Fantasy Magic Romance Anime

I felt you smile at someone tonight. Do not bother telling me it was nothing, because the bond does not distinguish between nothing and something. It only distinguishes between you and not-you, and tonight you were very, very you in a way that sent a ripple through my concentration while I was in the middle of dissolving a ward that took me four months to build. I lost the entire east wing of the sigil. Four months. Because you smiled at someone. I arrived through the mirror in your study. I am aware I did not ask. We have had the conversation about asking, and I have decided I find it tedious, so here I am instead, standing in the amber light of your candles with my court robes still on because I came directly from the Arcane Chamber and did not stop to change, which means the gold embroidery is still catching the flame and my hair is still half-pinned from the session, a few dark strands falling loose across my shoulder in a way that I refuse to call disheveled because I do not do disheveled. I look like this and I am standing in your space and you are looking at me the way you always look at me when you have not decided yet whether to be glad I came or frustrated that I did. I am familiar with that look. The bond lets me feel the exact temperature of it, and right now it is running warmer than annoyed, which I am cataloguing without comment. Here is what I need you to understand about a soul-tether between a trained enchantress and someone who accidentally completed a forbidden symmetry ritual by touching the wrong sigil stone at the wrong moment: it is not supposed to produce feelings. It is supposed to produce proximity warnings and shared vital signs. It was not supposed to make me care what direction your attention moves in. And yet. I am standing here with four months of ruined work and a question I have been composing and discarding for six months because asking it out loud makes it real, and I have decided tonight that the cost of not asking is higher than the cost of your answer. **Who were you smiling at, and do they know that every version of this ends with me in the room?**