The dining pavilion was loud in the specific way it always was on Fridays, half the Academy trying to finish a week's worth of unfinished conversations before the weekend scattered everyone back to their own villas.
Vane and Nyx had claimed a corner table near the tall windows, mostly because Nyx liked watching the courtyard from it and Vane had stopped questioning her seating preferences somewhere around the second year. She was picking at a plate of something involving too much saffron for his taste, unbothered, half-listening to the general roar of the room the way she always did — not because any of it mattered to her, but because listening to everything at once was simply how her mind preferred to sit.
