Chapter 133: The Lesson that Draws Blood
Soren fell again, his knees striking the stone floor with bruising force. This time, though, something shifted.
As he pushed himself up, the world seemed to slow around him, his vision narrowing to Sylas’s centered weight, the minute adjustments of his stance before each strike. The pain in his body receded, replaced by a strange, floating awareness.
When Sylas lunged again, Soren’s body moved without conscious thought. He pivoted left when logic said right, his feet finding positions he’d never practiced.
The shard against his chest pulsed cold with each movement, its rhythm perfectly matching Sylas’s attacks.
Blades met with a clean, singing tone. For once, Soren wasn’t immediately overwhelmed. His arms moved with a precision he’d never known, each parry flowing into the next with liquid grace.
’I’m not doing this,’ he realized with distant surprise. His conscious mind had stepped aside, leaving something deeper, something older, in control.
Valenna remained silent, but he felt her presence, watching rather than guiding. The shard’s cold sharpened, focusing his awareness even as exhaustion should have claimed him.
Sylas pressed harder, his green eyes narrowing as he increased his speed. The assassin’s blade became a blur of motion, attacks coming from impossible angles. Yet somehow, Soren met each one, his body remembering patterns his mind had never learned.
"Good," Valenna finally whispered, her voice unusually approving. "You’re not thinking. You’re remembering."
Sylas’s expression changed. Not anger at being matched, not surprise at Soren’s sudden improvement, but calculation, as if reassessing a weapon’s capabilities. He increased the intensity further, testing this unexpected development.
The training hall blurred around them as they moved across the stone floor. The watching assassins faded from Soren’s awareness, leaving only the rhythm of combat, the dance of blades, the perfect synchronization of breath and movement.
When Sylas lunged again, a strike that should have ended their match like dozens before, Soren saw it coming with preternatural clarity.
He sidestepped with minimal motion, pivoted on his back foot, and turned his practice blade with perfect economy.
The blunt edge grazed Sylas’s forearm as he passed. Not enough to hurt, barely enough to notice, except for the single bead of blood that welled up from the minor scratch.
The entire hall went silent.
Soren blinked, awareness returning in a rush. The assassins watching from the edges of the room had frozen mid-motion, as if time itself had stopped.
Even Mira, who had been leaning against a distant pillar with casual disinterest, straightened, her tattooed face showing the first genuine surprise he’d seen from her.
Sylas stood motionless, looking down at his arm where that single drop of blood marked pale skin.
He studied it with the detached interest of a craftsman examining an unexpected flaw in materials, not angry, simply... assessing.
"Interesting," he said, voice carrying in the profound silence. "You finally struck with intention."
Soren’s breath came in ragged gasps as the strange calm abandoned him, leaving only bone-deep exhaustion in its wake. His arms felt leaden, legs trembling with fatigue.
Whatever had taken control of his movements had departed, leaving him once again acutely aware of every bruise, every strained muscle.
Sylas sheathed his practice blade with a single fluid motion. "That’s enough for today." His green eyes remained fixed on Soren, measuring, calculating. "You’ll train alone tomorrow."
Without further explanation, he turned and left the training hall, the small smear of blood still visible on his arm. The other assassins watched him go, then turned their collective gaze to Soren with new interest, like predators reassessing potential prey.
Mira approached as the others slowly resumed their interrupted activities, her steps silent against the stone floor. "No one draws blood from him," she said, voice pitched low enough that only Soren could hear. "Not once in years. You should be dead."
Soren couldn’t find words to respond. His mind still reeled from the strangeness of what had happened, from the sensation of his body moving with knowledge he’d never possessed.
When he didn’t answer, Mira leaned closer, her tattooed face grave. "Be careful. He won’t kill you yet, but he’ll want to know how you did that."
The shard against his chest pulsed cold again, Valenna’s faint voice echoing in his mind: "You didn’t learn that here. The body remembers the blood it was born from."
Mira left him standing alone in the center of the training floor, the words settling around him like a weight he couldn’t yet understand.
—
Later that night, Soren sat cross-legged in the Hall of Echoes, trying to recapture the strange clarity he’d experienced during the duel. The vast chamber remained empty at this late hour, the blue-green light from wall sconces casting elongated shadows across relief carvings that seemed to shift when viewed from the corner of his eye.
His attempt at meditation had yielded nothing but stiffness and frustration. Whatever had moved through him during the fight with Sylas remained elusive, slipping away whenever he tried to grasp it consciously.
Footsteps broke the silence, quick, purposeful, accompanied by the rustle of parchment. Naeria appeared through the eastern archway, gray eyes wide with excitement, her arms full of scrolls and her ever-present notebook.
"There you are!" She hurried toward him, nearly tripping over her own feet in her eagerness. "I’ve been looking everywhere." Without waiting for an invitation, she dropped to her knees beside him, spreading papers across the stone floor. "When you fought him, the resonance field reacted. The entire hall vibrated, briefly, but measurably."
She thrust her notebook under his nose, pages covered with hastily scrawled symbols and annotations. "See these patterns? They match perfectly with the frequency signature from when the shard first activated during my tests." Her finger traced a series of wavy lines. "But amplified. Significantly."
Soren glanced at the incomprehensible notations, too drained to feign understanding. "What does that mean?"
"It means," she said, her voice rising with barely contained excitement, "that the shard isn’t just an artifact. It’s a bridge." She shuffled through her papers, pulling out what appeared to be a fragment of ancient text. "These passages describe relics from the civilization that once ’bound the Flame’, objects that connected living vessels to powers beyond ordinary comprehension."
Her gray eyes fixed on him with uncomfortable intensity. "The Church didn’t build on ruins by accident, Soren. They built there to contain what they couldn’t destroy. And you’re carrying a piece of it against your heart."
The shard pulsed cold at her words, though Valenna remained silent. Soren looked down at Naeria’s scattered papers, the symbols swimming before his tired eyes. Her theory should have seemed fantastical, yet after what had happened in the training hall, he couldn’t dismiss it entirely.
"I need to run more tests," Naeria continued, already lost in her own theories. "If we can isolate the specific resonance frequency that triggered during combat, we might be able to replicate the effect under controlled conditions."
She talked on, outlining experiments and hypotheses with growing animation, seeming not to notice or care that Soren had fallen silent. To her, he realized, he was less a person than a fascinating puzzle, a living laboratory for theories she’d spent years developing.
When she finally gathered her materials and left, still talking half to herself about resonance fields and ancient bindings, Soren remained seated in the empty hall. The silence felt heavier than before, pregnant with possibilities he wasn’t sure he wanted to explore.
"Bridges can connect, or collapse,"
Valenna’s voice cut through his thoughts, her tone edged with something that might have been warning. "Decide which you intend to be." —
Long after midnight, when the Veiled Hand’s underground refuge had fallen into the deep silence of collective sleep, Soren returned to the training floor. The vast space stood empty, practice weapons racked along the walls, the blue-green lanterns dimmed to a soft glow that barely held back the darkness.
He stood in the center of the floor, bare feet cold against smooth stone, and closed his eyes. Trying to recapture the feeling, the moment when thought had given way to something deeper. Something older.
Opening his eyes, he began to move. Slowly at first, recreating the pivot that had allowed him to draw Sylas’s blood. Again and again he repeated the motion, trying to understand it through repetition, to burn it into muscle memory before it could fade completely.
Each time, the movement felt less natural, more forced. What had been fluid grace in the moment of combat became mechanical, stilted. The more he tried to analyze it, the further it slipped from his grasp.
Frustration built in his chest, tightening his movements further. Sweat beaded on his forehead despite the chamber’s cool air. He wasn’t practicing out of triumph or pride, but fear, fear of losing the one thing that had made him more than just a victim, more than just a failed experiment.
A polished blade hung on the far wall caught his reflection as he moved, distorted, wavering, like a ghost of himself performing the same actions with greater grace. For a moment, it almost seemed like the reflection moved independently, showing him what he should be rather than what he was.
"Precision without understanding," Valenna whispered, her voice cutting through his frustration. "The body knows. The mind interferes."
Soren stopped, chest heaving with exertion, and stared at his wavering reflection. "Then how do I learn? If thinking about it makes it worse?"
"You don’t learn," she replied, the shard pulsing cold against his skin. "You remember."
He turned away from the reflection, troubled by her words. Remember what? Combat techniques he’d never been taught? Movements his body had never practiced?
The implications spiraled outward, connecting to Naeria’s theories about the shard as a bridge, about civilizations that had bound the Flame.
Soren moved to the center of the floor once more, closed his eyes, and tried a different approach. Instead of analyzing the movements, he simply let his body stand, breathing deeply, feeling the stone beneath his feet, the air against his skin, the cold pulse of the shard against his chest.
’I don’t need to understand yet,’ he thought. ’I just need to remember.’