Location:Obsidian Academy — Qin's office, then the grounds
Date/Time:Mid Sparkfall, 9941 AZI
Realm:Lower Realm
Qin's office smelled of tea and old paper and the dry warmth of a room that had been lived in by the same person for so long that the walls had absorbed his habits. Scrolls lined the shelves in an organization system that was chaotic and was, Jayde suspected, indexed in a way that only Qin understood — filed not by subject or date but by some internal logic that mapped to the headmaster's private mental architecture. The morning light came through the narrow window at an angle that put Qin's desk in a stripe of gold and left his visitors in shadow. This was not an accident. Qin did nothing by accident.
He sat behind the desk with his tea — the same chipped cup he'd been using since before Jayde enrolled — and his pale gray eyes settled on her with the patient weight of centuries spent evaluating the distance between what students said and what they meant.
