Nadia Pratt

Instructor of Soul Theory, in the academy's western lecture hall.

Given name from the author's notes. Ch. 263 gives only "Instructor Pratt".

the particular precise, unhurried composure of someone who had never once needed to raise her voice to command a room's attention

The fragment theory

Ch. 263 is the saga's first academic account of where souls come from, and it lands directly on Act 1's cosmology without naming it. See ../lore/the-fragment-theory.md.

PRT: The oldest texts describe souls as fragments. Pieces broken from something larger, something that existed before the current shape of the world settled into place.

She is careful about what is known and what is not, three times.

FNN: What was the larger thing? PRT: Nobody knows. That's rather the point of calling it a fragment. You cannot examine the whole from a single piece, only infer its possible shape.

BRR: What determines the shape? PRT: Also unknown. Family lines show weak correlation at best, which contradicts simpler inheritance theories.

And the one thing she will state:

PRT: A soul ability is not learned. It is not earned. It is not, in any meaningful sense, chosen. It simply is, the way a fragment's shape simply is, fixed before the person carrying it ever draws breath.

She is watching Arthur

Twice in one lecture, and the second time she says something out loud.

She said the last part without looking directly at Arthur, though he felt the sentence land regardless.

Then, at the end:

her eyes moving briefly across the room, and this time, unmistakably, they paused on Arthur.

PRT: Which makes certain exceptions considerably more interesting to study than the rule itself.

She does not elaborate. Arthur is left "wondering, not for the first time, exactly how much Instructor Pratt already suspected".

Her statement that an ability "is not learned, it is not earned" is the direct opposite of what Master Hobbes told Arthur in ch. 252. Neither of them knows about the other. See ../systems/the-built-ability.md.