Maris was easy to spot. He had the look of someone who had been the most impressive person in every room he had entered before this one and was currently recalibrating to a larger room. Good looking in an aggressive sort of way, the kind of features that worked best when he was smiling confidently and worked considerably less well when he was not. He had summoned a mid-tier warrior class knight at the ceremony, solid and respectable, and he had taken his applause like it was owed to him.
He clocked me early in the session and I watched him decide something from across the courtyard.
Here it comes, I thought.
He came over during the water break between the running segment and the forms review. Walked with the specific casualness of someone who had rehearsed the approach to look unrehearsed. Two other students trailed slightly behind him, the junior member formation of someone who had already started collecting social satellites.
"Dravenmoor," he said. Friendly enough on the surface. "That was something at the ceremony yesterday."
"It was a ceremony," I said, which was technically true and also the most deflating possible response to his opening.
He recalibrated smoothly. "An Ancient Class summon at sixteen. That is not something you see every year." He smiled. "Or ever, apparently."
"The Sovereign Mark has its uses," I said.
He looked over at Seraphine at the perimeter. She was looking back at us with the patient attention of someone who had heard this conversation begin and was waiting to see where it went.
"She is interesting," Maris said. "Vampire type?"
"Ancient vampiric lineage, yes."
"Powerful," he said. "Of course, raw power is only part of it at the academy level. Control and precision matter more than most people think."
There it was. The point of the approach. Acknowledge the impressive thing, redirect toward a metric where the impressive thing is less relevant, imply that his own position on that metric is superior. It was well executed for sixteen honestly.
I looked at him with the Caelum Dravenmoor resting expression, which did a lot of work for me in moments like this, and said: "You are right that control matters. I agree completely."
He blinked. He had been expecting pushback or dismissal.
"The first month of integration exercises is going to be useful for everyone regardless of summon class," I continued pleasantly. "I expect we will all learn something. How is your bond with your knight coming along?"
He spent a moment deciding how to respond to being asked about himself instead of continuing the angle he had set up.
"Strong," he said. "We have been working together since the preliminary bonding stage. He is well integrated."
"That is a genuine advantage," I said. And I meant it. Early integration work was actually valuable and he had done it, which was more than many noble sons bothered with. "You should do well in the practical assessments."
Maris looked at me for a moment with an expression that had not quite decided what it was.
Then the instructors called the session back and he moved off with his satellites in tow.
I drained the rest of my water and set the cup down.
From the perimeter Seraphine caught my eye briefly. Her expression was unreadable but something in it was adjacent to amusement.
The forms segment was straightforward. Basic combat stances adapted for summoners who needed to be functional fighters independent of their summons, because a summoner who could only fight through their bound entity was a vulnerability waiting to be exploited. Instructor Brev walked through the sequence twice and then had us run it.
I had Caelum’s muscle memory to work with, which helped. The body knew the basic forms already. What it did not know was the more efficient version I was working toward, the adjustments that would matter in three months when the first real combat assessments came around. I ran the standard sequence correctly and kept the refinements in my head for solo practice.
Then Brev said: "Summon integration warm-up. Anyone with a summon present, basic resonance exercise. I want to see connection stability, not output. Nobody is demonstrating power today."
Students called their summons. The courtyard filled with the various energies of different entities, a hawk, a fire spirit, two warrior types, a creature class that looked like a large cat made of grey smoke. Ordinary first year work.
I looked at Seraphine.
She walked from the perimeter to my side with her usual unhurried grace and stopped at my shoulder.
"Basic resonance," I said quietly. "Connection only. Nothing dramatic."
"I am familiar with resonance exercises," she said, which was probably fair given that she had been doing this since before the academy existed.
Resonance was the practice of opening the mental channel between summoner and summon without pushing power through it. Like opening a door and standing in the doorway without walking through. The purpose was to calibrate the connection, to make sure the bond was clear and responsive without straining either party.
I opened the channel.
It was not like the summoning circle. There was no explosion of light, no dramatic pressure. It was quiet and immediate and much larger than I expected. The channel to Seraphine was not a door. It was something closer to stepping outside and realizing the sky was bigger than you had been accounting for.
She was old. The age of her came through the connection not as data but as presence, the way standing next to a mountain feels different from standing next to a hill even if you cannot see either of them. Centuries of accumulated being pressed gently against my awareness from the other side of the channel.
And underneath all of that, pointed directly at me with the clarity of a held note, something warm and certain and completely undiluted.
I closed the channel after twenty seconds.
Brev walked the line of students and stopped in front of me. He looked between me and Seraphine for a moment. "Stable," he said. "Good."
He moved on.
Seraphine said nothing. But the warmth from the channel did not quite leave the air around her for a few minutes afterward.
The midday academic block was theory work. Summoning history, bond mechanics, the legal framework governing summoner conduct in the kingdom. I sat in the second row and listened and said nothing unless called on. Unremarkable. Intentionally so. The first days of class were for observing who the instructor responded to, who asked questions for understanding versus who asked questions for visibility, and where the natural information gaps were in the curriculum that I could use later.
The afternoon open practice session was where things got more interesting.
Open practice meant students could use the training grounds freely for whatever development work they wanted. Most of the first years clustered in groups. A few of the more serious ones worked solo. I took one of the outer sections away from the main cluster and started working on basic fusion exercises with Seraphine.