Chapter 47 — What Discipline Feels Like
The first two weeks under Garrett’s instruction taught Arlen more about his own limitations than any quest had managed in months.
He’d expected, going in, that his conditioning would translate easily enough — years of hauling water and firewood, months of forest quests, the quiet physical toughness that came from a lifetime of hard, unglamorous work. What he hadn’t expected was how little any of that mattered against the specific, exacting demands Garrett placed on him.
"Again," Garrett said, for what felt like the hundredth time that session, watching Arlen hold a basic guard stance with his sword raised at precisely the angle demanded. "Your shoulder’s dropping. Small thing. Matters anyway."
Arlen adjusted, sweat trickling down his back despite the mild afternoon, his arms trembling faintly with the effort of holding a position that looked, to any outside observer, almost embarrassingly simple.
"Better," Garrett allowed, though his tone carried no particular warmth. "Hold it. Count your breaths. Slow, even, from the belly, not the chest."
Arlen held the stance, breathing carefully as instructed, and found the exercise considerably harder than it appeared — his mind wandering, his balance shifting subtly without his notice, small errors Garrett caught and corrected with blunt, unsentimental precision.
"You’re strong," Garrett said, once he’d finally called an end to the drill. "Stronger than most Rank E adventurers I’ve trained, if I’m honest. Good instincts too, from what little combat work we’ve done. But strength and instinct without proper foundation just means you’re powerful in an uncontrolled way. That’s dangerous, in its own fashion. Uncontrolled strength gets you killed the moment you meet something that doesn’t fight the way you’re used to."
Arlen thought of Millbrook, of the creature’s shifting, unnatural form, and understood the point with an immediacy that made the lesson land harder than Garrett probably intended.
"How long before I see real progress?" Arlen asked, not out of impatience exactly, but genuine curiosity about the shape of the road ahead.
"Depends what you mean by progress." Garrett wiped sweat from his own brow, settling onto a low bench at the yard’s edge. "If you mean Awakening properly, formally recognizing Aura as your own — could be months, could be longer. Some people train years without it settling in. Others get there faster. No way to predict it reliably, whatever certain overconfident instructors might claim."
"And if I mean something else? Just... getting better, generally."
"That you’ll see faster. Foundation work pays off quickly in small ways — better balance, cleaner strikes, less wasted motion. The rest builds on top of that, slow and steady." Garrett studied him with the same critical, appraising look he’d shown that first day. "You’ve got patience for tedious work. That’s rarer than raw talent, in my experience, and matters more in the long run."
Arlen found, over the following weeks, that Garrett’s assessment held true. The training remained grinding and unglamorous — hours spent on stance, on breathing, on the same handful of basic strikes repeated until his arms ached with a dull, persistent fatigue that no amount of Enduring Vitality seemed to entirely dull. He didn’t mind it, though. If anything, the sheer, deliberate slowness of it felt like a kind of relief after the chaotic urgency of Millbrook — a return to the careful, patient rhythm he’d built his whole life around, applied now to something concrete and physical rather than abstract survival.
He balanced the training alongside his ordinary quest work, careful not to let one interfere too heavily with the other, taking on modest Rank E postings during the days he wasn’t training and spending his evenings, more often than not, simply resting his overworked muscles rather than pursuing the tavern’s usual social rhythm.
Cobb noticed the change in his schedule quickly enough. "You’ve gone quiet again," he observed one evening, the two of them sharing a rare dinner together at their usual table. "Different quiet than before, though. Less brooding, more... tired."
"Started formal Aura training," Arlen admitted, the explanation settling easily now that it had become genuinely true rather than simple cover. "Garrett Vane, out near the Smith’s District. Turns out foundational technique is exhausting in ways combat itself never quite manages."
"That explains it, then." Cobb grinned. "Figured you’d get around to formal training eventually, given how seriously you take everything. Suppose it makes sense, after Millbrook."
"Something like that," Arlen said, grateful, not for the first time, for how readily his friends accepted the visible, ordinary explanation without probing further into what lay beneath it.
The training itself, despite its slow pace, began yielding small, genuine results by the third week. Garrett noted improvements in his stance that no longer required constant correction, praised — in his own gruff, understated way — the cleaner economy of Arlen’s basic strikes, and gradually introduced more advanced drills as the foundation solidified.
"You’re picking this up faster than most," Garrett admitted one afternoon, watching Arlen complete a sequence of forms with noticeably improved fluidity. "Not unusually so, mind — don’t let it go to your head. But faster than average, certainly."
Arlen accepted the observation carefully, neither confirming nor denying anything beyond a simple, grateful acknowledgment, though privately he understood well enough that some portion of his progress traced back to advantages Garrett had no way of properly accounting for — Enduring Vitality’s steady support beneath the physical strain, an adaptability that came from instincts sharpened by two separate lives’ worth of careful observation and survival.
He wrote about the training regularly now, his journal entries taking on a slightly different character than before — less focused on the strange mystery of his hidden ability, more grounded in the concrete, satisfying details of ordinary, deliberate growth.
Six weeks under Garrett now. My stance has improved considerably — he actually said as much today, which for him counts as high praise. Strikes are cleaner, more economical. Less wasted motion, less relying on raw instinct to cover for poor technique.
I like this work more than I expected to. There’s something satisfying about improvement I can actually measure, session by session, compared to abilities that simply arrive whole and unexplained. This feels earned in a way Enduring Vitality and Water Affinity never quite have, however grateful I am for both of them.
Garrett mentioned today that some students never Awaken formally, despite years of dedicated training. I don’t know whether I ever will, in the ordinary sense he means. Perhaps whatever’s already happening inside me occupies that same space differently, in ways neither of us properly understands. For now, I don’t much mind not knowing. The training itself is worth doing, regardless of what label eventually fits whatever I become through it.
He closed the journal that evening, the familiar ache of overworked muscles settling into a kind of comfortable exhaustion, and found himself thinking, with quiet satisfaction, of how naturally this deliberate discipline had folded itself into the shape of his ordinary days — not a burden, but simply another piece of the patient, careful life he’d been building for himself since the moment he first walked through the guild’s doors.