Taz exhaled, slumping on the chair in his office.

It was the long, slightly weary exhale of someone who had been holding a breath they hadn’t entirely been aware of, the kind that came not from physical exertion but from the sustained low-level tension of a morning that had refused to be simple.

He was a distinctive-looking man, and not in a way he had chosen.

The hair at the sides of his head was white — a clean, full white that caught the light without ambiguity — but the center of his scalp ran bald from front to back, a smooth strip that divided the white on either side with the straightforward confidence of someone who had long since made peace with the arrangement.

It gave him a look that was difficult to place in terms of age, authoritative in bearing but worn at the edges in the way that people who managed complicated things for long enough eventually became worn.

The office he was in was quite large, which made sense, since it was the academy’s principal’s office.

He ran a hand across the bald strip down the center of his head.

It was an absentminded gesture, the kind that had become an habit over years without him noticing whenever he was feeling stressed.

He did it once, slowly, and then let his hand fall back to his side.

The morning had been unremarkable up until this point, which was itself a mild relief.

The academy’s rhythms were something he had learned to read over a long tenure, and an unremarkable morning usually meant an unremarkable afternoon.

After the week that had just passed—the whispers moving through the student body, the pressure from certain quarters about how the institution was being managed — unremarkable was something he would take without complaint.

Then he suddenly heard a thunder, causing his body to vibrate subconsciously.

Be frowned, turning towards the window to see if there was a storm coming.

However, the sky was clear, and there wasn’t even a sign that rain was about to fall.

And yet the thunder had been completely unmistakable.

He stares at the window for a moment longer, his frown holding, his eyes moving across the visible stretch of sky as if a second look might produce an explanation the first one had missed. It didn’t.

The sky offered nothing further — no follow-up rumble, no distant flash, no suggestion that the sound had been part of anything larger.

He turned away from the window slowly, the frown not entirely gone, still carrying the low-level puzzlement of something unexplained that he didn’t have the context to resolve.

He had just reached his desk when the door opened.

He didn’t look up immediately. The door to his office opened often enough that the sound alone wasn’t sufficient to pull his full attention — staff, students with appointments, administrative matters that couldn’t wait.

He drew breath to deliver the automatic reminder that knocking existed for a reason and was expected to be used regardless of the urgency one felt about whatever had brought them to his door.

"Don’t you know you should kno—"

The words stopped.

Not trailed off, not softened into something more polite — stopped, completely, as though the rest of the sentence had simply ceased to exist somewhere between his thought and his mouth.

His eyes had found the figure in the doorway, and everything that had been queued up behind the words dissolved on contact with what he was seeing.

The white hair. The mask.

He had heard descriptions of that same mask and hair many times, but seeing it in person, standing in his doorway, occupying his office entrance with a stillness that felt less like a person waiting and more like a presence that had decided to be somewhere —

It was different from the descriptions.

Something moved through him that he didn’t have a precise name for, but which expressed itself physically before he had any say in the matter.

A shiver, small and involuntary, that started somewhere at the base of his neck and moved downward. His body had registered something that his mind was still catching up to.

His voice, when it came, was considerably smaller than it had been thirty seconds ago.

"M-Mr... White...?"

The name came out with a gap in the middle of it, the hesitation splitting it almost in half. He heard himself say it and was dimly aware that he sounded nothing like the figure of institutional authority he generally projected, but there wasn’t much he could do about that in the immediate moment.

On the other side of the mask, Noah processed this.

He hadn’t really anticipated the principal to know who Mr White was, thinking he would have to come here and prove his status.

He was, genuinely, a little surprised.

"You..." Noah said, keeping his voice level and even behind the mask, "know me?"

The man nodded.

The movement was quick — perhaps slightly too quick, carrying the energy of someone who wanted to demonstrate cooperation without delay.

He straightened as he did it, a reflex toward recovering some of the composure that had scattered when the door opened, but the effort was only partially successful.

"How could I not," the principal said, his voice finding more stability now that the initial shock had begun to settle into something he could function within.

He gestured slightly with one hand, a movement that seemed to be trying to encompass a larger conversation than the words he’d chosen. "E-Everyone is talking about you."

He paused for a fraction of a second, as though deciding how much of the rest to commit to out loud.

"The one who easily beat a shadow monster," he continued. "And the miracle that left the great white ice mountain."

The last part carried something extra in its delivery. Not fear exactly — though the fear was still present underneath it, quiet and residual — but something closer to reverence, the tone of a person referencing something they had heard described in terms that felt larger than ordinary events were supposed to feel.

Noah’s brows furrowed behind the mask.

’What?’ he thought.

The word landed flat and simple in his mind, carrying the particular quality of a reaction that hadn’t finished forming yet.

He stood still and let the principal’s words replay themselves, pulling them apart to examine each piece separately.

The first part — the shadow monster — he could account for without much difficulty.

That hadn’t happened in a vacuum. There had been people present when he engaged Tara in her shadow form, members of the adventurer guild who had been close enough to witness what unfolded.

A small crowd, but a crowd nonetheless, and crowds talked. Information moved through people the way water moved through interconnected containers, finding its level regardless of whether anyone had intended to share it.

By the time it had passed through enough mouths and enough retellings, it would have shed some details and gained others, but the core of it — Mr. White, shadow monster, a confrontation that ended in a particular direction — would have survived the journey intact.

That part spreading wasn’t surprising.

He had accepted that as a likely outcome the moment he had acted in front of witnesses.

But the second part.

’The miracle that left the great white ice mountain.’

That was where his thoughts snagged.

’That mountain...’ he thought, the words forming slowly, as if moving carefully around something he wasn’t sure of. ’Is it still there?’

He hadn’t gone back.

After everything that had followed the confrontation with Tara — the imprisonment, the guild’s involvement, the interrogation, Lunge’s arrival, the weight of everything that had come spilling out of that prison room — returning to the site of the fight simply hadn’t risen to the level of something requiring attention.

There had been no reason to. Tara was contained, the immediate situation had been managed, and the location itself held nothing that needed his presence.

So he hadn’t gone. Hadn’t checked. Hadn’t given it more than a passing thought in the time since.

And now the principal of the academy was standing across from him using the words "great white ice mountain" in a tone that suggested it was not a past event but a present landmark.

The shock of it moved through him quietly but thoroughly.

He knew how spells worked. Not just in theory — in the practiced, internalized way of someone who had spent real time with the mechanics of it.

Magic, when cast, drew from the magi’s mana core, and conjures the spell.

But whatever element or structure conjured was temporary. The mana that had been directed and compressed and expressed as ice during that fight was supposed to do what all expended mana eventually did — loosen, disperse, dissolve back into the ambient mana in the air.

It was how the world maintained its equilibrium. Spells left marks, sometimes significant ones, but those marks faded.

It had been days since the fight.

Several days, with enough hours stacked between then and now that any reasonable expectation would have placed the ice well past the point of dissolution.

A few dramatic formations, some residual cold in the surrounding air, and then — nothing.