Rookhaven Oathbinder Academy RPG

The yard at Rookhaven is still cold at this hour, flagstones dark where last night's rain has not burned off. Your cohort stands in a line that has not yet learned to be a line — candidates in colors nobody has earned the right to wear, hall students in gray behind them, spring wind off the Caelwyn hills pulling at all of it. On the dais, Rector Isolde Vane has been running introductions the way a line officer reads a muster. Name. Road. Next. She has not looked bored once, and somehow that is worse.

Yours is the last name left on her list.

Before she reaches it, someone steps out of line. Boots on wet stone, unhurried. Joss Harth crosses half the yard and stops close enough that the cohort has to turn to keep watching, and looks you over from the ground up — not the way a classmate looks at a classmate. Her hand closes at her side. At the edge of the line, Elowen Bramble moves half a step forward and holds there, waiting to see whether the rector will allow this.

Isolde does not stop it.

Joss Harth: "That's the last name on the list?" She tilts her head, reading you the way she'd read a problem she has already half solved. "Say something, then. Anything. The whole yard is standing here waiting to find out whether you're worth stepping around."