Chapter 12: Change of Clothes, Pace.
Elian’s cheeks were still burning red when they left the armory, his neatly packed sparring set now added to the things closely floating behind him.
Vale glanced over at him once, taking in the color still sitting high on his cheeks, and said nothing about it for a solid ten paces, which was somehow worse than if she’d commented immediately.
"You should stop doing that thing," she said eventually.
"What thing."
"The thing where you look like you’re bracing for someone to make fun of you, and then get more flustered when they don’t."
She said it the same way she said everything else. Flat, observational, no real judgment attached.
"Marren wasn’t being kind to you back there, for the record. He genuinely didn’t care. Different thing entirely."
"I’m aware."
"You don’t look aware."
Elian didn’t have a good response to that, so he settled for glaring at a point somewhere over her shoulder instead, which did nothing to cool his face down but at least gave him something to do with his eyes.
Vale showed him to the dormitory, where Elian finally managed to say goodbye to his ludicrously heavy luggage, letting him finally take a full breath now that he didn’t have to constantly channel mana to the levitation spell.
She gave him a few minutes to put on his student robe. Which was entirely black and plain, similar to that of the teacher in front of him than any other student he had seen on his way here. Then, they left, Elian still following closely behind, staff in hand.
They cut back through the entrance hall, busier now than it had been that morning. The students filtering in from various directions, robes in a scatter of colors he hadn’t learned to read yet, all of it building toward some clear center of gravity further down the corridor. A low hum of conversation carried ahead of them, growing steadily louder the closer they got, punctuated every so often by a burst of laughter or the sharp clap of someone greeting a friend they hadn’t seen since last term.
"We’re going to the opening ceremony,"
Vale said, before he could ask.
"Every year, its same speech," She continued, slightly annoyed. "Same seating chart, same overly long list of names. You’ll probably be near the front, given the staff. They’ll expect it."
"Wonderful."
"You keep saying that word like it means the opposite of what it means."
"It usually does, around here."
That got something close to a huff out of her—not quite a laugh, but adjacent to one, the most he’d gotten out of her since he met her at the gate. She nodded toward a set of tall double doors at the end of the corridor, already propped open, warm light and noise spilling out from whatever hall waited beyond them.
"Come on," she said. "Best to get it over with."
The hall inside was larger than anything Elian had walked through yet, which was, at this point, a genuinely upsetting sentence to be true about a building that had already produced an entrance hall the size of a small cathedral.
Long seating arrangements sat in arc facing the central stage, each level climbing one pace in elevation through to the highest at the back.
Vale peeled off almost immediately, murmuring something about the staff table, leaving him standing just inside the doors with no idea where he was supposed to go.
"You’re blocking the doorway."
Elian turned. The voice belonged to someone about his age, sharp-eyed, different from Rowan Vale in a way that this was more innocent. Her arms wer crossed, clearly unbothered by the fact that she’d just said that to a total stranger.
"Sorry." He stepped aside, almost tripping over thin air, which did nothing for his dignity. "First day."
"Obviously." She looked him over—the staff, the haircut mainly—with an expression that gave away exactly nothing.
"You’re Elian Valcourt?"
"Word travels fast..." Elian stammered.
"Word travels the second someone awakens a six-generation dormant relic in front of an academy scout." She said it flatly, no particular warmth to it, already turning to walk further into the hall like she expected him to either follow or not, and didn’t especially care which.
"Front’s this way, if you want to avoid getting stared at more than necessary. Assuming you do."
Elian hesitated for exactly one second before falling into step beside her, deciding that a stranger with zero interest in flattering him was, at this point in his day, a genuinely restful change of pace.