The History classroom was the same as he had left it the day before — small, low ceilinged, the walls lined with old maps and older texts behind glass, the desks arranged in the loose unhurried cluster of a room that had never been interested in performing authority. The afternoon light came through the narrow windows at a low angle and lit the dust in long stationary columns that nobody had found a reason to disturb.

  Diablo took a seat in the middle row. Not the back — the middle. In a room this small the back was too deliberate. He set his bag down, folded his hands on the desk, and waited.

  Students filtered in ones and twos. He did not look at them closely. He noted the room filling the way he noted most things — functionally, without investment. A handful of faces from tiers he hadn't interacted with. A Fairy who took a seat near the front with the particular settled quality of someone who had chosen this room the way you choose something you intend to take seriously. He noted her and moved on.

  The bell rang.

  The door opened.

  The Elf who walked in looked middle aged — which for an Elf communicated almost nothing about actual age, since middle aged could sit anywhere across a range of centuries. He was lean, unhurried, carrying nothing. No ledger, no satchel, no papers. He walked to the front of the room and stood there and looked at them with pale precise eyes that had the quality of something that had been looking at things for a very long time and had stopped being surprised by most of what it found.

  "Aldric," he said. Just the name. No title, no subject introduction, no explanation of what the class would cover or what he expected from them. Just the name, stated the way you state a fact that requires no elaboration.

  He let the silence sit for a moment. Then his eyes moved across the room and settled on a Dwarf in the second row — compact, broad shouldered, the particular density of someone whose race had been built for endurance rather than height.

  "You," Aldric said. "Name the seven races."

  The Dwarf straightened. Listed them — Humans, Dragonneds, Vampires, Fairies, Elves, Dwarfs, Beastmen — in the flat competent tone of someone reciting something learned rather than understood.

  "Their primary power types," Aldric said.

  The Dwarf went through them. Aura, Magic, the combinations, the distinctions. He was accurate. He was thorough. He delivered each answer with the reliability of someone who had prepared for exactly this kind of opening and was executing the preparation correctly.

  Aldric listened without expression. When the Dwarf finished he waited a beat — just one, the specific length of a pause that indicates the previous answer was acceptable but not the point — and then asked his next question.

  "Why these seven?"

  The Dwarf looked at him.

  "Why these seven races specifically," Aldric said, with the patience of someone who had asked this question before and was entirely prepared to wait for an answer that was worth hearing. "Of everything that has ever lived in this world, of every species and creature and thing that has drawn breath and sought food and competed for survival — why did these seven rise above all of it? Why did they build civilisations while the rest did not? What is the quality that separates them from everything below them?"

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  The room was very quiet.

  The Dwarf opened his mouth. Closed it. The expression on his face was the specific expression of someone who had prepared for the examination they expected and had just been handed a different one entirely. He looked at the desk. He looked at Aldric. He sat back down without speaking.

  Aldric did not react. He simply waited, the way something waits that has no particular relationship with urgency.

  Then the Fairy at the front of the room stood up.

  She was from Sovereign Hall — Diablo had clocked it the moment she walked in, something in the quality of how she carried herself, the particular ease of someone who had scored at the top of every measure available and had come to this unpopular elective anyway, for reasons that were entirely her own. She stood without hesitation and looked at Aldric with clear direct eyes.

  "You already know the answer," she said. Not a challenge. A statement. "So tell us."

  Aldric looked at her for a long moment with those pale ancient eyes. Then something happened to his face — not quite a smile, but the space where a smile lived in someone who had been waiting a very long time for exactly the right question to arrive in exactly the right room.

  "Because they were afraid," he said. "And greed, in its purest form, is not about taking — it is about becoming. Every race that clawed its way to the top was afraid of something, and that fear drove them to become something. Powerful, wise, feared — it does not matter what. The ones who failed simply never decided what they were afraid enough to become."

  He let it sit in the room the way he let everything sit — without helping it along, without explanation, without any indication that he considered his work done or that he was waiting for a reaction.

  Nobody spoke.

  "Most of our sessions will be conducted this way," he said, returning to his even tone as though the previous moment had been one item in a sequence rather than something significant. "Questions. Yours to me, mine to you, and occasionally the room's to itself. There are no correct answers in this class in the sense you are accustomed to. There are only answers that have been thought about and answers that have not."

  He looked at the room one final time.

  "I accepted each of you into this class for a reason," he said. "Not because of your tier, not because of your assessment result, not because of your race or your power type. For a reason specific to each of you. If you find that reason — genuinely find it, not guess at it — you will receive a completion mark for this class. That is the only criteria. There is no examination. There is no assignment. There is only the question, and whether you are willing to sit with it long enough to find an answer that is actually true."

  He picked up nothing because he had set nothing down.

  "Adjourned," he said, and walked out of the room.

  ───

  The corridor outside was quiet — older stone, lower light, the stillness of a part of the building most people had no reason to visit.

  Diablo walked through it alone.

  Why these seven.

  The question moved with him. Not loudly. Not urgently. Just present — the way certain things are present when they have decided they are not finished with you yet.

  He pushed through the eastern wing door into the open grounds. Cold air off the plateau. The faint ozone edge of aura that never fully left these stones. The academy rising behind him, the paths stretching ahead, the cloud line already swallowing the last of the afternoon light.

  He stopped.

  Not because he had arrived somewhere. Because something had shifted — quietly, without announcing itself — and the question had stopped being about seven races and their civilisations and had become something else entirely.

  What were you afraid enough to become.

  He stood there for a moment in the cold. Then he walked on.