(Menssai — Training Grounds)
The courtyard behind the castle had seen better days.
It was functional rather than maintained — stone floor worn smooth from decades of use, the surrounding walls carrying the particular weathering of a place that had been through something and hadn't been fully restored since.
Scorch marks along the eastern wall from training sessions that had gotten out of hand. Cracks in the stone that nobody had gotten around to filling.
It suited the work being done in it.
Kolpa stood at the courtyard's edge with his arms folded, watching.
In the center of the floor, Tazz stood with his hands raised and his jaw set and the expression of someone who had been doing the same thing for long enough that frustration had moved past its loud phase and settled into something quieter and more dangerous.
Mist gathered between his palms.
Not immediately. Not cleanly. It accumulated in fits — building for three seconds, dissipating, rebuilding, thicker this time, then thinning again at the edges where his concentration wavered.
He held it.
Five seconds.
Eight.
Twelve.
Then it collapsed.
He exhaled sharply through his nose.
Kolpa said nothing.
Tazz reset his stance and raised his hands again.
"Soul Casting—" The words came with effort. Not the incantation itself — that had become automatic after the first three days. The effort was in what came after. "— Fog Veil."
The mist returned.
Thicker this time. It spread outward from his palms in a low rolling layer, moving across the courtyard floor with the particular heaviness of real fog rather than the thin suggestion of it he had been producing in the first days.
It reached the far wall before the edges began to fray.
Kolpa watched it.
Tazz held it for twenty seconds.
Then his legs shifted slightly — the small involuntary adjustment of someone whose body was telling them the energy expenditure was approaching a limit.
The fog thinned.
He released it deliberately rather than letting it collapse — which was new. Three days ago he had no control over how it ended. It simply fell apart when he ran out of whatever was sustaining it.
Now he could choose the ending, which was its own kind of progress even if it didn't look like much from the outside.
He lowered his hands.
Breathed.
Kolpa unfolded his arms and walked forward slowly.
He moved through the dissipating fog without acknowledging it — the way someone walks through weather.
"Better," he said.
Tazz looked at him.
"Better," he repeated flatly. "That's all you have."
"Would you prefer I lied to you?" Kolpa asked pleasantly.
Tazz said nothing.
Kolpa crouched and pressed two fingers against the courtyard floor where the fog had been densest. The stone was faintly damp.
"Real moisture," he said. "Not just the appearance of it. You're pulling actual water content from the air now rather than just manipulating the visual effect." He stood. "Last week you couldn't do that."
Tazz absorbed this without letting it show on his face.
"The range is still limited," Kolpa continued, walking a slow circle around him in the way that Tazz had learned meant assessment rather than performance. "And you're burning through your reserves too quickly. Twenty seconds of sustained fog at that density shouldn't cost you what it's currently costing you."
"Then teach me how to make it cost less," Tazz said.
"I am teaching you," Kolpa said. "You're simply at the stage where teaching looks like doing the same thing repeatedly until your body learns what your mind already understands."
Tazz's jaw tightened.
"That's an elegant way of saying I have to keep failing."
"Failing is a strong word for what you're doing," Kolpa said. "You produced consistent fog for twenty seconds and chose when to release it." He tilted his head slightly. "A week ago you couldn't produce anything for the first three days. I've seen people take a month to get where you are now."
A pause.
"Though I've also seen people get further in a week," he added pleasantly.
Tazz looked at him.
Kolpa smiled.
"Reset," he said. "Again."
Tazz exhaled slowly.
Raised his hands.
"Soul Casting — Fog Veil."
The mist gathered.
⸻
They went for another hour.
By the end of it the fog was coming faster — the gap between incantation and result narrowing session by session in the way that physical training narrowed the gap between intention and movement.
The body learning. The pathway between will and ability wearing itself smooth with repetition.
But the cost was visible.
Tazz was breathing harder than the physical exertion warranted.
A slight pallor beneath the effort. The particular look of someone running on the last portion of something that had been full at the start.
Kolpa called a stop without ceremony.
"Sit."
Tazz didn't argue.
He sat on the courtyard floor without looking for a better option — the kind of sit that said the legs had been consulted and had voted for immediately.
Kolpa stood over him, reading the state of him with the clinical attention of someone who had trained many people and knew exactly what this particular kind of exhaustion meant and how long it took to pass.
"You're depleting your soul energy reserves too aggressively," he said. "You're pushing output when you should be managing flow."
"There's a difference?" Tazz asked, between breaths.
"Significant difference." Kolpa crouched to eye level — which he rarely did, and which Tazz had learned meant what followed was worth listening to. "Output is how much you release at once. Flow is how efficiently you release it. You're currently pouring water from a bucket. What you need to learn is how to turn a tap."
Tazz looked at him.
"I don't control taps," he said. "I'm a prince."
"You were a prince," Kolpa said.
The words landed the same way they always landed when Kolpa said them.
Clean. Precise. Without malice and without mercy.
Tazz looked at the courtyard floor.
"You were a prince," Kolpa repeated, quieter this time. "Here you are a student. And students learn how to turn taps." He stood. "Rest for thirty minutes. Then we go again."
He walked back toward the wall.
Tazz sat in the dissipating remnants of his own fog.
His hands were resting on his knees — still. Steadier than they had been an hour ago when the frustration was fresh.
He thought about Erica.
About how she had always made everything look effortless — the blade, the command, the way she walked into rooms and immediately owned them without trying.
His entire life she had been three steps ahead of him in everything that mattered.
He thought about the Corpse Prince, Jericho.
Standing beside his father.
Standing where Tazz should be standing.
He looked at his hands.
The faint moisture still clinging to his palms from the fog.
His ability.
His.
Not inherited. Not given. Not borrowed from a bloodline or a title or a father's favor.
Earned.
One exhausting session at a time.
He closed his hands slowly.
Opened them.
"Soul Casting," he said quietly to himself. Barely audible. Not a training attempt. Just — the words. Grounding himself in them. "Fog Veil."
A thin tendril of mist curled from his palm.
Small. Weak. The dregs of a depleted reserve.
But there.
He looked at it.
And for the first time since arriving in Menssai — since the forest floor, since the failed coup, since the morning everything burned —
Something in his expression that wasn't grief or rage or wounded pride settled into its place alongside them.
Resolve.
Quiet. Personal. Not performed for anyone.
Just his.
Kolpa, from across the courtyard, observed it without appearing to.
And smiled to himself.
{There it is}, he thought.
{That's what we needed.}
⸻
(Kingdom of Vevaria — The Royal Court)
Sevik Oran was not a man who panicked.
He had survived seventeen years in the Vevarian court by being precisely the kind of person nobody looked at twice — competent enough to be useful, unremarkable enough to be overlooked, careful enough to never be caught standing too close to anything that might later be investigated.
He had built that reputation deliberately.
And he intended to protect it.
But Nass was back.
That changed things.
He had spent two days after her return doing nothing — which was itself a calculated decision.
Moving immediately would have looked exactly like what it was.
So he waited. Watched. Let the court absorb her presence and settle back into its rhythms before he did anything at all.
On the third day he requested a private meeting with Ciran Vol.
⸻
Ciran Vol's private office was exactly what you would expect from a man who had held his position for twenty years without ever drawing the wrong kind of attention. Tasteful. Organized.
Nothing in it that couldn't be explained simply and innocently if someone looked.
He was perhaps fifty. Sharp featured. The kind of face that gave very little away because it had been trained over decades to give very little away.
He received Sevik without surprise — which meant he had already heard about Nass's return and had been expecting someone to come to him about it.
He gestured to the chair across from his desk without standing.
Sevik sat.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Which was its own kind of language between men who had learned to be careful.
"She's back," Sevik said finally.
"I'm aware," Ciran said.
"Val Deka brought her in personally," Sevik continued. "Full reinstatement. The king received her privately before the formal return to court."
Ciran's expression didn't change.
But his eyes sharpened slightly.
"The king received her privately," he repeated.
"Yes."
A pause.
Ciran looked at the surface of his desk briefly.
"How long were they in that chamber," he asked.
"Over an hour," Sevik said.
Another pause. Longer this time.
Sevik watched him carefully. Ciran was processing — running the same calculations Sevik had been running for three days, arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusions.
A private audience of that length wasn't courtesy.
It was strategy.
"She knows something," Sevik said quietly.
"She always knew something," Ciran replied. "That was never the problem."
"The problem," Sevik said, "is that she's now inside the court with the king's ear and Val Deka's backing. Whatever she knows — whatever she's been gathering since she left — she now has a platform to act on it."
Ciran was quiet for a long moment.
He rose and moved to the window. Not to look at anything specific. Just the particular movement of someone who needed to think with their body as well as their mind.
"She was pardoned," he said. "She was never formally charged. She has every legal right to return."
"I know that," Sevik said.
"Which means we cannot move against her directly," Ciran continued. "Not without cause. Not without evidence of something new." He turned slightly. "And certainly not while she's standing under Val Deka's name."
"I'm not suggesting we move against her directly," Sevik said carefully. "I'm suggesting we be aware. Watchful. If she's here for a reason beyond simply returning—"
"Of course she's here for a reason beyond simply returning," Ciran said flatly.
Sevik went quiet.
Ciran turned back to the window.
"Nass doesn't do anything without a reason," he said. "She never did. It was what made her exceptional and what made her dangerous in equal measure." His jaw tightened slightly. "The question is what the reason is. And who sent her."
The room was quiet.
Sevik hadn't considered that angle.
He absorbed it now.
"You think someone sent her," he said.
"I think four years is a long time to be gone," Ciran said. "And I think people who disappear for four years and then walk back in beside one of the most powerful noble houses in Vevaria don't do so without infrastructure behind them." He turned fully. "Someone is using her. Or she is using someone. Either way—" His eyes were direct. "She didn't come back for herself."
Sevik sat with that.
"What do we do," he said.
Ciran returned to his desk. Sat. Folded his hands on the surface with the careful composure of someone who had just finished being unsettled and had decided to stop.
"Nothing," he said.
Sevik stared at him.
"Nothing," Ciran repeated. "We watch. We wait. We do absolutely nothing that could be interpreted as reaction." He held Sevik's gaze steadily. "Because the moment we react — the moment we move against her or even appear to — we tell the court exactly why we're afraid of her being here."
A pause.
"And we cannot afford that," he finished quietly.
Sevik understood.
He nodded slowly.
Stood.
"One more thing," Ciran said, before he reached the door.
Sevik stopped.
"Stay away from her," Ciran said simply. "Don't speak to her. Don't acknowledge her beyond basic courtesy. Don't give her anything to read."
Sevik thought about the courtyard.
The two seconds where his composure had slipped when he first saw her.
He said nothing about that.
"Understood," he said.
He left.
Ciran sat alone in the office for a long moment after the door closed.
He looked at his folded hands on the desk.
Then at the window.
{She's not here for herself}, he thought again.
{Which means whatever she's here for is bigger than all of us.}
He unfolded his hands slowly.
{And somehow that's worse.}