By noon the grand arena of Mythos Academy was full to the roofline.
Students from six academies filled the lower stands. Above them sat staff, guild scouts, nobles, broadcasters with their crystal recorders, and higher still, behind glass, the private boxes where the most powerful people in the world had come to watch twenty teenagers walk into a crown. The weight of all that attention came down on the arena floor like heat, and the twenty of us stood in it, in two rows, waiting.
Vice Headmaster Valerie von Lampez stood on a raised platform at the north end. Her voice carried to every seat in the arena and, through the recorders, to screens across the world.
"Distinguished guests," she said. "Representatives of the continental powers. Students of our allied academies. And everyone watching, wherever you are. Welcome to the last day of the Inter-Academy Festival."
