Lita's letter drifted far from where it was meant to go.
She had written it carefully — the kind of careful that takes several drafts, where you keep crossing things out not because they're wrong but because they're not quite right yet. She had folded it neatly and sent it off with the quiet hope of someone who has said something honest and is waiting to find out what the world does with it.
The world, as it turned out, was unkind about it.
Wind and chance carried the letter far off its intended path, across unfamiliar roads and through distances it was never meant to travel, until it finally came to rest on the stone steps of a grand and severe building. The kind of place that had earned its weight through years of accumulated purpose — and that did not particularly welcome strangers.
The doormaid found it. She was a woman of economy — sharp eyes, few expressions, fewer words. She carried the letter inside without ceremony and delivered it to the headmaster's hands with the same detached efficiency she gave everything.
The headmaster opened the letter. She read it. And something shifted in her expression — not softening, but moving. There was amusement in it. The particular kind of amusement that arrives when you encounter something genuinely naive — something that still believes, fully and earnestly, that the world is navigable if you approach it correctly. Lita's hope seemed to entertain her. The sincerity of her words seemed to entertain her even more.
"This girl has no idea what she's stepping into," she murmured to herself.
She held the letter a moment longer, then passed it back to the maid without looking at her.
"Destroy it. She'll never know it reached here. It's not her place to receive a reply."
The maid walked to the fireplace. The letter went in without hesitation. The paper caught immediately — curling dark at the edges, the words blackening and breaking apart as the fire took them. In less time than it had taken Lita to write it, the letter was gone. Nothing left but ash.
The headmaster watched the fire for a moment longer than necessary. Her lips curved just slightly at the corner.
"A shame," she said to no one. "But her path isn't what she thinks it is. The world will break her if it has to."
She turned back to her other work. The letter left her mind as cleanly as the smoke left the chimney. Somewhere far away, Lita was still training, still preparing, still completely unaware that her words had reached the wrong hands and been reduced to nothing.
She didn't know. She kept moving.
The weeks continued to pass. Lita's days blurred together in the best possible way — the blur of someone who is working toward something and can feel themselves getting closer. Every morning, the courtyard. Every evening, the books. Every mistake catalogued, studied, and corrected.
She was becoming something. She could feel it in the way her body moved now — less hesitation, less space between intention and action. The hilt her mother had given her was rarely out of reach. She practiced with it until it stopped feeling like an object and started feeling like an extension of herself.
Her mother watched. Flare trained her. And underneath the surface of all of it, things moved that Lita couldn't see — conversations she hadn't been part of, letters she didn't know about, names spoken in rooms she'd never entered.
But none of that was hers to carry yet.
For now, all that mattered was this: Ardent Peak Academy was coming. And Lita de Valliere was going to be ready for it.
Or she was going to make herself ready.
Which, for her, amounted to the same thing.