# Ch-03: The Somatic Hum

The heavy oak door of the adjoining quarters didn't just close; it severed the air with a finality that made the marrow of my bones ache.

I stood in the center of the Chancellor’s Sanctum, my hands still hovering over the mahogany desk where the Starfall Accord lay like a sleeping predator. The silence that followed Dorian’s exit wasn't empty. It was pressurized. It was a thick, mercury-heavy stillness that hummed with the phantom frequency of his heart. 

Stars' sake, I could still feel him.

It was a low-frequency thrum at the base of my skull, a static-drenched awareness that told me exactly where he was on the other side of that wood. He was standing still—too still. I could feel the rigid line of his spine, the way his breath was a synchronized cadence of frozen air, and the sheer, focused effort he was using to build a wall out of nothing.

I paced. My boots clicked against the basalt floor, each step a jagged spark of kinetic frustration. The Great Hearth behind me flared, the violet-white flames licking the soot-stained stones of the chimney. The temperature in the room climbed steadily—eighty, eighty-five, ninety degrees—but I couldn't stop the shivering. 

It wasn't a cold from the outside. It was a somatic bleed. Because Dorian Solas was terrified, and because he was terrified, I was freezing.

“Stop it,” I hissed at the empty room, my voice cracking. I threw a glance at the adjoining door. “Stop being so—obviously—heroic and just go to sleep, Dorian!”

The hum didn't change. If anything, it grew sharper, a crystalline needle boring into my solar plexus. I could feel his exhaustion—a gray, leaden weight that tasted like stale water. He was trying to practice Spire-style mental stasis, trying to turn his mind into a flat, featureless plane of ice, and all it did was make my head feel like it was being squeezed in a tectonic vice.

I didn't sleep. I couldn't. 

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw white marble. I saw a boy sitting on a block of ice, waiting for a shadow that never moved. The loneliness was so thick I could smell it—the scent of dust and old parchment and the bitter, metallic tang of a life lived in a ledger. I threw a pillow at the Great Hearth, watching it turn to ash before it even hit the grate. 

By the time the bruised, red angry glow of the dawn began to bleed through the stained-glass windows, I was vibrating. My skin felt too tight for my body, my magic roiling just beneath the surface like magma looking for a vent. 

I took a breath, trying to steady the thermal expansion in my chest. I had to be professional. I had to be the Chancellor of the Pyre, not a raw nerve ending tied to a block of Northern ice.

A soft, rhythmic tapping came from the adjoining door. It wasn't a knock; it was a calibrated sequence of sounds.

“Chancellor Vasquez? The evidence suggests that the breakfast hour has arrived.”

His voice was a blade of ice cutting through the heat of the room. I straightened my robes, smoothing the scorched silk over my hips. “Enter, Dorian. Obviously.”

The door opened. Dorian Solas stepped into the Sanctum, and the air temperature plummeted ten degrees in a single beat. He looked... pristine. His dark blue robes were perfectly pressed, his pale hair gathered in a silver clasp that looked like a frost-bitten crown. But as he crossed the threshold, his eyes flicked to mine, and I saw the lie.

The pupils were still slightly blown. There were faint, violet shadows beneath those inhumanly blue eyes. And then I saw his wrist.

He was still wearing the scorched cuff from the day before, the jagged black line of the thumb-print mark clearly visible as he moved his hand, the dark outline of the burn stark through the fine silk whenever the fabric shifted. It was a brand. A reminder.

“You didn’t sleep either,” I said, my voice verb-first and blunt. 

Dorian stiffened, his hand twitching toward the scorched cuff before he tucked it back into his sleeve, though the red glow of the underlying irritation remained visible against his pale skin. “My rest was... suboptimal. The atmospheric noise of this volcano is quite significant.”

“It’s not the volcano, Dorian. It’s the fact that I can feel your heart rate every time you decide to have a ‘deep thought’ about my debt to the charcoal guilds.”

Dorian’s jaw tightened. He walked to his glass-and-iron desk, his movements so precise they looked painful. “The shared sensory input is a variable we must learn to categorize. Currently, I am attempting to re-establish my internal lattices. It would be... auspicious... if you could refrain from pacing for at least twenty minutes. I have a certain obligation to Aric and Elara to ensure their recovery isn't marred by administrative collapse.”

“I pace when I think, Dorian. It’s kinetic. You should try it—moving your body might actually help that gray fog you call a personality.”

I snatched up a roll of vellum from my oak desk—the oversized floor plans for the Academy integration. I felt the heat rise in my palms, the parchment crinkling under the pressure. I needed to move. I needed to do something that didn't involve staring at the blue veins in his neck.

“Here,” I said, marching into the danger zone. 

As I crossed the twelve-foot radius of the neutrality lattice, his presence hit me like a physical wall of cold. My breath hitched. The somatic hum accelerated, a frantic, buzzing wire that ran from my heart to his. I stopped three feet from his desk and shoved the maps toward him.

“The floor plans. I’ve marked the primary geothermal vents and the sparring floors. The Spire students—stars' sake, they're going to have to learn where not to stand if they don't want their eyebrows singed off.”

Dorian reached out to take the vellum. As his fingers approached mine, the air between us began to shimmer with a violent, white-hot distortion. The neutrality lattice above us groaned, the silver etching glowing with a frantic light.

He took the map, his fingers carefully avoiding mine, but the proximity alone was a sensory overload. I felt the sharp, jagged spike of his irritation—and beneath it, that same, terrifying throb of attraction that had nearly wrecked us the night before.

“The Spire students are quite capable of environmental awareness, Mira,” he said, his voice dropping an octave. He unrolled the map, his eyes scanning the charcoal sketches. “However, placing a meditation hall directly adjacent to the primary copper-smelter is... not auspicious.”

“The smelter stays where it is! It’s been there for—actually, no. I’m not doing this again. Just find a way to make it work, Dorian. You're the one who likes equations.”

I turned to walk away, but the door to the Sanctum burst open before I could put six feet between us.

Kaelen stood there, his crimson robes singed at the hem, his face a mask of weary suspicion. He looked from me to Dorian, his eyes lingering on the way we were both breathing—short, shallow puffs that didn't match the cool temperature of the lattice.

“Chancellor,” Kaelen said, his voice flat. “We have a situation in the Great Hall. A... soup and blizzard incident.”

I closed my eyes. “Past and rot. Already? We have a week until the formal integration.”

“A Spire initiate attempted to ‘harmonize’ the temperature of the lentil stew,” Kaelen reported, glancing at Dorian with a look of pure loathing. “One of our kineticists took it as an insult to the chef’s fire. There is currently a localized weather system in the dining hall, and the reports on the documented incidents—the injuries to dignity and flesh—are mounting.”

I felt the frustration boil over. It wasn't just anger; it was a physical surge of heat that made the floor plans on Dorian’s desk begin to curl and smoke. 

“Injuries?” I snapped. “I told them! I told them one week! If those ice-sculptors can’t keep their hands off the—obviously—perfectly good soup, I’ll personally throw them into the Reach!”

“Mira,” Dorian’s voice was a warning, but it was too late. 

The room began to glow. The violet flames in the hearth roared, shooting sparks into the center of the room. My magic was reacting to the tribalistic rage of my students, channeled through my own exhaustion. The vellum on Dorian’s desk ignited, a sudden, bright flare of orange flame.

“Mira, stop!” Dorian stood up, his chair screeching against the stone.

“I can’t!” I shouted, my hands shaking. “I can feel them, Dorian! I can feel Kaelen’s anger and the students’ fear and it’s all—it’s all just heat!”

The map was a bonfire now, the flames licking toward Dorian’s pristine leather-bound ledger. Kaelen backed away, his hand on his brand. The neutrality lattice was screaming, a high-pitched, metallic sound that threatened to shatter every window in the Sanctum.

Dorian didn't move away. He did the most dangerous thing possible.

He stepped around his desk and grabbed my wrists.

The contact wasn't a spark. It was an explosion. 

My heat slammed into his cold, and for a second, the world turned to liquid gold in the marrow of my bones. It was the hum again, but intensified a thousandfold—a deep, resonant vibration that felt like it was rewriting the anatomy of my soul. I gasped, my head falling back against his chest as the sheer, overwhelming power of the grounding took hold.

He was the lens. I was the battery. 

The heat in the room didn't vanish; it transformed. It flowed through my arms, into his hands, and was suddenly... quiet. He was absorbing the surge, filtering my chaos through his absolute zero and grounding it into the stone floor. It felt like being submerged in a warm spring after a winter storm. It felt like coming home.

I could feel his heartbeat slowing. I could feel the way his lungs expanded, drawing in the scorched air of the room and turning it into something breathable. The flames on the desk died instantly, leaving behind nothing but a fine, silver-gray ash.

We stood there for a heartbeat too long. My back was pressed against his dark blue robes, his hands still encircling my wrists, his breath warm against the shell of my ear. 

“The evidence suggests,” Dorian breathed, his voice cracking, “that we are... quite effective when we coordinate.”

I couldn't speak. I was too busy feeling the way his skin felt against mine—not like a rival’s, but like the missing piece of a puzzle I hadn't known I was solving. The somatic hum was a song now, a complex, beautiful melody of fire and frost.

Kaelen cleared his throat, the sound like a gunshot in the silent room.

Dorian released me instantly, stepping back as if I had burned him. Which, looking at his hands, I probably had. 

He didn't look at me. He looked at Kaelen, his face regaining its mask of Spire-born discipline, though his chest was still heaving. “Tell the students that the Co-Chancellors will be presiding over the evening meal. Any further ‘harmonization’ of the stew will result in immediate and undivided attention from the administrative office.”

“Yes, Chancellor,” Kaelen said, his eyes darting between us. He bowed stiffly and retreated, the heavy oak door clicking shut behind him.

I stayed where I was, staring at the ash on his desk. My hands were still tingling, the heat still humming just beneath the surface of my skin. 

“Dorian,” I said, not turning around.

“We have work to do, Mira,” he intercepted, his voice rigid. “The residency allocations must be sent to the Ministry by dawn. We cannot afford another... suboptimal display of temper.”

He walked back to his desk, his fingers trembling as he reached for a fresh sheet of parchment. I finally turned to look at him, and my breath caught.

He was staring at his right hand. The one that had held my wrist. 

The silver cuff was scorched again, but this time, the mark flowed up onto his skin. A faint, dark line circled his wrist, a shadow of my heat that didn't fade. It looked like obsidian. It looked like a bond.