On the twelfth day, Kael beat Dort.
Not comfortably, not cleanly either. It was a specific exchange, a defensive sequence that became an opening that he took with the spear at half synchronization because full synchronization in a training session with Dort had become something Dort needed advance notice for.
The emotional impact of the full depth was still enough to break the older man's concentration at close range.
But he took the opening and Dort went down and stayed down for a second with the expression of someone who had been expecting this to happen eventually and was now having the experience of it actually happening.
Cass watched it with her arms crossed and her evaluating look.
"Again," she said.
They went again.
Kael lost the second exchange. He won the third, and lost the fourth to a combination from Dort that exploited the fact that the spear's reach advantage disappeared inside a certain distance and Kael's close-range work was still the weakest part of his fighting.
"Your short game," Cass said at the end. "That's what kills you, someone gets inside your range with a short blade and you have problems."
"I know."
"We have…" She checked against whatever internal clock she was running. "8 days left before the window closes."
The window- that was what she'd started calling the period between Orin's departure and whatever the Second Spire sent in response. The window where preparation was still possible before whatever was coming arrived and preparation became irrelevant.
"Short blade work tomorrow morning," she said. "Split the session with Ash."
After that, Kael went to find Edran.
His grandfather was in the practice space, which he used sometimes in the evenings for the slow maintenance work that kept his faded Anima from declining further. He stopped when Kael came in and waited.
"Edran," Kael said. "I need to ask you something."
"Ask."
"The depth," Kael said. "What Ash has been teaching me. The way he holds his Sorrow, without the walls, fully inside it." He paused for a moment.
"When that's active at full depth and I push it into the spear, what does it actually do at close range? Not training range, not twenty feet, but actual combat range, I've been curious".
Edran looked at him. "You haven't pushed it to full depth at close range deliberately?" He asked.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't know what would happen and the training sessions aren't the place to find out with the people I train with."
He held Edran's gaze. "I'm asking you."
Edran was quiet for a moment, then he answered.
"At close range with full depth synchronization," he said carefully, "you would be pushing the total weight of your Sorrow into direct contact with another person's emotional field. Not the managed version, not the contained frequency you used for Orin." He paused. "The real thing."
"What does that do to a person?"
"To someone with strong Anima and high emotional discipline, it's disorienting. Powerful but survivable." There was another pause.
"To someone with less control, someone whose own grief or fear or rage is close to the surface…"
He stopped.
"It breaks them?" Kael asked.
"It could," Edran said carefully. "Not physically, but the emotional impact at that range with that kind of depth could be incapacitating. Possibly for some time afterward."
Kael stood with that.
"And to a Pride clan warrior," Edran continued. "Someone who has spent their entire life suppressing everything except Pride, someone whose entire power structure is built on not feeling the things they've buried."
Edran looked at him for a long moment. "If everything they've buried hit them all at once," he said quietly. "At the moment of maximum vulnerability, in the middle of combat…"
He didn't finish the sentence.
He didn't need to, Kael filled the blanks himself.
He nodded slowly, lost in his thoughts. He was thinking about a Sovereign, about the fifth rank, and about a Pride Clan Animancer who had spent possibly decades suppressing every emotional frequency except pride into something compressed and powerful and completely unexamined.
All that buried grief, all that buried fear, all that buried everything that pride was specifically designed to sit on top of.
If the spear at full synchronization pressed against all of that from the inside, Kael struggled to imagine what would happen.
'It's not a killing ability', he thought again. 'It's a dismantling ability'.
He had a clearer idea of her now. Dara didn't beat her enemies by overpowering them, she beat them by making them feel what they'd spent their whole lives not feeling.
He went to the practice space and picked up the spear and held it and reached for the depth without the walls, the way Ash had been teaching him, and pushed it down through his hands into the weapon.
Instantly, the air around the blade changed.
He stood in the empty practice space in the grey evening and felt the full weight of everything he had built on moving through the spear and thought about what was coming.
Two weeks, maybe less.
From somewhere across the settlement Ash's signal reached him, steady, old and certain.
'Ready?' It asked.
Kael looked at the quality around the blade, at the grief his mother had built her hands into motion making something small and wooden and leaving it in his pocket without explanation.
He looked at the 17 years sitting behind him like a long road that had been going somewhere specific all along even when it felt like it was going nowhere.
'Not yet', he thought back at Ash.
There was a pause.
'Close', Ash said.
Kael almost smiled. It was the dry kind of smile, the kind that wasn't really about anything being funny.
"Close," he agreed out loud to the empty practice space.
He held the synchronization until the lamp burned low.
Then he went inside and read the old texts until he couldn't keep his eyes open and fell asleep with the bird token in his closed fist, warm from being held, the carved wings pressing their shape into his palm.
Outside the grey settlement, the grey rain came down.
Somewhere two weeks away, or maybe less, something was being decided about what to send.
And in a small dwelling at the east edge of Greyveil, a boy who had been told his whole life what he was worth lay asleep holding a weapon he didn't know was a weapon, built from the grief of a mother who knew more than she'd had time to say.
The rain came down.
The clock ran.