Training with Ash was not what Kael expected.
He'd expected combat and power demonstrations, he'd expected something that looked like the battle preparation it was supposed to be.
What he got instead, at least for the first session, was Ash sitting across from him in the practice space in the grey morning rain and doing something that Kael felt rather than saw.
It started as pressure, a gentle external pressure on his Anima. It was not aggressive, it was more like a hand testing the give of something before deciding how to handle it.
Kael kept his eyes open and watched Ash's face which remained completely still, amber eyes steady, while whatever was happening happened at a frequency below the visible.
"What is he doing?" Edran asked from the side.
"I don't know yet," Kael answered.
The pressure increased, slowly, gradually, with the patience of something that had been doing this for a very long time.
Kael felt his own Anima responding the way it responded to the deep work, opening up, the layers becoming available, but this time the stimulus was external rather than internal and that difference was significant.
He felt the depth of Ash's Sorrow for the first time at full contact.
He'd touched it at the gate, he'd felt the size of it from the outside. But this was inside it, or adjacent to it, and the difference between those two experiences was the difference between seeing an ocean from a cliff and standing in it.
It was the difference of a thousand years.
This was what a thousand years of grief felt like when it was pressed up against his own.
Kael's hands were shaking before he'd noticed them starting. Something was running up the back of his throat that he refused to let become a sound in front of his grandfather and the garrison fighters on the wall.
'How?' He thought at Ash. It was not a full question, just the fragment of one.
'How are you still here?'
'How are you still intact?'
'How does something carry this much for this long and remain anything at all?'
Ash's answer was not words and not feeling exactly, it was more like a demonstration. A brief moment where Kael felt what Ash felt, not the grief itself but the relationship to it.
He felt the way Ash held it.
It was not the way Kael had been taught to hold his Sorrow, contained and managed, taken out when useful.
Ash didn't hold his grief, he was inside it the way you're inside the air you breathe, completely, constantly, without it destroying him because he had stopped at some point long ago making the distinction between the grief and himself.
'He didn't survive it', Kael realized. 'He became it'.
'That's different'.
The pressure released.
Kael opened his eyes, which he hadn't realized he'd closed, and found the morning slightly brighter than it had been and his own heartbeat unusually loud.
Ash was looking at him with those amber eyes.
"He was showing me something," Kael said to Edran.
His voice came out steadier than he felt. "How to carry it without the walls, without any of the management." He paused. "That's what the Firstborn did, that's what made them what they were".
"They weren't stronger at managing the Sorrow, they were stronger because they stopped managing it entirely."
Edran was very still. "That's a different thing from what I've been teaching you," he said quietly.
"I know."
"It's more dangerous."
"I know that too."
There was a pause.
"Show me," Edran finally said.
Kael looked at Ash.
'Again', he thought.
Immediately, Ash pressed forward.
❖ ❖ ❖
By the afternoon of the same day, Kael's control had changed in a way that was difficult to describe and easy to feel.
The walls were gone. Not broken, not forced down, they were imply no longer the strategy. What replaced them was harder to explain, it was more like a relationship with the depth of the thing rather than a management of it.
He could go all the way in without the scraping hollow feeling that had been his constant companion since the training started.
The hurt was still there but it had changed character, it was less like injury and more like the specific discomfort of growing into something larger than your current shape.
Kael went to Cass in the afternoon and picked up the spear, and instantly he realized the difference. The synchronization was different now.
He pushed his Anima down through his hands into the weapon and what traveled down wasn't the managed surface version of his Sorrow.
It was the real thing, full depth, and the spear received it as the quality in the air around the blade became something that made Cass take a breath.
Dort was twenty feet away, he lasted only four seconds before he put his hands over his face and turned around.
"Dort," Cass called sharply.
"I'm fine," he said in a voice that was muffled by his hands. "Give me a second." He paused to catch his breath. "I'm fine."
Cass looked at the spear in Kael's hands for a few seconds in silence, she focused on the quality around the blade that wasn't light and wasn't heat and wasn't anything that had a name yet.
"How long can you hold it?" She asked.
Kael checked.
"Indefinitely," he said. "I think."
Cass looked at him for a moment longer, then she picked up her own weapon and her expression went into the focused blankness of a trainer who has just recalculated everything.
"Defense," she said sternly. "I'm going to attack".
"Don't fight back, just keep the synchronization live while you defend. If you can hold it through movement and pressure, that's something different from holding it while standing still."
Then she came at him.
She moved like a whirlwind. She was fast, faster than Dort with the efficiency of someone who had spent 12 years learning to do exactly as much as was needed and no more.
Kael blocked and retreated, he worked the footwork she'd drilled into him all week and kept the Anima pushed into the weapon throughout.
She broke off after two minutes, breathing harder than she'd started.
"You held it the whole time," she said.
"Yes."
She looked at him with the expression that kept appearing on people's faces around him lately, the expression of someone updating a prior assessment significantly.
"Aldric needs to see this," she said.