Angol
Rin Solace is ranked ninety-eighth. The rankings are lying.
In the empire of the Mandarinate, magic is measured, scored, and ranked - and your number is your destiny. A charcoal-burner's daughter from the soot-stained province of Ashfen, Rin has spent four years and every coin her family owns preparing for the Phoenix Examination, the trial that turns the empire's most gifted young mages into its ruling class. She arrives ranked dead last. Ninety-eighth out of ninety-eight.
But Rin reads systems the way she once read her father's kilns - by where the heat leaks. And the deeper she's pulled into the marble halls of the capital, the more she sees what no one is supposed to see: the rankings are tuned. For two hundred years, the examiners have quietly rigged the results, grading provincial talent down and dynasty bloodlines up, all in the name of "stability." The Phoenix spirit that supposedly judges every candidate's soul hasn't rendered an honest verdict in two centuries.
Paired by the examination's ancient Randomizer with Lord Cassian Veil - ranked first, everything she is not - Rin has one impossible chance to prove the whole system is a lie. But the people who built that lie have buried provinces to protect it. And they have a word for what they do to anything that threatens the order: decommission.
To expose the truth, Rin will have to beat a game designed for her to lose - and decide what she owes a system that was never going to let her win.
A standalone YA fantasy about class, talent, and the cost of a rigged game, for readers who like their magic systems clever and their underdogs sharp. No explicit content.
