinges.

The wind in the Admissions chamber was old. It moved in slow currents, shaped by the curved walls, channeled by the high windows. It carried dust from the stones, warmth from the bodies of the Masters, the faint salt-and-iron scent of my own nervous sweat.

But beneath those surface currents, there was something else. A deeper movement. A breath that seemed to come from the building itself—from the stone foundations, from the earth beneath, from somewhere far below where the University’s roots touched something ancient and vast.

“The wind remembers,” I said. “This building was built on a foundation older than the University. The air that moves through these walls has been circulating for centuries—the same air, recycled, filtered through stone and time. It carries the memory of every question asked in this room. Every answer given. Every truth and every lie.”

I opened my eyes.

“Right now, the wind is uneasy. It’s moving in patterns that don’t match the architecture—pushing against the walls instead of following them. Something is disturbing it. Something beneath us, or behind us, or in a place that doesn’t have a direction.”

The silence in the chamber was absolute.

Elodin’s face was unreadable. Then he sat back, and something in his expression closed, like a book being shut.

“That will do,” he said softly. “Thank you, Re’lar Kvothe.”

I couldn’t tell if his tone carried approval or terror. Perhaps both.

“Master Hemme.” Lorren’s voice was quiet, but it cut through the lingering tension like a knife through silk. “Is there a specific academic concern you wish to raise regarding Re’lar Kvothe’s status, or are we merely engaging in speculation?”

Hemme’s face reddened. “I simply think the Arcanum should maintain standards. We cannot allow students to vanish for months at a time and return without consequence—”

“The consequence,” Kilvin interrupted, “is that Re’lar Kvothe will be required to demonstrate his continued competence in all relevant disciplines. If he has fallen behind, he will be reduced in rank. If he has maintained his skills, he will continue his studies.” The Artificer’s accent thickened slightly. “This is the standard procedure. There is no need to invent new torments.”

But Hemme wasn’t finished. “And what of the reports from Vintas? The documented evidence of reckless behavior? Of consorting with nobility, of involvement in military actions without authorization—”

“Master Hemme raises valid concerns,” the Chancellor interrupted, raising a hand. “This body must balance academic progress with institutional safety.”

The vote was five to two for readmission. But the tuition—thirty-six talents—made the room go quiet. Even Hemme seemed taken aback by the number. Hemme and Brandeur voted against; Hemme because he hated me, Brandeur because independent thought had never been his strong suit.

As I left the Masters’ Hall, I found Manet waiting in the corridor.

The old student’s grey hair was wilder than ever, his face carrying the comfortable rumple of a man who has been at the University so long he has become part of the furniture.

“I’d heard you were back.” He fell into step beside me, ignoring the glare of a student whose place in line he’d usurped earlier. “You look different. Older. And you’re standing like a soldier.”

“I spent time with the Adem.”

“So the rumors say.” His eyes were shrewd beneath their bushy overhang. “The rumors say a great many things. Most of them contradictory. Some of them alarming.”

“Which rumors concern you most?”

He was quiet for a moment. Then: “The one about you consorting with the Fae. And the one about Hemme having a dossier. Reports from Vintas. Statements from people who claim to have witnessed… various things.”

My stomach tightened. “What kind of things?”

“The kind that make a student sound less like an arcanist and more like a reckless menace.” His voice was gentle, which made it worse. “Be careful, Kvothe. Hemme’s been waiting for this. He’s been sharpening his knives for months. And thirty-six talents—that’s not just tuition. That’s a message.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” He gripped my shoulder briefly. “For what it’s worth—I’m glad you’re back. Whatever you’ve done, wherever you’ve been. This place is more interesting with you in it.”

He walked away before I could respond.

Elodin fell into step beside me moments later.

“You really were there,” he said. “The Fae. How long?”

“I’m not sure. A few weeks, maybe. It felt like longer.”

“It always does.” He stopped walking, turned to face me with an expression I’d never seen on him before. Something between concern and… was that fear? “Did you speak with anything? In the Fae. Anything with more than animal intelligence?”

I thought of the Cthaeh. Of its knowing eyes and poison tongue.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“A tree.”

Elodin went very still. For a long moment, he didn’t speak. Then, quietly: “The Rhinna tree.”

“Yes.”

“The Cthaeh.”

“Yes.”

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the fear was still there, but it had hardened into something like resignation.

“Come to my rooms tonight. After dinner. We need to talk about what happens next.”

I found Auri on the rooftops.

She was where she always was—or rather, she was where I always seemed to find her, which may or may not have been the same thing. The moon was a slender crescent above us, and her pale hair caught its light like spun silver.

“You came back,” she said, not turning around. “I knew you would. The moon told me, three nights ago. She said, ‘He’s walking home now. He’s almost here.’”

I sat beside her on the tiles, careful not to disturb whatever internal geography had placed her there. “Did she tell you anything else?”

“She said you were different. Heavier. That you’d been carrying things you shouldn’t have picked up.” Auri finally looked at me, and her eyes were very bright. “She was right. I can see them. The weights.”

“What do they look like?”

“Shadows. But not dark shadows—the other kind. The kind that pulls the light into them and makes it different colors.” She reached out, almost touched my chest, then drew her hand back. “There’s something sleeping here. Something cold.”

“The name of silence,” I said. The words came out before I could stop them.

Auri’s face went very still. For a moment, she wasn’t the strange, broken girl I’d befriended. She was something older. Something that remembered things most people had forgotten. When her eyes met mine, they were entirely clear—present in a way that was both comforting and unsettling. Then she smiled and the clarity flickered like a candle.

“That’s a dangerous thing to know,” she said softly. “Dangerous to say. Dangerous to have.”

“I didn’t choose it.”

“Names don’t ask to be chosen. They find the people they fit.” She stood, brushed off her ragged dress. “Come. I have something for you. Something I’ve been saving.”

I followed her down into the Underthing, through passages I’d walked before and some I hadn’t. The darkness didn’t bother me anymore—another change from Ademre, where I’d learned to move through shadow like water.

She led me to a room I didn’t recognize. Small, circular, lined with shelves that held objects I couldn’t identify. Broken things, mostly. Things that had been beautiful once.

“Here.” She pressed something into my hand.

The moment it touched my palm, everything changed.

Cold. Not winter-cold—deeper than that. The cold of stone that has never seen sun. The cold of doors that have been closed so long they’ve forgotten how to open. My breath caught. The air around us seemed to thicken, and for just a heartbeat, I could have sworn I heard something—distant, vast, like the echo of a great bell struck centuries ago and still reverberating through layers of earth and time.

I looked down. A key. Iron, black with age, its surface pitted and scarred. But there was something about it—a weight that had nothing to do with mass, a presence that made my sleeping mind wake up and pay attention.

“What is this?”

“For later.” Her eyes met mine, and there was something in them that made my skin prickle. “For when all the other doors are closed. For when you need to open something that doesn’t want to open.”

The key grew warm in my hand. Or maybe my hand grew cold around it. I couldn’t tell which.

“Auri, I don’t understand—”

“You will.” She smiled—sweet and strange and impossibly wise. “The broken things always understand, eventually. That’s what being broken teaches you. How to see the cracks where the light gets in.”

I looked at the key in my hand. Felt its weight, its wrongness, its promise of doors not yet imagined. My fingers tingled where the metal touched skin.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” She was already turning away, disappearing into the shadows of her underground kingdom. “Thank me when you use it. Thank me when it works.”

Her voice echoed back from the darkness: “Or don’t thank me at all. That’s probably safer.”

That night, in Elodin’s rooms, I learned the shape of my doom.

He didn’t offer me wine or pleasantries. He simply sat across from me in his cluttered chambers and said, “Tell me exactly what the Cthaeh told you. Every word you can remember.”

I told him.

When I finished, his face was ashen.

“The Sithe hunt anyone who speaks with the Cthaeh,” he said. “They kill them. Without exception. Because every word that thing speaks is designed to cause the maximum possible harm.”

“Then why haven’t they found me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they don’t know yet. Maybe they’re waiting for something.” He stood, began to pace. “Or maybe the Cthaeh already accounted for them. Every action you take, every choice you make—it’s already seen it. Already incorporated it into its design.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know that either.” He stopped pacing, turned to face me. “But I know this: everything you think you know about the Chandrian, about Denna, about your parents’ death—the Cthaeh gave you just enough truth to make you act. And when you act, you’re doing exactly what it wants.”

“So I should do nothing?”

“No.” His voice was heavy. “That’s the trap. Inaction is also action. The Cthaeh chose its words knowing that you’d either act on them or choose not to. Either way, you’re playing its game.”

I felt cold. Not winter-cold. Understanding-cold. The chill of knowing you are a piece on a board you cannot see.

“Then what’s the point?” The words came out bitter. “If I’m going to destroy everything no matter what I do, why bother trying to save anything?”

Elodin was quiet for a long moment.

“Because that’s what we are,” he said finally. “We know we’ll die. We know it won’t matter. And we try anyway.” He shrugged. “The Cthaeh is ancient. It sees everything. But it doesn’t understand why someone would fight a battle they’ve already lost.”

He put his hand on my shoulder.

“It doesn’t understand hope. That’s its blind spot. Maybe its only one.”

“And if I destroy everything?”

“Then you’ll have done it trying to save the people you love.” His eyes were very bright. “That’s not nothing, Kvothe. That’s not nothing at all.”

I left his rooms with more questions than answers.

But beneath the fear, beneath the weight of everything, something else stirred.

Not hope. Not yet.

Defiance.

An ancient, all-seeing oracle had hand-selected me for destruction? Fine. I’d been underestimated by worse. Well, perhaps not worse. But I’d survived worse odds, and that had to count for something.

The Cthaeh wasn’t the only one who could play a long game. And I had something it didn’t.

I had nothing left to lose.