Second Dominion (Fourth Age)
Aurean Cycle no. 462 of the Macbeth dynasty, reign of Aldric II
Fourth Quadrant, Calixis
The next morning brought a different air. Though the sun still beat hard, the wind felt cooler, as if the rock had given a little of its heat back to the night. Veynar woke Lacrosse with the delicacy of a bucket of water to the head—the water was lukewarm, but the gesture served mainly to remind him he wasn't dreaming. Law, up for an hour already, was honing one of his blades on a stone. With every pass, a note of steel rang in the air.
"No rocks today," Law declared. "Or rather: not only rocks."
Veynar had set up a rudimentary course: along two parallel rows he'd driven iron stakes and strung copper wires between them that sagged like musical strings. Here and there he'd laid metal discs, nails, pebbles, and even rusted horseshoes scavenged from who-knows-where. Some stones were larger than yesterday's—nearly a man's head—to signal the scale would rise.
"It isn't a trap, even if it looks like one," the old man explained. "It's to teach you two things: your field is not a bomb, and gravity can be gentle."
Law snorted. "Don't say 'gentle' to a weapon," he muttered. "But what he means is you don't always need to explode. Sometimes you need to hold." He tapped his palm against the air between two posts. "Suspend. Balance."
Lacrosse studied the course, uncertain. "Looks… like a fairground game."
"Only here you don't win stuffed animals if you mess up," Law shot back. "You lift a stone, you move it, you set it down. Or you take a nail from the ground, carry it across, and land it without a bounce. Shall we?"
The boy took position at the start. His nape still felt a faint soreness, but the knot hurt less. He drew a deep breath, closed his eyes, and pictured the little iron disc resting on the first stand. He made his energy vibrate. This time it didn't burst; he let it flow slowly into his hands. The usual tingling, a spark racing along his fingers. He opened his eyes. The disc was hovering a few centimeters up, ringed by barely visible bluish flickers.
"Don't look at me," Law said, noticing him seeking his gaze. "Look at the disc. Talk to it. Tell it where to go."
Lacrosse held his breath. With controlled effort, he moved his wrist and the disc slid slowly along the copper wire as if resting on an inclined plane. Whenever the energy seemed to flag, he called the impulse from the knot—lighter, like a breath. It reached the end of the wire and he let the disc fall into Law's palm.
"Not bad," the grey-haired man admitted. "Now do it backwards."
The second drill meant lifting a stone far bigger than yesterday's—a hearthstone heavy—and instead of throwing it, lowering the "gravity" that pinned it to the ground until it hung midair. Lacrosse tried three, four times. Each wave was either too strong or too weak: the stone jumped and thumped down, or else clung to the earth. His nape throbbed, but not painfully—it was as if the knot were suggesting there was a right rhythm to find.
"It's like… like holding a brimming glass without sloshing it," he muttered, more to himself than to them.
"Exactly," Veynar said, pleased with the analogy. "Gravity isn't a switch. It's a dimmer. Turn the knob." He mimed it with his fingers, as if trimming a lamp's flame.
On the fifth try, Lacrosse shut his eyes, listened to his own breath, and "turned" the imaginary knob. The boulder rose slowly; the wind made it sway, but it didn't fall. It hung three handspans above the ground for three or four heartbeats, then the knot pulsed too hard and the stone dropped.
"See?" Law nodded. "You don't have to kick the world every time. Sometimes you take weight away." He ran his fingertips along the blade's edge, thoughtful. "And now, let's see that trick you did yesterday with the iron."
They smiled at what they called it; they still hadn't found a name for that odd push-and-pull. But the principle was serious: Lacrosse needed to learn to tell what could be drawn in and what had to be repelled.
Veynar tossed a dagger to the ground, making it skip on the gravel a few dozen paces off. "You don't need to 'summon' a sword," he clarified. "It just needs to rise when you tell it to and return when you send it away, like you're tugging an invisible thread." The distance was intentional: they wanted to learn how much field he could cover.
Lacrosse set the energy humming at his nape and spread it through his hands. He felt a faint rustle of air, a current slipping between his fingers. He opened his palms toward the dagger; nothing. A second attempt, imagining his energy wrapping the metal. A faint smell of ozone. The dagger slid sideways half a hand, but stayed down.
"Closer," Law suggested. "You can't grab what you don't at least touch with your eyes. And don't limit yourself to your hands. Think of the wave leaving your chest, your breath too. Like you're a human magnet."
Lacrosse stepped in twice. Inhaled, pictured himself pulling the dagger using the same sensitivity he'd used to raise the stone. He pictured the knot as a sphere of light sending fine lines down his arms and into the ground. For an instant he saw those lines—or thought he did—loop around the dagger. He tugged. The blade moved, scraped along the dirt, then popped up toward him. With a twist of his torso, he reached and caught it midair.
"Good!" Veynar exclaimed. "Now send it back without breaking my leg."
The boy chuckled, nervous, and recalling the wave he felt the tingle invert. The shove started at the nape, crossed his chest, reached his fingers. He opened his hand and the dagger flew off, landing a few paces from where it had started. Repeating the drill again and again, he got it to return from ever farther, until he sent it whispering across the whole flat and back again without touching down.
"You're starting to get it," Law said, giving him a small nod. "You don't always choose push or pull. Sometimes it's a cycle: attract, transform, release. It's a rhythm." The word settled on his tongue and reminded him of another rhythm: the life that had slipped through his fingers. He clenched his jaw.
Lacrosse didn't sweat like a human would; his smooth skin had no pores to bead. But his hands shook and the light at his nape pulsed as if firing the ceramic from within. He felt an unnatural heat under the lustrous surface, like a hidden ember. He turned to his teachers. "How long… before I'm… useful?"
"How long before your head stops hurting?" Law shot back. "Depends how stubborn you are about brute force. Tomorrow you'll be a bit more precise. The day after, a bit more." He crouched in front of him. "There isn't a number. There's your will. And there's the fact I can't take you to the Schwarzhaus if you faint over a nail." His tone wasn't scolding—just real.
Veynar cleared his throat. "And there's the Progressive Factor," he added, looking first at Lacrosse, then at Law. "In general, when you handle Astral Energy, you don't consume it: the more you use it, the more your body makes and carves channels for it. The 'tank' doesn't empty—it widens. And with time the channels thicken, the body toughens." He said it like something he'd seen a thousand times.
"I already told him, genius," Law cut in.
"Shut up. I was saying: the process isn't harmless. If growth is too fast or disorderly, the Energy can overwhelm its host. There's a name for that crap, among those who know these business: the Takeover. Not hunger, not fatigue—being drowned by what was meant to obey."
Veynar paused, weighing the next words. "We don't know if this applies to you, kid, 'cause you don't have channels. You have a knot. Which is why we go slow. I don't want to learn now that your knot can implode, or… do worse."
The word "Takeover" hung in the air like warm ash. Law stiffened a fraction. His jaw tightened and he looked away, as if that shadow had passed too close once. He said nothing, but his breath deepened for an instant, as if remembering something he didn't want to recount.
Lacrosse nodded. His body showed no signs of tiredness in the strict sense: no creaking joints, no burning muscles. Yet he felt a different vibration, as if a mesh of micro-veins of light had lit just under the smooth surface. In that intensity he sensed a curious satisfaction. He had moved stones and blades without touching them. He had watched force rise within and change. For the first time, the knot at his nape felt not only a curse but also a gift.
"Then tomorrow again," he said with a tired smile. "And the day after, maybe, I'll be a little less of a burden."
"You'll never be light," Law teased, tapping his chest, "but you might become manageable."
The wind carried their laughter away while the canyon's shadows stretched. Above them, the sky shifted from copper to deep blue. Lacrosse gave the posts and copper wires one last glance: they looked like the instruments of an abandoned orchestra. He thought of the rhythm Law spoke of. Perhaps he had to learn not only to play his energy, but to listen to the silence between one stroke and the next.
—
Two weeks later
Night slipped into the gorge on a finer wind than usual. The rock's dusk took on a rusty hue, and every crack looked like an eye. Veynar had put away the tools and left them space; he had withdrawn behind a leather curtain where his breathing became background noise. The kettle was cold, the embers buried under sand. Only the far song of the canyon broke the stillness.
Lacrosse sat on a stone bench, knees hugged to his chest. Every so often he lifted his fingers to his nape, as if to feel the knot still pulsing. The ringing had lingered in his ears after the last discharges. In front of him, Law drew a file along his sword's edge, a mechanical gesture he could have done blind. His synthetic arm cast pale reflections over the metal's grain. No one spoke. There was so much to say that words felt wasted.
Lacrosse broke the silence.
"I can't stop wondering…" he said quietly, staring at his hands, "…if they really… sold us." He was afraid to say it out loud, as if speaking it would make it real. "That man, Snow, looked at me like I was… a parcel. And I saw how Amarel died. Jean left. Sometimes I think if it weren't for Clarisse…"
Law stopped filing. He raised his eyes slowly, without blinking. The word "sold" plucked a string he knew too well.
"Families have two ways to rid themselves of a problem," he said at last. "Either they embrace it, or they sacrifice it." He didn't say it bitterly, but the way you state a physical law. "My first 'family' was a pile of scrap and a little brother found among corpses. They chose to die and leave me with a debt." He paused. "The Houses… they'll sell even themselves, if they must. I'm not saying yours did this."
Lacrosse squeezed his knees. "Clarisse… she had nothing to do with what happened," he murmured. "I'm sure she's trying to get a message to me. I trust her. But the others… I don't know. When I was with them, everything felt… safe." He realized the "before" he meant was only four years, and it felt as distant as another life. "And now I feel stupid for thinking it."
"Being naïve isn't a sin," Law replied, setting the file to work again. "Staying that way is." The teeth sang. "Clarisse kept you in sight. Maybe for affection, maybe because it was her job." He glanced sidelong at the boy. "If there's a person you care about, cling to that. Not to a surname."
The words came out harder than he intended. He too was handling a knife he couldn't see: the weight of the promise he'd made to Amarel. A pistol round meant for another had taken him, and Law had reacted too late. Amarel's eyes still looked at him every time he closed his own.
Lacrosse dared to ask:"Amarel… was he really your only friend?" He didn't want to pry, but he didn't know how to avoid the question. "Because, well… I'm not sure I can even call anyone a 'friend.'"
Law closed his fist around the sword and slid it back into his belt slowly. He gave a half-smile without joy."Amarel was the only one with the guts to laugh in my face," he said. "I don't say my brother, because he… was that and that's all. But Amarel… he's the kind who jabs you with an elbow and says 'you're not as tough as you think' when everyone else runs. We saved each other's skins a couple times, but he saved something I didn't know I had." His voice dropped. "And I didn't save him at the end." He added nothing else.
"Your brother… what was his name?"
"Dan," Law answered, like he'd already said all he wanted to.
Lacrosse lowered his head. "I'm sorry," he said, simply. There were no words to make grief less sharp.
"Don't use pity," Law replied without anger. "It doesn't serve him." He looked toward the shadow of the curtain where Veynar slept. "It serves us not to make the same mistake again." He ran his hand over his nape, an instinct that belonged to another time.
Lacrosse nodded, swallowing. His nape still burned. "I thought that if I stayed with you, I'd be helpful. Instead… I've been a burden," the words scraped out. "Jean saved me twice, you're teaching me, and I… I hid." He paused. "I want to be more useful."
Law shrugged. "No one's born knowing." He jerked his chin toward the rock he'd cleaved in two a few days after they'd arrived. "It took me my time to be able to do that, and I did stuff I'm not really proud of. You made a canyon tremble on day one." He scratched the scar on his cheek. "I don't expect you to save my life tomorrow. I expect you not to die because you think you owe me something." His eyes thinned. "And Jean… Jean grew up with blood under her nails. She hates me and has reason to. She'll come back when she feels like spitting in my face again."
Lacrosse drew a slow breath. "I… I've seen things," he confessed, as if it were a secret. "Fragments. A green-blue meadow, three kids. Every time I see a little more. A girl with dark hair, a mole at the corner of her mouth. A boy with a half-moon birthmark on his brow…" He shook his head. "I don't know who they are. I don't know if it's me. When Snow looked at me like that, I was scared it was all true. That I'm something I know nothing about."
He looked at Law with blue eyes that seemed lighter. "What would you do if you knew your past might be… bigger than you?"
Law measured the question like a blade. "If your past is bigger than you," he said, "the only thing to do is make sure you're strong enough to look it in the face when it stands in front of you." He stood, stretching. "And don't let others define it."
Their talk was broken only by the sound of a stone rolling outside the cave. Veynar coughed behind the curtain but didn't intrude. Perhaps he was listening; perhaps asleep.
Lacrosse lowered his gaze. "Do you think Clarisse…" he began, then stopped. "…do you think she's looking for me?" The question came out mixed hope and shame.
Law adjusted his belt. "Clarisse isn't stupid," he said. "And I don't think she'd have tossed you into this circus without a plan. But plans change." He fixed him with a look. "If you believe in her, keep believing. But don't expect her to be the one to pull you out of the messes." He sighed. "If tomorrow she had the chance to save her House by sacrificing you… I can't tell you what she'd do. I only know you're here, and they're there." He jerked his chin toward the mouth of the cave. "And I prefer to reason with who I can touch."
Lacrosse nodded slowly. "Then I'll stay," he said with a shy smile. "I don't want to die in the desert or get lost in hotels."
Law laughed once, dry. "Nobody dies at the hotel because they want to." Then he turned serious. "Vossheim isn't where you go to make friends. You go to ask questions and risk answers. There'll probably be people I know. People I don't get along with. Keep your head down, listen, and remember every smile is worth a knife." He bent, grabbed a sack, and tossed it to Lacrosse. "Sleep. We move tomorrow."
Lacrosse caught it midair, almost surprised. "Good night," he said.
"Close your eyes first," Law replied, planting himself in the cave's mouth. He stayed there, watching the canyon's dark. Wind-borne sand pricked his skin. He thought of Amarel, of Jean, of Dan. He smelled iron. He allowed himself a single thought: he must not fail again. Then he shut his eyes and rested his head against the wall—but he did not sleep.