The heart of Aetherbridge's reason for being. Riverbridge District occupies the central crossing of the city, arranged around the Grand Athenaeum — the university that gives the city its identity and much of its tension. The campus is a small city within the city: lecture halls, libraries, laboratories, and green quadrangles where students walk with the studied ease of the institutionally fortunate.
This is where Aetherbridge's young elite are made, and where its fractures are most visible. Fraternity row lines a single street of grand old houses, their porches the site of parties, initiations, and — as the scandals have revealed — crueler rituals that the institution has been slow to examine. Students here are acutely aware that they are being sorted, ranked, and selected for futures, and the competition is quietly ruthless beneath the academic courtesy. Its signature detail is the Great Reading Hall's clock: its chimes mark the hours for the whole district, a metronome of ambition under which the city's most promising young people either rise or are crushed.