The first pass was just noise. Cassian played to spectacle, lunging from the edge, hurling feints at Seren, then spinning to attack Soren as if the interim blurs of blue and white cloth might overwhelm him.

Soren moved by measure, factoring only the blade, not the body behind it. Cassian's rhythm proved easy to time: a predictability lurking under all the flashing teeth and sudden pivots.

He baited Cassian into a higher feint, then winged Mara's guard low enough for Kale's short blade to tap her forearm.

Disarmed, Mara dropped away from the fight, a bit of blood beading along the welt as she barked a curse. The next second, Soren realized Cassian hadn't disengaged, but abandoned his own team, circling Soren from behind and closing in fast.

Two on one, then.

Soren and Kale fell into instinct, Kale fast and inclose, Soren hanging back, looking for the opening. Kale scored a nick on Cassian's sleeve, but Cassian rotated and caught Kale at the collarbone with a controlled, but brutal, flat strike that left the redhead reeling. Down to two.

Cassian's mouth drew a thin line, sweat shining along his jaw. His sword whistled for Soren's head, and Soren had to take the block on the outside, pain radiating up the bone.

The blow jarred, but Cassian's balance opened just enough to let Soren torque, pivot, and reverse, inside the other boy's guard, forearm locked against his wrist, shoving both blades high and wide.

They held, teeth bared, every muscle insisting on its claim.

"You try too hard," Cassian said.

Soren didn't bother with a reply. He let Cassian push, then redirected the force down and off, spinning the blade free of his hand. The steel made a clatter on stone that had the whole yard looking over.

Soren's edge hovered at Cassian's throat, not a threat, just the conclusion of motion.

Dane called: "Break."

Silence, save the wind. Cassian stared at Soren as though trying to process a new math. His jaw flexed once, then he looked away and stalked off the line, not humiliated so much as reset to factory settings.

The rest of the unit cycled until the bell, but nobody else landed a clean win.

After the final round, half the cohort collapsed against the low wall, arms limp with the drag of fatigue. Soren dropped beside Seren. She handed him a canteen, hers, not communal, then flicked a look toward the retreating figure of Cassian.

"You enjoy that?" she asked.

"Not really," Soren said, sipping the flat, mineral tang of courtyard water. "But it felt necessary."

She considered that for a moment, then shrugged. "You fight like you're waiting for something worse."

He wiped his brow. "I am."

That got her to smile, at least a little.

From the far end of the green, Soren heard the instructors debriefing, soft-voiced but intense. Dane's voice, never less than a bark even in whisper: "He doesn't fight for dominance. He fights to end things." A note of concern, not pride.

Seren said, "You could make commander at this rate."

Soren shook his head, feeling the weight of the morning's violence swell in his biceps. "I don't think that's what they have in mind."

More initiates drifted over, absently massaging wrists or clutching at fresh bruises. Mara glared at Soren, but let it go with a small, grudging nod. Even Kale, still rubbing his collar, offered a finger salute and a faint, "Not bad, Vale."

For an hour, the cold did not matter. The brutalist routine had its logic: wear them so thin that only the real shape endured.

By evening, the sky bled out behind the Spire, the clouds gone from raked wool to yellow plum. Soren walked the perimeter of the yard, letting the pulse in his wrist settle.

The soreness in his bones held the memory of the day's rumors, Cassian, frustrated enough to lace every word with spite, and Ohn quietly circulating that Soren's new assignment was "performance review for tactical merit." The usual theater.

He supposed he ought to feel something about it, but the only sensation was a kind of emptiness, not wholly unpleasant.

The archives called. Soren reported in two minutes early, as always. The automaton greeted him with a longer-than-usual stare, then asked if he required "elevated lighting."

"Leave it dark," Soren replied, and meant it.

Tonight, the work was cataloging the training logs, mundane, repetitive, but it gave his hands something to do while the ache faded from his arms.

He worked by lamplight, reading the names and dates and patterns of advance and retreat. Most initiates washed out before a cycle could finish; few names recurred more than two terms in sequence, and those that did showed a sharp drop-off after the Sundering.

He wondered whose job it was to erase the failures from memory. He doubted they left ghosts in the archives, but the echo at his chest suggested otherwise.

From the edge of thought, Valenna's voice ticked in: "You're learning to fight in teams. I wonder if that's progress, or just a more personal form of containment."

He ignored her, or tried to.

Near the end of shift, Soren found a page that did not match the rest. No heading, no signature, only a block of text in cramped, angular script:

The sword is remembered only by those it cuts. A sheath is a kind of archive. The living never dare read themselves in the blade.

Soren closed the log, stamping the date on the cover. The motion felt weighty, like folding shut a part of himself he'd been avoiding.

He gazed out the archive window, watched the Spire's skeleton frame black against the city's last light. Below, runners crossed the close, their voices lost to the wind.

The rest of the Academy faded into the new normal: drills, pain, and late-night study. Cassian avoided Soren for three days, then began watching him again, but with a different hunger.

The other initiates circled, their calculations as public as always, but now Soren noticed that even the instructors could not keep from glancing at him, as though each week the math of his being here made less sense.

He added nothing to the rumors. He let the bruises accumulate and slough, and learned, at last, how bruises could make rings, layered, visible only in the right light. A record of impact, but also a record of survival.

He supposed that was the logic of the blade, as the Academy saw it.

At night, when the ache climbed his arm and set his whole hand trembling, Soren practiced not drawing the sword, but returning it to its sheath, over and over, the edge hidden, the memory contained.

He supposed that too was a kind of lesson.

He slept, when he did, with the shard's cold heartbeat no longer alien, but finally in tune with his own.

It was only a week later that a new name appeared on the cohort roll, slotted not at the bottom but directly beneath his own.

He looked at the entry, then at the empty desk, and wondered what history the Academy had decided to remember, and what it planned, now, to let loose.

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