Chapter 106: The Academy Gates
The Academy of Ashenveil occupied the northeastern quadrant of the Scholar’s Ward — a compound of seven buildings arranged around a central courtyard, connected by covered walkways and surrounded by a wall that was decorative rather than defensive. The wall bore the Academy’s motto in carved Common script:
From the forge of ignorance, the steel of understanding.
Ryn had been a student for four months. Long enough to stop being awed by the architecture. Not long enough to stop being awed by the people inside it.
The Academy had six hundred students. Ages ranged from fourteen to twenty-five, drawn from every province, every race, and — nominally — every social class. In practice, the composition was stratified: noble house children in the upper tracks, merchant-class children in the middle, and commoners like Ryn filling the lower tracks through a combination of provincial scholarship, examination placement, and the occasional Academy dean who believed that talent was more interesting than lineage.
Dean Yveth was one of those deans.
She was a Kobold. Sixty-three years old, barely four feet tall, wearing reading spectacles that made her eyes look twice their actual size and carrying a teaching staff that was taller than she was. She had been Dean of the Academy for eighteen years and had spent every one of those years in a state of controlled fury at the institution she loved and the limitations she couldn’t overcome.
"You’re in my Advanced History seminar," she said, when Ryn reported for his fourth-month evaluation. Her office was on the top floor of the Academy’s central tower — a room filled with books, papers, half-eaten meals, and the particular organized chaos of a mind that was thinking about too many things simultaneously. "Your examination scores are adequate. Your essays are—"
She paused. The pause lasted three seconds, which in Dean Yveth’s conversational cadence was an eternity.
"—surprisingly good."
"Thank you, Dean."
"It wasn’t a compliment. It was a diagnostic. Students from the Northern Reach typically score in the bottom third on written work. Your literacy foundation is weak — your grammar is provincial, your vocabulary is limited, and your sentence structure occasionally reads like Growltongue translated into Common by someone who learned Common from a merchant manual."
Ryn’s face heated.
"But your analytical capacity is in the top ten percent. You see patterns. You connect events across timelines. Your essay on the Second Demeterra War identified a supply chain failure that most military historians didn’t recognize until thirty years after the fact." She removed her spectacles. Without them, her eyes were small and sharp — the eyes of a Kobold who had survived six decades in an academic institution by being smarter than everyone who outranked her. "So. You have a raw mind and a bad education. The first I can’t give you. The second I can fix."
"Fix how?"
"Remedial literacy with Scholar Dreven. Three sessions per week. Additionally, I’m moving you from the general history track to the Scriptist elective."
"The Scriptist elective is for—"
"Noble children and high-examination scorers. Yes. You’re neither. But the elective teaches primary source analysis, archival methodology, and critical thinking at a level the general track doesn’t reach. And you need it." She tapped her teaching staff on the floor — a Kobold emphasis gesture that startled Ryn every time. "The Academy exists to produce competent citizens, Ryn. Not privileged ones. Competence requires training. Training requires access. I’m giving you access. And if you do well —" She paused. "The Scriptist elective feeds into specialized tracks. Ministerial service. Intelligence. And the Warden Academy’s theoretical division, which requires archival methodology certification before admission. Not that I’m suggesting anything. I’m merely noting that doors open in sequence, and the key to the next one is usually hidden behind the first."
***
The Scriptist elective met in the Academy’s west wing — a building that had been a Scriptist chapel before the Academy absorbed it, and that still carried the architectural signature of Orrythas’s religious tradition: arched windows designed to maximize reading light, carved bookshelves built into the walls, and a floor mosaic depicting an open book with text flowing from its pages like water from a spring.
The instructor was a Scriptist priest. Not a scholar — a priest. The distinction mattered: scholars studied knowledge, priests served it, with the particular devotion that only a religious order could maintain. Father Voss was Human, middle-aged, thin in the way of men who forgot to eat because eating interrupted reading, and possessed of a voice that could make a tax document sound like scripture.
"Primary sources," Voss said, setting a stack of documents on each student’s desk. "The kingdom runs on secondary narratives — histories, chronicles, religious texts, political speeches. Secondary narratives tell you what happened. Primary sources tell you why it happened — and more importantly, who wanted it to happen and what they left out."
Twelve students. Eight Human, two Lizardman, one Minotaur, one Ryn. The noble children wore their house signets openly — rings on fingers, pins on collars, the small tokens of hereditary identity that said I belong here by blood. Ryn wore a provincial scholarship badge that said I belong here because someone decided I was interesting enough to fund.
The document on his desk was a military report. Dated Year 83 AF. Written by a commander named Gorthan — the original Gorthan, the Gnoll scout who had mapped the northern frontier and whose descendant house now guarded it.
"This is Gorthan’s after-action report from the Battle of Shattered Creek," Voss said. "A skirmish in the northern expansion — forty soldiers against a band of Beastmen raiders. The official history records it as a decisive victory. Thirty enemy killed, minimal friendly casualties."
Voss paused. The pause of a teacher who was about to demolish something.
"Read the report. Tell me what the official history missed."
Ryn read. The language was old — pre-standardized Common, before the Academy had formalized grammar and spelling — but the content was clear. Gorthan’s writing was blunt, direct, a soldier’s prose stripped of decoration.
Engaged raiders at creek crossing, third bell. Force composition: 40 mixed (23 Lizardman, 11 Kobold, 6 Gnoll). Enemy force estimated 50-60 Beastmen, type unknown, armed with stone and bone. Engaged in skirmish formation. Pushed enemy to creek. Enemy withdrew after approximately 30 casualties.
My assessment: this was not a raiding party. This was a scouting group. Equipment was wrong for raiding — no loot bags, no pack animals, no provisions for a return journey. They were mapping. Someone sent them to map our expansion corridor.
I have not included this assessment in the formal report because the formal report goes to the administrative council, which is civilian. Civilians do not need to know that something is watching us expand and taking notes. I am sending this assessment separately, to the military command, by sealed courier.
Something is watching. I don’t know what. But it’s not Beastmen. Beastmen don’t map.
Ryn looked up. The room was quiet.
"The official history recorded a victory," Voss said. "What did the primary source record?"
"A warning," Ryn said.
"Exactly. A warning that was separated from the official record, sent through a different channel, and preserved in the military archive rather than the public history. The historians who wrote the chronicles never saw this document. They wrote what they were given — a skirmish report showing a clean win. The truth — that something was scouting the kingdom’s expansion — was classified."
"Was the warning investigated?"
"It was. By Gorthan himself, over the following three years. He eventually identified the source of the scouting parties as an agent of Demeterra — the goddess who would, fifty years later, launch the first war against the kingdom." Voss let the silence hold. "The First Demeterra War was not a surprise. It was predicted. By a Gnoll scout who noticed that stone-age beastmen don’t make maps."
Voss moved to a second document — thinner, written in a different hand, the ink faded to brown.
"And here — a companion source. Written by a different Gorthan. The minotaur Warden. Same name, different man, different role. This Gorthan’s report is from Year 89 AF — six years after the scout’s warning. He writes: ’The Hydra has changed behavior. For three weeks, it has oriented all three heads southeast. It tracks something I cannot see. I believe the creature senses a divine presence beyond our borders. If the scout’s warning is accurate — if something is watching us — the Hydra is watching it back.’" Voss closed the document. "A Gnoll scout detected the threat through military observation. A minotaur Warden detected it through a divine creature’s behavior. Two primary sources. Two warning systems. The kingdom’s security has always been layered — mortal eyes and divine eyes, working in parallel."
Ryn looked at the document in his hands. One hundred and sixty-eight years old. Written by a man whose great-granddaughter now commanded the Frostmarch frontier. A warning that had been right and that had been hidden and that had shaped a kingdom’s military posture for two centuries.
Primary sources tell you who wanted it to happen and what they left out.
He was beginning to understand why Dean Yveth had put him in this class.
***
After the seminar, Thresh was waiting in the courtyard.
The Kobold had his own class schedule — a specialized engineering track that Ryn understood roughly as "how to build things underground without them collapsing" — and the two had developed the habit of meeting between sessions to compare notes and eat the Academy’s terrible bread.
"Scriptist elective," Thresh said, chewing. "How was it?"
"I read a classified military report from a hundred and sixty-eight years ago that predicted the First Demeterra War."
Thresh stopped chewing. "Good class, then."
"The Academy has classified documents?"
"The Academy is the kingdom’s educational arm. The educational arm has access to the historical archive. The historical archive contains everything — classified, unclassified, sealed, unsealed. The difference is who gets to see what." Thresh swallowed. "In the Athenaeum, we have the Deep Archive. House Myrvalis’s library. It contains documents that the Academy doesn’t know exist and the Crucible would rather didn’t."
"Like what?"
"Like the original transcripts of the first three Papal Conclaves. The unedited census reports from the demographic transition period — when Humans first exceeded Lizardmen in population. The sealed correspondence between the first King and the Crucible regarding the scope of royal versus religious authority. The complete Warden behavioral logs — not the sanitized copies in the Ministry archive, but the originals, including the entries that the Gorvaxis family withheld from public record." Thresh’s amber eyes gleamed. "The Deep Archive has Gorthan’s personal journal. Not the bond-log — the journal. The one where he writes about what the Hydra said to him through the bond. Things the Warden Academy has never published because they raise uncomfortable questions about creature intelligence." He paused. "Knowledge, Ryn. It’s not a weapon because it kills. It’s a weapon because it changes what you’re capable of deciding. A king who knows the real census numbers makes different decisions than a king who knows the published ones. A scholar who reads the unedited creature journals asks different questions than one who reads the Academy’s curriculum."
"Are the published ones wrong?"
"Not wrong. Curated. The published census reports are accurate on population totals. They’re less detailed on demographic breakdown by race, economic class, and geographic distribution. The details that would make the Founders’ Question louder are present in the full reports but absent from the summaries that reach the public."
Ryn thought about the carved words on Sarvek Tarvond’s plinth. *Founders not owners.* A slogan that someone had chiseled in anger. The full demographic data would have made the argument more precise — and precision, in political debates, was more dangerous than anger.
"Who curates the census?"
"The Ministry of Scrolls publishes. The Ministry of Whispers advises on what to omit. The Crown approves the final version." Thresh paused. "The Sovereign is aware of all of it. Every number. Every omission. Every decision about what the public sees and what it doesn’t. He *could* make the full data public. He chooses not to."
"Why?"
"Because full transparency in a kingdom with racial tension and demographic anxiety would produce the exact argument that happened in the courtyard yesterday — except instead of twenty students shouting at each other, it would be a hundred thousand citizens reading numbers that confirm their worst fears." Thresh finished his bread. "Information is a resource. Like iron. Like stonesteel. Like faith. The Sovereign manages it the way he manages everything — strategically."
Ryn sat in the courtyard of the institution that was supposed to teach him everything and thought about the things it was designed to leave out.
Knowledge forged is knowledge kept.
The Academy’s motto. He’d read it on the first day and thought it meant preservation. Now he wondered if it meant something else entirely.
Kept from whom?