On the first morning of the Inter-Academy Festival, six hundred second-years sat in the Grand Amphitheater and pretended not to be looking at each other.
It was the oldest building on the Mythos grounds, a great bowl of pale stone cut into the hillside below the main campus, with rows that climbed so steeply the back benches looked down at the stage like a cliff looks down at the sea. Old enchantments were worked into the stone itself. Whoever stood on the stage could be heard in the very last row, and whoever sat in the last row could see the speaker's face as if they were ten feet away, which was why Mythos had chosen it for the opening. Above us the morning was cold and very blue. The banners of the six academies hung from poles along the rim: black and crimson, white and gold, red, silver, green, cobalt.
