The Problem With Pink Hair and Cat Ears

The Great Hall was simply enormous in the kind of way that made you stop trying to measure it and instead just accept it.

Cait walked in with the rest of the people of her class, she found a spot on one of the long curved benches near the front left of the hall and sat down relieved that an immediate problem she’d just been trying to figure had resolved itself. Somewhere between the courtyard and the doors. The tape situation had mercifully, finally stabilized. She noted this with quiet but great gratitude and moved on.

She was doing a casual survey of her new classmates when someone announced themselves from beside her.

"Do you mind if I sit here?"

Tall. Bright blonde hair, long pointy ears, and with the luminous and graceful quality that marked high-Elf lineage immediately. Sharp eyes already doing their own quiet assessment of their mutual classmates. She glanced at Cait's brooch. Azure blue, just the same as her own, and that seemed to be reason enough.

"We are in the same class," she said, with a slight incline of her head aimed towards Caitlynn's brooch. "I'm Caelyne."

"Caitlynn."

"What do you use?" She asked as she was sitting herself down, without any apparent hesitation.

“That's your first question?” Cait asked back, not sounding offended just, curious.

“Mm” Caelyne nodded slightly, with calm serenity that seemed to come naturally.

Cait slowly crossed her legs. “Tell me first and I’ll tell you”

Caelyne looked at her for a moment with the faintest smile hinting at amusement. "Ice magic. Primarily."

"Two swords, one short one long" Cait said.

Caelyne seemed to wait for something more, "... That's it?"

"Primarily." Cait said with a slight shrug.

Caelyne considered this briefly and then raised a single eyebrow.

"Fair enough."

They sat in silence for a moment watching the hall fill around them. Caelyne seemed to have the quality of someone who didn't feel the need to fill silences with small talk, which Cait very much appreciated.

She eventually caught sight of Elayna.

She was standing near the entrance, not really moving with the crowd, more like standing right in middle of it. Her head was slightly down and very clearly somewhere else entirely. The people around her shuffled and sorted themselves into seats and she stood there with the complete stillness of someone having a very involved internal conversation.

Maybe I lost control a little, went a little too far, Cait thought, caring more about something like that than she thought she would.

Master sword mage.

The crowd moved around her and she moved with it, more or less.

Master sword mage. I came here to become a master sword mage. I am going to become a master sword—

"—that plump tushy of yours—"

Sword ma—

"Elaay-yn-na~"

She stopped walking. Someone behind her walked into her back. She apologized without turning around.

Sword mage, she thought, very firmly this time. Master sword mage...

She found the doors to the Great Hall and walked through them mostly on autopilot, still repeating the mantra quietly to herself like something she was trying very hard to memorise before an exam.

The Great Hall stopped her.

She walked in and her feet slowed without her realizing it. The hall was enormous. Its walls were lined with portraits in oils so vivid the painted eyes seemed to follow the room, row after row of long curved benches already filling with students, the whole space humming with the loud noise of a lot of people settling down.

But what stopped her, what really stopped her was the ceiling.

There wasn't one. Or rather there was, but it wasn't stone or wood. It was sky. The same morning sky she'd been walking under for the last hour, clear bright-blue with thin clouds drifting slowly through it, the light shifting naturally as they passed. Warm and open and completely impossible inside a building that had definitely had a roof last she checked, outside, minutes ago.

She stood there with her head tilted back far for a moment, just looking at it.

Whether it was an illusion or something else entirely she couldn't tell from down here. She wasn't sure it mattered.

Oh, she thought, with some sudden clarity. This is the Imperial Academy.

Then she looked around and realized with a small lurch that most people had already sat down and settled themselves while she was still standing near the doors.

She needed to find the Azure section, her class. She knew there was an Azure section. And she had absolutely no idea where it was supposed to be.

She scanned the room, slightly panicked, looking for any kind of landmark. A banner, a sign, anything—

And found instead a head of hot pink hair near the front left of the hall, immediately recognizable even from across the room.

Oh, she thought. There.

Caitlynn was in her class. Problem solved. She knew where her class was.

She started toward the front left with purpose, already planning to find a seat, any seat, any seat at all, next to someone she hadn't met yet, she saw plenty of options, she didn't need to sit next to any specific person just—

Caitlynn was talking to someone. A tall and beautiful blonde girl, high elf by the look of her, the two of them in what appeared to be an actual conversation. She saw the elf smile softly, something about it caught her attention.

I wonder what they're talking about, Elayna thought.

Before she realized she was walking over she had sat down next to Caitlynn.

She folded her hands in her lap. Stared hard at them.

It was purely out of curiosity about the conversation. Nothing else.

From her left, slightly past Caitlynn the blonde girl leaned forward.

"Caelyne," she said, with a small nod.

Elayna looked up. Sharp eyes, with a calm and pleasant expression, the kind that suggested she noticed things but didn't make a fuss about it. Elayna assembled a smile.

"Nice to—" she started—

Her eyes drifted, involuntarily, to Caitlynn. Just for a moment.

"—N-nice to meet you," she finished quickly, and looked back down at her hands.

She was aware of Caelyne waiting. She was aware of the social convention that said the two people on her right should now introduce each other to each other. She was indeed very aware of Caitlynn existing approximately twelve inches to her left. Very aware of her.

She studied her knuckles with great attention.

"Do you two already know each other?" Caelyne asked.

Elayna opened her mouth.

"Well..." Cait said, smiling down at Elayna, "I suppose you could say that."

A pause.

Elayna's ears were doing something she couldn't stop.

She looked at her hands. They were still there. Very normal. Very interesting.

Somewhere to her left Caelyne said "right" in the tone of someone putting something away for future reference, and Elayna made a private resolution to maybe sit somewhere else next time.

She somehow knew she wouldn't.

She was still thinking about that. Specifically about why she knew she wouldn't, which was a question she had decided not to think about too deeply for now, when something cut through the noise of the hall like a blade through still water.

Not loud exactly. Just. Instant. The way a thunderclap is instant. The hall went quiet between one breath and the next, two hundred students all making the same decision simultaneously without quite knowing why.

The person everyone presumed to be headmistress walked to the front of the hall without hurry, no one thought too deeply about exactly how or why they instantly assumed it was the headmistress.

She was not tall exactly, though she carried herself in a way that just made the question irrelevant. Snow-white hair. Pale skin. And eyes—

Oh, Elayna thought, recognizing the eyes immediately. She looks just like Vaelithra.

Completely white. No pupil, no iris. The very distinct and striking quality she'd only ever seen on one other person in her life. She'd never seen another moon elf before, and hadn't realized until this moment just how striking the resemblance between them was. Same coloring, same all-white eyes. Same quality of absolute, graceful, deadly stillness.

She wondered briefly if all moon elves looked and acted this similar to each other.

The headmistress looked out at the hall for a moment without speaking.

The silence held itself.

"You are here," she said, without preamble, "because you were deemed capable of being here. That assessment was not made lightly and will not be maintained lightly."

She let that one land.

"This academy will give you the tools to become strong. To become someone capable. To become the kind of person who can walk freely into the outside world with everything in it and handle what they will encounter, also handle what they eventually will fail at." A brief pause.

"That is the purpose of this institution. Not comfort. Not prestige. Not the title that comes with graduating."

Her white eyes moved across the hall slowly.

"You are here to become someone who survives. Someone who protects. Someone the empire can rely on when it needs to. Someone who thrives in adversity."

Another pause. Shorter.

"Whether you become that person is entirely up to you. We will provide every resource available to this institution, which is not insignificant or lacking. The rest of it all is completely up to you."

She looked at them for one more moment with the look of someone who has said what needed to be said and has no interest in repeating it and stepped back.

That was, apparently, the ceremony.

Elayna realized her back was very straight and her hands were clenched in her lap. She wasn't sure when that had happened.

She was going to become someone strong. Someone who didn't need to be worried about.

Someone who survives, she thought. Someone who protects.

So cool, she thought, with great feeling.

She became aware, a moment later, that she was grinning slightly to herself.

She straightened her expression. Composed herself. Folded her hands neatly back in her lap.

She was going to become someone capable, someone serious. And right now she was going to be a very serious person.

The hall shifted as the speech ended. Two hundred students remembering how to speak all at once, excited but hushed whispers in every corner of the hall.

From the sides of the hall, figures were already making their way toward each class section.

The one who approached Elayna's section of benches was a lean human man with thick, dark hair slicked back without a strand out of place, and eyes that were perhaps the most aggressively unimpressed eyes Elayna had ever seen on a living person. Heavy-lidded, half-closed, holding the expression of someone who would watch paint dry and find even that overstimulating. They moved across the assembled Azure students with the slow flat sweep of someone performing a task they had performed too many times that even pretending it was interesting was a task too tall for them.

He stopped. Looked at them.

The look did not change. It gave no indication it ever had, or ever would.

He clapped his hands once.

"Azure. On your feet."

Forty students rose. Benches scraped. A murmur of collected movement passed through the group.

He turned around. Slowly, hands clasped behind his back. With the unhurried patience of someone who had all the time in the world and intended to use most of it.

"Follow me," he said, to the wall ahead of him.

His voice was exactly what his face suggested it would be. Which was flat, toneless, carrying the emotional temperature of a closed door.

He started walking without checking if anyone was following.

Elayna glanced up at the sky ceiling one more time before she had to stop looking at it lest she fall behind the group.

it was still there. Still impossible. She noted it as one of many things to think about later — along with approximately everything else that had happened today, and followed her teacher.