Soren's first breath sent frost plume curling from his lips, the exhale white against the unlit courtyard.

The campus lamps burned two blocks west, but this far up the old battlements the only light was false-dawn gray, thin as a blade.

He pivoted on the stone, feeling the grain beneath threadbare sandals. Every step scored by fifty generations of other restless initiates, desperate, hopeful, bored stiff as statues waiting for first bell.

His sword scraped the air.

Not the practice blade issued by the armory, with its clubbed tip and splintered handle, but his own, Refraction, an absurdly fine piece to risk even for shadow drills. He kept it wrapped in winecloth out of habit, only pulling it free when he was sure the walls were empty.

Containment of Remnant or not, the last thing he needed was Cassian or a ranking Blade snooping around and reporting "talent above station." Fifty students cycled through that label every term, most breaking on the shoals of Master Dane or the quieter, more dangerous Veyra.

He moved the blade through the sequence again. Edge, guard, pivot; three-count pause to shadow the incoming strike. He could almost feel the ghost weight of a rival's weapon against his own.

The shard's cold rhythm kept time at his heart, each pulse aligning cadence with breath.

"You refine the surface, but the edge beneath still trembles."

Valenna's voice, coil-smooth and impartial, rustled through his skull on the long part of the backswing.

Soren corrected, spine straightening, elbow tucked even as the old instinct to overcommit tried to reassert itself.

Second pass, faster, wrists absorbing more recoil, the blade's geometry slicing arcs so neat they seemed to redirect the morning air itself.

He listened for the micro-errors, the slip in the hilt or disguised hesitation right before an improvised parry. If there was a flaw, it would wear the mask of perfection until the moment it wasn't.

He was not, by nature, a perfectionist. In the Veiled Hand, flaw was oxygen, a thing to be traded, hidden, or sold. Here, flaw was simply public, and public in Aetherion meant dangerous.

He repeated the form until the sky pinked at the horizon and the wind changed, carrying with it the smell of soapy water and burnt oats from the lower kitchens. Someone was on cleaning shift. Good.

The staff never paid attention unless blood was involved, and even then, they wrote it up as "enthusiasm during peer review."

He finished the sequence, sheathed the sword, and breathed in the minute of stillness before the world resumed.

'Glass on the surface, sand below,' Valenna chimed, not quite praise.

He preferred this version of her: deliberate, instructional, the Pale Oath distilled to technical critique. Still, the warning lingered in the undertone. The edge beneath, the thing not quite hidden.

Within ten minutes the courtyard filled with a clutch of first-year trainees, all in the hated blue uniform, shuffling and muttering against the chill. Soren drifted toward the low wall, unremarkable again, Coren Vale in public. Not the first to arrive, but never among the last.

The bells tolled: tiered, endless, each one requiring some mandatory motion.

Instructor Thale assembled the cohort on the wide green, his own uniform immaculate and, Soren privately suspected, thickly padded against the wind. He was a tall, slope-shouldered man with a nose sharp as a hawk's beak and forearms that could snap a short sword with a twist. His voice cut through the morning fugue with the efficiency of a first incision.

"Rhythm drills. Reaction under strain. Pairs to my left, group work to the right. Scribes form up on the benches, the rest of you with blades draw and reset."

They sorted out by ranking, everyone knowing precisely where they stood thanks to the public scoreboards posted inside the armory. Soren's name, for the first time, had shifted two tiers upward. No comment or applause, just a raised eyebrow from his assigned sparring partner.

Seren Avelle, again. She moved like a contained argument: all harmony until pressure was applied, then a sudden change in tenor.

By unspoken agreement they started slow, establishing the new rhythm; by the tenth sequence, the pattern escalated until each parry or counterstrike felt like a debate carried out in the hissing scrape of wood against wood.

Soren's goal was never to win these rounds. It was to see how long he could draw out the exchange, keep a partner engaged until either the instructor interrupted or they broke posture from exhaustion.

Today, though, Seren never faltered. She had a new crease above her left eyebrow, the sort of scar that healed ugly and permanent. He wondered who had put it there.

"Hold," Thale called, voice unchanged whether addressing error or excellence.

Soren and Seren reset; he let her claim the momentum, falling into second position and responding only in kind. In the background, he heard Cassian's voice, but not the full sentence, just a clipped "again" and the sound of a training axe finding its mark.

The instructor made his rounds, pausing just behind Soren's shoulder. "Better," he announced for Seren's benefit, "but your transitions hang on breath. Breathe through, never at the strike." Then, lower: "You, Vale, don't anticipate. You predict."

Soren offered the minimum nod. Thale's assessments, while rarely inaccurate, always left something obvious unsaid.

From the edge of the green, Master Dane watched without participating. His arms were folded across his chest, mouth set in its usual near-scowl, but he tracked the progress of each pair with the omnivorous attention of a cat watching a roomful of mice.

Soren glanced up once and caught the Swordmaster's eye; it was like looking into a crevasse that ran bottomless below the surface.

Dane did not intervene, but Soren knew he would be summoned before week's end for another 'corrective.' It was how the man worked: never directly, always through layers of expectation and silent demand.

Drills finished, they were herded to the refectory for a half-portion meal and then into the eastern lecture halls for tactics. The noise died at the threshold, replaced by the dry, relentless syllables of Professor Ohn.

This morning the lesson was drawn from a campaign two centuries old, the futile siege of Lathrim Heights, a disaster memorialized in every textbook and every joke about "tunnel vision."

Professor Ohn gestured to the sparkling blue diagram floating above her desk, fingers tracing patterns as if inscribing runes onto invisible glass. "Review the West Flank scenario," she called, and the room quickly subdivided into teams.

Soren's group consisted of Seren Avelle, again, no surprise, and two upperclassmen from the Silver cohort: Rhysten, a tall, almost spectral youth who wore his academic badge twice as prominently as his actual blade; and Mara, whose flat voice had already killed six suggestions before Ohn finished arranging the teams.

The scenario: breach the Heights with minimal loss and disrupt the enemy lines before sunset.

They argued for five minutes over whether to reinforce the embankment or attempt a direct charge. Soren listened, watched the pieces slide across the board.

The markers themselves were small, weighted brass, tokens for squad, cavalry, supply corps. He reset the board twice in his head before nudging a unit in silent demonstration.

He moved a tiny squad marker to a spot where the defenders' angle of sight overlapped two supply lines, exposing a dead zone in the Flank that would neuter the opponent's reserves with half the bloodshed. Seren got it immediately. Mara pretended not to notice, but Rhysten's face twisted as though he'd tasted a sour fruit.

"That's just standard doctrine," Mara said.

Soren shook his head. "Not that century."

For the first time, the group looked at him as if he actually existed, not as 'the first-year anomaly', but as a participant. The debate recentered.

By the session's end, Professor Ohn walked the perimeter and gave each team a two-word evaluation. "Elegant fix," she said to their group, raising one eyebrow in a way that might, in another universe, have been a smile.

As he gathered his slate, Ohn's gaze fixed on Soren and didn't budge. "War rewards precision, but it worships perception," she told the class in general, but her eyes stuck on him long enough to leave a mark.

He filed out, mind already halfway to the library. The rest of the day was mandatory study, back-to-back with instructor-mandated rest. Which no one, not even the instructors, seriously enforced.

Outside, the city had brightened to its noon heat, the lawns full of initiates in various states of collapse or lazy conversation.

Soren sat under the arms of an ancient, gnarled birch and watched shadows shift in real-time down the quad. He kept Refraction hidden beneath tunic and notes, fingers tracing the spiral pattern along its hilt, each loop warm from the touch of the shard.

He let his vision go soft. In the wavering heat, the world distended itself, boundaries slipping. He thought of the drill that morning, the way Thale's voice bent intention out of air, or the way Seren's parry felt like a question he couldn't yet answer.

'You are not the edge. Not yet.'

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.