They said the dead left the world easy, but it was the living who carried forward like anchors, inch by inch, into a future they no longer fit.
Soren found the city unkind in its indifference, every tower and cobbled gutter looking exactly as it always had.
The stink of mildew leaked through windows at the yolk of sunrise; the blue lit corridors echoed the same slaps and mutters that had framed every day in the barracks. Nothing had changed. He had.
His boots hit the dirt of the training pit the same hour as before, but the sand felt different, denser, unwilling to shift beneath his weight.
He worked the edge until it stopped hurting, then worked it past that, swinging and resetting, then again.
Each breath came thin and sharp, frost burning his lungs even as sweat started to streak along his ribs.
Every time Soren's blade cut the air, the memory of Orsell's scream returned, a backwards echo that trembled his hands for half a second before the next swing erased it.
Tavren circled the perimeter, voice gone flat. He spoke only if forced, and when he did, the brightness in the words was gone: "You missed a spot, gutter."
Soren didn't answer. Not because he feared, but because the shape of Tavren's face had changed; the smirk hung slack now, like a towel forgotten on a railing.
Rhain took to lingering by the edge, pinching at the cracked scabs on his wrist, eyes ducked from Soren's as if they'd shared a secret no one wanted to revisit.
The merchant had vanished in the way all things vanished from the city, overnight, matter of fact, his debts and promises left for braver idiots to settle.
Soren dug the blade in an arcing diagonal, again and again, until his shoulder threatened to seize.
He planted his feet, checked the position, then did it again without bothering to look where it landed.
The repetitions blurred, one indistinct agony stretching into the next. Sometimes, when the arc caught just so, he could see the line of spray from the night outside the wall: not sand, but blood, fountaining into the snow, turning white to pink and then to rust.
Orsell's face stayed sharpest. They'd buried him, but Soren still saw his teeth clenched against the last cold, the lips drawn tight against judgment.
At the edge of the grounds, the instructor watched. Soren felt it more than saw it, the itch between his shoulder blades growing fierce whenever he turned away. The man's arms were folded, his aura of patience bloated to cartoon enormity. He said nothing, letting the morning wind carry any lesson worth hearing.
Valenna's voice did not arrive at first, but when it did, it was more corporal than ever, as if the sword itself had chewed a hollow inside Soren's chest to live in.
"You're off axis," she snapped. "Again."
He adjusted, or tried to, but the next cycle doubled the ache in his elbow.
"No. Too much reach. Compact. The cut is not a gift, it's a barbed courtesy. Less."
He compressed, cinching the line of his swing as if it offended her personally. The sword, dull steel, no edge but the memory of one, moved with less violence than before, quieter. But this time, the arc landed straight, splitting the air with a tight, ugly whicker.
"Better," Valenna observed, "but you lead with the upper body. You'll die like that, and the man will laugh over your corpse. Again."
He tried. Arm, then waist, then hip, a sequence unfamiliar and stubborn. The sword wobbled, nearly an insult.
"This isn't theater," she spat. "You're not staging an opera in the yard. Put the weight on the back foot. Again."
It took hours for Soren to break the habit, and when he did, it felt less like learning and more like dismemberment.
By mid morning, his thigh trembled so violently he considered biting down on it to keep it from shaking the rest of him apart. Breath steamed the air; the sweat freezing at his temples turned to grit, then ice.
He stopped only when his palm slipped and the sword barked his finger raw. Soren flexed it, expecting the blood, then sucked the cut.
Valenna did not comfort. "What are you waiting for?" she said, skeptical. "For the pain to teach you something original?"
He choked down the urge to spit back. Instead, Soren reset the grip, set his feet, tried again. He lost track of time this way.
Lost track of the other boys, too, at some point, Tavren and Rhain had wandered off to the refectory, the sound of their voices a distant, intermittent clatter. Soren preferred them gone.
The world shrank to blade, breath, and the relentless metronome of Valenna's corrections.
"Draw the line, don't chase it."
"Don't look at their eyes. Look at the point of the attack."
"You're not fighting the man. You're fighting the memory of the man."
He learned, but worse, he learned so fast it frightened him. The adjustment period was a single repetition, never more; the pattern cut itself into his hands like grooves in a millstone.
The muscle, once slow and petulant, now responded before the thought could fully finish. His wrist, his elbow, even the lean of his head fell forward into each form as if he'd done it for years, maybe always.
After a second hour, Valenna's instruction shifted, the tone edged not with disdain but something acid, conspiratorial.
"Do the spiral cut," she said.
He hesitated. It was not a term he'd heard. But the ghost-memory, the overlay from the bad nights, flickered: a swirl of movement, a feint toward retreat, then a whip-crack rotation bringing the blade back for a sudden forward lunge.
Soren tried it, slow, missing the tempo at first. He ran it twice more, and on the third, the maneuver worked, swinging him low then upright, the sword's tip arriving at an invisible target's neck.
Silence. Even the wind settled.
Valenna's voice, when it came, was smaller. "Who taught you that?"
"You did," said Soren, and then hated himself for answering. He checked for eavesdroppers out of paranoid instinct, then quieter: "I saw it in a dream, when you fought the Knight with the red mask."
A long, slow hush. Soren could feel the memory, hers, his, both, bubbling up through his veins, seeking a place to nest.
"That fight was about twelve years before you were born."
He shrugged, swinging the blade again, a little less certain now.
"If you keep learning at this rate, you'll burn up by summer," she said. Valenna no longer sounded amused. The words thickened, weighted with something Soren refused to name.
He kept going. Each maneuver sapped his bones, but every repetition made the movement easier, more assured.
The pain stayed, but now it was a signal, the proof of having done it right, because when he did it wrong the ache vanished, and the only thing left was embarrassment.
He worked the edge until it stung, then ignored the nerves. He let the form take him whole, let it draw the memory over the surface of his muscles until the two were indistinguishable.
In the background, Tavren and Rhain had returned. They watched from a safe distance, hands wrapped around mugs of the brown, bitter stuff the mess called coffee. Soren could hear them; not the words, but the rhythm, the up and down that sounded less like mockery and more like caution.
He was not sure what he looked like from the outside. Every bone in his body felt heavier than before, but the sword itself now weighed so little he often forgot to brace for the shock at the end of each cut.
He was sure, at least, that he looked different to Valenna. In the silence, he could sense her reappraising, the way her presence, usually sharp as vinegar, now seeped long and slow, taking its time.
Night crept up without warning. The pit, drained of sun, turned blue, then black. Soren kept at it, even as his fingers numbed and the muscles in his legs begged.
He was adjusting for wind direction now, even though none had been ordered. He did the drills with his eyes half-closed, only stopping when he caught himself trying to sight unseen.
"You're not supposed to be this good."
Valenna said this, not as rebuke, but as observation. She let it hang, as if waiting for the world to correct itself.
For a minute, Soren wished someone would.
He let the blade fall to his side, breath steaming, shirt soaked and already stiffening in the night chill. Head bowed, he stared into the dimpled sand.
The past few days, Orsell's laugh, the merchant's winey breath, even Tavren's idiotic boasts, collapsed together until they were nearly the same voice, the same echo, running in the hollow the old him used to fill.
He turned, and for an instant caught Rhain's eyes: unblinking, searching for sense, but finding none.
The instructor watched from the edge of the dark, silent as ever.
Soren squared his feet, then, for no real reason, drew the spiral cut again through the empty air. It landed with a soft, final sigh.
He waited for Valenna to speak. She did not.
Soren went back to the barracks. Even with the ghost at his chest and the memory in his hands, he felt as if something had been left behind, scaled off with the sweat and vanished into the yard.
He left the sword by his cot, lay down with arms over his face, and listened for anything that might tell him he was still himself.
In the blue tinged dark, the only voice was his own, and it wasn't enough to fill the silence.