The academy had a tradition for the day before the dungeon trial.
It was not an official tradition.
Nobody had written it into the student handbook or posted it on the lecture schedule.
It had simply accumulated over the years, the way certain habits accumulate in institutions repeated by enough people for enough seasons that it stopped requiring explanation and became instead the kind of thing that older students mentioned to newer ones at the end of October in a tone that said:
you'll understand.
The tradition was this: the day before the trial, you did not train.
You did everything else.
You ate.
You slept.
You talked to the people you cared about and checked your equipment one final time and then put it away because checking it a second time would mean you didn't trust yourself, which was worse than not checking at all.
But you did not train.
The senior students who had been through the trial the year before were unanimous about this.
