The Ledger Beneath the Floor

The first hour of Neris’s arrival at Valdyr Academy

After a disastrous training spell, Neris is ordered into a sealed chamber beneath Valdyr with Odran as her escort and Sella waiting outside. A damaged rune tablet speaks in the voice of dead graduate Aven Rusk and reveals that Valdyr measures students by harvestable soul-energy; Neris finds her own name marked unsuitable, while her supposedly weak magic can erase the tablet’s runes. She hides a shard and demands that the other failures reveal how they survive.