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Paendrage Empire,

City of Aldaene, Lands of Miranda,

Aerath Samvat 1302, Basar Vad the Fourteenth

Twelve hundred disciples flooded into Aldaene from every corner of the Seven Lands to sit for the single entrance examination of Aethoria Academia.

Aethoria invited everyone with confidence, as though its gates belonged to all who dared to dream, and then shattered that confidence, for out of the thousands who arrived believing themselves extraordinary, the university chose only seventy-five students for each of its four academies.

“So, we meet,” Prince Rhovyn Aestlae drew rein the moment the gates came into view, his sun-red, glowing eyes fixed upon the words carved into the white stone above the high-arched entrance. “Aethoria Academia.”

“It is... so vast, and so magnificent,” Saelis Erynae Sinhalaese halted beside him.

“I feel strangely small,” Rhovyn dismounted and stretched the stiffness from his back. “This university is older than Ashenvale.”

“Older than a great many kingdoms,” Erynae leapt down with effortless ease.

“Do you suppose we shall see a Draconian here?” Curiosity colored Rhovyn's voice. “The university permits anyone in Myris to sit the entrance examination, provided they possess the required merit from their primary academy.”

“They burned the villages along our border,” Erynae turned towards him. “Karasova Bridge now lies beneath Vialthor's passing domination. I do not imagine they would permit even a single Draconian to pa...”

Erynae's words faded into the morning air before they were finished, for a Draconian girl walked past her, and the instant her foot touched the first step of Aethoria she slipped the coat from her.

Sunlight found her at once as she rested the coat over one arm, gold came alive within her eyes and veins of molten gold shimmered along her neck as though they had been waiting for the sun to remember them.

Aethoria forgot herself, conversations broke in the middle of sentences, students who had been pushing towards the gates stopped where they stood, attendants, nobles, and commoners alike found their eyes following her as though something spoken only in legends had walked through the gates in living flesh.

The crowd shifted without command, one person after another stepped aside until a clear path opened through hundreds of strangers. She never acknowledged them, never spared them a glance and climbed the stairs as though the silence trailing behind her belonged to someone else.

Let them look, she thought, a fortnight of safety had carried her this far, Viana's border had fallen behind her days ago and had taken the disguise with it. She had crossed Myris as Koina because she had possessed nothing but a name too dangerous to spend, and for two months she had buried Ryska Aen beneath borrowed cloth, borrowed speech, and borrowed caution. She was done spending caution instead of herself.

Grief, too, could wait, she decided. It had waited two months already; it could wait one evening more.

She came to the registration table of Aelthara Academy, placed her documents upon the wood and the registrar behind the desk accepted the document.

"Ryska Aen, Solari Viana." She said in calm but firm voice.

The registrar looked up, shock plain on his face but the composure returned very next second, he lowered his gaze and began writing out her hall card after checking her details, Aethoria's invite note and the grades from her primary academy. “Ryska Aen,” he read aloud once as he slid the finished card towards her, and dismissed her with a single word. “Next.”

Most attention drifted back towards registration, though glances continued to find her in passing, and the gossip that wandered through the grounds of Aethoria changed with remarkable swiftness from the university's history and the supposed cruelty of its examinations to the presence of a Draconian girl beneath its gates.

People looked at her, at her Draconian features, at the molten gold resting quietly within her eyes, and whispered amongst themselves as she crossed towards the waiting grounds.

A Draconian... here.

Did you see the sigil on her body...?

She said she is Ryska Aen...

I heard she was dead...

Ryska heard it all as she passed them, found a patch of grass still damp with the morning dew and lowered herself onto it. She drew the golden band that had come with her hall card into her palm and turned it over once between her fingers before trying to fasten it around her wrist. She caught the clasp between two fingers, pulled it taut, lost it, tried again, and lost it a second time.

The whispers from the registration tables still lingered somewhere behind her, and now even the stubborn little clasp seemed determined to join them in testing her patience, but she refused to look up. She would not give a single soul the satisfaction of believing their eyes or their opinions had reached her.

“Need a hand?”

The voice arrived before her eyes found the pair of boots standing a little too close. She glanced up and found a girl smiling down at her, and before Ryska had even decided whether to answer, the stranger had folded herself onto the grass beside her. Ryska stared without quite realizing the girl had already taken the band from her hands.

“I'm Nehara Sonysae of Baenidae,” Nehara worked the clasp shut around Ryska's wrist with practiced ease before lifting her own loose band and giving it a small shake. “Help me?”

“I am Ryska Aen of Solari,” she answered, taking Nehara's band into her own hands and beginning to work the clasp around her wrist instead, and somewhere between the first attempt and the second she forgot entirely about the eyes that had been watching her.

Rhovyn watched until the Draconian girl disappeared into the gathering crowd.

“The Draconian girl looks exactly as the books say they do,” he said, unable to keep the amusement from his voice.

“Aye,” Erynae nodded, then beckoned a horseman over and quietly instructed him to arrange their lodging for two days.

She had been certain she would not need to return home, confident she would finish within the first three hundred, but her father and mother had insisted the horseman remain until Aethoria's selections had been announced.

“Do you think she has serpent's eyes as well?” Rhovyn's brows rose with open curiosity.

“Are you suggesting your favorite book has been lying to you?” Erynae answered with an arched brow. “Come. Let us register with Solmaere, then we shall return to the inn.”

The registration tables of Solmaere stood beside those of Aelthara, students flowing between them in steady streams of color and conversation. Rhovyn followed after her, but halfway there his gaze wandered of its own accord towards the place where the Draconian girl had gone.

She sat upon the grass with her back turned towards him, then she tilted her head for the briefest instant, and sunlight caught the side of her neck and Rhovyn stopped. His breath caught somewhere inside him as his eyes found the faintest whisper of golden lines beneath her skin, there for no more than a heartbeat before they vanished with the movement of her body, and in that same heartbeat the pages of The Nine of Myris opened inside his mind.

He tried to fit the woman seated across the courtyard into the legend he had spent years reading, and for the first time in his life the book and reality refused to become the same picture. His gaze lingered upon her a moment longer before Erynae tugged him gently towards the Solmaere desk.

Would her cheekbones carry the sculpted grace of the Goddess Amara? His mind rebuilt her all the same. Or would her jaw be sharper, bearing the austere elegance dragons were said to have inherited from the First Brood? Would her face be small and almost ethereal, delicate enough for whispered prayers, or long and regal, fashioned for crowns rather than smiles? And the sigils, every chronicle insisted a Draconian bore five golden sigils upon their body, but he had seen only one.

Where are the rest? he wondered. Hidden beneath her collarbone... along the sweep of her shoulder... against the curve of her ribs... perhaps somewhere no stranger's eyes were ever meant to wander and so his mind returned, inevitably, to the eyes. He searched every face he had ever known, every portrait preserved in ancestral halls, every illuminated manuscript, trying to place such eyes upon a living soul and found none worthy of the stories that had imagined them before he did.

What does she truly look like? Rhovyn wondered, could serpentine eyes dwell upon a woman's face and yet leave beauty humbled before them?