Valdris Academy occupied the high ground of the city of Erenmoor like a crown placed on a skull — impressive from a distance, slightly ominous up close. Seven towers of pale stone, each representing one of the seven elemental disciplines, rose from a central campus the size of a small town. Banners snapped in the wind: the Academy's sigil, a flame encircled by stars, embroidered in gold on deep blue.
Kael walked through the gates with the card in his pocket and a mind already cataloguing everything he saw.
The students moved in visible hierarchies. Those with golden insignia on their collars walked with ownership in their steps. Silver insignia: cautious pride. The few with black insignia — the scholarship students, the outer-ring admits — moved like they were apologizing for existing.
Kael observed this for approximately forty seconds before concluding: *A status system based on visible markers. Efficient for maintaining hierarchy. Catastrophically bad for identifying genuine talent. Classic.*
He reported to the administrative tower and was directed to a waiting room already occupied by six other students. He assessed them with the speed of long habit: three were nervous, one was artificially calm (hiding nerves), one was genuinely calm (too young to understand the stakes), and one—
One was watching him with the calculating eyes of someone significantly more intelligent than their surroundings usually required.
A girl. His age, or close to it. Black hair cut in a severe line, grey eyes that caught light like mirrors. Her insignia was black — scholarship — but she wore it like an insult she intended to repay.
"F Rank?" she said. Not a question, reading his card from across the room.
"Currently," Kael said.
"There's no recovering from F Rank. The mana-sorting exam doesn't lie. If you have no affinity, you have no affinity. You'd be better off applying as a staff member."
"What's your name?" Kael asked.
She blinked at the non sequitur. "Seris Vane."
"Seris Vane. What's your Rank?"
"D. Fire affinity, minor." A flicker of frustration crossed her face — honest, quickly suppressed.
"And you're here in the scholarship waiting room with an F-Rank student you just told had no future." Kael sat down. "Which means D-Rank with minor fire affinity is also, by this system's evaluation, not particularly impressive."
The silence that followed was precise and calibrated.
"What I'm saying," Kael continued pleasantly, "is that we're both, according to this institution, mediocre. So perhaps we could table the ranking conversation and discuss something more useful. Like — why do the seven towers have unequal window distributions? The light-element tower has forty percent more windows than the dark-element tower, despite dark-element practitioners requiring more energy input. That suggests either an architectural preference or a deliberate resource restriction. Which is it?"
Seris Vane stared at him for a long moment.
"You're strange," she said.
"Frequently noted. Is it the tower windows or not?"
Another pause. Then, despite herself, the corner of her mouth moved. "Dark-element is restricted. The Academy considers it unstable. They limit the practitioners' access to natural light-mana."
"Artificially handicapping an entire discipline to maintain control of it," Kael said. "Interesting. That'll be relevant later."
"Later when?"
He glanced at her with the patient expression of someone who sees a longer timeline than everyone around them. "When I master it."
The administrator called his name. Kael stood, straightened the collar of his too-large scholarship uniform, and walked toward whatever exam awaited him.
Behind him, he heard Seris Vane make a sound that was not quite a laugh but was close enough to be worth cataloguing.
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