My Sister Is The Villainess

The inside of the Academy did not look like a school. It looked like something built to make a person feel very small.

The entrance hall alone could have swallowed the entire ground floor of Rhys Manor twice over, ceilings vaulting up into shadow, pillars thick as ancient trees marching off in rows toward a set of doors at the far end tall enough to admit a giant walking upright. Every footstep echoed. Every whisper carried further than it should have.

’Someone spent a great deal of money making first-years feel insignificant. Mission accomplished.’

The crowd thinned as ushers in Academy black split students off by year, first-years funneled toward the great doors while older students peeled away toward staircases and side corridors, already familiar with the place. Sera lingered a moment longer than she needed to, her hand closing briefly around my shoulder.

”You will be fine,” she said, low enough that only I heard it.

”I know.”

”You do not know. You are making the face.”

”I do not have a face.”

”You have had the face since we stepped out of the carriage.”

She almost smiled, the expression there and gone before Eliza pulled her toward the upper-year staircase, already talking about someone named Professor Voss and a scheduling conflict I did not have the context to care about.

Then she was gone, and it was just me, Arthur, and several hundred strangers moving toward the doors.

”She seems protective,” Arthur said.

”She is worse than my father, and my father once had a man escorted off the estate for looking at me wrong.”

”That sounds like an exaggeration.”

”It sounds like one. It is not.”

The great doors opened onto a hall that made the entrance look modest by comparison.

It was circular, domed, walls rising in tiers of dark stone seating like an amphitheater built for judgment rather than lectures. Faculty stood along the upper ring in Academy robes, watching the first-years file in with the specific, weighing patience of people who had seen this exact scene play out every year for decades and had long since stopped finding it interesting.

The floor itself held my attention and refused to let go.

A pentagram, vast and inverted, cut into the stone in lines that glowed a slow, pulsing purple, dark as a bruise and twice as unsettling. It was not painted. It was not inlaid metal catching torchlight. The color moved under the surface of the stone itself, breathing in a rhythm too slow and too even to be anything but deliberate.

’That is not ominous at all. Nothing says welcome to your new school like an inverted pentagram built into the floor.’

I filed the detail away without comment, the way I had learned to file most things, and joined the crowd settling into place around the edge of the ring.

A professor stepped forward near the center of the pentagram, older, silver at the temples, voice carrying easily across the domed hall without any visible effort.

”When your name is called, step to the center. Place your hand flat against the stone. Nothing more is required of you. The Array does the rest.” A pause, long enough to let the weight of the room settle further. ”Some of you will awaken a Core today. Some will not. Neither outcome reflects your worth, whatever anyone tells you afterward.”

’That last part sounded like it was aimed at someone specific. Probably several someones.’

Names began to call. Students walked forward one at a time, knelt, pressed a hand to the glowing lines, and waited.

The first seven produced nothing. No light, no shift in the air, no reaction from the Array beyond a faint pulse that faded as quickly as it came. Each of them stood afterward with the same carefully arranged expression, the one that tried very hard to look unbothered and failed in exactly the same way each time. A murmur followed each of them back into the crowd, not cruel, just present, the kind of quiet attention nobody actually wants.

’That is most people. Unawakened is not rare. It is normal. The novel made it feel rare because the novel only followed the interesting ones.’

The eighth name called was a thin, nervous-looking girl who knelt, pressed her palm down, and gasped as the purple lines beneath her hand flared into something closer to gold, warm light spreading up her arm like sunrise breaking over her skin. The professor’s tone did not change, but something in the crowd’s attention sharpened.

”Medical affinity. D-Rank Talent.”

A ripple of applause, restrained but genuine. The girl looked like she might faint from relief rather than exertion.

The ninth followed the same pattern, another flare of gold, another quiet announcement.

”Medical affinity. C-Rank Talent.”

Then the tenth name rang out across the hall.

”Arthur Eesper.”

Arthur exhaled through his nose, shot me a grin that did not entirely reach his eyes, and walked to the center of the pentagram like a man approaching a card table he was fairly sure he was about to lose money at. He knelt. He pressed his palm flat against the stone.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then green.

It came up through the lines like something growing rather than glowing, vines of pale emerald light threading outward from beneath his hand, curling and unfurling across the stone in patterns too deliberate to be random. Somewhere above us, I could have sworn I caught the faint, impossible scent of wet leaves and turned earth, gone as quickly as it arrived.

”Forest affinity.” The professor’s eyebrows rose fractionally, the closest thing to surprise I had seen from him all afternoon. ”C-Rank Talent.”

Arthur returned to my side looking somewhere between stunned and thrilled. ”I grow plants,” he said, in the tone of a man still working out whether that was impressive or mildly ridiculous.

”You grow plants,” I agreed.

”I do not know how to feel about that.”

”Feel proud. You could have been unawakened. Instead you are a very polite houseplant.”

”I hate you.”

I laughed, and for one moment I almost forgot where I was standing, almost forgot the weight still pressing faintly against the edges of the hall, almost forgot the name I knew was coming next.

”Edmund Rhys.”