Chapter Five: The Edge of a Word
The days after the Aptitude Test moved with a strange, dual rhythm.
The sun rose. Zack's father worked the south field, where three more rows had gone grey overnight. His mother mended. Mira kneaded dough. Life in Zoe continued as usual, a stream flowing around a new, permanent obstacle. Him.
Well, at least I'm memorable. "Remember Zack? Turns out he was a rock. A very sad, useless rock." They'll tell that story for generations.
Training began each dawn with Chief Burrel. No ceremony. The sky would barely grey and Burrel would already be standing in the yard, holding two wooden staves. He'd toss one to Zack.
"Catch."
Zack fumbled it. The staff bounced off his palm, hit his shin, and rolled into the dirt.
Point made. My hands are decorative.
"Again."
They both knew the truth that sat between them, unspoken and heavy. Without Aether, the gap between Zack and anyone with even a drop of power was a canyon. One drop of Aether in the dantian could reinforce bone, speed muscle, sharpen reflex. The difference was biological. Permanent. No amount of physical conditioning could close it.
But Burrel couldn't ignore what he saw each morning. The boy who showed up before the birds. The boy who took every hit, stood up, and reset his stance without being told. Stubbornness had its own gravity, and Zack's was dense enough to bend the old soldier's schedule.
Burrel's teaching was a language of impact. A tap on Zack's wrist meant his grip was wrong. A shove to his shoulder meant his stance leaked power. A blocked strike followed by an immediate, effortless counter showed the flaw in his attack.
This old man communicates like a very angry dictionary. Every correction is a bruise. I'm going to be fluent in purple by the end of the week.
The first week focused on reading. See the signal before the strike. Burrel's left shoulder dipped a fraction before a feint. His breathing hitched when he shifted from defense to a finishing blow. These were the tells. Zack cataloged them with the same precision he used to track Aether currents.
Good. So when I see the "I'm about to flatten you" signal, I can have a full philosophical debate about it before I hit the dirt. Progress.
One morning, after a session that left his forearms striped with welts, Burrel did not walk away.
"You are learning to read me. That is step one." He rotated his practice knife in his hand. "Now you must unlearn it."
"Unlearn it?"
I finally memorized one page, and he wants me to burn the book. This is why I never went to school.
"My signals are mine alone. Kael's will be different. A Soul Path caster's tells are in their fingers, their breath. A Hybrid is a mess of both." Burrel's dark eyes held his. "If you only learn to fight me, you learn to fight one man. You must learn to fight the idea of an opponent. The shape of their mistakes."
The next day, Burrel changed. His style became fluid. Unpredictable. He mimicked the wide, heavy swings of a brawler. Then the quick, probing jabs of a skirmisher. He shuffled his feet like a beginner, then moved with the gliding precision of a veteran who'd killed men in six different provinces.
Zack spent the first week falling for every feint. Walking into every trap. Eating dirt on a schedule.
The "shape of mistakes" looks a lot like the ground. Up close. Repeatedly.
But he began to see. Not Burrel's patterns. The categories of patterns. The overcommitment that followed a power lunge. The brief blindness after a complex combination. The half-second of recovery when a heavy swing missed its mark.
So everyone gets briefly stupid after doing something fancy. Good to know. I plan to never do anything fancy.
One evening, he landed a strike. Not luck. Calculation. He baited Burrel into a low sweep, dodged the arc, and placed the wooden knife point against the Chief's kidney in the half-second gap.
Burrel froze. He looked down at the blade touching his side.
He stepped back. Lowered his knife.
A slow nod. "Good."
That single word. One syllable. It was worth every bruise of the past two weeks.
I'd frame it if I could. "Certificate of Not Being Completely Hopeless." Signed, Chief Burrel. Witnessed by my aching everything.
The village noticed the change in different ways.
At the well, women no longer fell silent when Zack approached. They fell silent and then watched. The pity had thinned. Curiosity replaced it, cautious and calculating. Old Man Kael, the smith, grunted one day as Zack passed and shoved a wrapped bundle at him.
"For the whetstone you lent last winter."
Inside was a strip of good leather. Perfect for a knife grip.
A peace offering from the man who stepped away from me at the test. I'll take it. Grudges are heavy, and I'm carrying enough weight.
Mira was his barometer. Her sharp tongue softened into blunt commentary.
"You move differently. Less like a startled deer. More like an annoyed cat."
"Thanks."
"It wasn't a compliment. Cats get killed by dogs."
My personal cheerleader. If cheers were death predictions.
He noticed her wrists one evening. Both wrapped in cloth strips. She'd been hauling double loads all week, pushing her modest Body Path harder than it was built to handle. Compensating. Working for two because one of them couldn't work at all.
"Sit down."
"I'm fine."
"Your wrists are swollen. Sit."
She sat. He unwrapped the cloth and examined the joints. Strained. Not broken, but close. He rewrapped them with the leather strip from Old Man Kael, tighter, with better support.
"Don't tell Mom."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
She's doing what I'm doing. Fighting the verdict with her body. Except she has Aether and is burning through it faster than she can recover. We're the same kind of stupid, my sister and I. Must be genetic.
His mother caught him at the door one night. Her hands, rough from decades of needlework and garden soil, gripped his shoulders.
"This training. It is a fuel. But what is the fire? Is it revenge? A need to prove them wrong?"
The fire is mostly "I don't want to be monster bait." Is that a proper life goal?
"To not disappear."
She held his gaze. Her eyes searched his face for the truth behind the truth. She found enough.
"That is a good fire, son. Be careful it doesn't burn down the home you're keeping."
His father said little. But one afternoon, Zack found him repairing a fence post. His father worked beside him for an hour, handing nails, steadying wood. As they finished, a heavy hand landed on Zack's shoulder.
"Your mother sees the fire. I see the work. The work is good."
One squeeze. Then back to the field.
That's the most he's said in a week. From him, it's a monument.
Thirty days after the test, the first conscription notice arrived in Zoe. Not for Zack. For Hobin, a boy two years older who'd tested as a weak Hybrid. Manual labor at a craft-guild annex. Hobin's mother stood at the posting board, her face carved from white stone. His father kept one hand on the boy's shoulder, fingers digging into the fabric.
Zack watched from the shadow of the smithy. His own clock ticked louder.
Thirty days gone. Thirty left. And Hobin had a Path. A real one. If they're sending Hybrids to labor camps, what chance does a Husk have?
That night, sleep wouldn't come. He lay in the loft listening to Mira's breathing and the house settling into its bones.
Then he heard it.
Low. Beneath the house sounds. Beneath the wind. A vibration that didn't come through his ears. It lived in the marrow of his bones, a single bass note rising from the earth itself. Patient. Resonant. Pulling from the south.
That's new.
He turned his head toward the southern wall. The vibration sharpened. A pressure behind his eyes. A repeating pattern, geometric and precise, pressing into his thoughts.
He closed his eyes. The hum pulsed once, strong enough to make his teeth ache, and then faded to a low, persistent throb.
It was not imagination. It was not grief or fear or sleeplessness. Something in the southern woods, near the boundary of Sunspire's territory, was calling.
And it was calling him.