The lesser residencewere at the far southwest corner of the campus. As for why they were called the lesser residence…
“Because anyone below the noble and royal castes are considered… lesser,” Myel explained.
“If elves are royal, who’s considered noble?” I asked.
“Dwarves, sylphim, undines, oh… and dragons.”
I choked on my next breath. Most of those words I’d never heard, but… “Dragons? There are dragon’s here?”
Myel chuckled. “You’ve already met one.”
“I have? Who? Where?”
“One of Princess Saldrea’s guards is a dragon: big guy, silver hair.”
Oh, the one who’d offered tobeat some sense into me. If I’d known he was a dragon I might not have sassed him as much. No, who was I kidding. I was born to piss off the wrong people.
I wondered if all dragons were ass-hats.
Sexy, brooding ass-hats.
“He looked human,” I murmured.
“Most beings here do, most of the time. It’s easiest.”
I was clearly going to need a full rundown of all the beings and how to tell them apart. But not now. I was exhausted.
An exceptionally tall and well-built man with greenish skin came out of the dorms we were passing. Yet another wonderous being.
Myel must have seen my startled look. “Troll.”
Oh good, trolls, yeah. Dragons and trolls just strolling around. I could handle this. Then I remembered the tall woman pushing the mail cart, she’d had a similar look.
Trolls… tall with gray-green skin. Got it.
Pixies were colorful. Easy.
Dragons, big and scary. Stay away from them.
And elves were assholes.
I was getting the hang of this.
“Here we are,” Myel said indicating a long hall. The dorms we’d just passed — which Myel had said were the nobles’ residence — had looked more like large houses. The larger building before me was more like what I’d heard college residences were like: big and boxy with students crammed inside.
And I say boxy, but the large building was still stunningly beautiful in its design. Nature didn’t seem to be as baked into these buildings as some others, but the stone walls still held faint carvings of trees and much of the stone was covered with climbing vines. Everything was old too, which gave it an “ivy league” sort of feel.
“How long has the school been here?” I asked as we circled the complex of halls which made up the lesser residence looking for my building.
“A few thousand years, I don’t know exactly.”
Yeah, just a fewthousandyears. And I’d thought learning American history had been bad.
My building was at the back of the complex, to the south.
“Oh!” I gasped as I looked past my dorm to where the land fell away. The glimmering waves of an ocean lay beyond. “Beautiful.”
“Yeah,” Myel said with a soft sigh.
