A World from Heavenly Music
Hallowmoon Academy
Created by Arla Jones
Hallowmoon Academy stood high in the mountains, built into a shelf of pale stone beneath the great Spire whose unfinished crystal crown could be seen for leagues across the valleys below.
From a distance, it looked almost delicate. Slender towers rose from the mountainside beneath steep slate roofs, connected by covered bridges and narrow arched walkways. Pale stone walls caught the morning sun and turned nearly silver beneath the moon. Tall windows filled the music halls, while the upper observatories were enclosed in old, imperfect glass so the scholars of the Choir Astral could watch the stars without leaving the warmth of the towers.
Up close, Hallowmoon was not one building, but dozens gathered around a series of courtyards and terraces. There were dormitory wings for students and visiting musicians, practice halls built with vaulted ceilings to carry sound, classrooms crowded with maps and old instruments, libraries extending deep into the mountain, and workshops where instrument makers worked with star-metal, silverwood, crystal, and ordinary maple and ash.
The oldest sections had been carved directly into the mountain. Their corridors were narrow and uneven, their walls worn smooth by centuries of hands. Newer wings had grown around them until Hallowmoon had become a maze of staircases, cloisters, towers, hidden passages, and doors that seemed to lead somewhere different depending on which staircase one had taken to reach them.
Music was everywhere.
Someone was always practicing.
Violins sang behind closed doors. Harps sounded from the western classrooms. Choir voices drifted through the stone corridors in scales and harmonies. Bells marked lessons, meals, Council sessions, and changes of watch. Even after midnight, Wella sometimes heard a single instrument somewhere far away, repeating the same troublesome passage until its player finally got it right.
The entire Academy seemed built around sound.
The great practice halls had curved walls designed to return a musician's own notes to them. Smaller training rooms were lined with dark wood that absorbed resonance so completely that playing inside one felt strangely private. The Hall of Harmonics contained tuning forks, resonance bowls, old stringed instruments, and devices Wella could not name, all used to teach students how ordinary sound differed from the deeper resonance of starblood.
Then there was the Choir Astral. Its scholars occupied the highest academic chambers beneath the Spire. There, enormous brass instruments tracked the Great Veil through vibrations, celestial motion, and shifts in magical resonance. Their rooms smelled of lamp oil, old paper, warm metal, and chalk dust. Charts of the Veil covered the walls alongside star maps so old that some showed constellations Wella could no longer find in the sky.
Below them lay the archives. Those were Brother Armir's kingdom. Official histories filled the upper rooms: Nightingale records, Hymn transcriptions, Council proceedings, genealogies of known starblood families, maps of old breaches, and reports from Lumenguard patrols.
The deeper archives were another matter. They occupied rooms carved into the mountain long before the present Academy existed. The air there was dry and cold, and iron gates protected some shelves. Older documents were kept in sealed cabinets or wrapped in linen because careless handling could reduce centuries of history to dust.
Hallowmoon possessed a remarkable number of rules concerning who was allowed to read what.
The Lumenguard occupied the northern side of the Academy.
Their world was very different from the musicians'. Training yards had been cut into the mountainside behind high stone walls. Students learned swordsmanship, climbing, wilderness survival, breach containment, and the unpleasant business of killing wound-things that made it through the Veil. Their quarters were plain, their meals early, and their mornings apparently designed by people who held a personal grudge against sleep.
Most Lumenguard could hear enough of the Veil to recognize a breach but possessed little or no usable starblood. Most Choir musicians could work with magical resonance but had never held a sword.
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