3

She fell silent, allowing the weight of her words to settle over the hall. The answer came only in glances, heads turned towards strangers on either side, infantry to archer, cavalry to medic, each searching another face to see whether the same weight had settled there as well. Then the stewards moved bench by bench, laying a single sheet face down before every student, each one sealed with a stamp whose color matched the band upon the student's wrist.

Eyes dropped towards the papers bound with cords, then lifted again towards Amaeren, violet eyes travelled across the hall as though she were weighing every soul before her. Then she raised both hands and along the walls, the sensory mages mirrored the motion as one, murmuring the spell of the soul beneath their breath. A faint shimmer travelled across the hall, passing over every paper at once, and the cords loosened at once as the bell rang.

Twelve hundred hands reached for twelve hundred papers in the same breath. Parchment rustled through Ashwing Hall like wind moving through dry leaves, and the chamber fell into that peculiar silence made only by twelve hundred minds beginning their work together.

Rhovyn read the questions without touching his quill, a habit his father had drilled into him from the first year of his education. He sorted all seven by difficulty, read each once, assumed its answer, and found the fourth claimed the crown by far, the only question that had truly surprised him.

"Your enemy commands the stronger cavalry, the stronger archers, and an infantry equal to your own. Name the terrain upon which you would meet them, the weather you would call your ally, the formation you would raise, the strategy you would trust your life to, and the hour of day in which you would spend it. Explain why each choice holds, and why each would fail. Name the single tactical error, theirs or your own, that would open the road to victory or seal the road to ruin and explain why waiting upon another's error is itself a strategy rather than merely the absence of one. Name a war in which such a thing was tested, and tell what became of it, whether it earned a mere victory or one that could be called a historical win, and what odds you would have given the commander who dared to choose it."

“Narrow mountain pass,” he began, the quill moved before the thought had fully settled within his own mind. “Where their cavalry cannot charge in number, and their archers surrender the high ground...” He did not stop after that.

Ryska, seated a few benches to his left, read the paper through three times before she ever set quill to parchment then she wrote as she shot, with certainty and without hesitation. For the fourth question she chose city warfare. “Narrow streets to strangle their cavalry...” she began, and by the time she laid the quill aside, four pages bore the weight of her answer.

Erynae, five seats ahead of Ryska, chose city warfare as well and wrote without once pausing to think, while Bram scratched at his head instead. He knew the answer to the fourth question well enough; the understanding existed perfectly inside his mind, yet the writing refused to follow it, and the distance between those two things seemed about four paragraphs wide, while the bell, merciless as time itself, was always going to ring.

It rang at the end of the second hour. Papers were bound and collected, and Amaeren ordered them all into the courtyard below. Twelve hundred students spilled into t he great courtyard; into the oldest place within the university, where the stones there were darker than anywhere else in Aethoria, four centuries of weather and footsteps worn into the paving until it carried a patina no scrubbing could ever lift.

“This is a strange feeling,” Rhovyn stood amongst the blue cohort, looked out across the court and his gaze stopped on gold cohort, caching slight glimpse of golden hair among crowd.

“The Draconian girl,” Erynae followed his gaze.

“She is brave... or else a fool enough to be brave,” he shrugged.

“She did not come lightly to those gates,” Erynae looked towards Ryska once more. “Whatever brought her here, it cost her dearly."

Rhovyn opened his mouth to say something, but the hush that swept across the courtyard stilled him before a word could leave his tongue.

Guru Ayhsate the Ashgrave, Human man of Sixty, had appeared upon the platform, young still by the reckoning of Myris, where centuries measured a life.

The murmurs shifted from the Draconian girl's arrival to how unfairly handsome Ayhsate was, beautiful in the effortless, infuriating way legends often were. Every military academy in Myris knew Guru Ayhsate name. His beauty was infamous, his brain, even more so. Cadets had spent years hearing of the strategist with the impossible face and the brilliant mind that had rewritten wars, but no one had warned them he was this beautiful.

His face was a harsh landscape carved by decades of war, a jagged scar crossed his sharp angled jaw which he had never bothered to explain, the deep blue of a winter sky beneath a watchful brow watched them all as though he could read hearts upon faces. Clad in plain linen, its sleeves rolled carelessly to his forearms, clean leather boots and hair the muted color of rain dark wood kissed by a cold blue sea, fell on his neck in controlled, unruly waves.

To ordinary eyes, he was a scholar dressed without ceremony, but military students recognized the quiet geometry of a soldier's body, the effortless posture that never truly relaxed, the disciplined stillness that belonged only to those who had survived battle after battle, the cords of muscle running beneath his rolled sleeves and blue veins etched along his forearms like battle maps written beneath skin.

“Greetings, Travelers!” Ayhsate said in a voice low enough to settle beneath skin, edged with a rasp that sounded earned rather than rough.

"May it end here!"

Twelve hundred voices thundered back as one, Ayhsate let it crest, let the echoes dissolve against stone and sky, and waited until the last murmur surrendered to silence before he spoke again.

“Four hundred and twelve years ago, the first cohort of Aethoria stood within this courtyard. Forty-three students, most of them Human, for the Charter was new, and the world had not yet seen fit to trust it. The second cohort brought seventy students of eight species, and that number has never fallen since," his gaze swept across the courtyard. “The Charter is simple, and it is absolute. Within these walls, you are not soldiers, not subjects, not the face of your people, nor your lands, nor whatever troubles lie beyond these gates. You are students, shielded by a Charter older than this principality, older than two empires and older than any name or banner that shall one day attempt to tell you the Charter bends,” he clasped his hands behind his back. “It does not. Should any man tell you otherwise, my door stands open in north wing.”

Some stood drinking in every word, for they listened to the man whose reputation had become doctrine across the military academies, that to have Ayhsate Ashgrave at your side was to march beneath a banner victory had already claimed before the battle was ever fought.

Some had already gone glassy-eyed, fighting back yawns that split their jaws wide, while the rest endured in silence, either unmoved by speeches, indifferent to the man giving them, or simply longing to return, collapse into bed, and wait for the results rather than another word.

“Some amongst you shall not pass, and that is no judgment upon your worth for this examination was fashioned to discover the seed that either lives within you, or it does not. Today's result is only the truth of where your seed lies, and truth is seldom found where we imagine it to be," he let the silence linger for a single, measured breath. “The ones who pass today, you have met her halfway, Aethoria Academia.”