Chapter 57 - 56 — Aria
The news arrived on a Monday, carried through the quiet, pristine corridors of the Royal Academy by the kind of people who made a career out of noticing things first.
Aria heard it at seven in the morning from a third-year noble whose primary asset was an ear for social shifting. She processed it with her characteristic lack of drama—which was to say, she filed it under things that were either overstated or immediately actionable, and moved on with her day.
This was how it always worked with Aria. Information arrived, she assessed it, she formed a position, and the position was usually some variation of I can do better. It was an orientation toward reality that had served her exceptionally well through sixteen years of life, three years of advanced martial and spellcraft study, and a lifetime of being educated to eventually rule. It was a quality that had produced a clean record of top-tier marks and occasionally produced situations that her mother, the Queen, described as incidents and that Aria described as learning opportunities.
The information on Monday was specific: there was a new visiting faculty member assigned to the combat and mana application wing in room 412. He was taking the second and third-year advanced cohorts.
Normally, visiting faculty were objects of polite, mild condescension. They were usually retired high-tier spellcraft theorists from the capital or retired field captains who had lost a knee or a lung to a border skirmish and had been given an academic stipend as an honorable discharge. They were respectable. They had stories. They were rarely relevant.
This one was different. The second-years were talking about him in a way that second-years didn’t usually talk about faculty—not with the dutiful, slightly bored respect of students being instructed, but with the specific, jittery energy of people who had encountered something that had fundamentally disrupted their understanding of their own limitations.
She tracked down Maren between third and fourth hour.
Maren was a second-year advanced student—not the Maren who had made a name for herself in the S-rank mercenary guilds three seasons ago, a naming coincidence that still produced occasional confusion in administrative records—and she was currently sitting on a stone bench in the inner quad, staring at her own open hands with the expression of a person who had lost an argument to a mirror.
"What happened?" Aria asked, stopping in front of her. She didn’t offer a greeting. She rarely did when there was an efficiency loss involved.
Maren looked up, her fingers twitching slightly. "The southwestern pull."
Aria frowned. "Your structural anchor? You’ve been running that construct with a five-degree southwestern bias since the mid-term evaluations. Professor Vance told you it was a bone-structure artifact."
"It wasn’t a bone-structure artifact," Maren said, her voice entirely flat. "He looked at it for roughly thirty seconds. Didn’t even stand up from his desk. He told me my foundational grounding vector was off by two millimeters because I favor my left heel when I draw from the ambient ley-node. I adjusted the heel. The pull vanished."
She paused, staring at the flagstones.
"Thirty seconds," Maren whispered. "I’ve spent two years trying to compensate for that drift with secondary counter-runes."
Aria processed this.
She stood in the cool morning air of the quad, listening to the ambient hum of distant mana-drills from the lower training fields, and evaluated the claim. A thirty-second diagnostic on a construct that two senior professors had spent six months diagnosing as a permanent physical quirk. It was either an absurd stroke of luck, a rehearsed trick, or a level of structural perception that bordered on the absurd.
She formed a position.
The position was: she was going to room 412.
Logistically, this presented a minor issue. She was third-year advanced placement, which meant she wasn’t in his assigned cohort for the week; his current rotation was dedicated to second-year diagnostics and remedial structural theory. But Aria had a long, documented history of treating logistical details as things to be navigated rather than respected. Rules were constraints designed to keep mediocre talents from destroying the plumbing; they were not meant to inhibit legitimate inquiry.
She went to room 412 on Tuesday morning, just after the first bell.
She knocked—a sharp, double-tap that was more of a notification than a request—and opened the door without waiting for an answer. It was a habit several tutors had tried to break her of, including the Master of Protocol, and none had succeeded.
The room was quiet. It smelled of old parchment, damp stone, and the sharp, ozone tang of unbonded mana that always lingered in the application wings.
He was sitting at the heavy oak desk at the back of the room, reading a bound manuscript that looked like it had been salvaged from a fire. Beside him, perched on a stack of archaic spell-registers, was the lizard.
Maren had mentioned the creature. She had described it as wrong in a way I can’t explain, which Aria had quietly filed as the hyperbole of an easily rattled second-year.
Aria looked at the lizard.
She revised the filing immediately.
It was small, no larger than a forearm, with scales the dull, mottled color of dry river slate. But its eyes—bright, piercing gold—were fixed on her with a quality that was entirely devoid of animal instinct. It didn’t blink. It didn’t tilt its head with curious reptile twitchiness. It observed her with the cold, comprehensive weight of an entity that was taking inventory of her soul, weighing her mana-density, and finding the total mildly unremarkable.
She looked away from the lizard and turned her gaze to the man at the desk.
"You’re the visiting faculty," she said.
He didn’t rush to close his book. He finished the line he was reading, marked the page with a strip of plain grey ribbon, and turned his eyes toward her.
"Yes," he said.
"I’m Aria," she said.
She said it the way she always said it. Her name wasn’t just a label; it was information that carried a specific density. It was a title, a lineage, an expectation, and a history that usually made people adjust their posture by a fraction of an inch. Most people in the academy—including half the faculty—treated her name like an incoming projectile they had to politely duck under.
He didn’t move. He didn’t adjust his posture, nor did his expression change.
"I know who you are," he said.
"Then you know I’m not in your assigned cohort," she said, stepping further into the room and letting the heavy oak door swing shut behind her.
"Yes."
"I want to be assessed."
He looked at her for a long moment. He took in the sharp line of her shoulders, the immaculate silver trim of her third-year tunic, and the distinct, quiet confidence of someone who had been the best at everything she had ever attempted, for long enough that superiority was no longer a goal, but an atmospheric reality.
"Sit down," he said.
She sat in the straight-backed wooden chair across from his desk, pulling her skirt back with a single, practiced motion.
"Show me something," he said.
She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t ask for parameters, and she didn’t waste time with basic light-spheres or elemental darts.
What she showed him was genuinely exceptional.
She knew this not out of vanity, but out of the rigorous, unblinking self-assessment she applied to everything she did. She was the highest-ranked student currently enrolled in the institution. Her technical precision was legendary among the lower years, and her spell-density was forty percent higher than the faculty baseline for her age bracket.
She raised her right hand, palm upward, and drew from her core.
Within two seconds, a construct materialized above her skin. It was a triple-elemental integration loop—a delicate, spinning geometric polyhedron that held a core of compressed fire, wrapped in a counter-rotating sheath of high-density water, anchored by an outer framework of structural earth mana. It was a fourth-year combat engine, designed for high-yield defensive suppression. It required simultaneous control over three distinct harmonic frequencies, a task that usually required two casters or a focus-crystal the size of an apple.
She held it perfectly stable. The air around her hand didn’t even heat up; the heat containment was absolute. The water didn’t vaporize; the earth matrix didn’t crack. It was clean, brilliant, and computationally exhausting.
She waited.
She waited for the specific beat of silence that usually followed her work—the slight widening of the eyes, the subtle shift in breathing as a teacher realized they were looking at a prodigy who was rapidly outstripping their ability to instruct.
He looked at the spinning geometric lattice for roughly four seconds.
"The integration point between the fire and water elements," he said, his voice entirely conversational.
Aria’s eyes narrowed slightly. "What about it?"
"There’s a buffer you’ve built in," he said, leaning back in his chair. "A thermal-dampening ring made of passive earth mana, tucked between the inner fire core and the fluid shell. To prevent cancellation. It works—the construct is stable, and the output is clean. But the buffer is consuming approximately eighteen percent of your total mana input just to maintain its own existence. And it doesn’t need to be there."
Aria stared at him. The fire in her palm flickered, just for a fraction of a second, before her control clamped down on it.
"If I remove the buffer, the thermal feedback from the fire core will boil the water sheath," she said, her voice dropping into the icy, precise tone she used when arguing theory with the Senior Board. "They’ll cancel each other out within three seconds. It’s basic elemental opposition."
"The cancellation you’re preventing doesn’t occur at the integration point," he said calmly. "It occurs at the output stage—and only if the density ratio is wrong. You’ve placed a lock on a door that doesn’t have hinges. You’re preventing a problem that only exists because you assumed it would."
He reached out a single finger, pointing toward the core of her construct. He didn’t touch the mana, but his finger hovered precisely where the internal buffer ring was spinning.
"Drop the buffer," he said. "Adjust the ratio to 2.3 to 1, fire dominant. Run it."
She looked at her construct.
She had built that buffer during her second year, after three failed attempts to integrate liquid-fire engines had resulted in third-degree burns across her forearms. She had found the buffer solution in an old imperial text, implemented it, and it had worked. It had worked perfectly for fourteen months. It was the foundation of her high-tier output.
She had never thought to look underneath it.
Aria set her jaw. She focused her mind, entering the internal architecture of the spell. With a precise mental flick, she dissolved the earth-mana buffer ring.
Instantly, the construct shuddered. The water shell surged inward toward the naked fire core. Panic—sharp and instinctual—spiked in her chest, but before the elements could collide and explode in a violent burst of steam, she forced her mana flux to shift. She squeezed the fire core, swelling its density, and pinched the water shell back until the ratio hit exactly 2.3 to 1.
The shuddering stopped.
The room didn’t explode. Instead, a sound echoed through the office—a low, clear, harmonic hum, like a silver bell struck beneath deep water. The construct didn’t just stabilize; it condensed. It shrank to half its previous size, its light shifting from a bright, noisy glare to a deep, terrible, crystalline brilliance.
Aria felt her internal mana channels instantly relax. The draw on her core dropped like a stone. The efficiency gain wasn’t eighteen percent—it was nearly twenty-five. The spell was running cleaner, hotter, and faster than it ever had in her life, and it was taking almost no effort to hold.
She stared at the tiny, terrifying sun spinning in her palm.
"How?" she asked. The word came out smaller than she intended.
"Mana Sight," he said simply. "I read constructs the way you read text. The buffer was visible the moment you produced the construct. It looked like a lump of clay taped to a watch movement."
She looked at him. Really looked at him.
"You saw that in the first second," she said.
"Yes."
Aria closed her hand. The construct vanished, the remaining mana dissolving silently back into her skin without a single stray spark.
She looked down at the floor. The polished grain of the oak planks seemed very dark. She stared at it for three long seconds, processing the fact that the technique she had considered her crowning achievement for over a year had been held together by a piece of theoretical tape.
She raised her head. Her eyes were bright.
"Again," she said.
"Tomorrow," he said, turning back to his manuscript. "Your cohort has a formal session at second hour. Come to that."
"I want to go again now," she said, her voice carrying the full, unyielding weight of her royal bloodline.
"Tomorrow," he repeated, without looking up.
She stood there, staring at him with the specific, dangerous expression she used when the universe offered her an obstacle and she was calculating how much force was required to shatter it.
He didn’t look back at her. He didn’t offer a polite excuse, he didn’t apologize, and he didn’t adjust his boundary to make her feel better about being turned away. He had made a decision, and as far as he was concerned, the conversation was over.
She stood straight, smoothing her tunic.
"Tomorrow," she said.
"Tomorrow," he agreed.
She turned and marched toward the door. She reached the handle, turned it, and stopped.
She didn’t turn around. "The lizard," she said to the door frame.
"Yes?"
"It stared at me the entire time."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"It does that," he said.
Aria looked over her shoulder. The lizard was still sitting on the stack of registers. It hadn’t moved an inch. Its golden eyes were still fixed on her, completely unblinking.
She opened the door, stepped out into the hallway, and let it click shut behind her.
She walked four paces down the corridor.
She stopped.
She turned around, walked back to room 412, pushed the door open without knocking, and leaned into the frame.
"What’s your name?" she demanded. "The rumors in the quad say Cael, but that’s not—" She cut herself off, her brow furrowing as she looked at his face. "That doesn’t feel like a real name."
He looked up from his page.
"It’s the name I’m using," he said.
Aria’s eyes narrowed. She weighed the sentence, dissecting the precise syntax of it.
"That’s not an answer," she said.
"No," he agreed gently. "It isn’t."
She stared at him for three seconds, trying to find a wedge, a crack, any point of leverage in his posture. There was none. He was simply a stone wall that happened to be wearing a plain faculty robe.
"Tomorrow," she snapped.
"Tomorrow," he said.
She left.
This time she walked all the way down the stairs, crossed the central foyer, and made it halfway across the courtyard before her brain caught up with the underlying mathematics of what had just happened.
She froze in the middle of the gravel path. Two second-year students had to veer wildly around her to avoid a collision.
She turned around, walked back into the application building, marched up the three flights of stairs, down the hallway, and kicked open the door to room 412.
"The ratio," she said, her voice slightly breathless from the brisk walk. "2.3 to 1. Why specifically 2.3?"
He didn’t look surprised to see her. He hadn’t even turned the page.
"The fire element’s natural resonance frequency is 2.3 times the water element’s in standard atmospheric mana," he said clearly, as if explaining why rain fell downward. "At that specific numerical ratio, their waveforms don’t collide as opposing elements—they overlap as harmonics. The cancellation doesn’t occur because the fundamental relationship between them isn’t opposition anymore. It’s resonance."
Aria stood frozen in the doorway. "That’s not in any text in the grand library. I’ve read the entire fourth-floor vault."
"No," he said. "It’s not in the academic literature. I derived it independently."
"From what?" she demanded.
"From understanding why fire and water behave the way they do," he said, finally looking up at her, "rather than simply accepting that they do."
She stayed in the doorway for a long, silent minute. The light from the high leaded windows cut across the desk, illuminating the dust motes floating between them.
He went back to his reading. The lizard shifted its weight by a fraction of a millimeter, its tail curling slightly over the edge of the parchment.
"Tomorrow," she whispered.
"Tomorrow," he said, his eyes already tracing the lines of his book.
She left. And this time, she actually made it out of the building.
The next two weeks settled into a specific, relentless pattern.
Aria came to every single one of his cohort sessions. She arrived twenty minutes before the doors were unlocked, sitting on the cold stone steps outside room 412 with a notebook, and she stayed until the caretaker came around with the evening keys to clear the floor.
She did every exercise he assigned to the group. Then she did the advanced variations he hadn’t assigned. Then she modified those variations, pushed them to their absolute physical limits, and brought the glowing, volatile results back to his desk with a list of hyper-specific questions.
Her questions were extraordinary. They weren’t the questions of a student trying to impress a teacher; they were the sharp, piercing queries of an intellect that was aggressively dismantling its own ignorance. When she didn’t understand a concept, she admitted it instantly, without shame, processed his explanation, and immediately applied it.
He answered everything she asked.
He didn’t withhold information to preserve his authority, nor did he dole out knowledge in careful, patronizing doses like the traditional masters did. If she asked a direct question about high-density mana-compression, he gave her the exact mathematical framework. He treated her intellect with a dry, absolute honesty that she found entirely bizarre.
And she pushed.
It was her fundamental nature. Whenever she encountered a boundary—a rule, a person, an authority—she pushed against it to see where the structure was soft. Most people softened immediately. Tutors folded because she was brilliant; nobles folded because she was royalty; instructors folded because it was easier to compliment her and let her have her way than to spend three hours arguing structural theory with a princess.
He didn’t fold.
When she pushed, he simply stood his ground. Not with anger, not with smug condescension, but with the unshakeable weight of absolute correctness. His position was his position because it was backed by truth, and her title, her talent, and her determination didn’t alter the math by a single fraction.
She spent three full days sitting in her room at night, staring at the canopy of her bed, trying to find the exact word for how he made her feel.
She finally found it on a Thursday night: Clarifying.
The world around Aria was usually soft. It yielded. It made room for her before she even arrived, smoothing out bumps and clearing paths until she was left wondering whether she was actually good at anything, or if the universe was just politely getting out of her way.
He didn’t make room. He offered her precisely what her effort earned—nothing more, nothing less. In his room, surrounded by the smell of old paper and the unsettling gaze of his lizard, she wasn’t the crown’s ultimate prodigy. She was just a student who had a bad habit of adding unnecessary buffers to her constructs.
It was the most clarifying thing she had ever experienced.
It was also, she admitted privately to her pillow, profoundly maddening.
Syla noticed on the third day of the second week.
She sat on the windowsill in the back of room 412 while Cidd—or Cael, as the academy records currently called him—graded foundational theory papers. Syla didn’t say anything for an hour. She simply watched the door, watching the specific rhythm with which Aria entered, worked, demanded corrections, and left.
She filed it away in her mind with her usual, silent precision.
Later that afternoon, while the halls were quiet between the fourth and fifth hour sessions, Syla leaned against the stone balustrade of the inner corridor, watching the students move through the quad below. Cidd stood beside her, a cup of bitter, hot tea resting in his hands.
"She’s good," he said softly.
"She’s exceptional," Syla corrected him, her voice low. "Technically speaking, at least. The construct work she’s been demonstrating since your first diagnostic... she’s compressed roughly a year’s worth of advanced practical evolution into fourteen days."
"She works," Cidd said, taking a sip of his tea. "Most people with her level of natural talent spend their lives building defenses against being proven wrong. When someone shows her a gap in her knowledge, she doesn’t defend the gap. She fills it."
Syla tilted her head, watching a group of third-years cross the grass below. "She is also," she said carefully, "the Princess of the Realm."
"I am aware."
"Which means," Syla continued, her tone shifting into the measured, analytical register she used when assessing political logistics, "that her technical development is not an isolated academic event. What happens with her in this building has immediate, heavy ripples in the High Council, the Military Command, and the Royal Household."
"I know."
"And she has spent every single day of the past two weeks in your office," Syla noted. "Including the hours reserved for second-year remedial diagnostics."
"I know."
Syla looked up at him. She stared at his calm, unbothered face—the face of a man who had seen empires rise and crumble into dust and could not bring himself to be overly concerned by the political administrative anxiety of a local monarchy.
"Father," she said softly.
"I am teaching her," he said, his voice flat and absolute. "She is learning. That is what an academy is for. That is all this is."
Syla looked at him for a long moment. She saw the absolute lack of pretense in his eyes, the total absence of political ambition, and the simple, terrifying clarity of a master craftsman who had found a piece of raw material worth shaping.
She understood what was happening. She also understood the massive, impending headache it was going to cause for the academy’s administrative board.
She decided not to say any of that.
"Alright," she said softly.
"Make your tea," he said.
"It’s already made," she replied.
They stood together in the quiet corridor, drinking their tea in silence as the second bell rang across the grounds.
The competition wasn’t a formal event.
Aria didn’t engage in formal competitions. Formal competitions had registration forms, panel judges, standardized scoring rubrics, and rules designed to make everyone feel included. Instead, she engineered situations that functioned as brutal, definitive contests without ever being officially declared as such.
The arena she chose was the third-year advanced assessment session on Friday afternoon.
It was an open-observation session held in the Great Practical Amphitheater—a massive, tiered stone chamber designed for high-yield magical demonstrations. The assessment faculty sat in the front rows with their ledger books, while upperclassmen and visiting scholars filled the high observation gallery.
Aria knew he would be there. She had personally verified his schedule.
She wanted him to see her perform at full capacity. Not in the small, controlled environment of room 412, where she was an eager student absorbing corrections, but in the open arena, where she was a weapon of incredible precision. The distinction was critical to her. She needed to prove—not to the academy, but to him—that the time he was spending on her was an investment in something real.
When Cidd walked into the high observation gallery and sat near the back, his plain grey robes blending into the shadows of the stone arches, she saw him immediately.
She stepped into the center of the sand pit.
The demonstration began.
It was, by any objective standard, extraordinary.
The work she had done over the past fourteen days was visible in every micro-adjustment of her technique. She didn’t just cast; she executed a flawless, three-stage dynamic spell-structure. The triple-elemental integration loop—the one that had previously required a clunky earth-mana buffer—appeared above her hands instantly.
The ratio was a perfect, unyielding 2.3 to 1.
The earth buffer was entirely gone. In its place was a razor-thin harmonic boundary that hummed with a terrifying, crystal-clear tone that echoed off the high stone walls of the amphitheater. The eighteen percent efficiency gain she had reclaimed was channeled directly into the output stage, swelling the construct’s density until the air in the pit visibly distorted under the heat and pressure.
Three of the senior assessment faculty leaned forward so fast they nearly dropped their quills. A low murmur ran through the observation gallery.
Aria held the construct for ten seconds—a display of pure, effortless containment—and then dissolved it in a single, perfectly clean pulse that left not a trace of residual smoke or heat in the air.
She stood in the quiet sand.
She didn’t look at the faculty panel. She didn’t look at the cheering third-years in the front rows. She raised her head and looked straight up into the high shadows of the gallery.
At him.
Cidd sat near the stone pillar. He watched her with the calm, measured expression of a craftsman inspecting a finished joint.
He caught her eye. He gave a single, firm nod.
Aria looked down at her hands. She looked at the smooth, undisturbed sand of the pit. She looked at the faculty members furiously scribbling high marks into their ledgers.
She felt something strange in her chest—something that wasn’t the familiar, hollow satisfaction of winning an easy contest. It was sharper than that. It was deep, heavy, and quiet. It was the specific, terrifying weight of having been seen clearly by someone whose standards were absolute, and having passed the test.
She filed the feeling away for later analysis.
She bowed politely to the panel and walked out of the pit.
He was standing in the outer corridor near the gallery arches when she came up the stairs.
She stopped three feet away from him, wiping a thin sheen of sweat from her forehead with the back of her sleeve. She swallowed, cleared her throat, and put her hands behind her back.
"Well?" she said.
"The ratio was right," he said. " The buffer is gone. The output is approximately where it should be for your current core capacity."
Aria caught the word instantly. "Approximately?"
"You’re pulling slightly on the water element during the final stage of the collapse," he said, his tone entirely dry. "It’s not enough to destabilize the matrix. It’s not enough to affect the output in a way anyone on that panel could measure. But it’s there. There’s room."
She stared at him. Then, despite herself, a small, dangerous smile touched the corner of her mouth.
"There’s always room," she said.
"Yes," Cidd said quietly. "That’s correct. That’s the one thing you understand that almost no one else in this building does."
Aria absorbed the sentence. It wasn’t praise in the way she was accustomed to receiving it—it wasn’t a flowery compliment designed to curry favor with her house. It was simply a fact. A direct observation of her mind.
She found it clarifying.
She also found it slightly maddening.
"My mother wants to meet you," Aria said, shifting her weight.
Cidd looked at her. "The Queen?"
"She summoned you," Aria said, pulling a small, thick piece of heavy vellum stamped with the crimson royal seal from her pocket and holding it out. "Officially. It came through the Headmaster’s office two hours ago. She heard about the new visiting faculty member her daughter refuses to stop talking about."
"You talk about me?" he asked.
"I talk about structural application theory," Aria corrected sharply, her cheeks flaring with a tiny, faint touch of color. "She extrapolates."
Cidd looked down at the royal seal. He didn’t take the parchment.
"When?"
"Tuesday," Aria said. "The Royal Palace. Second hour past midday." She paused, looking up at his face with a sudden, rare hesitation. "Will you come?"
"Yes," he said.
She blinked. "You agreed very quickly."
"I don’t have a reason not to," he said simply.
Aria stared at him for a moment with the expression of a tactician who had brought an entire siege engine to a wall, only to find the gate wide open and the guards offering tea. She didn’t quite know what to do with the total lack of friction.
"Tuesday, then," she said, composing herself.
"Tuesday."
The small slate-grey lizard shifted on his shoulder, its golden eyes fixing on her face with that same terrifying, unblinking intensity.
Aria pointed a finger at the creature. "What is it?" she asked. "Really. I’ve checked the beast-registers in the royal menagerie records. There is no species of mana-sensitive reptile that matches its scale structure or retinal luminescence."
"Later," Cidd said.
Aria threw her hands up. "Everyone in the advanced cohort says that’s what you say whenever anyone asks a direct question about your background!"
"They’re right," he said softly. "It is what I say."
She turned toward the heavy iron gates leading out to the main courtyard. She took three steps, stopped, and turned back to face him. Her posture was stiff, her chin pulled high, but her eyes held a small, raw sliver of vulnerability that she couldn’t quite mask.
"The sessions," she said, her voice dropping an octave. "After Tuesday... can I still come?"
Cidd looked at her. He took in the sharp, brilliant energy of her spirit—the pride, the ruthless ambition, and beneath all of it, the desperate, beautiful hunger of a mind that just wanted to know how the world was built.
"Yes," he said.
Aria nodded once. It was a sharp, definitive nod—the confirmation of a contract.
"Good," she said.
She turned and walked through the heavy gates, her silver-trimmed cloak snapping behind her in the afternoon wind.
Cidd stood by the stone archway, watching her until her figure vanished into the crowds of students filling the central avenue.
On his shoulder, Kuro turned his head, his golden eyes following her lingering mana trail through the air. The lizard let out a tiny, imperceptible huff of warm air that smelled faint of old ash, and its long, thin tail gave a single, slow flick against Cidd’s collar.
"Don’t," Cidd said quietly to the lizard.
Kuro looked forward, his gold eyes flattening into dull amber.
Cidd adjusted his plain robe, turned away from the courtyard, and began the long, quiet walk back to building three.