Chapter Four: The Girl With Rabbit Ears
The next morning, Zyphir Academy woke to a hush that didn't belong.
Students passed through stone corridors more quietly than usual. Teachers paused before speaking his name. Rumors had sprouted like weeds: He spoke fire into silence. He made time pause. He is a god. He is a monster. He is both.
But Kyoko wasn't in the courtyard, or the library, or the elemental chambers.
He was in the garden.
A rare place of natural peace in a school built of shifting stone and forgotten magic, the garden lay inside a dome of transparent crystal. Flowers from lost continents bloomed in silence. Vines wrote stories in foreign tongues across marble pillars. Birds that only existed in dreams perched on floating branches.
Kyoko sat by a pond where silver fish darted beneath the surface like starlight.
He didn't look at the water.
He was listening.
Not to the pond.
But to footsteps.
Small ones. Hesitant. And then, with a curious hop.
Her name was Apya.
She was five years old, though small enough to be mistaken for younger. Her face was round, soft, always smudged with crumbs or ink or wonder. But it was her ears that truly made her stand out—long, thick, fur-lined ears that fell past her shoulders, nearly to the floor.
One twitched when she was nervous.
Both bounced when she was happy.
And that morning, both trailed behind her like oversized ribbons as she walked up to the boy who had stopped fire with a word.
Kyoko didn't turn, though he had heard her coming long before her arrival.
"You're the one who saved me," she said quietly.
He nodded.
Apya plopped down beside him, cross-legged, ears pooling in the grass.
"Thank you."
"You don't have to thank me," Kyoko replied.
"Yes I do," she said simply. "You could've let me get squished. But you didn't. That means you're nice."
"I'm not."
"Yes, you are," she said, chewing on her lip. "You just don't know it yet."
Kyoko blinked.
No one had ever spoken to him that way.
Not since his rebirth. Not with the assumption of kindness.
Apya leaned in, peering at his face.
"Your eyes are like the moon," she said. "Not our moon. A different one. I see it in my dreams sometimes. It sings."
He didn't know what to say. No one else had seen that moon. Not even the teachers.
"You're strange," she added. "But that's okay. I'm strange too."
She pulled one of her long ears forward and hugged it like a pillow.
"People call me 'Floppy' or 'Patch' or 'Stumble-Fur.' They think I'm weird. But weird things are usually more interesting. You're like a puzzle with too many pieces."
"And you're... not afraid of me?" Kyoko asked.
She looked at him like he'd asked if the sky was made of soup.
"Why would I be? You saved me. Besides, fireballs are scary. You're just quiet."
That was how it began.
In the days that followed, Apya started finding him. Not in a clingy, frantic way—but as though her feet simply knew where he would be. She brought books too big for her arms, snacks in cloth bundles, and questions he never expected.
"Do you dream?""Do you think stars get lonely?""Why do frogs blink like they're keeping secrets?"
Kyoko didn't always answer. But he listened. And slowly, something shifted in him.
He began responding.
Not with power.
With presence.
Apya didn't treat him like a god. Or a legend. Or a threat.
She treated him like Kyoko—the boy who liked still water and didn't mind when she talked too much.
They sat together during classes now, Apya resting her head against his side when she got sleepy, her ears wrapping around her like blankets.
Other students noticed.
Some whispered. Others stared.
Ranor, still bitter from his humiliation, muttered one day in passing, "Takes a half-rabbit freak to trust a monster."
Apya's ears twitched.
She looked at him, and in a voice small but precise said, "At least I don't burn people for fun."
Ranor said nothing after that.
The faculty watched carefully.
Vareth Alnein observed them through scrying glass—Kyoko and Apya sitting beneath the sun-drenched dome, a god and a child, talking about frogs and stars.
"He's opening," she whispered to no one. "Not as a god. As a boy."
Professor Wryn didn't look up. "And that makes him more dangerous."
"Or more human."
"They're the same thing."
But deeper than stone and soul, something else stirred.
Kyoko dreamed for the first time.
He stood at the edge of a broken sky.
Before him was a mountain made of bones, upon which sat a throne of silence.
On it, a figure. Featureless. Vast. Cloaked in shadow.
The figure spoke without sound:
"The Balance returns. But affection... weakens symmetry."
Kyoko looked up, not afraid, not angry.
Just curious.
"Then maybe the scales need to feel. Just once."
In the waking world, Apya tugged at his sleeve beneath a tree.
"Wanna know a secret?"
He nodded.
She leaned in and whispered, "You're my best friend."
Kyoko looked at her for a long moment. Then slowly—awkwardly—his hand lifted and patted one of her ears.
"I think… you might be mine too."
And for the first time since his rebirth, Kyoko smiled.