1st of Ignvar, 251 AF — Festival of Flame
The city woke early.
Ryn had been in Ashenveil for seventy-eight days. Long enough to find his dormitory in the Scholar's Ward. Long enough to learn that the Academy's entrance examination was harder than anything he'd imagined — not because the questions were obscure, but because the baseline assumption was that applicants could already read, write, and perform arithmetic at a level that Coldhollow's trade-ledger education hadn't prepared him for. He'd passed. Barely. The examiner — a Scriptist scholar with spectacles and a expression that suggested she'd been grading papers since the dawn of time — had written "CONDITIONAL ADMIT" on his form in red ink and told him he'd need to complete remedial literacy within the first term or forfeit his seat.
