Chapter 132: The Blade’s Quiet
Days passed like water dripping from stone in the Veiled Hand’s underground refuge. Soren counted them by the aches in his body, each morning bringing new pains from muscles he hadn’t known existed.
The assassins’ sanctuary was unlike anything he’d imagined, not the blood-soaked den of killers the Church painted in its sermons, but something closer to a monastery.
Silence hung in the air, broken only by the controlled exhales of practitioners, the subtle shift of feet on stone, the clean sound of blade striking blade.
Soren sat cross-legged on a stone ledge overlooking the main training hall, his back pressed against the cool wall. Below him, a dozen hooded figures moved through synchronized forms, their curved daggers catching blue-green light from the strange lanterns that illuminated the underground complex.
Not a single wasted movement. Not a single unnecessary breath.
’Watch how they distribute their weight,’ Valenna murmured, her voice clearer now than it had been since their escape from Northaven. ’See how the blade becomes an extension rather than a tool?’
Soren nodded slightly, eyes tracking a slender assassin as she pivoted, weight shifting seamlessly from back foot to front, her blade flowing through the air like water. The motion looked simple, effortless, which meant it was neither.
’I could never move like that,’ he thought, the familiar doubt settling in his stomach like a stone.
’Not yet,’ Valenna replied, her tone suddenly practical where once it would have been cryptic. ’Mimic precision before strength. Strength will follow precision.’
The advice had become his daily ritual, replacing the Church prayers he’d mouthed without believing during his years in Northaven. Wake before the others. Observe the forms. Repeat Valenna’s instruction. Sleep when exhaustion claimed him. Begin again.
His gaze drifted to the far side of the hall where Sylas stood, arms folded across his chest, those unsettling green eyes missing nothing. The assassin leader hadn’t addressed him directly since their arrival, yet Soren felt the weight of that assessment with each passing day. Measuring. Calculating. Waiting.
For what, he wasn’t certain.
–
"Your posture is wrong."
The voice startled Soren from his attempted meditation. He opened his eyes to find the tattooed woman, Mira, he’d learned, standing over him, her face expressionless save for a slight narrowing of her eyes.
"I wasn’t aware there was a wrong way to sit," he replied, immediately regretting the defensive tone.
Mira’s mouth twitched, though whether in amusement or annoyance, he couldn’t tell. "There’s a wrong way to do everything." She gestured to his crossed legs. "Your weight isn’t centered. Your spine curves. You’re fighting your own body before you even begin."
The criticism stung, but Soren forced himself to consider it objectively. She wasn’t wrong. His lower back had been aching for the past hour, his right leg beginning to tingle with lost circulation.
’Listen,’ Valenna urged. ’She speaks from knowledge, not cruelty.’
With a nod, Soren uncrossed his legs and tried to adjust his position, mimicking what he’d observed in the assassins during their morning rituals. Spine straight but not rigid, weight distributed evenly, shoulders relaxed rather than hunched.
Mira watched critically, then reached down and pressed two fingers against his lower back. "Here. Engage this muscle." She moved to his shoulder, tapping lightly. "Release tension here."
The small adjustments made an immediate difference. His breathing deepened naturally, the strain across his back easing.
"Better," she said, stepping back. "Small corrections compound. Remember that."
She left as abruptly as she’d arrived, moving with that unsettling silence all the assassins seemed to share. Soren remained in the corrected position, noting how much easier it was to maintain once properly aligned.
’Small corrections compound,’ he repeated to himself, finding unexpected wisdom in the simple statement.
–
The Hall of Echoes was aptly named. Soren’s footsteps whispered against the ancient stone, each sound returning multiplied from the vaulted ceiling high above.
Unlike the austere training chambers, this vast space celebrated its own history, walls covered in relief carvings that seemed to shift in the blue-green light, telling stories in a language he couldn’t read but somehow felt he should recognize.
Naeria knelt in the center of the hall, surrounded by scrolls and open books, her ink-stained fingers moving rapidly across a sheet of parchment. She’d claimed this space as her own within days of their arrival, establishing what amounted to a scholar’s camp amid ruins that predated anything in Northaven’s carefully sanitized histories.
"Don’t just stand there," she called without looking up. "Come here. I need to measure the resonance when you approach from the eastern axis."
Soren hesitated. Their last session had left him with a piercing headache and strange dreams that lingered into waking hours. But curiosity pulled him forward, not just about the shard and its mysteries, but about this strange, obsessive woman who treated ancient knowledge like sailors treated north stars.
He stepped carefully around her arranged texts, approaching from the direction she’d indicated. The shard against his chest began to hum, a subtle vibration that wasn’t quite sound and wasn’t quite feeling.
Naeria’s head snapped up, her eyes widening. "There! Do you feel it?"
Soren nodded, one hand rising instinctively to press against the spot where the shard lay beneath his shirt. "It’s... responding to something."
"Not something. Everything." She gestured to the carvings around them, her excitement palpable. "These reliefs, the foundation stones, the very geometry of this chamber, they’re all keyed to the same frequency." Her fingers traced a symbol etched into the floor, a spiral pattern that made Soren’s eyes water slightly when he looked directly at it. "The shard recognizes its kin."
As he moved closer to the center of the hall, the vibration intensified. The carvings on the nearest wall seemed to ripple, as if viewed through heat rising from summer stone. Not an illusion, the ancient reliefs were actually responding to his presence, lines deepening, figures becoming more distinct.
Naeria scribbled frantically in her notebook, occasionally glancing up to track his movement through the space. "Remarkable consistency. The resonance field strengthens in perfect proportion to proximity."
She scrambled to her feet, grabbing a crystal rod from among her scattered instruments. "Hold still," she commanded, approaching with the same clinical detachment she’d shown in her underground laboratory beneath Northaven.
Before Soren could object, a new voice cut through the hall.
"Enough, Naeria." Sylas stood in the eastern archway, his tall figure silhouetted against the blue-green light beyond. "He is not your experiment."
Naeria’s shoulders stiffened, but she lowered the crystal rod. "This is research, not experimentation. The distinction is important."
"Not to his body, it isn’t." Sylas moved into the hall with that predatory grace that made him seem more shadow than man. "Your curiosity doesn’t justify treating him like one of your specimens."
"My ’curiosity,’ as you so dismissively call it, might be the only thing that explains what happened with the Flame." Naeria’s voice took on an edge Soren hadn’t heard before. "Knowledge is power, Sylas. Or have you forgotten that principle of our arrangement?"
The tension between them crackled like static before a storm. Soren took a step back, suddenly uncomfortable being the center of their dispute.
"I forget nothing," Sylas replied, his perfect mouth curved in what might have been a smile on anyone else. "Including our priorities. Knowledge serves purpose—not the other way around."
Naeria’s gray eyes narrowed, but she didn’t argue further. Instead, she knelt to gather her scattered notes, movements quick and precise with suppressed anger.
Sylas turned to Soren, those green eyes assessing him with uncomfortable thoroughness. "The training hall. One hour." Not a request. A command.
As the assassin leader left, the shard against Soren’s chest pulsed with sudden cold.
’The scholar hungers for what you carry,’
Valenna whispered. ’The killer seeks to shape what you might become. Neither sees you as whole.’ Soren watched Naeria continue her rapid note-taking, her earlier frustration apparently forgotten as she sketched a carving that had responded most strongly to his presence.
’And what do you see?’ he asked Valenna silently.
The shard’s cold deepened. ’Potential. Nothing more. Nothing less.’
–
"You lived through the Flame," Sylas said, his curved blade catching light as he circled Soren in the training hall. "Let’s see if you can survive a blade."
Soren adjusted his grip on the practice sword, the unfamiliar weight awkward in his hand. His body had barely recovered from the Inquisitors’ attentions, muscles still protesting at unexpected movements, but pride kept him from mentioning this.
The first attack came without warning, a simple thrust that shouldn’t have been difficult to parry. Yet somehow Sylas was past his guard before he’d even registered the movement, the blunted training blade tapping his ribs with insulting gentleness.
"Dead," Sylas said flatly.
They reset. This time Soren focused entirely on defense, determined not to be caught by the same straightforward attack. Sylas feinted left, then right, then, impossibly, was behind him, blade pressed against the back of Soren’s neck.
"Still dead."
Again and again they repeated the exercise. Each time Soren adjusted, trying to anticipate, to counter, to simply survive for more than a few heartbeats. Each time Sylas found a new way past his guard, each defeat coming faster than the last.
The shard flared cold against Soren’s chest when his concentration slipped, the sensation almost mocking. Sweat stung his eyes, his breath coming in ragged gasps while Sylas remained unruffled, not a hair out of place, not a drop of perspiration on his perfect face.
After what felt like the hundredth defeat, Soren remained on his knees, the practice sword fallen from fingers too numb to grip properly. His body shook with exhaustion, muscles quivering like a newborn colt’s.
’You hesitate because you fight like prey,’ Valenna’s voice cut through the fog of fatigue. ’Stop surviving. Start learning.’
"Get up," Sylas commanded, circling him with predatory patience.
Soren pushed himself to his feet, legs threatening to buckle beneath him. He retrieved the practice sword, forcing his fingers to close around the hilt despite their protests.
’Stop surviving. Start learning.’
The words shifted something in his mind. He’d been approaching each exchange as separate, discrete, trying to survive this attack, then the next, then the next. But there was a pattern to Sylas’s movements, a rhythm he’d been too focused on individual moments to perceive.
When Sylas came at him again, Soren didn’t try to predict the specific attack. Instead, he watched the assassin’s center, the subtle weight shifts that preceded any movement. The blade still came impossibly fast, but this time Soren moved with the intention of learning rather than surviving.
As he fell backward, something instinctual took over.