Their grind started with optimism, to say the very least.
For the first few days, the Hall of Petals still felt like a massive cathedral, sunlight laid across the mosaic spiral and students streaming through it in a current that never quite stopped. The eight of them built some small fortress walls of chairs, around the biggest table in the room, just so the books wouldn't fall. They weren't allowed to take more than a few books out of the Academy, by what Kori said – nobody wanted to know why.
Everyone sorted differently. Hikari stacked by subject, Lynea by thickness, Arashi by aesthetic for some reason, and Esen by how funny each title sounded out loud. Keahi claimed the thin, mean-looking manuals with no pictures. Feris took anything with scribbled margins, on the grounds that fate had clearly gathered all those little notes together specially for her. Ichiro simply kept setting down books nobody else had sorted or wanted yet — one, then another, then another.
