Adriano opened his eyes.He was sixteen, from a village forty minutes outside the city by carriage, the kind of village where nobody's family had ever produced a mage worth mentioning and everyone had been very specific about reminding him of this when he left for the tower assessment three weeks ago. He had sat in front of this tablet for the better part of an hour with everything he had and he had felt it working, felt the comprehension building in layers the way his instructor had described, and when he opened his eyes the tablet in front of him was gold.Gold.Forty-two percent. The number sat in his vision clean and certain, and the gold color on the tablet's surface was real and present and catching the tower's light the way gold catches all light, announcing itself.By any framework he had studied, this was extraordinary. This marked him as someone with a clear path to Rank B, someone the major institutions would want to develop, someone whose name would move through the tower'

The couch accepted him without complaint.Dante dropped onto it with the specific relief of someone whose body had been making a case for horizontal for several hours and had finally won the argument. The ceiling of the inn room was plain and unremarkable and he looked at it with genuine appreciation.Eva was at the small table with tea and a plate of biscuits, looking rested in the particular way of someone who had slept without interruption for the first time in a week. She looked at him over the rim of her cup."You look terrible," she said."Magic Tower," he said. "Long morning.""What happened?"He told her. The tablets, the Grand Mages arriving, the offers, the shattering. He kept it brief and factual the way he kept most things, and Eva listened with the focused attention she gave information she understood was important."The River of Dragon's Tears," she said, when he finished. "That's what they're offering.""Tomorrow. Same time.""And the tournament." She set her cup down.

The guards bowed before he reached the door.Both of them, simultaneously, with the coordinated urgency of people who had spent yesterday evening thinking about their choices and had arrived at conclusions. Dante walked past them without breaking stride and said nothing, because the moment had already made its own point.The space distortion met him inside the entrance and he stepped through it and arrived in Atlantis's office, where the morning light came through the east-facing glass in long flat lines and the papers on the long table had been moved aside to make room for two cups of tea.Atlantis was standing at the window with his hands folded behind his back, looking at the city below with the expression of someone who had looked at the same view for long enough that it had stopped being a view and become something more like thinking space.He turned when Dante arrived."Good morning," he said, and meant it in the uncomplicated way of someone who was genuinely glad to be here."M

"I have a question as well."The voice came before Eleonora could move anything forward, and it had the quality of something that had been sharpened specifically for this moment.The girl standing second from the left had dark hair cut bluntly at the jaw and the kind of stillness that belongs to someone who has been angry for a long time and learned to keep it at a temperature they could control. She was looking at Dante with cold, direct eyes that had already decided something and were checking whether the evidence agreed."Annalisa," Eleonora said."Headmistress." Annalisa's voice was respectful in the technical sense and nothing else. "The written exam to qualify for this slot covered six months of advanced spiritual theory. The oral component was conducted by two senior mages." She kept her eyes on Dante. "I ranked fourth out of sixty-three candidates. The three students ranked above me are standing in this group." She paused. "Who is this person. What exam did he pass. What test

The palace materialized around him the way things materialized in dreams, all at once, fully formed, no edges to catch.Western architecture. High ceilings and stone floors and the kind of light that came through tall windows in the late afternoon, going gold across everything it touched. Dante looked down at his own chest and found the military uniform there, medals on the left breast, the fabric crisp in the way of something that had been maintained with care. His hands were older than they were now. His body carried weight differently. He knew where he was before he identified a single piece of furniture.His previous life. The palace. The last day of it that had mattered.Rohan was sitting at a chessboard.Short black hair, glasses, his own uniform with its own decorations. He had the posture of someone who had been waiting long enough that waiting had stopped feeling like anything. When he looked up at Dante his expression didn't change. It never had, not in the way other faces c