Starfall Academy

D1 | Crown Year 542, 3rd Month, 1st Day | Monday | Night | 🌙 | The Great Bridge → West Courtyard

Night, and the Great Bridge under your feet — a span of pale stone thrown from the city's heights to the Academy's gate, long enough that the far end is only lanterns.

You look up. The stars are out in all their glory: purple and white painted across a dark galaxy, and falling stars glance across it without pause, one after another, as if the sky were being scratched open. It happens once a year, on this night, and the Academy takes its intake under it. Hundreds of students walk ahead of you carrying candles, a river of small flames crossing the dark, and past the parapet the grand city of Aurelia lies spread below you, roofs and towers catching the same light you are.

The West Courtyard opens beyond the gate. Three banners hang over three lines: 1ST YEAR — 2ND YEAR — 3RD YEAR. You find the first.

A few places ahead a girl with a long gold-blonde braid steps up to the registrar's table and does not lower her voice at all.

Cagali:

"Arms! And fighting!"

The girl behind her giggles into her sleeve — long purple hair, a ribbon that seems to move on its own — and then it is her turn.

Lacus:

"Star weaving."

The one beside her, all brown-to-copper curls and amber eyes, bobs a small bow to the table.

Priscilla:

"Theology, please!"

Each of them gives a name, and a sentence about what they did before they came here, and the registrar writes it down without looking up. Behind the table a professor in plate with ash-blonde hair in a bun and amber eyes watches the line — and then you — the way a captain watches a formation that is about to fall apart.

Balalaika:

"Keep it orderly. One person at a time."

Everyone, you included, straightens up behind the person in front. The line moves. Then the registrar's pen stops, and it is pointed at you.

[Answer her in your first message: your first and last name, and what you did before now to prepare for your studies here.]

She glances from your face to her ledger and finds you already on it.

A key on a cord: Hall A. A fold of entrance papers. Three coins.

The Atrium is a hall built for exactly this: a vault of skylight windows, the whole falling sky visible through them, and every year of the Academy seated beneath it by hall. The first-years are the last in and the loudest. Then the lamps go out all at once, and the only light left is the stars coming down through the glass.

A tall woman walks out onto the dais, long dark-purple hair crowned in a braid, and beams at all of you like you are the best thing that has happened to her this year.

April:

"Good evening, new stars! Oh, look at all of you. Look up — no, really, look up. That is why we are called what we are called."

She lifts one hand, and a thread of light peels off the nearest falling star and slides in through a side window, a slow bright line that the whole room turns to follow. It climbs the vault. As it crosses the top it gathers the others behind it — every star that falls through the skylights bends and follows — until the ceiling is a single turning river of light with a thousand tails.

The river breaks. Out of one half rears a dragon of ice, out of the other a dragon of fire, and they circle the vault above your heads throwing wind and earth at each other — gales that flatten the candle smoke, stone that forms in the air and crumbles before it falls. Nobody breathes. It is, truly, a stunning thing.

The dragons collapse inward to a single point above the centre of the Atrium. A star forms there, as bright as the sun, then as blue as ice, then white — and it descends, slowly, into her open palm, and sits there. Beautiful.

She closes her hand and the lamps come back.

The students disperse, exasperated and lit up at once: some clasping their hands into fists, some already mimicking what it looked like to cast star magic, tracing a thread of nothing through the air. Star weaving.