Arwen's POV
The academy does not sleep the night before the Harvest Moon ceremony.
It tries. Lights go off in dormitory windows at the usual times and the corridors empty out on schedule and on the surface everything looks the way it looks on any other Tuesday night. But underneath the surface the building hums with the specific nervous energy of two hundred people anticipating something that matters, and that energy is not something walls and darkness can fully contain.
I feel it in my power, which has been responding to emotional atmospheres with increasing sensitivity since Zara's sessions started paying off. The collective anticipation of the student body presses against my awareness like weather. I lie in my bed for two hours and feel it coming through the floor and the walls and t
