Darkness, when imposed upon a room already filled with expectation, possessed a peculiar authority.
For several breaths after the doors closed, the Rotunda Salon surrendered every distinction it had so carefully displayed beneath the lamps. Noble silk and common cloth became equally invisible. Crests vanished from lapels. The balconies disappeared above them, taking professors, officials, and whatever hidden observers occupied those seats into the same blackness that had swallowed the students below. Even the great architecture around them seemed to withdraw, leaving nearly fifty young men and women standing inside a darkness spacious enough that the echoes of their breathing offered the only reliable measure of distance.
Toven's whispered revision concerning mysterious smells earned neither laughter nor rebuke.
Perhaps everyone had become too aware of their own breathing.
Then something moved beneath their feet.
It began too faintly to call sound.
