Two days passed since Raen first spoke to Kavran.
Since then, he'd returned to the graveyard every morning—alone, bruised, hungry. The whispers were louder now. Some muttered. Others wept. And a few… screamed. They weren't voices so much as memories, compressed and aching, trapped in rusted blades buried beneath the earth.
Raen no longer feared them. He listened.
But listening wasn't enough anymore.
"What's the point of hearing dead swordmasters if I still get hit like a blind drunk in a tavern brawl?" he muttered, wiping blood from his lip. Again.
He'd set up a crude training ring in the middle of the graveyard using discarded stone markers and shattered blade hilts. There, he fought shadows. Not real ones—ghosts of movements burned into his mind from the sword whispers. In his visions, he faced masters long dead: a one-armed man with a flickering step, a woman who spun her blade like water, a beast-faced warrior who never blocked—only attacked faster.
Today, he focused on the one that danced.
The swordsman had no name. But in his vision, Raen remembered watching him dart between spears, disappearing like mist between raindrops. He had moved not with speed—but with rhythm, like he was always one heartbeat ahead of the world.
"Flicker Step," Raen said aloud.
A movement art passed down not through scrolls, but through a dying breath—one Raen had felt inside his soul.
He exhaled.
Stepped forward.
And immediately tripped over his own ankle, falling face-first into mud.
"…Again," he growled, spitting out a mouthful of wet dirt.
Over and over he practiced. Step. Shift. Breathe. Pulse. He tried to mimic the rhythm, the way the swordsman's foot struck earth not to press forward, but to disappear, using momentum to skip through space like a dropped stone across water.
But he couldn't do it.
His body remembered pain. His leg still dragged from the break his cousin Kael had given him. His balance was off. His timing wrong. Even the wind laughed at his failure.
He collapsed beside a broken stone and clenched his fists. "Why do I hear these techniques if I can't use them?!"
A low hum answered him.
The graveyard dimmed, shadows growing longer as Kavran stepped from Raen's thoughts into the fractured spirit realm that hung between wakefulness and dream.
"You move like someone waiting to be struck. Not like someone seeking death."
Raen didn't even flinch anymore. "Because I don't want to die."
"That's why you're slow."
Kavran raised his arm—burnt, skeletal, and pointed. "Again."
"But—"
"Again."
So Raen stood.
This time, he didn't focus on moving fast.
He focused on being somewhere else—a step ahead, half a breath before, like the flicker-swordsman had shown him.
He stepped.
And the wind tore past where he had been—his body shifting sideways in a short blur.
Raen blinked.
He was behind the stone instead of in front of it.
He'd flickered.
It was only half a step. It drained his breath. And his leg screamed in protest.
But he'd done it.
Raen laughed—dry and breathless, but real. "I moved."
Kavran nodded once, then faded without a word.
Raen collapsed, again—but smiling this time.
---
Later that evening, Nira arrived with a loaf of stolen bread and a wrapped vial of pain salve.
She found Raen slumped against a sword, sweat-drenched and grinning like an idiot.
"Don't tell me you've cracked," she muttered, handing him food.
"I flickered," he said between bites. "Only once. But I felt it."
"Congratulations, master ghost dancer. Now eat before your ribs shatter from joy."
She sat beside him in silence.
Above them, the sky turned deep red, and a bird cried far in the distance.
Neither of them noticed the two shadows watching from the treetops above the graveyard.
One wore a red sash. The other carried a blade of shattered obsidian.
And far beyond, deep in the catacombs of the Sibilant Coil, a whisper passed through the darkness.
"The boy has moved."