The study was quiet in the way that only the deep hours produced.
Not silent. The Academy was never truly silent — the mountains had their own voice, wind moving through stone corridors and across open terraces with the particular resonance of architecture that had been built to last rather than to comfort. The kind of sound that became background after enough years, that the mind stopped registering as sound at all and filed instead under the category of always.
Sariah had stopped hearing it approximately two centuries ago.
She sat at her desk with a cup of tea that had gone cold sometime in the last hour, the documents spread before her carrying the particular weight of things that required attention and were receiving none. The lamp burned low. Outside the study's high windows the Academy's towers rose against a sky thick with mountain stars, the kind of visibility that only existed above a certain elevation, away from the lights and smoke of human settlements below.
