Chapter 19: The Night After (Part 1 of 2)

  Pain arrived late.

  Laurent noticed it first when he stopped moving.

  The academy dormitory was quieter than he had expected—stone walls dulling sound, footsteps softened by distance. Students filed in with the same stiff, careful gait, packs slipping from shoulders more slowly than they had that morning. No one rushed. No one joked loudly.

  Movement had consequences now.

  Laurent lowered himself onto the narrow bed and exhaled. The moment his muscles relaxed, the ache surfaced properly—deep, spreading, unnegotiable. His shoulders burned. His thighs throbbed. His forearms felt dense, like they had been packed with wet sand.

  He stared at the ceiling and waited for it to pass.

  It didn’t.

  Across the room, someone groaned.

  “I can’t lift my arms,” Cael said. Not dramatic. Just factual.

  “Good,” Seris replied weakly from the next bed. “That means they still exist.”

  A short laugh followed, cut off immediately by a sharp hiss as someone shifted wrong.

  Laurent rolled onto his side with care, every movement measured. This wasn’t injury. He knew injury. This was different—uniform, pervasive, honest.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Training pain.

  It reminded him of the forest. Long days carrying weight that didn’t care who he was. Nights where his body argued with him about standing up again in the morning.

  But this was worse.

  Because here, everyone was supposed to be learning how to make it easier.

  “Law Bearers don’t get this,” Eren muttered from somewhere near the wall. “I heard they just sit and breathe.”

  “Yeah,” someone else said. “They look tired, but not like this.”

  “Figures.”

  Silence settled again, broken only by careful breathing and the soft scrape of fabric against stone.

  Laurent closed his eyes.

  He tried to do what the others had done earlier—slow his breathing, settle inward, wait for something to respond.

  Nothing did.

  The ache stayed exactly where it was.

  He lay still, listening.

  A few beds down, someone shifted and exhaled in relief.

  “That helped,” Aila said quietly. “Still hurts. But less.”

  Laurent opened his eyes.

  Helped how?

  He didn’t ask. Not yet.

  It wasn’t pride that held him back. It was habit. He was used to not knowing things other people assumed were obvious.

  Instead, he lay still and counted breaths.

  Minutes passed. Then more.

  The pain didn’t fade, but it changed—settling into a heavy, constant presence rather than sharp protest. It was the kind of pain that promised worse in the morning.

  Someone swore softly. Another laughed, brittle.

  “I’m not doing that again tomorrow.”

  “You are,” Seris replied.

  “I hate this place already.”

  Laurent listened without joining in.

  He didn’t hate it. Not yet.

  But as he stared at the dim outline of the ceiling beams, a thought surfaced—quiet, unwelcome, persistent.

  I’m falling behind already.

  Not because he was weaker. He had carried heavier loads than today’s frames. He had slept on worse ground.

  But because whatever everyone else was doing—whatever eased the pain even a little—he wasn’t.

  When sleep finally came, it was shallow and broken, interrupted by stiffness and the dull certainty that morning would hurt more than tonight.

  And beneath that certainty, another realization took shape, unformed but pressing:

  Everyone else seemed to know something he didn’t.