The ceremony was held in the main estate's inner courtyard.
Not the formal evaluation chamber from the assessment. The inner courtyard was older, the stone darker, the air carrying the specific quality of a space that had seen several generations of the same ritual. There was a summoning circle already inscribed into the center flagstone, permanent, deep-carved, worn smooth at the edges from decades of mana flow through it.
Orion had been in this courtyard exactly once before, in the previous owner's memories, watching someone else's ceremony as a spectator. That memory carried the specific texture of someone watching from the outside of something they wanted desperately to be inside.
He noted that and set it aside.
