The next day after Kairen made his decision, he woke up in pure pain.
It wasn't the sharp, anxious burning of the mark nor the empty ache of defeat. It was something else. It was a raw, true soreness that lived in tissues he didn't know existed. His shoulders protested as he sat up. His forearms felt like they had been replaced by lead pipes. He groaned, and the sound tried to escape but was roughly squashed by the pillow. The day before, wielding the wooden sword had been a fresh start. Today, it felt wrong.
The first complete week of Vanguard training was a masterclass in humiliation.
In the dusty courtyard, Rayan was a merciless drillmaster. "Again!" he'd bellow, his voice slicing through the morning cold. "Your stance is pathetic, Zephyrwind! You're posing like a newborn fawn on ice! Stand firm!"
Kairen would attempt, his legs shaking with effort, perspiration searing his eyes. The wooden sword was not a weapon at all, but a clumsy heavy club. He was clumsy. His blocks were a jarring, splintering impact that hurt his already sore arms.
Dain, on the other hand, was a natural. His raw strength meant that even his clumsy swings had devastating power. He shattered a training dummy's arm on the second day, earning a rare, amused grin from Rayan. While Kairen was learning not to trip over his own feet, Dain was learning how to channel his inner avalanche.
The difference was a perpetual, wear some burden on Kairen's heart. He had managed to elude the shadow of his father's power only to be trapped in the shadow of his friend's brute force.
"Don't mind him," Dain would tell him, thumping Kairen on the back and sending him stumbling towards his knees. "You're just more. technical! Yeah, that's it! A little sword-spider! I'm the big, dumb troll!"
He intended it to be a motivating remark, but all it did was make Kairen feel small.
The evenings were a solemn routine of nursing his wounds. His hands, delicate from a lifetime of attempting and failing at grasping magic, were now a mess of raw, oozing blisters. When his mother first saw them, she gasped.
"Oh, Kairen."
She did not continue. She simply took his hands gently, wiped them with a soft cloth, and rubbed on a calming herbal salve with a scent of mint and dirt. Her touch was gentle as she worked, but her eyes were not. That deep, animal fear that had been their constant companion for all those years was no longer there. It was replaced with a calm, solid pride. She was no longer staring at a delicate secret she feared to shatter; she was staring at her son, exhausted and sore from a day's labor.
"Does it hurt?" she whispered.
"Yeah," he grunted, wincing at the wrapping of them in clean cloth. "A lot."
"Good," she said, her mouth twisting into a small, fierce smile. "It means you're building something real."
It was during the middle of the second week when Ilya came. She did not appear in the dusty courtyard, but spotted him in the quiet, moss-covered courtyard after lessons, where he was awkwardly going through his forms. He was irritable, stiff and stilted in his movements, his thoughts a knotted mess of Rayan's bellowed improvements.
She stood watching him in silence for a full five minutes, her silver eyes analytical, as if she were reading a particularly complicated book.
"You're thinking too much," she spoke up at last, her voice startling him.
"I'm supposed to think," he muttered, putting down the sword. "Footwork, grip, posture, breathing. if I forget one thing, Rayan yells at me."
"You're focusing on your own body," she told him. "That's why you're slow. You're responding to yourself. You need to respond to your opponent."
"My opponent is a wooden pole, Ilya."
"Then observe the pole," she said, without a trace of irony. "Look at the splinters? Here, and here. They indicate where the last strikes have landed. It has patterns. Weak points. Every opponent does. You just need to be able to read them."
The following day, in sparring practice, Kairen was matched with a lanky boy who was surprisingly quick. Kairen was in the defensive position from the very beginning, his wooden sword clashing in desperation with the screeching strikes. He was losing. Horribly.
He backed away, gasping to breathe, then heard Ilya's voice in his head. Watch the post. He stopped looking at the other boy's sword. He started watching his body. He saw it then-a tiny, almost imperceptible dip in the boy's left shoulder a fraction of a second before he began his swing. It was a tell. A pattern.
The second swing. Kairen noticed the shoulder lower, and rather than blocking where the sword was, he stepped to where it would be.
CLACK.
His block was solid, clean. It jolted the other boy's arm, knocking him off balance for an instant. It wasn't a win, but it was the first time he hadn't merely been reacting. He had anticipated. A thrill, keen and bright, seared him.
He saw Ilya, leaning against the water fountain, nod once slowly.
The great surprise came at the end of the third week. The blisters had changed into calluses. The soreness in his muscles, though, remained a near-permanent friend. The sword was heavy, yes, but it no longer felt like a foreign body.
Rayan paired him with Dain for his final practice drill. "Don't kill him, Ragnor," Rayan said, smirking.
"No promises!" Dain bellowed, charging forward like a mad bull.
Kairen prepared himself. He ducked the first swing, the gust of air from the heavy wood whizzing by his ear. He couldn't possibly equal Dain's strength, so he had to be cleverer. He recalled Ilya's tips. He ceased looking at the sword. He looked at Dain's hips, his feet. For all the strength Dain had, Dain was predictable. He set his feet wide for every power swing.
Dain roared and struck again, a massive, overhead swing intended to shatter Kairen's sword and win the match.
Kairen noticed Dain set his back foot. He could anticipate the swing. Rather than backing away, he took a half-step forward, in the path of the swing. The world slowed down. He did not think; he simply acted. He raised his own sword, not to block, but to parry, to use Dain's momentum against him.
The angle was perfect.
The two swords made a ringing crack as they smashed together, and Dain's sword was knocked aside harmlessly, exposing him. Kairen walked happily forward and softly applied the tip of the wooden sword to Dain's chest.
And then there was silence.
Dain looked down at the sword, then back at Kairen with his mouth open slightly. "Whoa," he said finally.
Kairen, equally astonished, felt his heart racing inside his chest. He had done it.
Rayan, who had watched the whole thing, gave Kairen a very small, quick nod of approval while standing just at the edge of the yard. It was a small movement, hardly noticeable, but Kairen felt it was a medal prize.
That same night as the sky grew dim to a haze of orange and purple behind the sunset, Kairen remained in the yard for hours after the other children had gone home. He remained still alone at the center of the dusty circle, wooden sword hanging limply in his hand while he was intimately acquainted with the aches in his bones. Just as he was preparing to trek homeward, he heard a voice pierce the silence.
"Still here, Zephyrwind?"
Kairen turned. Rayan leaned against the archway, arms folded, his brow furrowed in thought.
"Just. thinking," Kairen replied softly.
Rayan strode towards him, his footfalls soundless in the dust. He halted a few feet away and nodded at the wooden sword. "You want to know what the difference is between a mage and a swordsman?"
Kairen shook his head.
"A wizard is born with a flame within them," Rayan said, his eyes far away, seeing the final slice of sun drop out of sight below the horizon. "Their entire life is spent learning to master a force they were given. They begin with it all and learn to focus."
He turned back to Kairen, his eyes sharp, serious in the growing twilight. "A sword begins with nothing. Just an empty hand. We fashion our fire from the outside in. We take a piece of steel—cold, dead, useless steel—and we put it through the forge."
He stepped in closer, his voice lower, more urgent. "We hammer it. We bend it. We quench it in water and oil until it screams. We sharpen it against stone until it gets its edge. Every blister on your hand, every bruise on your arm, every pain in your back. that's the forge, kid. You're not learning how to hold a sword. You're learning how to be one."
Rayan gazed at the plain wooden sword in Kairen's hand. "Mages are born. Warriors are forged. And what is forged by fire and pressure can never be broken."
He allowed Kairen a uncommon, sincere smile. "Go home. Rest. Work is only starting."
Rayan turned and strode away, his figure engulfed by the twilight, leaving Kairen standing by himself in the quiet yard.
He gazed at the sword, then at his own hardened hands. The hurt in his body remained, but Rayan's words had altered it. It was no longer the hurt of weakness. It was the hurt of the forge. The sense of being forged.
As he practiced his forms for the final time, the sun setting golden on the weathered wood, the sword no longer sat wrong or strange.
It was a part of him.
An extension of his will, hammered out not of magic or fate, but of sweat and calluses and the sheer determination not to give up.
He was still bruised, still sore, still a boy with much to learn. But for the first time, alone in the stillness of the yard, he felt something he hadn't experienced in the casting hall, something more substantial than any glint of .something more substantial than any glint of magic: he felt strong.