A/N: Hello

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A perfectly content Luka Sullivan quietly musing to himself despite the absence of Iolani Tori was perhaps the rarest sight one would ever have the privilege of coming across and yet, this sight was witnessed by no one other than the sun phoenix—by a coincidence entirely crafted by herself, yours truly.

It was upon her request at sometime around noon, after Io had left them for the library, that the eagle had dropped by the tailor's in the evening and walked in on the phoenix slipping into her coronation robes. He turned and walked back out.

There were voices in the distance, down the hallway and past several doors where fluorescent lights coming from the windows of the post office could be seen. He turned to Victoria, perched on the curve of a lampshade, talons digging into the material.

I didn't do it on purpose, Mary Poppins laid out, referring to the grand holes she'd made in the lamp shade. I'm not settling on the floor.

He looked elsewhere. Naturally, a ruined lamp shade could not rival the greatest of Luka's concerns, which were directed at the distance between the tailor's and the post—a tempting invitation to drop by with an order slip for sunflower seeds and the Japanese snack that Papercrane had been eyeing and telling him about just yesterday. Having decided upon this, he started towards the post.

"Luka."

As soon as he did so however, the door he'd only just closed behind him opened with a creak, sweeping aside all thoughts of sunflowers and Iolani Tori. Out popped a head of dark, pin-straight hair, parting to reveal a familiar face.

"What are you doing outside?"

The eagle stared. "You did not have any clothes on."

"You are exaggerating," corrected Jing with a face as impassive as the other's. "I'd already worn my first layer when the door opened."

Luka could not think of anything to say in return. "Okay."

The phoenix held the door open a little wider and Luka took this as the cue for him to enter the tailor's, to which he obliged in a moment of silence. She closed the door behind him and exchanged a brief introduction of her companion to the tailor, turning to him with a shortened version of his job description.

"Pick out the fabric for Io's coronation robes," Jing instructed, leading him over to the generous samples of material draped over towering racks and some folded and tucked neatly into the shelves that lined the wall, stretching several feet above their heads. "You may pick the color as well. Or leave a comment on design specifics, if you wish."

The tailor watched in disbelief as Luka ran his fingers along a six-foot sample of moonlight satin, unable to fathom the phoenix's decision of appointing a statue as Iolani's fashion advisor.

"Does he know a dime about color coordinates?" She muttered under her breath with a frown, speaking to no one in particular. "Goodness."

Victoria was having a hard time stepping over the heaps and mounds of fabric stacked across the room, searching for a spot to stretch her wings. Considering the severe lack of space inside the tailor's however, Victoria could only cross her talons and pray that she would not, by accident, tear any of the precious fabric lying around.

"The coronation robes consist of three dresses. The surcoat, the anointing gown and the cape—or the parliament robe," Jing continued to explain, allowing Luka to use her own crimson robes for reference. "Pick a material for each of the three."

The eagle nodded briefly, glancing at the hem of her longest robe that trailed across the floor. It was a long-ass robe. "Okay."

Had the sun not retreated below the horizon hours ago, Jing would have blinked at that thought of Luka's. Thankfully however, she did not hear it.

"Any restrictions?"

The phoenix shook her head, watching as her companion drew towards the chiffons by an unknown magnetic force. "No. Just—don't make it translucent."

Luka returned with a blink, glancing over his shoulder before resuming his hunt for the perfect fabrics. "Why would I?"

Good point. Jing had stopped short of considering a predator's (or any human being's) distaste for sharing anything at all and knowing that the ceremony was to be conducted before the entire island, it would not be surprising for Luka to cover every inch of Io's skin save his face. Hers on the other hand, designed to resemble the traditional robes of a Chinese empress, had an anointing gown that sported a slit up the side of her right leg all the way up her thigh—characteristic of a qipao.

She'd come to have that altered, having grown a couple of inches since she last wore the robes for coronation. The slit was far too provocative for her liking, thus making her movements stiff and unnatural. Jing turned to the tailor, only to observe her distraction; seemingly perturbed by something outside the room.

"Mrs. Magpie?"

The tailor's head snapped around. "Ah. Apologies. I thought I heard something coming from the hallway... but the door's closed, well. It shouldn't be anything worthy of attention."

Jing followed her gaze. "Perhaps just a couple of students entering the post."

"Yes, perhaps," the magpie repeated with a frown, seemingly unconvinced. "What is it that you need help with?"

"Just a slight alteration." Jing held her outermost robes aside to reveal the slit up the side of her gown. "I would like to have this stitched up."

The tailor was about to protest by insisting that it was a designer choice of hers and that it added a unique dimension to the dress when she quickly recalled that it was the phoenix's voluntary decision for doing so; a request she cannot possibly decline. Miffed, she settled with an indignant murmuring under her breath instead of a direct confrontation.

Luka on the other hand, was perfectly content with the progress of things on his side of the tailor's—having already picked out three delicate pieces of fabric which he thought suited Io best. Then, as though struck by a sudden thought, the eagle paused. He turned, gazing out of a window nearby that was dusty and slightly frosted by the cold.

"Shouldn't Io be the one deciding," he stated in the form of a question but with a tone so impassive, one would have thought him reciting multiplication tables. "He's the one wearing all this."

Jing looked up from the tailor working at her gown, arms lifted sideways and looking quite as though she was a wooden cross. "Because it is tradition," her gaze averted briefly, "that the one closest to the coronated pick the robes."

It did not cross Luka's mind to ask who did the picking for her, the sun phoenix, years before when she was crowned. All that filled his mind was the scent of bedding—fresh out of the laundry and hung outside on a sunny day to dry before being made into that which invited to be undone. For the honor to be his instead of Pipa Felice's, that the phoenix had chosen him instead of the girl, Luka could not stop the blooming of a bud that was otherwise closed. The uncontrollable yearning that followed suit, for the other to appear right beside him and share the moment, together, was thankfully contained.

Or so Luka thought it had been until he heard the door of the tailor's tremble with a low rumbling of the wood, hinges creaking from the violent quake.

"Goodness!" Mrs. Magpie looked up from her adjustments, scuttering towards the door where loud voices seemed to be coming from. "What was that? Felt very much like sky was falling!"

Jing considered the narrow prospect of the island experiencing a couple of temporary tremors but soon found it unlikely, having never heard of such a phenomenon or read of anything like it. She deduced instead that someone had slammed the front doors of the building so hard (the double doors that were at least fifteen feet high), that everything else on the first floor felt the after effects of it.

She turned to Luka. "Could you...? I'll come in a second."

He understood the message surprisingly fast, crossing the tailor's and making for the door. Logically, checking on the commotion in her coronation robes was unwieldy and simply inconvenient for the phoenix; and because Mrs. Magpie was, after all, prey, and this building was under predator's watch, she would not have been an ideal scout either. Only Victoria remained fairly reluctant to leave the house of stunning fabrics.

Stepping out into the hallway made the eagle fully aware of the source of the commotion. The noise was coming from the large area before the bottom of the stairs and he could make out a total of three distinct voices—one of which he recognized as Faustes'.

"What are you doing?"

The professor had not raised his voice in any manner but already, the words traveled up the building and the space above where the crystals of the chandelier seemed to tremble in fright.

Silence ensued, and Luka was quietly grateful for his footsteps that were naturally silent as he closed the distance between the tailor's and the post, peering out from underneath the banister of the bottom-few steps. He had not expected to see Jeremiah and Lucienne, alone together.

"Do not make me repeat myself," Faustes was not so courteous to display a false front of patience that most educators seemed to wear,

Yet upon closer inspection, Luka was able to discern the outline of a figure in the distance, lit by the fluorescent lights from the windows of the post—the back of Dmitri Ford, holding three cans of soda and standing a couple of feet away from the commotion. Still.

*

"—over something as stupid as your childish pride, then I suggest you take the drop-out template outside the office tomorrow morning," Faustes fired round after round of spoken ammunition, eyes hard and dark. Jeremiah was quiet, eyes staring unblinkingly at a spot on the carpet.

"And you," the professor turned to Lucienne, "I expected more."

The harpy eagle was furious. "He provoked me—"

"But your Avian drew first blood." Faustes' gaze did not waver. "Don't argue. I saw what you did."

Lucienne's lips were sealed. She could not find in herself another word to say and simply being 'wronged' felt much to her like an understatement. A shift of her gaze made it so that Luka, standing by the corner of the stairs, could be seen even as he attempted to conceal his presence. The falcon, a couple of feet away, wore an expression she did not wish to see.

"Kirill must be out of his fucking mind, Knighting you kids," snorted the hawk. "More drama. Exactly what he wants."

"Sir—this isn't about the Knight thing," Dmitri the careless hopeful stepped forth. Everyone in the room except himself were probably wishing he hadn't. "It's not about the partner thing. Is it?" He forced a laugh, stiff in nature. "C'mon. Jerry's just tired. It makes him a little snappy, right? And Luci's always snappy, so."

Lucienne did not know whether she should be rolling her eyes or just shutting them entirely, finding herself unable to witness what was about to unfold. This was not the time for Dmitri, who was taking the opportunity of silence to inch closer and closer, as though hoping to involve himself in an instance of chaos bad enough without his participation.

"Let's shake on it, and it's all over." The falcon had the gall to take their wrists and bring them closer to one another.

"Dmitri."

His partner had started in warning, but Dmitri was never one to listen to words he should be listening to. He often dived right through them, and into the abyss.

"Seriously sir, look." He gestured to his classmates before him. "See? It was nothing. Please don't raise this to Ki—Professor. Kirill. Don't. Please please," begged the falcon, only to receive a scoff in return.

"Who are you trying to convince, Ford?" Faustes shook his head, laughing at the absurdity of it all. "You have no business in this. Go up to your room," he said with finality before turning to the kite and harpy eagle.

"You two, in my office."

Dmitri's eyes were wide. Luka had never seen the falcon wear such a helpless expression, so seemingly desperate. It was simply uncharacteristic of a boy so free of care and concern; worries of the world, allowing him to understand that the matter was beyond Dmitri's comprehension. Everything was falling into the category of disbelief.

"Faustes," the crack in Dmitri's voice appeared almost visible as he left all formalities behind, forgoing a mind. "Look. It's really, really nothing."

The professor was about to put it across to the boy in the harshest manner he could manage when the double doors of the central building opened with a creak, turning heads towards the entrance.

____________________

The blue morpho perched upon Io's shoulder did not so much as lift one of its six legs or disagree with its mode of transport, staying as still as an artefact and looking quite as though it was an accessory of the boy's, chosen to make some sort of fashion statement.

Io tottered between shelves and study aisles, peeking past each one to check if anyone had remained past opening hours or bothered to skip dinner for the sake of burning the midnight oil. He made his way quietly towards the librarian's desk, fingers crossed.

It was at the final aisle before the entrance that Io came across the mentioned book—atop a stand before the counter a good couple of feet away—and made the connection between what he had seen, long before he was here, and what Sylvain had been referring to.

"I've read this before!" The boy managed in a breath of excitement, voice rippling the surface of a pond that was still. "This is the book. I remember telling Pipa about it. The one that talked about dual Avians. Or, well, someone else who had them, actually."

Sylvain fluttered in a curious circle before landing on Io's forefinger, listening. The latter approached the stand after moments of lying in wait, checking every corner before confirming that everyone was, indeed, at dinner.

"Alas," said the butterfly as he shifted an arm's length away gazing at the unusually large book that was the size of perhaps eight of Io's palms put together. "You've read it before?"

The moon phoenix nodded at once, eagerly flipping its cover aside and revealing the very first page. A blank.

"I can't recall the exact page but," he flipped to the second. This time, it had several words printed—or was it written?—in the tiniest print he had ever come across; a single sentence cutting through the very middle of it all, so small that he had to lean so close and lower his head so much more:

He who creates shalt seeth what is writ.

"I myself remember reading it when I was a little one like yourself," mused the blue morpho, hiding a smile behind his sleeve. "That must have been years ago. Fifty, at least? No. By Lord Falrir's age, it must have been at least ninety human years ago when I first read about him. The only being so magnificent, unmatched by all. The dragon! An immortal existence... ah."

An elusive mist of remembrance seemed to cross his features at those words, as though speaking of something long and nearly, almost, forgotten.

"And there was, of course, the phoenix. Not the current one, no—the one before her," Sylvain went on as Io flipped, page after page of nothing. Absent of words, pictures, ink. "Sweet little girl she may be but the man who came before her, oh! So very cruel was he that he murdered the moon just to be the only eye in the sky. His wish? That there would only, only ever be light and never darkness."

There was nothing. No pictures. No paragraphs, no sentences, no words.

"But that was when Lord Falrir, the dragon, came along, you see. It was He who restored balance and brought along with him, the gift of immortality."

The book was empty.

Was Iolani Tori really listening to the information that he'd come for, laid directly before his ears to be heard and understood—no, he was not. His attention seized by the book in his hands, utterly, completely absent of words and yet present in every sense of the word 'existence', he could not seem to comprehend what the external world was showing him.

"Do you... is there—is there a title? To this book," said Io to the blue morpho as he closed it with a heavy thunk, turning it with difficulty to search the front, back and spine for a slither of a clue.

"Why," thought Sylvain with a moment's pause, "now that you mention it, no."

Io stared. "This book doesn't... have a name?"

"Not that I know of, no," repeated the butterfly with a blink, fairly surprised. "Is it wrong not to have a name?"

Io shook his head, taken aback as well. "Not at all, Sylvain. Identity can come from names, yes, but that itself should never be equated to identity at all because Identity comes from the Self and the Self is within, not in relation to whatever it is that the external world terms the Self."

The moon phoenix laughed strangely, as though suddenly coming to terms with the nameless, empty book. "It is what... it is what one sees oneself as."

Sylvain's eyes widened in awe, impressed by the tiny frame before him. "That is very profound indeed, Iolani. It sounds like something out of this world," he too, laughed small. Together, they returned to the nameless book.

"I can't find it though," said Io to the other, flipping the empty pages once more. The four, five-hundred pages that were yellowed and a little blotched on the sides, dusty but oddly pristine. "I'm sure it was this book. It's the very first book I actually picked up—um, being curious, that is, I mean, it is big and bulky and I'm sure everyone sees it right out here—aside from those old articles that Pipa made me read about predators when we first came here."

"Well, it has indeed been years since I've last read the book too, Iolani. I must say—" Sylvain's words came to a halt the moment he peered past the other's shoulder and at the empty pages of the book. "By skies! I-i-it's empty!"

Lyra almost fell off the shoulder she was perched upon, laughing inside. Io did the same, although, well, he was not standing on a shoulder, per se.

"That was what I was referring to all along, Sylvain," managed the moon phoenix between gasps for air. The library seemed a little brighter than before. "The book is empty!"

"But," the butterfly spent minutes pouring over the pages, looking unbelievably cheated. "But it was here. I'm so sure it was, Iolani. Ah, I am so sorry." Another moment was spent re-examining the pages of the book, flipping front and back, front and back, holding it up to the light as if to see if the ink had, somehow, turned invisible to the naked eye.

Io shook his head at once. "You're not the only one, Sylvain. I can't seem to find what I'd read about the previous time either about that one person with dual Avians. It was what made me understand what I—"

He stopped himself there. Sylvain didn't need to know about him having two Avians, or that he was an Eye himself, seemingly skies apart from a butterfly. He felt it would be hard for a butterfly to regard him the same, who he'd thought all along to be a mere sparrow. For Sylvain to have another friend so far beyond his world, it seemed to Io quiet and lonely.

Occupied with this thought, the moon phoenix did not expect Sylvain to respond with the most paradigm-shifting words he'd heard in what felt to him like a long, long time.

"But Iolani," said the butterfly with a gaze so peculiar. "There hasn't been anyone with dual Avians since the island was born."

________________________

Vaughn Alekseyev was in the midst of returning to the predator's halls after a night's worth of stargazing—a weekly habit of his that he could not seem to kick since he first met Cameron at the highest tower years back when he was still the child he used to be—when he spotted a ridiculous-looking figure coming towards him with an open book the size of an elephant in his hands, staring at pages that appeared to him, blank.

"Did your mother never tell you not to read and walk at the same time," sighed the vulture, folding his arms as he came to a stop in front of Iolani Tori.

The latter looked up from his book, eyes lighting up as he registered the figure before him. "Vaughn! What are you doing out here? It's cold and dark out," Io peered at the instrument peeking out of the vulture's bag. Vaughn shifted immediately to block his gaze. "I was just making my way back to the dormitories. Head back together?"

"Then you're heading the wrong way," said the expert at giving round-about answers, continuing down the hallway but at a slower pace. Io fell into step with ease, quietly amused by Vaughn's unique way of agreeing to things. Otherwise, he was the most upfront person when it came to turning down everything else.

"So," said the moon phoenix, lugging the gigantic book in his arms. He'd written his name on the register and formed a serial number for it (0000, The Book Without a Name) so that the librarian would at least know that the book was—like how every other one in the library could be—on loan. Not stolen. Definitely not stolen. He'd return it the next day. "You've been stargazing?"

"No," replied Vaughn at once, his favourite word always on the tip of his tongue.

"Moon gazing?" Io continued hopefully.

"Wrong."

The moon phoenix's shoulders fell. "Aw."

"Wrong again."

Io laughed, a response so prompt that it almost put a smile on Vaughn himself. Thankfully, he stopped short of doing so.

They spoke about the mundane; a fair occurrence in days so unfortunately peaceful and absent of chaos and disruption that it sometimes made one wish for the presence of something out of the norm. Something extraordinary.

But the ordinary vulture and his ordinary companion made it to their ordinary destination, passing ordinary fields of grass accompanied by an uninterestingly ordinary view of the night and the ordinary rustling of leaves and whispering of the wind. Nothing seemed quite out of the norm—that is, until Vaughn Alekseyev decided to open the double doors of the predator's hall at the timeliest, most extraordinary moment.

*

The people indoors stared at the ones who'd served themselves up for an extraordinary task in the heart of the night, squinting when they noticed a tuft of hair, the shade of the moon, shimmying just behind a pair of stiff and broad shoulders until the tuft of hair rose a little, revealing a pair of curious eyes that belonged to a tiptoeing Iolani Tori.

"Vaughn? Vaughn," the tiny thing of destruction poked the shoulders that blocked his entire line of sight, whispering. "I can't see."

The vulture did not dare move out of the way.

He could, in an instance, grasp the air of iron that weighed upon every shoulder in the lobby of the main building—tension pulled taut and ready to snap. This was not a coincidence, or so he deduced. There was simply no way Jeremiah, Lucienne and/or Dmitri would so oddly collude with Luka Sullivan hiding in the shadows of the stairs to ambush Professor Faustes who wore the darkest expression he'd ever had the misfortune of witnessing. Everything about the scene before his eyes spelled disaster.

A flash of beautiful inspiration made him begin to close the door at once, slowly and quietly, as though nothing had ever happened, and nothing ever seen.

"Alekseyev."

Vaughn let slip a curse so poetic that Io stared. The former ceased all movement at once, allowing the door to close by itself. "Yes?"

"Come in."

Io heard him sigh (poetically, as well). "Yes..." The vulture glanced over his shoulder, rolling his eyes before beckoning the moon phoenix to follow.