Breakfast, then tactics, then, unexpected, a summons to the armory annex for "refined practicals." Which, Soren learned, meant real steel, dulled only at the tip; everything else was actual metal and mass. A rare privilege, usually because someone wanted to watch the reactions up close.

The armory master, a one-eyed veteran named Verrin, distributed the weapons himself. Most took the issued blade with no complaint, but Soren held the new weapon in his palm for a long, silent moment, testing the balance, the lay of the hilt, the way the light caught on the battered crossguard.

"Feel heavy?" Verrin asked.

Soren shook his head. "Feels like a warning."

Verrin's mouth creased as if to smile, but didn't. "That's the right answer."

Dane and two other instructors lined the perimeter of the annex, eyes on every spar as the cohort clashed steel-on-steel. The sound changed everything; the metallic ring was sharper, more final, less forgiving of overreach or error.

Soren's attention tunneled. He registered only the next hand, the next blade between him and the future. When he engaged Cassian again, the difference in Cassian's demeanor was almost alarming: no banter, just a tight focus, as if the stakes had finally presented themselves with sufficient clarity.

They traded two sequences, each ending in deadlock. On the third cycle, Soren noticed the small tell in Cassian's left knee, an old injury or new fatigue, it straightened a fraction too soon when planting. Soren bent his own right leg, shifted weight, and on the next pass let Cassian overcommit, guiding his blade up and past until the collision rang topnote clear in the high, domed ceiling.

The round ended with both at arms' length, neither the clear victor, but Soren saw the calculation in Cassian's eyes: a resizing, not a surrender.

Next round: Seren, this time with more force than usual. Her attacks played at his defense, probing for any give in the new blade. Soren parried, then pressed, trusting her skills not to panic. When the exchange grew ragged, they both reset at the same time, almost laughing, which in its own way was the sharpest proof of discipline yet.

Verrin prowled the edge, calling corrections with a tone somewhere between disinterest and contempt. "Tip down, Avelle. Vale, reset your hips, you're dragging left." On each point, Soren complied, logging the feedback in memory for next time.

By the end of the morning, his hands were raw and his shirt stuck to his back in a latticework of sweat. As he filed out, Cassian caught him by the locker, voice pitched lower than usual.

"Next time, come at me real. I know you're holding something back."

Soren kept his gaze fixed on the locker hinge. "So are you."

Cassian barked a laugh, not entirely without joy. "At least it's mutual." He wiped his face with a silk square, then vanished down the hall, trailing the faintest scent of new-forged steel.

The rest of the day blurred: lectures, supervised study, a quick meal, and then another shift in the archives before midnight. Soren walked to the west tower on legs that felt at once leaden and hollow, as if nothing filled them but the lingering echo from the morning's real steel.

At the archive's threshold, the automaton librarian greeted him as always. "You appear altered," it observed, irises telescoping in on his face with predatory accuracy.

"Long day," Soren said. He signed the ledger and moved for the reading desk at the rear.

Tonight's assignment was simple: review and crossreference a set of tactical dispatches from the last round of initiates. Most of it was boilerplate, but every fourth page or so he found a marginalia note left by some prior "Witness." Usually warnings, sometimes jokes, sometimes nothing more than a repeated pattern of blue ink Xs along the margin.

Half an hour in, Soren's fingers started tingling. He set the quill down, flexed his hand, and realized the echo in his chest had not faded, only gone quiet while he was on the move.

'It's worse at rest,' he thought. 'Or better, depending who you ask.'

Valenna's voice, when it came, was brittle as dry grass: "You're learning. Be careful what you teach yourself to endure."

He shivered, though the room was not cold. The next file was a transcript from the Sundering: a page-and-a-half of names, all blacked out except for the initials "L.H." and a note: SURVIVING WITNESS.

The page bled ink from the edge, as though the darkness sought to overrun the text itself. Soren fingered the margin, half-expecting the page to scream.

Nothing happened. Or, rather, the world around him went slightly off-true, a second resonance joined the first, pulsing just out of sync. Soren's vision doubled. He felt two trajectories at once: the mundane, and the shadow echo of something else, something that bled blue around the edges.

He blinked until the feeling resolved, then packed up his papers and left the archives an hour before he had to. The librarian marked his egress with a spidery hand, nothing more.

Walking the empty corridor toward the dorms, Soren caught a glimpse of himself in the black glass window. Two reflections: the corporeal and, offset by a half-step, the faintest suggestion of another Soren, this one ragged at the edges, as if waiting for the right trick of light to solidify.

He looked away first.

Dawn again, and the cycle repeated. Soren found himself almost eager to see what new war the Swordmaster would throw at them. The forecast was more of what came before: formation drills, then live steel, then "adversarial composite." The kind of scenario that pretended at chaos and delivered only exhaustion and the chance to make public errors.

They fell in at the same line as yesterday, but Dane had altered the groupings, smaller units, two and three, then full cohort split into halves across the yard's chevron-shaped boundary.

As they advanced and reset, advanced and reset, Soren tracked how the angles compressed the field until every partner rotation meant circling up on different enemy terrain, always lacking a wall to fall back to.

By the third shuffle, he landed with Seren and Kale Trennor as partners against Cassian, Mara, and an over-tall first-year known for flinching at loud noises. This arrangement was not quite balanced, but nobody expected anything else.

Dane called: "Enact."

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