Forty-seven people in this room. Three of them knew his name. Two of those were administrators who'd spelled it wrong.
Orrin Pryce stood in the back row of the Awakening Hall with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders doing that thing they did. The curling-forward thing. Not a slouch. Just the posture of someone who'd gotten good at taking up less space than he was.
The hall was a converted grain warehouse. Everyone in Ashen Ford knew that. The ceiling was high enough that birds nested in the beams and nobody bothered clearing them out because the town had bigger problems.
The stone circle sat in the center of the floor, permanently stained with faded blue rings from thousands of awakenings. Old light. Old decisions. The stains pulsed. Slow, rhythmic, like a heartbeat that belonged to the building and had nothing to do with the people inside it.
The air smelled like old stone and ozone. The ozone was the System's residue. It clung to the platform the way cooking grease clings to a kitchen wall. You didn't notice it until you were close enough to taste it on the back of your tongue. Sharp and metallic.
"Delworth, Sanne."
The girl in the second row walked to the platform. She'd been crying earlier. Quiet tears, the kind that just happen without the face doing anything to help. She placed her hand on the array and the blue stains flared and a white notification appeared above her head.
Common. Civilian Support.
Her face didn't change. Like she'd already done the math on this before she got out of bed. She walked off the platform and sat on one of the benches along the wall and put her hands in her lap and that was that.
Nobody said anything. Common was common.
A boy three rows up elbowed his friend. "See? White. That's what happens if you don't train."
"She trained more than you did," the friend said.
"She trained wrong."
"You can't train wrong for an awakening. It's random."
"It's not random. My dad says..."
"Your dad got Rare because he bribed the registrar in Millhaven and everyone knows it."
That shut him up. Orrin filed the conversation away. Not because it mattered. Because filing things away was what his brain did when the rest of him was trying not to think about the fact that four percent of the people who stepped onto that platform walked off with nothing.
Four percent. Roughly two people in this room. Statistically.
That number had been sitting in his gut for three weeks. Like something he swallowed wrong and his body just decided to keep.
"Think I'll get Swordsman," the boy next to him said. His boots had been squeaking against the stone floor for ten minutes straight. He shifted his weight again. Squeak. "My uncle got Swordsman."
"Your uncle got Militia Guard," the girl on his other side said without looking at him. "That's not Swordsman."
"It's basically the same."
"It is not basically the same. At all."
Orrin didn't join in. He was counting exits. Two. Main door behind him. Service entrance on the east wall propped open with a brick. The cold came through the gap. April in Ashen Ford was still cold enough to stiffen his fingers inside his pockets.
The Hum was louder than usual today.
Everyone who grew up near the Veil heard it. The low vibration that came through the ground and settled in your back teeth. You learned to ignore it the way you learned to ignore the mineral taste in the water. But today the Hum had a weight to it. A pressure behind the ears. The bleeds had been heavy last night. Red wisps threading through the barrier until dawn. The adults were tense about it. The teenagers pretended the awakenings were what made them nervous instead.
"Gosse, Fen."
A lanky kid near the middle row practically bounced to the platform. He put his hand on the array like he was shaking someone's hand. White. Common. Elemental Caster. He grinned anyway. Looked around like he knew Common wasn't a grinning occasion and decided he didn't care. Walked off still grinning.
Nan had told Orrin not to worry. "You'll get something, Rin. Everyone gets something." She'd said it from her chair by the window. The one with the cushion she kept meaning to replace. Her breathing had that whistle at the end of each exhale again. The one she pretended wasn't there.
He hadn't asked about the breathing. She hadn't asked why he'd been up since four. They had an understanding that worked because neither of them pushed on it.
Lisel's letter was in his back pocket. Come find me at Thornspire. I'll be waiting. Three years old now. He'd read it enough times that the paper was going soft at the folds. She'd written it before he existed in this body. Before Nan spent two months nursing a boy who woke up and wasn't quite right in ways she couldn't name but stopped asking about.
He needed a class. Any class. Anything above Common would qualify him for Thornspire's entrance exam. That was the plan. The whole plan. Get a class, get to the academy, find the sister who wrote him letters that were meant for someone else.
Simple. As long as he wasn't one of the two.
More names. More colors. Blues, mostly. A couple Whites. The squeaky-boots boy got Rare. Elemental Striker. He pumped his fist and then looked embarrassed about it. The girl next to him got Rare too. Shield Bearer. She nodded like she'd expected better but would take it.
Then his name.
"Pryce, Orrin."
Wrong pronunciation. The R too hard, the second syllable swallowed. He didn't correct it. Hadn't corrected anyone in two years because the name wasn't really his and correcting people felt like stacking lies.
He walked to the platform. Forty-six pairs of eyes tracked him for half a second and went back to their own problems. Nobody watched the quiet one from the back row longer than they had to.
Good.
The stone was cold through his boots. The blue stains hummed under his feet. Not the Veil kind of hum. Smaller. Closer. Like standing on top of something that was only pretending to be off.
"Hand on the array, please." The administrator didn't look up from her ledger. Her pen kept moving. Her posture said she'd be done by lunch.
He placed his hand on the stone. Cold. Smooth. The kind of smooth that comes from thousands of palms on the same spot until the texture just gives up.
Something moved.
Not in the room. Under his skin. In a place he didn't have a name for because two years in this body hadn't taught him all of its rooms. It started in his palm where it touched the stone. Traveled up his arm. Not pain exactly. Something else. A cramp that decided to migrate. It settled in his chest and opened there. Like a fist unclenching. One that had been closed longer than he'd been alive.
The blue stains under his feet pulsed faster.
He knew the colors. Everyone did. White for Common. Blue for Rare. Purple for Epic. Those were the options. The entire menu.
The notification appeared in gold.
Not white. Not blue. Not purple. Gold. A color that had no entry in any chart. A translucent panel hovering in the air above his head, but wrong. The standard System display was clean. Digital. This looked like parchment. The text wasn't typed. It was pressed into the surface. Stamped. Like a seal on something that had been waiting a very long time to be opened.
Two words.
Sanctum Warden.
The hall went quiet. Not the gradual kind where conversations wind down. The instant kind, where forty-seven people stop breathing at the same time because none of them recognize what they're looking at.
The administrator's pen stopped.
"What," she said. Not a question. Her brain hadn't caught up to her mouth yet.
"I don't know," Orrin said.
More text appeared below the class name. Smaller. Still gold.
Class Grade: Sealed.
Not Common. Not Rare. Not anything. Sealed. As if the System had looked at the question of where to rank what it had just given him and decided the answer wasn't available.
The administrator reached for her communication crystal. Her hand shook. Not a lot. Enough that the crystal clinked against the ring on her index finger when she picked it up.
"Has anyone here seen gold before?" she asked the room.
Silence. Then not.
"What's Sanctum Warden?"
"Is that a summoner class? Summoner text is blue..."
"That's gold, Cass. Are you..."
"What does sealed mean?"
"My dad says there used to be..."
"Your dad doesn't know. Nobody does."
The voices came in layers. Overlapping. Forty-six people discovering at the same time that they didn't know what they were looking at and not handling it quietly.
Orrin stood on the platform with gold light on his face. The notification hung in the air above him, catching the weak light from the high windows and throwing it back brighter than it had any right to be. The blue stains had stopped pulsing. They were steady now. Constant. Like the building had remembered something it had been trying to forget.
He touched his sternum through his shirt. The mark. The one that had been there since the day he woke up in a body that wasn't supposed to be his. It was warm.
It had never been warm before.
Somewhere in the back of his head, in the part that still thought in schematics and load-bearing calculations from a life that was over, a voice said: this is going to be a problem.
Forty-seven people in this room. Every single one of them looking at him now.
He liked it better before.