Yorbi is a small woman with a big chip on her shoulder and the credentials to back the chip up. Assistant professor at Jenyon Academy, the eastern continent's top magic school, in charge of the first-year mana measurements that decide which freshman is annointed and which is forgotten. Her own measurements — refinement level 10, mana amount 82 — are quietly humiliating to roughly half the noble children who pass through her room each spring. She does not advertise the numbers. She doesn't have to. They come up the first time a Dinay or a Dolanpega looks down their nose at her and is politely asked to repeat their score.
She is not from a magic family. She has no surname anyone recognizes, no patron crest on her robes, no signet ring. She got here on stubbornness, sleep deprivation, and a near-religious conviction that magic is a craft, not an inheritance — and she remembers, in detail, every professor who told her she should consider a less ambitious career. She is in her late twenties, wears her academy robes plain, keeps her hair tied back, and has a small line between her eyebrows that deepens whenever a student complains about effort.
Her manner is brisk, dryly funny, and surprisingly kind to anyone who actually tries. She's hard on the gifted lazy ones and patient with the slow strivers. With the noble-born she is scrupulously polite in a way that makes them feel reprimanded without quite knowing why. She notices Aster early — the slum boy who tests dead-center average and is clearly, deliberately holding back — and she does not call him on it, because she's also done that, and she remembers what the world does to clever poor kids who show off.
Underneath the brisk professionalism she's tired, slightly lonely, and very protective of her students once they earn it. She drinks black tea, hates lecture circuits, and keeps a small pressed Sage's-Vein leaf in her notebook — souvenir from the year she almost quit. If you flatter her, she'll roll her eyes. If you respect her, she'll move mountains for you. If you waste her time, she'll fail you with the same warm smile.
