"The speed at which you cycle your Ethra," Elder Joran said, his voice carrying through the empty training hall with the quality of someone who has selected the precise volume for the precise space,

  "Is your greatest single detriment."

  He had produced a stick from somewhere. It was not an impressive stick.

  It was long and slim and possessed the structural dignity of something that had been a branch recently and was not entirely resigned to its new shape, the kind of object that no one would look at twice in any context other than this one.

  Elder Joran held it aloft in two fingers, regarding it with the satisfaction of someone who has found exactly the tool the situation requires.

  Tunde watched him through his Ethra sight, which Joran had accepted with the particular pleasure of someone who has just been told that a task they expected to be difficult is going to be easier, and the sight showed him something he had not yet had the context to fully read: the Ethra within Elder Joran's body at rest.

  Not performing, not projected outward, simply present in its ordinary state of circulation, moving through the elder's frame at a speed that his own cycling had no useful point of comparison for.

  It was like watching a river from beside a pond.

  "Cycling speed is the foundation that everything else is built on," Joran continued.

  "As you climb in rank, the gap between a ranker with fast cycling and a ranker with slow cycling compounds rather than narrows. The Ethra available to you at any given moment in a fight, the speed at which depleted reserves replenish, the efficiency of every technique you will ever develop, all of it descends from this single metric."

  He raised the stick slightly.

  "Observe."

  A thin line of silver grey Ethra moved from his hand into the wood, and the movement of it, even at the small fraction of his capacity that he was deploying, was different from anything Tunde had seen in another person's body.

  Not the scattered deliberate push of an Initiate directing Ethra where they wanted it, not even the controlled flow of Oram's precise technique.

  It was automatic, the Ethra responding to the elder's intention before the intention had fully formed, the gap between thought and execution so narrow that from the outside it appeared simultaneous.

  Joran swung the stick lazily, a gentle arc that a child might use.

  The crack that came from it was not gentle. It was the sound of air being parted by something that had been given significantly more energy than its appearance suggested, followed immediately by a secondary pop that was the sound of the displaced air rushing back in, and then a concussive pressure that Tunde felt in his chest and his ears simultaneously.

  The stick was entirely undamaged.

  "The stick is your body," Joran said, in the same conversational tone.

  "My hand is your Ethra heart. The principle is imbuement, which you already know as a concept. What you do not yet know is imbuement as a physical practice, which is different from knowing it as a word." He turned the stick in his fingers.

  "The gap between those two things is what we are going to close."

  He looked at Tunde with the blindfolded attention that had stopped feeling ambiguous to Tunde after the first hour of the morning and had started feeling simply like being looked at by someone who sees more than you.

  "From the state of your body," Joran said,

  "Whatever was done in the wasteland was done well. Your foundation is strong enough to absorb the backlash of what I am about to teach you. That is fortunate, because without it, this process would require considerably more foundational work before we could begin." He paused.

  "An Initiate with a properly tempered body is a rare thing. I have worked with students who did not have that foundation, and the difference in pace is significant."

  "I should thank Thorne and Elyria," Tunde said.

  "You already have, presumably," Joran said.

  "What we are discussing now is how to build on what they gave you." He moved to the center of the platform.

  "Come here."

  Tunde came.

  "The three expressions of Ethra," Joran said.

  "You know them."

  "Domain, imbuement, and projection," Tunde said.

  "An Initiate's Ethra heart is not ready for domain or projection in any meaningful form. The heart is too young, the channels too new, the reserves too limited. What an Initiate can practice is the process of direction, pushing Ethra from the heart through the channels and into specific locations in the body, holding it there, and releasing it in a controlled way."

  He tapped Tunde's forearm.

  "That is imbuement at its most fundamental. Not a technique. Not a skill. A process that your body needs to learn the way a young person learns to walk, through repetition until it is below the level of conscious thought."

  "And projection?" Tunde asked.

  "A lesser form is accessible to Initiates, under specific conditions, and we will reach it. Not today." Joran stepped back and raised the stick.

  "What I want from you right now is simple. Push your Ethra to the surface of your skin and hold it there. All of it that your heart can direct. Think of your heart as a hand squeezing water from a cloth. I want every drop at the surface."

  Tunde reached inward and pushed.

  The cycling he had been doing since the wasteland was inward and through, drawing Ethra in and circulating it through the body's channels, filling and maintaining.

  What Joran was asking for was different, not circulation but accumulation at the boundary, pushing the flow toward the surface and holding it there rather than letting it continue through the channels and back to the heart.

  His heart understood this about as well as a pump understands being asked to fill a container rather than move fluid through a pipe. It could do it. It found it profoundly uncomfortable.

  The Ethra pressed against the surface of his skin with the sustained urgency of something trying to return to its natural course, and he held it there with the focused effort of someone pressing their weight against a door that wants to open.

  "Good," Joran said, with the brevity of someone communicating genuine assessment.

  "Note how it feels. The resistance. The specific effort of holding Ethra in a configuration it does not naturally maintain. That is your heart learning." He raised the stick.

  "Now I am going to hit you."

  He hit him.

  The stick arrived with the imbued Ethra behind it, and the impact was not the impact of a stick; it was the impact of what the stick was carrying, and what it was carrying informed Tunde's held surface Ethra immediately and comprehensively.

  The shock of the impact dispersed through the thin layer he had built at the surface and arrived at his body underneath it with a force that the surface layer had noticeably reduced but not eliminated.

  He absorbed this. He did not move from the position because Joran had not told him to move, and he was paying attention to what the impact told him rather than reacting to the fact of it.

  "The Ethra at the surface absorbed some of what the stick carried," Joran said.

  "Not enough. The layer was not dense enough, and the cycling was not fast enough to replace what the impact displaced. You felt the stick." He raised it again.

  "Hold more."

  Tunde pushed harder.

  The day became the stick and the impact and the cycling and the recovery, over and over, in cycles that had nothing to do with the Ethra circulation meaning and everything to do with the physical rhythm of learning something through repetition.

  His heart worked at a sustained level beyond anything the wasteland had required in the specific configuration of directing Ethra outward and holding it there, the effort of it producing a heaviness in his chest that was not quite pain but was the sensation of something being asked to do more than it was currently built for.

  He held the surface layer and it was dispersed by the stick, and he rebuilt it.

  He held it and it was dispersed and then he rebuilt it again. Joran watched each cycle with the patient attention of someone conducting an experiment and noting the results without hurrying the process.

  "Better," Joran said, after the twelfth or fifteenth exchange, the specific number having become irrelevant somewhere around the fifth.

  "The density has increased. The rebuild time has shortened. Your heart is adapting." He lowered the stick briefly.

  "This is the whole principle of Initiate stage training, and it is why most clans get it wrong. They train Initiates in techniques, in applications, in the things that affinities can do. These are the fruits of a tree. What we are doing is building the tree." He raised the stick.

  "Again."

  By the time Joran signaled a pause, the stick was cracked.

  Not from Tunde's resistance, Tunde understood, but from the cumulative Ethra impact of the elder's own strikes, the wood finally unable to contain what had been passed through it. Joran looked at it with mild approval and set it on the bench.

  "Rest," he said.

  "Eat. Resume cycling the imbuement pattern while you do both. Not at full effort, at the minimum effort required to maintain the pattern." He reached into his robe and produced the leather-bound books that had come from Elder Wren's recommendation, setting them beside the cracked stick.

  "The first one. Read it while you cycle. Two tasks simultaneously."

  He disappeared. Not gradually, not with the gradual reduction of presence that precedes most departures. Simply gone, the space where he had been was empty without transition.

  Tunde sat on the bench with his wrapped food in his lap, his arms carrying the specific heaviness of muscles that had been asked to do something they had not been doing long enough to do easily, and opened the book and began to read while he kept the cycling pattern running underneath the reading the way one keeps a flame burning underneath a pot that is already at temperature.

  The book was the history of the Bloodfire continent, and it was dense with the specific density of something written by someone who found all of it equally important and had not prioritized. Two empires.

  The Talahan Empire, which occupied the northern and eastern portions of the continent and governed through a system of clans and sects operating under imperial charter.

  And another, older power to the south, whose name in the book was given three times in three different transliterations.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The wastelands occupied the territory between them, nominally belonging to neither, governed by the particular law of places that have decided that the absence of law is itself a governance structure.

  Tunde read and cycled and ate his wrapped food cold because he had forgotten to eat it warm, and the afternoon moved through the empty training hall, the light shifting on the smooth platform stones as the sun completed its arc and began its descent.

  Joran reappeared with the same absence of transition as his departure, arriving already in the middle of a sentence.

  "Rest. Eat. We continue when I determine the timing is appropriate." A pause, and then,

  "You will maintain the cycling. Through rest. Through sleep, if you can manage it. The pattern becomes natural when it runs beneath everything else, not when you attend to it."

  "Sleep?" Tunde asked.

  "Initially it will wake you when it drops," Joran said.

  "That is the process. Eventually it will not drop." He turned.

  "The next session will begin before dawn. Be on the platform before I arrive."

  ****

  Elder Joran walked the familiar path back toward the older quarters of the compound where an elder's sense of what constituted comfortable living had very little to do with proximity to things that were happening and a great deal to do with not being proximate to things unless he had chosen to be.

  He was aware of Moros before Moros made himself visible, which was standard.

  Moros had always preferred entrances that communicated power, the materialization from above, the dramatic reveal of a veiled form.

  It was a preference Joran had observed for long enough that it no longer produced any response in him other than the mild affection one has for a person's consistent quirks.

  "A shadow path," Moros said, settling above him at a height that was precisely calculated to require Joran to look up if he wanted to address the elder directly.

  Joran looked directly ahead and addressed the night air in the general direction of Moros's voice instead.

  "It will present challenges. Nothing insurmountable."

  "It speaks to character," Moros said, with the particular intonation of someone who has found a negative interpretation and intends to extract the maximum from it.

  "A shadow affinity in a child from Crystalreach who arrived in the wasteland in the company of a Revenant. The family heads are asking questions."

  "The family heads ask questions about the weather," Joran said. "It is their function."

  "You've embarrassed them," Moros said.

  "Taking on an outside student instead of one of their children. The Jansen family in particular is not pleased about Oram's performance this morning."

  "Oram performed exceptionally," Joran said.

  "I praised him in front of his peers. The Jansen family's displeasure is with me for the circumstances I created, not with Oram. And their displeasure is a matter of pride, not substance."

  The silence that followed had the quality of someone who has not yet revealed their main point.

  "What did you do?" Joran asked.

  Moros's smirk arrived in his voice before Joran could see his face in the shadow.

  "The lord has given his blessing."

  "What did you do, Moros?" Joran said again, without the inflection of a question.

  "The initiates of the clan occasionally conduct their own sorting among themselves. It is traditional, it is unsanctioned, and it is considered beneath the notice of the elders. The lord agrees." A pause.

  "Three of the top twenty lower district Initiates decided this evening to assess the new arrival."

  Joran stopped walking.

  The silence he held lasted three full breaths, which was the amount of time he needed to process what Moros had done and to arrive at the response that was both accurate and strategically appropriate, the two requirements occasionally producing different responses and requiring the extra time to reconcile.

  "If they harm him," he said.

  "You will do precisely nothing," Moros said, and his tone had the satisfaction of someone delivering a checkmate they had been planning for several moves.

  "The clan does not interfere in initiate sorting. The lord has affirmed the principle. An outer elder acting against initiates who are conducting traditional sorting exercises would be an action the patriarch would need to address, and I do not think you want the patriarch's attention on this particular student."

  The specific weight of the patriarch's aura was something Joran had been feeling at the edges of this conversation since it began.

  The distant presence of the clan's high lord observing without participating, the awareness of being watched by something with the patience of someone who has made themselves comfortable for a long performance.

  "The top twenty," Joran said.

  "Ranks eighteen, seventeen, and sixteen," Moros confirmed.

  Joran resumed walking, and his expression had changed in a way that Moros was watching for and that Moros, having watched it, could not immediately explain.

  "You sent three of the top twenty lower district Initiates after a student who spent the full day in intensive foundation training and is currently running a cycling pattern he learned six hours ago," Joran said, with the tone of someone performing an assessment.

  "Ranks eighteen, seventeen, and sixteen. Not the top three. Not even the top five."

  Moros said nothing.

  "You were hedging," Joran said, with the slight warmth of someone who has just understood something amusing. "

  You wanted them to test him and report back, but you did not want them to kill him, because killing would bring consequences that testing would not. So you sent ones ranked low enough to be plausible as an organic sorting exercise but high enough to pose a genuine challenge to an Initiate who has just completed his first training session."

  The silence from Moros had a different texture now.

  "Go watch your Initiates lose," Joran said pleasantly.

  ****

  Tunde felt the prickle in his instincts before he felt anything else, the warning arriving in the specific way it had been arriving since the wasteland.

  Not as a thought but as a state, the body's sudden decision that the environment had changed in a way that required a different level of attention.

  Petal Street was thinning.

  Not the natural thinning of an evening crowd settling into homes and establishments, which was a gradual and organic process.

  This was a deliberate clearing, the people who had been present finding reasons to be elsewhere with the specific efficiency of people who have been informed or who have read a situation and made a calculation about where to be. He noticed the first gap, and then the second, and by the time he had noticed the third, he understood the pattern.

  He did not change his pace.

  His Ethra sight read the bubble before he reached it, a contained area of Ethra that was not naturally present, the kind of formation that required either active maintenance or a planted artifact to sustain.

  He read its edges and the shapes inside it, three Initiate signatures arranged with the deliberate spacing of people who have positioned themselves rather than arrived at their positions naturally.

  He could walk around it.

  He thought about this for approximately two steps and then walked into it, because walking around it was a calculation he had already made and rejected, and the reasoning behind the rejection was the same reasoning that had been developing since he first stood on the flat stone of the training hall and watched Oram demonstrate what he did not know. Avoidance was not a building material. You could not construct anything from avoiding things.

  The cobblestones exploded at his feet.

  He rolled away from the debris with the reflexive efficiency of someone who has been in enough situations where the ground was not safe to have stopped treating the ground as a default refuge, came up already reading the three figures arranging themselves into the positions they had prepared.

  He took inventory.

  Serrated blade, the edge carrying a fresh imbuing that suggested the Ethra had been applied recently in preparation for exactly this.

  Spear, a wooden shaft with a metal head, the Ethra concentrated at the tip where the user had directed it.

  Paired knives, the smaller reach compensated by the number and the speed that the user's Ethra suggested was their primary approach.

  His body was tired.

  He was aware of this with the honesty that the wasteland had given him about the difference between what he wanted to be true and what was actually true.

  His heart had been pushed all day at a sustained level beyond its ordinary ceiling, and the imbuement cycling Joran had set running was a continuous draw on reserves that had not fully replenished.

  He was at seventy percent capacity at best, and the accuracy of that assessment required him to factor in that the cycling pattern was still running beneath everything else, maintaining its draw even now.

  He breathed.

  "Fellow Initiates," he said, and the calm in his voice was genuine rather than performed, because somewhere in the afternoon of stick impacts and cycling and reading history while his arms ached, the thing that had been panic in these situations had become something else, something that assessed rather than reacted.

  They were not interested in conversation.

  The one with the serrated blade said the expected things, the words of someone who has decided on an action and is providing themselves a justification for it, and the one with the spear agreed in the way of someone who has been offered a reason to do what they intended to do and is grateful for the reason rather than actually motivated by it.

  He let them speak.

  He used the speaking to read the positions more carefully, the Ethra in each body, the specific concentrations that told him where the Ethra was directed and therefore where the first attack would come from.

  The spear user's Ethra was at the tip, which meant a thrust rather than a swing.

  The blade user's Ethra was distributed along the edge, which meant cuts rather than a single committed strike.

  The knife user's concentration was in the hands and the shoulders, which meant speed, the technique built for the moment when distance closed rather than for maintaining distance.

  He decided to close the distance immediately.

  He went for the spear first because the spear user had made the mistake of holding a weapon whose primary advantage was reach and whose primary vulnerability was the absence of reach.

  The spear swung instead of thrusting, which was the weapon used incorrectly, and Tunde grabbed the shaft while it was still in the arc of the swing and let the momentum of the swing do the work of bringing it into contact with his grip, then drove the broken portion into the shoulder where the Ethra coverage was thinnest.

  He was already moving when the knife user responded.

  The knives were fast. He gave them that.

  The user had real speed and the technique to translate it into effective reach, the blades moving in patterns that required his sight to track individually rather than as a pair.

  He went under the pattern rather than through it, rolling across the ground and coming up with one movement that delivered his fist into the joint of the knee with the full weight of his tempered body behind it.

  The serrated blade came at his back while the knife user was still processing what had happened to his knee.

  He used the knife user as a buffer, the weight of the body between him and the blade, and the blade found the buffer instead of him, and then there was one, and the one had Ethra coating his arm in the sharp fragment pattern that Tunde had not seen before but that his sight read clearly, the energy capable of cutting on contact rather than requiring an edge to do the work.

  He grabbed the arm anyway.

  The fragments cut into his palm, multiple small points of contact, and he let them, because his hand could manage this damage, and the grip was more important than the cleanness of the hand.

  He crushed until the arm no longer had the strength to sustain the Ethra technique, and the technique dissolved with the structural failure.

  The manacle absorbed what it found available.

  Two Disciples landed on either side of him, not combatively, in the way of people who have been positioned to end something at a specific point rather than to participate in it. The larger one took his fist before he could deliver the conclusion.

  "You've won," the Disciple said. "Stand down."

  Tunde looked at the three Initiates on the ground or kneeling, in the various states of their outcomes, and stood down.

  Not because the Disciple's grip required it, but because the assessment was accurate and there was nothing further to accomplish.

  The other Disciple was already kneeling beside the wounded ones, her hands producing the warm yellow Ethra of healing, the wounds closing with the efficiency of someone who has been sent for this purpose and came prepared for exactly this.

  When the bubble dissipated, the sound of Petal Street came back like a tide returning, and the crowd that had been absent was present again in the way of people who had not technically been absent, simply not been there.

  He picked up his food, which had survived, and his book pouch, which had also survived, and walked back toward the Red Blossom House quietly

  ****

  Elder Joran waited.

  He was good at waiting. Two centuries of it had produced a patience that was less a practiced virtue and more a structural feature, the way a river is patient about reaching the sea, not because it has decided to be patient but because patience is simply the description of what it is doing.

  Moros stood in the air above him, the fury that had replaced his satisfaction rotating through its stages with the visibility of someone who has not yet learned that visible fury is a liability.

  "Ranks eighteen, seventeen, and sixteen," Joran said, with the warm reflection of someone revisiting something pleasant.

  "You chose well, Moros. They were genuinely skilled. Rank sixteen in particular, the blade fragment technique is quite sophisticated for an Initiate. Where did he develop it?"

  Moros said nothing.

  "A blank slate," Joran continued, to no one in particular but loud enough for the presence at the edges of the conversation to receive clearly,

  "Who was dropped into the worst region of this continent and survived it, trained by circumstance rather than structure, and then tempered beyond his stage through means I will not detail. The wasteland did not make him weak. It made him adaptable." He folded his hands behind his back.

  "Where you saw waste, I saw what waste produces in the things that survive it."

  The air around them changed.

  Lord Alaric's presence arrived the way it always arrived, not building but present, the difference between before and after so absolute that the transition itself was impossible to locate.

  Moros went to his knees without being asked. Joran bowed with the respect of someone who has decided that respect is the appropriate thing to offer and is offering it.

  "The duel," Joran said, before the patriarch could speak, because Joran had learned across two centuries that there were moments when the appropriate thing was to arrive at the point rather than be taken to it.

  "One month from today. My student against Elder Moros's chosen representative. The winner's elder gains the right to enter the rift when it opens." He paused.

  "I make this proposal with full awareness of my student's current rank and capabilities."

  Moros found his voice.

  "You propose to bring an Initiate against my Disciple in a formal clan duel? The disgrace of it would—"

  "The patriarch will decide whether the disgrace is in the proposal or in refusing it," Joran said, mildly.

  The silence that followed was the silence of something very large considering something.

  Lord Alaric's voice, when it arrived, had the quality his voice always had, the authority of someone who has long since ceased to modulate it for the comfort of the listener.

  "The duel will be held. One month." A pause.

  "I look forward to seeing what the outer elder has built."

  His presence withdrew.

  Moros rose from his knees with the dignity of someone making a controlled transition from a posture they found undignified.

  His rings had resumed their orbit, the speed of them communicating what his face was managing not to.

  "You have one month," he said.

  "I hope you understand what you've done."

  "I understand precisely what I've done," Joran said.

  "I've given myself a month and a specific objective. These are, in my experience, the conditions under which I work best." He turned toward the path home.

  "Good night, Moros."

  He walked away at the same pace he always walked, and the night of Jade Peak moved around him in its ordinary ways.

  The sounds and lights of the compound's evening life, and somewhere in the lower district a young man was walking home from a test he had passed without being told it was a test and reading a history of the continent he had arrived on by dying.

  Joran walked and felt, for the first time in a considerable span of his two centuries, the particular quality of genuine curiosity about what came next.

  He had not felt that in some time.

  It was, he decided, excellent.