They did not walk far, as even from there, they could see the academy's entrance that rose on one side of the street, almost like a second city, filled with black towers, dark glass, and banners that glowed along with the red sky.
Directly opposite, close enough that the two gates seemed to be arguing over the same stretch of stone, sat a house large enough to be called a mansion.
It was beautiful.
Not academy-beautiful.
The academy won on size and on the expensive darkness: obsidian arches, carved bone-metal rails, windows like slits in a fortress.
The mansion competed anyway.
A pale kind of crimson stone, high balconies, a courtyard of black-leafed trees arranged too carefully to be wild. Moon-sigils worked into the gates, smaller than the academy's banners and somehow more... expensive-looking.
A Crimson Moon residence planted at the academy's door, as if the family had decided proximity was a kind of claim.
The princess did not explain it.
