The Moonlit Faction's training grounds sat at the edge of the canal district, inside a converted warehouse that had clearly been something else first — the high ceiling and wide open floor suggesting storage or shipping, before somebody had gutted the inside and turned it into this instead.
The space was dim. No lanterns along the walls. The only light came from moonstone fixtures set into the floor at scattered intervals, throwing narrow columns of pale blue light upward, leaving most of the room in a soft, manageable dark.
"We train in the dark," Aurelian said, catching the look on Clyde's face. "Most of the Faction hunts after the lanterns go out across the city. Figured we should get comfortable working without them."
"You hunt at night," Clyde said. "On purpose."
"On purpose. Howlings move more freely once the lanterns die down — something about how the ambient ichor balance shifts once the artificial light drops out of the equation. So we go find them while the rest of the city's asleep." He rolled his shoulders, casual about it in a way that didn't quite match the subject. "There are exceptions sometimes. Things that don't wait for dark. But mostly, yeah — we work the hours nobody else wants."
"Why not just join the Sentinels? Same goal, isn't it?"
Aurelian's smile shifted, something more complicated moving underneath it.
"Different methods and different rules." He glanced toward Eira, who had drifted to the far end of the training floor without a word and was standing in one of the moonstone columns, her shadow pooling wider around her feet than it should've. "The Sentinels work inside a structure — Academy oversight, classification, the whole machine. We don't have that. Some of us couldn't get through that front door even if we wanted to."
"Because of the forged cards."
"Because of the forged cards." Aurelian nodded. "Officially, the Sentinels don't love that we exist. Unofficially, about half of them owe us favors at this point." He grinned. "It's complicated."
Clyde looked across the hall at Eira.
She hadn't moved. Her shadow kept pooling, dark and slightly too large, the moonstone light around her not quite reaching all the way into it.
"What does Shroud actually do," Clyde asked, quieter now.
Aurelian followed his gaze.
"Camouflage and concealment." He paused, choosing his words with more care than he'd used for anything else so far. "At her phase, it's not just hiding herself anymore. She can hide what's around her too and she almost moves extremely fast in the dark.
He clapped his hands together once, the sound sharp in the quiet, and the easy energy came back into his voice like a switch flipping.
"Alright," he said. "Let's see what you've got, Hollow Star."
Eira's eyes lifted from wherever they'd been resting and found Clyde across the dim floor. She didn't say anything. She just watched him the way you'd watch a door you weren't completely sure was locked.
"What's the plan exactly," Clyde said. "You drag me out my window, walk me across half the city, and now you want me to fight her?"
"Not fight," Aurelian said. "Spar. Lightly."
"Define lightly."
"Nobody dies."
"That's a pretty low bar, Aurelian."
"It's a great bar, honestly. You'd be amazed how many people manage to miss it." Aurelian stepped back toward the wall, giving them room. "Come on. You wanted to know what Shroud Ichor does right? Easier to show you than talk about it all night."
Clyde looked at Eira. "Is this something you actually agreed to, or is he just deciding things for you again?"
Something flickered across her face that wasn't quite flat for once.
"He decides things," she said. "I let him."
"That's not the same as agreeing."
"No," she said. "It isn't."
She moved.
There was no wind-up to it — no gathering of intent the way Clyde had learned to read off Aldric or Soren or even Noxar. Just a sudden burst of speed, there and then gone, the kind of fast that blurred the edges of her outline for a fraction of a second before she reappeared somewhere else entirely.
His Hollow Eyes caught the frequency shift half a beat after his body had already started reacting on instinct.
He stepped back, sparring stick raised — the blunt wooden practice tool Aurelian had tossed him at the door, lighter than Hollow Edge, no edge to it at all, just weight and reach.
Eira swept past where he'd been standing, her own stick cutting a clean arc through empty air.
"Okay," Clyde said, breathing a little harder than he wanted to admit. "That's fast."
"Told you," Aurelian called from the wall, far too cheerful about it. "Night vision and speed. Phase Two Shroud Ichor. She sees better in the dark than you do, and she's faster than anyone has any right to be in a warehouse this size."
"You could've told me that before."
"Where's the fun in that?"
Eira had already repositioned, off to his left now, stick resting loose in her hand, watching him without saying anything.
"You're not even out of breath," Clyde said.
"Why would I be?"
"Most people are out of breath after doing that."
"I'm not most people."
She came at him again — and this time she split.
One Eira became three in the space between one blink and the next, each one identical, each one moving with the exact same posture and pace, fanning out across the training floor in a loose triangle around him. Clyde's stick came up defensively, his eyes flicking between all three.
"That's new," he said.
"Phase Two also gets her clones," Aurelian said. "Shadow split. They're not solid, exactly. More like — afterimages with opinions."
"That's not helpful, Aurelian."
"I'm not trying to be helpful. I'm trying to watch."
Clyde opened his Hollow Eyes fully.
The world sharpened the way it always did, flow lines and frequency gradients layering over the dim hall — and against that layered perception, two of the three Eiras read as flat. No variation in their Lunar ichor signature, no breath, and no micro-adjustment, the same fixed quality he remembered from Noxar's clone in the Aqueous Channel except smaller, cheaper, less convincing the longer he looked.
The third one breathed.
He could see it now — the faint, continuous fluctuation in her signature, the small irregularities that came from an actual person actually standing there, Lunar ichor moving with her pulse instead of holding a flat, perfect line.
She was the one on his right.
He didn't say anything. He just moved.
His stick caught her across the shoulder before she could react — light contact, controlled, more tap than strike, exactly the kind of hit a sparring round was supposed to produce.
The two flat copies dissolved instantly, fading into thin trails of shadow that sank back into the floor.
Eira looked at him, rubbing her shoulder where the stick had landed, something unreadable crossing her face.
"How," she said.
"You breathe differently than they do."
"That's not supposed to be visible."
"It's not. Not normally." Clyde lowered his stick. "I don't really know how to explain it better than that. It just — read wrong. The other two."
Aurelian pushed off the wall, grinning like he'd just won something personally. "Oh, that's good. That's really good. Nobody's caught that on the first try before."
"Nobody?" Clyde said.
"Well. Two people, one of them was me, and I cheated."
"How do you even cheat at that?"
"I asked her beforehand which one she'd be." Aurelian shrugged, entirely unbothered by his own dishonesty. "Worked great, I highly recommend it."
This guy is shameless!
Aurelian settled back against the wall, watching the two of them with the satisfied look of someone who'd planned this whole evening exactly the way he wanted it to go, even though he very obviously hadn't.