Time in Thornhaven lost its gentle meaning. There was no longer morning or afternoon; there was only the brutal cycle of exhaustion and recovery. The measure of days was now the burning ache in their muscles and the amount of air their lungs could suck in before collapsing.
A week had passed since Aldric locked away the theoretical books and declared that the time of peace was over.
In the dirt courtyard, the air shimmered with heat and dust. Konstant was on his knees. His chest rose and fell like a broken bellows. Sweat streamed down his forehead, mixing with dirt and burning his eyelids. The wooden staff in his hands seemed to weigh as much as a mountain of iron, and his fingers were white from gripping it so hard.
"Again!"
Daven's voice thundered, loaded with an invisible pressure that seemed to make the air itself heavier.
"Get up, boy! An Abyssal won't wait for you to catch your breath!"
Konstant groped the rough ground, found purchase, and forced his body to rise. Every muscle fiber screamed, a chorus of agony. He tilted his head, not to see, but to feel.
His nose twitched involuntarily. The pores on his skin stood on end. It wasn't wind; it was the disturbance in the flow of air. When Daven moved to the right, the muscles in Konstant's back tightened a millisecond before the instructor's foot touched the ground. A phantom reflex, a premonition born of pain.
It was a tenuous balance, a spider's web stretched to its limit. And then, it snapped.
An intrusive noise invaded the yard. The metallic clang of a hammer striking the village anvil, leagues away, echoed like thunder in his hypersensitive ears. For a mind trying to hear the rustle of clothing, that sound was an earthquake.
For a fraction of a second, the "image" of Daven flickered and vanished. Konstant's chin lifted, an involuntary reflex seeking the new source of noise, his attention diverted to the irrelevant sound.
The metallic clang acted like a flash of light in a dark room, blinding Konstant's subtle perception. The sound-map he was building with such effort crumbled. For an instant, the world was just noise, and the deadly silence of Daven's staff was lost in the chaos.
"The world will always scream, Konstant. If you try to hear everything, you will hear nothing," Aldric said, his voice cold and cutting as polished steel. "The hammer on the forge is just vibration. Daven's attack is a sentence. Do not use your ears as open funnels for the world's trash. Use them as sieves. Discard the noise."
Daven did not wait for the advice to finish. He lunged. The pressure of the air changed.
Konstant did not see the strike. His dead eyes captured only the usual darkness, but his ears registered the sharp sound of the wooden staff cutting the air to the left. Fast. Brutal. Inevitable as a landslide.
Fear screamed for him to block. But something deeper, something that had just awakened, screamed something else.
Duck.
And in that instinctive movement, something inside him broke. It was like a violin string stretched beyond its limit, snapping and releasing a wave of pure sound.
The world stopped.
It was not a conscious thought. It was a fusion. All the loose threads of information bombarding his chaotic mind—the acrid smell of sweat on Daven's leather jerkin, the turbulence of air displaced by the weapon, the microscopic creak of the boots, the subtle vibration in the soil caused by the man's hundred kilos in motion—suddenly intertwined.
Chaos turned to order. Noise turned into a mental map.
For an instant, the darkness ceased to be empty.
In Konstant's mind, there were no colors or light. There was only Daven.
But not the Daven of flesh and bone. It was a grey, pulsing phantom, made of pure heat and intention. A silhouette outlined by the pressure of air against his skin, against the void. The staff was not wood, but an incandescent extension of that nucleus of threat, tracing a lethal arc in space.
Konstant did not need to calculate the trajectory. He did not need to guess. He knew where the weapon was with the same absolute certainty with which he knew where his own heart was.
The staff passed whizzing millimeters from his white hair. It cut only air, a hiss of frustrated violence.
For the first time that morning, the strike was not followed by the dull thud of wood crushing flesh.
Konstant remained crouched, frozen in the posture, his chest heaving, but his mind was clear as a mirror of ice.
In a fluid motion, guided not by sight but by the perception of Daven's "form," Konstant swung his own staff.
Bam!
The wood struck hard against the side of the guard's knee, right at the joint of the protection.
The "grey phantom" in his mind flickered, unstable, and dissipated like smoke in the wind. The confused roar of the world invaded his senses again with full force: the distant hammer, the wind in the leaves, the blood pumping furiously in his ears.
The "vision" disappeared. But the feeling remained. The seed had been planted. For a second, he had not merely heard the world. He had touched the Law that governed it.
Daven took a step back, grunting in surprise, looking down with wide eyes.
"Better," said the guard, massaging his leg with a grimace that mixed pain and approval. "But you hesitated at the end. Your intent was weak. If it were a real blade and a real enemy, you would have had to break my knee, not announced you were there. Mercy in training is death in battle."
While Konstant absorbed the weight of that sentence under the scorching sun, the shade nearby sheltered an equally somber lesson.
Seated under the canopy of an ancient tree, Keiko did not hold a weapon, but something far more insidious. She was learning that, in this new world, the line between giving life and taking it was as thin as a petal.
The table before her was full of plants. Some vibrant and beautiful, others dry and twisted like the fingers of corpses.
"This one," Aldric pointed, holding a delicate purple flower with a silver tong. "Shadow Belladonna. One drop of the extract paralyzes a grown man in three breaths. Two drops stop the heart before the fourth."
Keiko swallowed hard, her hands trembling slightly as she handled the plant. She felt a cold energy emanating from the flower, something that repelled her own nature.
"Why do I need to know how to make poison? I spent months learning to heal with Mira. My hands were made to save, not to poison."
"In Aethérion, Cure and Death grow from the same root, child," Aldric replied, his voice sounding like the crackle of dry leaves. "You cannot cure a poisoning if you do not understand the nature of the poison. Too much remedy kills; the right dose of poison cures."
He leaned in, his eyes fixed on hers.
"And if one day your strength fails? If your courage dries up and you are alone, surrounded by beasts or by men who have forgotten their own humanity? This knowledge will be your last defense. Learn to respect it. Morality is a luxury negotiated among the living. The dead do not bargain."
Keiko looked at the flower. It seemed innocent, but now Keiko saw its "aura." Cold. Silent. Mortal. She nodded, storing away the revulsion and accepting the weight of the knowledge.
Aldric observed the nod, a dark gleam of approval in his blue eye. He said nothing more. He turned, and his gaze swept across the yard, passing over Konstant, who still trembled on the ground after the glimpse, until it settled on the farthest edge of the dirt field.
There, isolated from everything, was Rady.
The boy was lying face down, his ear pressed against the frozen ground. He did not seem to be part of the training. He seemed part of the landscape, like a root or a stone. But Aldric saw what others would not: the rigid line of his spine, the fingers of his hands lightly buried in the earth.
"What do you hear?" Aldric asked, appearing beside him without a sound, as if he had sprouted from the soil.
Rady lifted his face, dirty with brown dust. "Footsteps. Konstant breathing heavily. The wind in the leaves."
Thump.
Aldric struck the tip of his staff hard against the ground. The vibration traveled through the soil.
"No. Those are echoes from the surface. Just noise." The elder's gaze was severe. "Deeper, Rady. The earth is not a solid, stupid block. You have worked the fields with Tomos for months. You know this. It has veins. It has a pulse."
Rady closed his eyes again, furrowing his brow in concentration. He tried to recapture the feeling he had when planting, when he felt the earth yield and embrace, like a silent mother.
"Feel the weight," Aldric's voice now seemed to come from within the earth. "Water running through aquifers like blood. Roots stretching like nerves. The earth is alive. It is the deep foundation that holds everything up. You have an affinity with its stability. If you want to protect your friends, you cannot just be the grass that sways in the wind. You must be the rock that breaks the storm."
Rady stopped trying to "hear" and began trying to "be."
He sank his consciousness. The cold of the ground ceased to be uncomfortable and became an extension of his skin.
For a second, just a second, the world spun.
He felt.
It was not a sound. It was a resonance. He felt Daven's heavy step ten meters away not as a noise, but as a tectonic impact reverberating in his own ribs through the ground. He felt an earthworm digging two meters below him.
"I...," Rady began, his eyes opening in shock, and the connection shattered.
"He's getting it," Aldric murmured, a rare gleam of satisfaction in his ancient eyes fixed on Rady. "The Earth's path is slow, but unshakable. Keep going. Until the soil is not where you step, but part of your own body."
He then raised his voice, addressing the others scattered across the clearing. "For today, enough. The sun has already set, and exhaustion makes learning useless."
The dismissal was met with simultaneous sighs of relief. Rady undid his connection with the soil and felt his muscles burn as he moved. He managed to stand up by himself, but his legs still shook. Keiko, who was nearby, massaged her temples, as if trying to expel a persistent headache caused by the poisons.
"I thought he would never release us," Daven grumbled, cracking his back noisily. He approached Konstant, still seated on the ground, and extended a large, calloused hand. "Come on, boy. Dinner won't eat itself." Konstant grabbed it and pulled himself up, still groping the air with his free hand until he found Daven's shoulder to steady himself.
"At least you could move," Rady commented, joining them with heavy, dragging steps. "I think I really grew roots."
The group bid farewell to the training yard and started back. Daven and Keiko flanked Konstant, adjusting their steps to his pace, while Rady brought up the rear, still shaking the numbness from his legs. Conversation flowed easily between good-natured complaints and theories about the lesson; each other's presence made the weight of exhaustion more bearable.
The first to part ways was Daven. When the main trail crossed a narrow shortcut leading to the guards' quarters, he gave Konstant a friendly—and slightly too hard—slap on the back.
"See you tomorrow. Don't dream about today's beating," he said, laughing, before disappearing into the darkness among the trees, his heavy steps crushing the undergrowth.
Shortly after, they reached the fork by the stream. Mira's house was right there. Keiko stopped and picked something leaning against a nearby oak trunk: the wooden staff Konstant used to guide himself, which he had left there before training.
"Here," she said softly, extending the object. She did not merely extend it but also guided the tip of the handle to touch Konstant's left hand. "You almost forgot your eyes."
Konstant's fingers closed around the handle with an automatic, relieved familiarity. The combat staff was heavy and brutish, but this staff was light and flexible, a nervous extension of his touch.
"Thank you, Keiko. Good night."
"Good night," she replied. The sound of her footsteps soon faded, muffled by the murmur of the stream water.
That left Rady, Konstant, and Aldric behind. The dynamic of the walk changed instantly. Now with something to guide him, Konstant relaxed his posture. The rhythmic sound of the tip of the staff tapping the ground—tack, tack, tack—preceded each of his steps. He swept the ground with the staff in arcing motions, feeling the vibration of the wood travel up his arm and creating a mental map of exposed roots, loose stones, and uneven ground his feet should avoid. It was a constant, methodical sound, the music that kept him safe in the physical world.
At the final curve, Aldric left the rear and veered off the main path, climbing a secondary trail. Konstant followed him, the toc-toc-toc of his staff on the stone path growing fainter with each step.
Rady stopped at the fork. He looked up just enough to see the two figures merge with the larger shadow of the house atop the hill—merely a dark outline against the starry sky, with windows already lit.
A voice descended the slope, clear in the silence of the night: "Until tomorrow, Rady."
He did not reply. He merely nodded, even knowing they might not see, and turned onto the dark trail leading to the village.
Now, only he and the sound of his own footsteps.
The solitary walk only ended when he finally spotted the lit, warm windows ahead.
Upon opening the door, the comforting smell of vegetable stew and damp earth embraced him. Tomos and Lira's house was warm. It was the smell of "home." A smell he had learned to love more than any expensive perfume from his previous life on Earth.
But today, the smell made him nauseous.
He was seated at the sturdy wooden table, pushing a piece of potato back and forth on the clay plate, creating imaginary trenches in the sauce.
"You've barely touched your food, dear," Lira said, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder. The woman had the kindest smile he had ever seen, and her hands, though calloused from housework, radiated a maternal warmth.
Across the table, Tomos cleared his throat. The man was a mountain of silence and strength, with broad shoulders accustomed to plowing the land from dawn till dusk. But that night, the mountain seemed smaller. His small, dark eyes studied Rady with an awkward concern.
"Is the training with the Elder difficult?" Tomos asked, his voice deep like stones rolling down a hill. "Nothing grows strong without first tearing through the soil."
"It's not the training," Rady whispered. He dropped the fork, which clinked against the plate like a funeral bell. "I don't want to go."
The silence in the kitchen was absolute, broken only by the crackling of firewood in the stove.
"I like it here," Rady continued, his voice choked, his eyes fixed on the table so he wouldn't have to face the couple who had taken him in. "I like the fields. I like seeing the seedlings grow. I like when we finish the harvest and sit on the porch. If I go to Aethérion... to that Academy... I could die."
He looked up, eyes brimming, the vulnerability of a child breaking through the armor he was trying to build around himself.
"And even if I don't die... I won't be here. Who will help with the spring sowing? Who will check the irrigation on the north side?"
Lira pulled a chair and sat beside him, taking his dirty, calloused hand in hers.
"Rady, look at me."
He looked. Her eyes were bright, but firm.
"When you arrived here, you were a frightened boy hiding from his own shadow. Now...," she squeezed his hand, feeling the roughness of his work-hardened skin, the proof of his effort. "Now you have earth under your nails and strength in your arms. But that strength... it's becoming too big for this farm. A dragon cannot live in a shallow pond."
"We don't want you to go because we want to get rid of you, son," Tomos said. The word "son" came out hoarse, heavy, but full of a raw affection.
Rady felt a lump in his throat. It was the first time Tomos had called him that out loud.
"We want you to go," Tomos continued, looking at his own enormous hands on the table, "because we know what happens when the Abyssals come. Aldric told us the barriers are weakening. The world is changing."
Tomos looked up, and Rady saw a fear there he had never seen before. Not a fear of monsters, but the terrible fear of a man who cannot protect what he loves.
"If an attack comes, I have a hoe and my brute strength. Lira has her courage. But we are just ordinary people. We cannot stop what is coming. We cannot protect Thornhaven alone."
Tomos stood up, the chair scraping the floor. He walked around the table and placed his heavy hands on Rady's shoulders, anchoring him.
"But you can. Not now. But if you go, if you learn to control that power that makes the earth obey you... you can come back. And when you return, you will not just be a farmer. You will be the wall that stops anything from touching this house, these fields."
Rady looked at Lira, then at Tomos. He saw the raw truth in their eyes. They were not casting him out. They were betting everything on him. They were entrusting him with the only thing that truly mattered: their future.
The understanding fell upon him with the weight of a rock. Staying was cowardice disguised as love. Going was the only way to keep that love alive. To protect the world he knew, he needed to have the strength to leave it behind.
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, smearing his face with tears and dust, mixing them together. He took a deep breath, smelling the house one last time as a refuge, and the first time as something to be defended.
"I will eat," said Rady, his voice trembling, but firm as granite. He picked up the fork and stabbed the potato forcefully. "I need energy. Tomorrow... tomorrow I will manage to feel the earth. I promise. I will train until the earth is part of me."
Lira smiled, and a solitary tear traced a path down her tired face.
"That's my boy."
The next morning, before the sun had even risen, when the sky was still a deep, cold blue and mist covered the world, Aldric found Rady already in the training yard.
The boy was standing, barefoot on the frozen earth, his eyes closed.
Aldric was about to say something but stopped. His spiritual perception caught a change. The air around Rady seemed... dense. Heavy.
The Elder looked at the ground. Small stones around Rady's feet were vibrating, levitating millimeters above the soil. It was not wind. It was resonance. The Earth's Qi was responding.
The boy was not merely standing on the earth now; he was planted in it. His legs seemed like invisible roots penetrating deep, seeking the source. He was listening to the heart of the world, and the world was answering his silent call.
Aldric smiled, a rare and brief smile that vanished as quickly as it came.
"It seems someone has finally decided to put down roots in order to reach for the heavens," the Elder murmured to himself. "The foundation has been laid."
Rady opened his eyes. The childish doubt was gone from them. There was the stubborn, patient determination of one who works the soil and knows the harvest demands sacrifice and time.
"When do we leave?" Rady asked. His voice held a new weight.
Aldric looked to the north, where dark clouds were forming on the horizon, piling up far faster than the season should allow. Portents of a storm.
"Soon, Rady," Aldric replied, his voice laden with foreboding. "Too soon."