He did not understand what made it special.
But that was amended within approximately four seconds of his first thrust.
He aimed for the center. The tip went downward. He nearly drove it through his own boot, yanking back with a startled jerk at which point the spear lurched forward, and he stumbled face-first toward the earth with it, barely catching himself.
He straightened, turned… and looked at Edward.
Edward had one eyebrow raised. "Did you think it would be simple?"
"..."
"The spear is infused with the concept of mischief. It will redirect itself whenever opportunity presents itself," he explained. "Your task is to sense how it intends to move before it moves. Anticipate, compensate, and act accordingly."
"And the purpose…?"
"Will become clear when you've mastered it." Edward settled back into his spectating posture. "Begin."
Ashen looked at the smiling face once more.
Then he thrust.
The tip went sideways.
⛧
⛧
⛧
The spear, it turned out, had opinions.
When he slowed his strikes to create a reaction window, it stopped misbehaving entirely, acting docile as any ordinary weapon, gliding through the air with perfect cooperation. The moment his concentration drifted, even for a beat, it struck back.
It targeted toes. It twisted mid-thrust to clip his shins. It used the momentum of an overextended reach to yank him stumbling sideways as if personally affronted by the attempt.
And it always chose embarrassment over injury, which somehow made it worse, since he got injured most of the time anyway.
He tried splitting the difference… trying to be fast enough to constitute real training, but slow enough to stay ahead of it. The spear spent one session calibrating to that compromise and then found three new angles he hadn't accounted for.
CRACK—
The butt swung left as the tip went right, catching the outside of his knee.
He bit down on a curse.
SMACK—
The shaft snapped across his knuckles on the recovery.
He gritted his teeth and kept going.
By afternoon, his exhaustion had become the spear's favorite instrument. The window it needed to play him narrowed as the hours piled up.
A fraction of a second of drifting focus was enough, and drifting focus was inevitable when his body was already running on fumes, and Edward's mental pressure had his thoughts smearing at the edges.
It learned his rhythms. It would behave perfectly through an entire sequence, patient and cooperative, and then— the moment his concentration dipped by a single degree—
TWACK—
His ankle burned from the strike.
'Every time… this little…'
He stopped cursing it. He didn't have the energy for that anymore. He adjusted and kept moving… and somewhere in the space between adjustment and movement, he started noticing something.
A microscopic tremor, barely a sensation at all. It ran through the shaft a fraction of a moment before the blade redirected, present only if he reached his attention all the way down through his palms and into the grain of the wood. He noticed it first by accident, reacting before his conscious mind had finished processing. Then he started looking for it deliberately.
Slowly, but surely… he started catching it.
Not reliably at first. But enough that the spear's behavior began to feel… not predictable, exactly, but readable. Like learning to hear a particular tone in a new language he was still studying.
Days passed.
His speed climbed back up.
The catches became more frequent while the stumbles fewer. He stopped anticipating through the tremor alone and started arriving at the anticipation before even that.
It was as if there were a quiet attunement between his hands and the shaft, a dim awareness that caught the spear's mood a half-beat early. He wasn't moving purely on reflex anymore. It felt more like empathy… like he was reading it, and then wielding it.
Edward kept watching and said nothing throughout it all.
⛧ ⛧ ⛧
He was midway through a thrust sequence when he noticed his teacher stand and approach.
The bad feeling arrived before Edward had taken three steps.
"Good." He stopped just at the edge of the training radius, hands clasped behind his back, carrying the tranquility unbefitting of the man about to introduce additional suffering for educational purposes. "Now that you've reached this level, we can return to parrying and dodging."
Ashen opened his mouth.
A staff was already moving at his forehead.
Instinct snapped his spear up to intercept, and at the last moment, as if it had abruptly remembered it had opinions, the shaft snaked around the staff and let the blow pass cleanly through.
TWAHCK—
The world rang. He was briefly aware of the sky being sideways, and then of his back meeting the ground.
Thud.
He lay there for one stunned moment, holding a specific word behind his teeth—
BANG—!
The spear butt struck his head from the other side.
'Fuck you too,' he thought, with considerable feeling.
He heard Edward make a sound. It might have been a laugh. But for the sake of his remaining sanity, he chose not to investigate.
⛧ ⛧ ⛧
When dusk finally arrived, and Edward announced the end of the session, Ashen threw the spear across the field with all his might.
He put real feeling into it.
The spear flew vertically instead of horizontally, used the force of the throw to spin twice, and drove itself blade-first into the earth, directly between his feet, the smiling face at eye level, two inches from his nose.
He stared at it.
"Damn it—"
He stumbled backward and collided with something warm. Arms caught him from behind before he went down. They were familiar hands, and they were followed by familiar light already pressing through the wreckage of his body in slow, careful waves.
"Ash." Seraphine's soothing voice was close to his ear. "Are you alright?"
He exhaled and let his weight settle against her. "Now that you're here," he murmured, "I am."
Her arms tightened.
Lucia appeared from the side, slipping under his other arm and taking his weight. "Come on. Let's settle you somewhere more comfortable."
He leaned into her shoulder and let them guide him. Behind him, from the corner of his eye, the spear remained upright in the earth, smiling face pointed skyward.
"Lucy," he said.
"Hm."
"I never knew you were this considerate. Are you after my body?"
"I cannot believe," she said, in a tone of perfect composure, "that you still have enough breath for that."
"I could probably regrow the important parts if it really came to it." He managed a smirk. "Though I know how attached you are to them, so—"
Her free hand settled against his lower stomach and remained there idly, in a light, unhurried touch. "That's right," she said, voice dropping just enough. "So do keep them safe. Understand?"
"...Oh." He blinked. "Okay."
He glanced at Seraphine.
Her face was the color of a sunset.
He decided, wisely, to stop talking.
Edward watched the three of them recede under the last of the dusk light with an expression of mild, private amusement… it was a particular moment he suspected he would not easily forget…
He was still watching when the fourth figure emerged from the garden's edge.
He noticed the absence of that sharp gaze immediately. Every time she'd appeared in his vicinity before now, she'd carried it alongside an analytical quality, the quality of a mind running ongoing calculations in which he was a variable to be continuously assessed.
It was not a comfortable gaze to be the subject of.
Interestingly, it wasn't there now.
"Lady Sinclair." He kept his voice even. "Ashen has just left."
"I know." She stopped at a polite distance. Her expression stayed composed. "I came for you."
'Oh? Am I going to get assassinated here?' he thought with humor, but he didn't make any move and just waited for her move.
"I wanted to know," she said, "the conditions for becoming your student. And what you'd want in return."
Edward regarded her for a long moment.
Then he unclasped his hands from behind his back and turned to face her properly.
"That," he said, "is a longer conversation."