The door to the Chamber of Blades closed behind Soren with a sound like a guillotine's promise, clean, final, and a little too loud.

His pulse scaled up a notch. The room beyond was built for intimidation.

Rows of weapons, more artifact than armament, lined the whitewashed walls: swords, axes, matched daggers, each in a custom bracket, each so perfectly maintained that the scent of oiled steel crowded out the more subtle notes of wax and chalk and old sweat.

Soren walked the narrow aisle down the room's center, making himself look, making himself catalog, even as a learned flinch made his shoulders tight.

At the far end, under a cone of cold light, Master Halric Dane sat at a work table hunched over a longsword.

He was running a block of whetstone along the blade in long, even strokes, slow, deliberate, with no wasted motion. He didn't look up or acknowledge Soren's approach. For a moment, only the sound of stone grating on steel moved the air.

Soren waited, feeling the stillness bite at his calves and forearms. A chess match in silence. The urge to break it, to announce himself, to fidget or cough, was something he could kill and bury by now.

Most initiates would have spoken by now, tried to impress or ingratiate, fill the silence with noise. Soren held his ground, taking in every detail: Dane's uniform, pressed and creaseless, the glint of the Swordmaster's signet ring, the hair gleaming like poured mercury in the lamplight.

Small mountain of a man, everything about him suggesting permanence, even his scars. The arrangement was clear. Soren was here as specimen, not pupil.

Minutes ticked. Dane finished with the sword, wiped it down, and set it across the table with geometric care. Only then did he look up, eyes laser-sharp and so pale they seemed cut from glass.

"Most initiates," Dane said, his voice neither loud nor soft, "make noise to ease their nerves during these, interviews."

Soren kept his hands at his sides. "Noise rarely helps."

"That so?" Dane's gaze lingered, looking for cracks. Soren focused on the nearest weapon display: a battered saber with a twist in the hilt, clearly functional but ugly as sin. "Restraint isn't the usual skill at your age, or from your background."

He waited for Soren to bristle or protest. Soren did neither, but instead catalogued the subtle cues from the Swordmaster's face: controlled lines around the mouth, a minute drop in the chin when he expected a challenge, the way his arms tensed and relaxed with every question. On some level, the man wanted a fight.

Instead: "You invited me here."

Dane's mouth twitched, displeasure or possibly approval, impossible to say. "And you came, though you knew neither the purpose nor the duration." He rose from the bench and moved toward a rack of training swords along the adjacent wall. He took one down, blunt, heavy, the business end dulled and battered from countless drills, and weighed it in his palm as if testing a piece of fruit for rot.

"You fight too clean," he said. "That's not the Aetherion way."

Soren considered, then: "I was trained elsewhere."

Dane snorted. "I can tell. But I want to see the edges you hide. Pick a blade." He gestured at the racks, and Soren scanned the selection, each weapon mirrored and amplified itself in memory; his own blade felt suddenly inadequate at his hip.

He chose a longsword just shy of regulation length. He liked the weight, heavier toward the tip, made for decisive follow-throughs. Dane's face gave away nothing.

"Disarm me," Dane said flatly, no announcement, no warning. "You have one chance."

Soren barely had time to square up before Dane stepped inside his guard and feinted left with a flick so fast it blurred. Soren caught the intent, not the feint, the real blow, and shifted his feet, letting the attack whistle past his collarbone. Dane pressed again, more force this time, a brutal strike for the wrist that would cripple if left unaddressed.

Soren moved, pushed up on the guard, absorbed all the force, and let his own wrist go loose, letting Dane's momentum overrun the line of attack.

They reset. The entire room was silent, only the click and thrum of their footwork echoing in the white air.

Dane launched another sequence, and this time the man's intent was on full display: no wasted motion, no feints. Soren parried high, dropped low, retreated, then leapt in, finding the exact angle not by calculation but by a kind of memory in his nervous system.

He let Dane's next cut come in, then shifted inside at the last instant, catching both wrists in a cross arm-lock and twisting hard. The training sword clattered to the floor. Soren's lips parted in the ghost of a breath. He'd won, not by strength, but because he'd read the pattern perfectly.

Before the sword hit the ground, Dane had caught it in his off hand. He backed up, smiling in a way that made Soren's skin cold. "That's better," he said.

Soren, breathing steady, said nothing.

Dane set the sword back on its rack and dusted his hands off. "You were not taught to fight. You were taught to kill cleanly."

Soren met his stare. This was not accusation, but a kind of diagnosis.

Dane's voice shifted, hardly warmer, but less clinical. "A blade without a sheath always injures its wielder. You'll need to learn restraint, or you'll die the moment someone like me stops holding back."

He stepped close enough that Soren could see the cracks in his irises, those pale blue lines running like flaws in quartz. "You'll report here at dawn, three times a week. No partners. No witnesses." The sentence was a verdict, not a suggestion.

Soren nodded.

Before he could turn away, Dane's voice caught him: "Lady Kareth spoke of you. She said you were precise. She didn't mention you were dangerous to the touch." A pause, calculated. "We'll see if you can unlearn that before someone takes your head off."

Soren shrugged, barely, more in the eyes than the shoulders, and let the silence between them thicken.

Dane finally relented, turning away with a gesture that dismissed Soren to the corridor. Soren walked out, feeling the pressure drop behind him. His fingers ached, all of them, even those that hadn't gripped the sword.

At the far end of the corridor, Professor Ohn waited in the shadow of a marble pillar. She inclined her head minutely as he passed. No words, just the faintest edge of a smile at the corner of her mouth, as though a question had been answered.

As he climbed the stairs two at a time, Valenna's voice rippled against his thoughts, wry, but not mocking: "He sees too much."

'So do I,' Soren thought. He stepped into the reawakening life of the main hall, where students hustled between theory and drills, where the clangor of blades was background to a hundred minor dramas.

The Spire's light had shifted with the hour, and city dusk poured through the high windows, refracting into blue and orange across the tile.

Overhead, the banners of the Blades and Arcanists caught in the eddying air, snapping like canvas sails. He wondered how many generations of initiates had been shaped in rooms like this, and how many left unbroken at the end.

The day's work left his muscles burning and his mind sharper than glass. He looked up, and through the arc of the Spire's glasswork, the first stars of evening were just beginning to pierce the sky. What remained was not hope, nor fear, but the simple, bladed clarity of something honed too sharp to bend.

He lingered at the stair landing, letting the rhythm of the halls settle in. No students on this level, just an old custodian scraping candle drippings off the banister with a dull knife and the ghostly pulse of the Spire's heartstones vibrating underfoot. He pressed his forearm to the stone window ledge and let his breath slow, gaze drinking in the blue-rich skyline.

On the far side of the quad, dormitory lamps were coming on, popping like fireflies in the long dusk. Figures crossed the flagstones: some pairs, some clots, always in motion, always half a breath away from sprinting to the next commitment.

Above, in the northmost eave of the Arcanists' tower, a tiny, determined patch of light stubborned on, projecting what looked like arcane diagrams across rippling glass. Soren left his hand on the ledge until the chill numbed the gouged calluses of his palm.

A day at Aetherion, survive getting noticed. And at night, survive getting remembered.

He made it back to the dorm stairs just as a tide of Blades poured out from evensong drills.

The corridor reeked of sweat, leather polish, and the yeasty funk of communal baths gone sour. Soren kept to the wall, slivered himself between a bellowing cadre of second-years and three girls arm-in-arm, faces raw with laughter.

Head down. No eye contact. When he neared his room, the door was already ajar. Not enough to be an invitation, but enough that the overlapping voices inside couldn't help but spill out into his ears.

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