Location:Obsidian Academy — The Old Armory, Base of the Mountain
Date/Time:6 Ashwhisper, 9942 AZI
Realm:Lower Realm
The armory sounded like work before it looked like anything.
Somebody was hammering at the far end in a rhythm too even to be repair, and under that ran the hiss of a quench trough and the flat slap of bolts of cloth being thrown down on a bench, and somewhere behind both of those a woman was arguing about thread count in a dialect Jayde could follow about two words in three. The room had been a storage hall for sixty years. It had six forges in it, four of them cold, and the two that were lit had made the whole space warm enough that Bai Shu had taken her outer robe off within a minute of coming through the door and had then not known what to do with it.
Meifen had walked straight to the lit forge and stood in front of it without saying anything, and had stayed there.
"You can stop pretending you came for the meeting," Jayde said.
