And the Myris moved on?

Aethoria Academia,

City of Aldaene, Lands of Miranda,

Aerath Samvat 1302, Basar Vad the Thirteenth

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

Aethoria invited everyone with confidence, as though its gates belonged to all who dared to dream, only to shatter 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, at last, we meet.” Prince Rhovyn Aestlae took in the sight of the gates as he stepped down from the carriage, his sun-red eyes settling upon the name carved into the white stone above the high-arched entrance. “Aethoria Academia,” he murmured, before turning back to offer his hand to his friend as she stepped down from the carriage.

“It is... so vast, and so magnificent," Saelis Erynae Sinhalaese looked up.

“I feel strangely small," Rhovyn stretched the stiffness from his back. "Do you suppose we shall see a Draconian here? The university permits anyone in myris to sit the entrance examination, so I wonder if we shall finally see one. Perhaps we might see them among all nine peoples gathered here. I have always wanted to know whether Draconians are truly as they are described in tales, whether they are even real people.”

“They are real,” Erynae said, smiling at his curiosity. “I have seen some through a spyglass when I visited the Great Keep of Miranda...” Her smile faded, and her voice grew stern. “The very keep Vehome Aen destroyed, his army burned our villages along the border, too," she turned towards him, her expression hardened. “I do not imagine the watchful army at Karasova Bridge would permit even a single Draconian to pa...”

Her words faded into the morning air before she could finish for a Draconian girl had just walked past her, and the instant her foot touched the first step of Aethoria, she slipped off her coat and rested it over one arm. Sunlight fell upon her, bringing the gold within her eyes to life and revealing the golden veins that traced her neck.

Conversations broke midway through sentences. Students pressing towards the gates stopped where they stood, for something they had known only from tales had passed through those gates in living flesh. The crowd shifted without command, one person after another stepped aside until a clear path opened through hundreds of strangers. Ryska never acknowledged them and never spared them a glance, she climbed the stairs as though the silence trailing behind her belonged to someone else.

Let them look, she thought, she had possessed nothing but a name too dangerous to spend, and for two months she had buried that name beneath borrowed cloth, borrowed speech, and borrowed caution.

She was done spending caution instead of herself.

At the registration table of Aelthara Academy, she placed her documents upon the wood and spoke. “Ryska Aen, Solari, Viana.”

The registrar looked up, shock plain upon his face, but his composure returned at once. He lowered his gaze, checked her details and began writing out her hall card. “Ryska Aen,” he read aloud, sliding the finished card towards her, then, with a single word, he dismissed her. “Next.”

Most of the attention drifted back towards the registration tables, though glances continued to find her as she crossed towards the waiting grounds. The gossip passing through Aethoria changed with remarkable swiftness, abandoning the university's history and the supposed cruelty of its examinations for the presence of a Draconian girl beneath its gates.

People looked at her, at her Draconian features, at the gold resting within her eyes, and whispered amongst themselves as she passed.

A Draconian... I have never seen a Draconian before...

Did you see the golden veins along her neck...?

She said she is Ryska Aen...

The Princess of the North?

Ryska heard it all as she passed them but paid them no attention. Instead, she found a patch of grass still damp with morning dew and lowered herself onto it. Drawing the golden wristband that had come with her hall card into her palm, she turned it over once before trying to fasten it around her wrist. She caught the clasp between two fingers and pulled it taut, but it slipped free, then she tried again, only for it to slip free again.

“Would you like some help?”

The voice reached her 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 watched, a little taken aback, as the girl took the band from her hands.

“I'm Nehara Sonysae of Baenidae.” Nehara worked the clasp shut around Ryska's wrist, then lifted her own loose band and gave it a small shake. “Would you fasten mine?”

“I am Ryska Aen," she took Nehara's band into her own hands and began working the clasp around her wrist. Somewhere between her first attempt and her second, she forgot entirely about the eyes that had been watching her.

High above, the sky watched Ryska forget the countless eyes upon her. Below, Rhovyn could no longer keep his thoughts from returning to the Draconian girl, even after she had disappeared from his sight.

“Do you think she has feline eyes?” Rhovyn's brows lifted with curiosity.

“Are you suggesting your favored book has been lying to you?” Erynae raised a brow, then glanced towards the cavalry registration table, Solmaere's. It stood to the left of that of Aelthara's. "We ought to find a place for breakfast after registration, too," she began walking. "Hurry, boy."

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, the pages of The Nine of Myris opened inside his mind and he tried to fit the woman seated across the courtyard into the legend he had spent years reading. His gaze lingered upon her until Erynae tugged him towards the table.

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

“Rhovyn,” Erynae stopped and looked back at him. “The table is not going to register itself.”

He tore himself away from his thoughts and hurried after her, and together they completed their registration at Solmaere before setting out in search of an inn. They soon found Tev's Inn, one lane south of Aethoria.

There, Teram, a broad-shouldered human man of fifty at one, brought them soup and stuffed bread without being asked. He had served examination candidates for forty years and had long since learned what they hungered for before a word left their mouths. “Your first time?”

Rhovyn found it amusing that a man of Teram's age, who had lived within sight of the academy for years, should ask so foolish a question. Everyone knew the examination granted no second attempt, and therefore, for every candidate who sat it, there could be no first time but the first.

“Eat, and do not think,” Teram advised. “The ones who spend the hour before the examination trying to solve it in their heads are always the ones who walk through the gates already weary.”

With that, he returned to serving the other students and Erynae glanced towards Rhovyn only to find him doing precisely what Teram had warned against. She saw it in the set of his jaw, she had known that jaw since she was eight, knew the expression he wore whenever curiosity ceased to be mere curiosity and began to take root as an obsession but she said nothing, for years had taught her that Rhovyn listened least whenever someone tried to interrupt a question taking root inside his mind.

Silence, where Rhovyn was concerned, had become its own discipline, and so she abandoned the battle before it had begun. Her attention drifted instead towards the endless stream of boys and girls arriving from every corner of the world, each carrying a hope for future they did not yet know.