Three weeks passed.
The festival ended.
The faction representatives went back to wherever faction representatives went when they weren't being humiliating to academy students in public arenas.
The bracket boards came down.
The competition documentation got filed somewhere administrative and stopped being anyone's immediate problem.
Life returned to its normal shape.
Or as normal as things got around here.
And right at this moment, I was sitting on the edge of the academy's courtyard fountain with a cup of coffee.
Kael was sitting beside me, explaining something.
He had been explaining it for approximately twelve minutes, and I had understood roughly the first two of them, after which the explanation had taken a turn I couldn't fully follow and had stopped trying to.
"—and THAT'S why the secondary ranking system for divine artifact appraisal is completely and fundamentally broken at its core," he finished, with the energy of someone landing a point they were satisfied with.
