"Ahhh~"
Ashworth sighed, settling deeper into the chair with a boneless, unhurried capitulation he had spent the last thousand years perfecting into an art — the art of sitting down — and had finally decided tonight was the night to demonstrate his complete and utter mastery of the discipline, because if the universe insisted on being this tedious, one might as well excel at the small things before it remembered to kill you.
The academy was uncommonly quiet.
Unlike most evenings — when the corridors thrummed with the residual chaos of a thousand richest families kids and Legacy children with the hundreds of Immediates who treated the institution as a combination of battlefield, catwalk, and social experiment in how many creative ways one could ruin a rich kid family before break — tonight, Ashford Elite Academy existed in a state of near-sepulchral stillness that felt less like peace and more like the entire campus was holding its breath, waiting for the screaming to start.
