The three-day deadline became a two-day vigil, then a one-day silent countdown. The Academy, oblivious, thrummed with a different tension—the mundane anxiety of impending exams, the flurry of students finishing papers on "Architectural Evolution," and the scattered gossip about which lucky nobles might get to observe the Imperial Geomancers at work. The Old Wing stood quiet behind its newly erected silk ropes and polished brass "Restricted" signs, a sleeping beast everyone pretended was simply a dusty museum.
I moved through those final days with a surreal calm. My secret preparations were complete. All that remained was the waiting. I attended lectures, ate my meals, and performed the ghostly pantomime of Lady Rosalind Thorne with an automaton's precision. My mind was not on magical theory or history. It was tuned to a different frequency—listening, through the soles of my boots and the core of my being, for the first note of the dirge.
