Cass fought like Greyveil looked- patient, grey, and relentless with no wasted movement anywhere, almost like a storm.
Clashing with her felt like barely surviving a persistent prowling predator.
She'd been running the settlement's garrison training for 12 years and she had the teacher's gift of finding the exact gap in your understanding and pressing on it steadily until you either fixed it or broke.
She never relented, she persistently pressed on a lot of gaps.
Day 1 was footwork until Kael's legs stopped working properly and then more footwork. On Day 2, she introduced Dort as a training partner.
Dort was bigger than Kael and had been fighting seriously since before Kael could walk and had absolutely no intention of making any of this comfortable, he was even more ruthless than Cass.
Kael spent most of Day 2 on his back on the wet ground staring at the grey sky, wondering the kind of wrong decisions he made in his life to find himself in his current position.
Yet, he never gave up. He got up every time.
Cass watched that happen without commenting, but her eyes always gleamed a different way when he did. She watched it the way she watched things she was filing away rather than things she was dismissing.
The mornings were Edran's.
From dawn to midday, Kael was pushed through Anima work, deeper every session, and the results were getting stranger as his range extended.
By the 11th Day, he could feel past the settlement's walls entirely, past the open ground between Greyveil and the Wilds like a gap in a conversation, and beyond it the presence he'd been reading since Day 5.
On the 13th Day, he pushed toward it deliberately for the first time instead of just receiving what arrived.
He achieved directed contact for the first time, reaching outward the way Edran had been teaching him to redirect, and pointing the reach at something external rather than going inward.
What came back made him open his eyes fast and sit very still for a moment.
"Tell me," Edran said.
"It felt the reach," Kael said. "When I made contact, it reached back."
Edran went very still. "What did the return signal feel like?"
Kael sat with the question for a long time, he was looking for accurate words for something that didn't map well onto language and finding the mapping difficult.
"Old," he said finally. "Old and sad. Not the sad that comes from something recent, it's the kind of sad that comes from something so long ago it's stopped being sharp and just become the texture of existing." He paused.
"And under that, something like recognition. Like finding something you'd stopped believing you'd find."
His grandfather looked at him for a long moment. "That's not a beast," Edran said quietly.
"No," Kael agreed. "It really isn't."
❖ ❖ ❖
On the 15th Day, Cass stopped the training session early and held out her hand for his spear.
He gave it to her.
She turned it over slowly, looking at the blade the way Edran looked at the old texts. "During the morning work," she said. "When you push your Anima outward, try pushing it into this."
Kael frowned. "I've barely had 17 days of training."
"I know what you've had, try it anyway." She glared at him and said sternly in a tone that suggested that she was not asking.
He was tired in the bone-deep way that had become his constant background state since the training started, but tired was apparently useful for this because he didn't have the energy to think too carefully about it.
He just pushed the way Edran had been teaching him to push. He found the depth, let it move outward and down through his hands and into the spear shaft.
Then, the weapon changed.
The change was not visible. There was no light, no heat, nothing dramatic.
Just a quality shift in the air immediately around the blade, a density like the space around the spear point had become more present somehow, more real than the space around anything else in the room.
Dort, standing twenty feet away, immediately took a step back without appearing to decide to do it. He did it instinctively.
Kael looked at him. "What did you feel?"
Dort's jaw was tight. "Something old," he said carefully. "It felt like standing in a place where something bad happened a long time ago. The specific feeling of that," he shook his head slightly. "It passed when you stopped."
Kael looked at Cass, waiting for her verdict and judgement.
Her expression was doing something controlled and careful. "Again," she said quietly. "And this time hold it."
He pushed it again and held it and the quality in the air around the blade deepened this time, spreading slightly outward from the spear point like cold radiating from something very cold.
Dort's jaw immediately went tight as his eyes did something, shifting in a clearly unsettled manner.
"My daughter," he said suddenly.
His voice had gone rough at the edges even as his eyes became slightly bloodshot. "She died two winters back. I don't…," He stopped and pressed his mouth flat. "I don't usually think about her during drilling."
Kael let it go immediately and the air cleared.
Dort breathed out hard and looked at the ground for a second with his hand on his knee, panting slightly.
"Sorry," Kael said.
Dort looked up and his eyes were wet but steady. "Don't be," he said. "That's something real. Whatever you just did, that's real."
Cass was quiet for a moment. "Dara's spear," she finally said. "Three hundred years and it comes back."
She looked at Kael with an expression he hadn't seen on her face before.
"18 days was never going to be enough to make you safe. I knew that when Aldric set the timeline, but this…," she gestured at the spear. "This is something different from safe."
"What is it then?"
She picked up her own weapon and turned it over.
"Dangerous," she said, then she grinned. "But in the right direction."