Location:Obsidian Academy — Great Hall
Date/Time: 1 Frostforge, 9941 AZI
Realm:Lower Realm
The girl at the table next to Jayde was writing a letter.
She'd been writing it for twenty minutes. Not composing — writing. The words coming too fast for composition, the brush moving across the paper in the rhythm of someone who'd been carrying these sentences for weeks and was only now setting them free. She was Grade 5. Twenty-nine. Dark hair tied back. Hands steady — steadier than her breathing, which caught every few lines in the hitch of someone who was not going to cry because crying would smudge the ink, and the ink needed to be legible because this letter might be the last thing she ever wrote.
