Orin left on the third morning.
Not the second, which would have been the natural endpoint of a census visit. The third, which meant he'd stayed an extra day with a reason Aldric described as further documentation requirements and everyone understood to mean something else.
He left on foot the way he'd arrived, with a travel pack and the careful pace of a man who walked everywhere like he was making observations.
Kael watched from the east wall. Ash was somewhere behind him, signal steady and close.
The report was already gone, carried by a message runner who had left on the second morning while it was still dark, fast enough that Kael hadn't felt the departure until it was too late to matter.
'What was in it?' He thought at Ash, but it was not a useful question. Ash hadn't been inside the room and couldn't read writing, but sometimes asking helped him think.
'What you gave him,' Ash said. 'And what Maren gave him'.
There was a pause. 'The question is which version is the headline'.
Kael watched Orin's figure diminish toward the tree-lined road that eventually connected Greyveil to the larger roads that connected to the Neutral Cities and from there to the Second Spire.
'He looked at you differently when he left', Ash said.
'I noticed'.
'Not with hostility.'
'No', Kael agreed.
He'd been trying to read what the look was since this morning when Orin had shaken Aldric's hand and glanced at Kael with an expression that didn't fit neatly into any of the categories the archivist usually occupied.
'Curiosity', Ash said. 'The specific kind that comes from finding something you didn't expect'.
'That could go either way'.
'Yes', Ash agreed again. 'It could'.
Aldric came up the wall behind them, he stood beside Kael and watched the road without speaking for a moment.
"How do you read it?" He asked finally.
"I don't know yet," Kael said honestly, he was getting used to saying that. "Best case is he writes the Dara precedent story".
"Strong Sorrow awakening, notable, worth monitoring, then a standard delegation in three weeks with assessors who have an existing framework to apply." He paused. "Manageable."
"Worst case is he writes what Maren told him. Full Anima frequency, multiple emotional signatures simultaneously, Firstborn bloodline." There was another pause. "Not manageable."
Aldric was quiet for a moment.
"What did you say to him?" He asked. "The second night."
Kael had told Aldric about the visit; he hadn't told him everything about it.
"The truth," Kael said. "Mostly."
Aldric looked at him sideways. "Mostly?"
"I told him what I am is real and I wasn't asking him to pretend otherwise. I told him to think about what the Second Spire does with the information and whether that outcome was what he wanted to be responsible for." He watched the empty road where Orin had been. "I mentioned a Sovereign."
Aldric went very still. "You told a Second Spire archivist that you knew what they'd send?" He asked quietly.
"Yes."
"That's information that suggests you have sources inside the Spire's response protocols."
"Yes."
"Which you don't."
Kael said nothing.
Aldric looked at him for a long moment with something in his eyes that moved between exasperation and something else, in the end he asked. "Where did that information come from?"
Kael looked at Ash and Aldric followed his gaze.
There was another pause.
"The creature knows Spire response protocols?" Aldric asked flatly.
"He's a thousand years old," Kael said. "He knows everything the Pride clan did when they encountered something they considered a threat, the Spire's protocols have changed in the details over the centuries but not in the logic."
Aldric looked at Ash for a long moment, Ash looked back with those amber eyes and the patience of a very old thing that has stopped being surprised by what the young find surprising.
"Right," Aldric said. He turned back to the road. "Two weeks, possibly three."
"Yes."
"What do you need?"
Kael thought about that, about where he was and where he needed to be. He thought about the spear and the synchronization and Ash in the mornings doing whatever Ash did in the mornings that kept shifting the baseline of what Kael could reach and hold.
"More of what we've been doing," he said finally. "Deeper, faster, and Cass needs to start putting me against multiple opponents."
"Multiple," Aldric repeated the term softly.
"If a delegation comes it won't be one person." Kael said then paused. "And if it's not a delegation…"
"Then multiple opponents is the least of your problems," Aldric said.
"Still useful to practice."
Aldric almost smiled. It was Edran's almost smile, Kael noticed, the same shape in a different face. The family resemblance landing at unexpected moments.
"I'll tell Cass," Aldric said, then he went back down the wall.
Kael stayed at the top and looked at the empty road, thinking about two weeks and whether two weeks was enough, and concluded that same as always, that enough wasn't really the relevant question.
The question was what he could do with the time he had.
He jumped down from the wall. "Training," he said to Ash.
Ash fell into step beside him.
They went to work.
❖ ❖ ❖
The days that followed had a rhythm to them. It was not comfortable, nothing about them was comfortable.
But there was a rhythm to them which was different.
Mornings were with Ash.
The calibration sessions had evolved into something harder to describe, less like instruction and more like two people doing the same deep work in parallel, Ash's enormous grief running alongside Kael's and the proximity of them doing something to both, deepening Kael's reach and doing something to Ash that Kael found hard to read clearly.
Like the weight was still the same but the carrying of it had shifted.
Afternoons were with Cass; multiple opponents from the third day onward.
Dort and Pell to start with, then Dort and two garrison fighters whose names Kael learned fast because learning the name of someone who is hitting you regularly seems like basic courtesy.
He lost every session for the first four days, then he started losing them differently, losing in ways that suggested the wins were getting closer.
On the fifth day, he held Pell to a draw for twenty minutes before Pell caught an angle he'd left open.
Evenings were with Edran and the old texts.
This was new. Edran had been working through the locked cabinet texts with him since the beginning, but the evening sessions had become something different since Ash. Since the change in how Kael held his Sorrow.
He was reading the texts differently now, understanding things in them that he'd read before without fully understanding, and Edran was reading his understanding and occasionally saying something precise and short that reorganized what he thought he knew.
On the ninth day, Edran said something that Kael turned over for the rest of the evening.
"The Firstborn didn't train the way we've been training you," Edran said.
He was looking at one of the oldest texts, the one with the damaged cover. "They developed through living, through the accumulation of genuine experience. Genuine grief, genuine joy, genuine fear".
"The depth of their Anima was a direct reflection of the depth of their lives." He looked up. "Which means the training has limits."
"What kind of limits?"
"Technical proficiency limits". Edran answered. "You can get better at using what you have. You can get more controlled, more precise, and more efficient. But the thing that makes you what you are, the depth of the Sorrow itself, that doesn't grow from training. It grows from living."
Kael sat with that.
"Then what grows it?" He asked carefully.
Edran looked at him steadily. "Loss," he said simply. "Real loss, the kind that goes deep enough to leave a mark."
He closed the text.
"That's not something I can teach you," he said. "That's something life teaches, and it teaches it on its own schedule regardless of what's convenient." He paused for a heartbeat.
"I'm telling you because I think you should know what you're building on. What the foundation of all of this actually is."
Kael looked at the bird token in his hand, which he'd taken out without deciding to somewhere during the conversation.
It reminded him of his mother's hands and the warmth he couldn't quite remember anymore.
He put it back in his pocket.
"I know what it's built on," he said.
Edran looked at him for a moment.
"Yes," the old man said quietly. "I think you do."