Chapter 10: A New Beginning?
The carriage rocked once, hard, then settled—the particular motion of wheels that had finally stopped rather than merely slowed. Elian blinked awake groggy and disoriented, momentarily unsure how long he’d actually been out, before the door swung open and pale gold light spilled in across his lap.
He stepped down still half-asleep, the Everbloom clutched automatically in one hand, and it took him a solid few seconds standing there on the gravel path before his mind caught up to what he was looking at.
He blinked, awestruck at the sight.
Lucenhall sat atop a low rise, the road curling up toward it in a wide, deliberate arc. The kind of approach clearly designed so that every new arrival got exactly this moment, whether they wanted it or not.
The sun was only just clearing the horizon behind it, and the academy’s spires caught the first light before anything else around them did, pale stone flushing gold at the edges while the rest of the grounds still sat in the soft blue-grey of early morning.
Mist clung low over the lawns, thinning where the light touched it, and somewhere off past the gates a bell was ringing—slow, unhurried, marking the hour rather than calling anyone anywhere in particular.
Elian stood there a moment longer than was probably dignified, just looking.
It wasn’t the size of the place that caught him, though it was large enough. Courtyards stacked behind courtyards, towers of uneven height like they’d each been built in a different century by architects who refused to consult one another. It was the quiet.
Nothing about it demanded attention the way the Valcourt estate’s formal halls—or any other house he had been to—always had, all polished surfaces meant to be admired. This felt older than that, and less concerned with being impressive, which somehow made it more so.
A groundskeeper passed nearby pushing a cart of firewood, glanced at him—at the staff in his hand, mostly, eyes catching on the faint seam of light still visible along one crystal petal—and gave him a short bow before continuing on, unbothered, like new arrivals with glowing heirlooms showed up before breakfast all the time.
Maybe they did.
Elian let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding since the carriage door opened.
His hand went to his hair on reflex—shorter now, no tie to fuss with, nothing to adjust—and he caught himself mid-motion, oddly unsettled by having nothing left to fix.
The road ahead led up through the mist toward the main gates, iron worked into some old sigil he didn’t recognize yet, standing open despite the hour.
Beyond them, faint lantern-light still burned in a few windows, early risers or students who hadn’t slept at all, and somewhere further in he could hear the distant, rhythmic clang of a training yard already active despite the sun barely being up.
He looked back once—at the carriage, at the driver already unloading his boxes, at the long empty road curling back down toward everything he’d left behind—and then made himself turn forward instead.
Cede et perdura, he thought, and for the first time since he’d said it aloud at the estate gates, the words sat strangely in his chest, like a coat that no longer quite fit.
He shifted the Everbloom in his grip, squared his shoulders the way Nessa always used to tell him to before anything that mattered, and started walking up toward the gates alone, the mist parting slow and reluctant around his footsteps as the sun kept climbing behind the spires ahead of him.
***
The size of the campus grew even larger as Elian walked up the hill it sat on. His belongings were gently floating behind, following him with the help of the simple levitation spell he had cast.
He quietly thanked Roderic for the time he had taken to drill that particular spell into him before he left—one of the few pieces of conventional magic that had actually stuck, mostly because it demanded so little of the forceful, declarative casting that never sat right in his hands. A light touch, a gentle intention, and his trunks drifted along obediently a few feet behind him, bobbing slightly with each step up the incline.
The path leveled out as he crested the hill, and the full scope of the campus opened up ahead of him properly for the first time—buildings he hadn’t been able to make out from the base of the road, tucked behind the first ring of towers, spreading out further than he’d expected.
A lake caught the early light off to one side, still enough that the reflection of the spires on its surface looked almost sharper than the spires themselves.
Students were beginning to appear now too—not many, this early, but a few. A pair crossing one of the courtyards deep in conversation, robes marking them as upperclassmen by some system Elian hadn’t learned yet. A boy alone by the lake’s edge, sketching something into a notebook with quick, sure strokes.
None of them looked twice at him, too absorbed in their own morning to register one more first-year trudging up the hill with his luggage in tow, Elian found that oddly steadying—the anonymity of it, after weeks of being watched, discussed, congratulated by people who’d barely spoken two words to him before the Attempt.
He slowed near the edge of the main courtyard, letting his trunks settle gently onto the flagstones beside him while he got his bearings.
Somewhere in this sprawl was an admissions hall, or a registrar’s office, or whatever passed for one at a school old enough to have towers built by architects who’d apparently never agreed on a single style.
He had a letter in his coat pocket with instructions he hadn’t yet had the nerve to reread.
He was still working out which direction looked most official when a voice behind him said, dryly,
"You’re going to want to move those trunks. Foot traffic doubles in about ten minutes, and first-years never learn until someone trips over their luggage."
Elian caught himself before the undignified sound left his mouth, then he turned, already halfway into an apology for blocking the path, and found the voice belonged to a woman who looked entirely unbothered by the hour.
She was sharp-eyed, her arms crossed as she leaned against one of the courtyard’s stone pillars like she’d been standing there for a while and had nowhere better to be.
Grey threaded through her onyx black hair pulled back without much ceremony, robes plainer than he expected for a teacher, but oddly complimenting her dark olive skin, no obvious markers of rank beyond the way she held herself, which managed to be both completely relaxed and entirely unmissable at once.
"Sorry," he said, already reaching to drag the trunks closer to the wall.
"I wasn’t sure where to-"
"Don’t apologize, just move them." She pushed off the pillar, unhurried, studying him.
Her eyes dropped to the staff in his hand, lingered there a beat longer than casual interest would explain, then came back up to his face.
"Valcourt?"
It wasn’t a question. Elian straightened slightly.
"How did you..."
"The staff’s not exactly subtle, and you’re the only first-year arriving this week with a resonance artifact that’s been dormant longer than most family trees around here."
She said it flatly, no particular weight to it, the way someone might comment on the weather.
"Rowan Vale. I’ll be one of your instructors, assuming the registrar hasn’t lost your paperwork, which given the state of that office this week is a genuine possibility."
"Elian," he offered, then immediately felt foolish, since she’d clearly already known.
Vale didn’t seem to mind the redundancy.
She nodded toward the staff instead, expression unreadable.
"May I?"
He hesitated—old instinct, the same one that made him grip too tight—before he made himself loosen his hold and let her take it.
The moment it left his hand something in his chest pulled uncomfortably tight, the familiar low thread of dread he still hadn’t figured out how to name, but he held still and let her turn the staff over in her hands regardless.
She studied the crystal head for a long moment, thumb brushing near the single hairline seam of light, her expression giving away nothing at all.
"One petal, barely." she said finally. "Out of five."
"...Is that bad?"
"It’s early to tell."
She handed it back, and the tightness in his chest eased the instant his fingers closed around the wood again, which she seemed to clock without comment.
"Most open in full or not at all. Yours cracked and stopped."
She said it with the same flat, unbothered gravity she’d used for everything else—no excitement, no alarm, just plain fact—and something about that steadiness settled Elian more than any of the wide-eyed congratulations he’d gotten back home ever had.
"Come on," Vale said, already turning, clearly expecting him to follow without needing to be told twice.
"Registrar first, then I’ll want you in the east yard before midday after the opening ceremony. No sense wasting a first morning standing in a courtyard admiring the view."