Gold met blue in the air and the whole yard went white for a heartbeat.
Varun felt it before he saw it the pressure change, the smell of ozone gone suddenly sharp and close and he was already moving when Riya’s arc came down where his head had been a second ago.
Stormfang Alpha caught the last edge of it instead, storm-grey steel drinking a thread of blue-silver light that ran up the blade and died against the wolf’s head etched into the crossguard.
Sloppy on my end, Wolfy said, only for him.
You saw that coming from her shoulder, not her hand.
Ten steps ahead and you still almost lost an eyebrow.
I didn’t lose the eyebrow, Varun thought back, and pivoted low as Riya came again.
Two years did strange things to a training yard.
It used to be a strip of packed dirt behind the house where Varun swung a blade too big for him and mostly lost.
Now there were scorch marks laid into the ground in overlapping fans, some old and pale, some fresh enough to still smoke faintly at the edges a record of every session going back further than either of them talked about out loud.
Riya moved like her mother.
Varun had never said that to her, because he wasn’t sure if it would land as a compliment or a wound, but he thought it every time that same unhurried certainty in how she planted her feet before she struck, like the ground owed her the space.
Gentle Thunder came off her palms in short, disciplined bursts, blue laced with hairline silver, each one shaped exactly as wide as she wanted it and no wider.
She could take a bolt meant to blow a hole through a boulder and narrow it down to something that would sting a moth.
Varun’s Thunder didn’t behave like that.
It came off Stormfang Alpha in gold and black, and it came off big an answer, not a question.
He’d gotten better at aiming it.
He had not gotten better, in two years, at making it small.
“You’re stalling,” Riya said, circling.
Fourteen looked good on her she’d grown into the height that used to make her clumsy, and Gentle Thunder sat behind her eyes now like something she’d made peace with instead of something that surprised her.
“You do that when you’re actually trying.”
“I’m always trying.”
“You’re lying, is what you’re doing.” She smiled when she said it, not accusing, just certain.
“You’ve been reading my openings before I open them for two years and you still act surprised every time it works.”
She wasn’t wrong, and that was the part he couldn’t explain to her.
Reading an opponent’s weight before they committed to a strike wasn’t a hunter-kid skill you picked up from a father who trained you on weekends.
It was a body that had done this before, in a life she’d never hear about, against people who’d have killed her real fast for the kind of tell she was giving him right now shoulder dropping half an inch before every real attack, chin lifting half a degree before every feint.
He filed it, the way he always filed it, and said nothing, and let his stance answer for him instead.
She came in low.
He’d expected low.
What he hadn’t expected what made him actually move, actually commit weight instead of coasting on the read was the second bolt, smaller and faster, sent skimming along the ground half a breath behind the first like a decoy that wasn’t a decoy at all.
Riya had learned to lie with her own lightning now.
That was new.
That was hers.
He took the ground-bolt on Stormfang Alpha’s flat rather than dodge into the real strike, and the shock of it ran up through the hilt and into his arm hot enough to numb two fingers.
There it is, Wolfy said, delighted in the private way only Varun could hear, the voice arriving from somewhere behind his sternum rather than his ears.
That’s the one that’s going to actually get you someday.
Not the big showy one.
That little rude one that looks like nothing.
Thanks for the warning.
Beforehand would’ve been useful.
Beforehand is your job.
I just get to watch and be smug about it.
Varun answered with his own Thunder for the first time that match not because he wanted to, but because pride made him, and he knew even as gold-black lightning left the blade that it was going to be the wrong kind of answer.
It came out too whole.
Too loud.
A fist where she’d thrown a needle.
Riya read the shape of it a full second before it arrived and simply stepped sideways out of a strike that could have taken a wall down, and the bolt went past her and scarred a fresh black line into the dirt that would sit there next to all the old ones.
“That,” she said, not unkindly, “is the difference between us.
You could probably beat a fully grown hunter in a real fight right now.
But ask that lightning to do anything smaller than destroy and it doesn’t know how.”
She was right, and it needled somewhere under Varun’s ribs in a way the ground-bolt hadn’t managed.
Two years of Wolfy walking him through what Thunder actually was how to feel the charge building instead of just calling it, how to let it thin out instead of only ever letting it loose and he still couldn’t make it behave the way it behaved for her without even trying.
Hers had been born in her.
His had been lent to him, generously, by something that loved him and still couldn’t hand over what it hadn’t been asked to give.
You won’t always be starting from nothing, you know, Wolfy had told him once, early on, on a night when the frustration had been worse than this.
Get one element into your bones properly really properly, not just aim-and-throw and the next beast that comes along with a different one won’t feel like starting over.
The basics underneath are more alike than people think.
Control’s control.
It hadn’t made today any less clumsy.
But it made the clumsiness feel like a floor he hadn’t finished building yet, instead of a wall.
She’s not wrong, you know, Wolfy offered.
You’re supposed to be on my side.
I’m on the side of you not lying to yourself in the middle of a fight.
Different thing.
He came at her again, faster this time, a clean diagonal cut he’d already run through every branch of in the half-second before he threw it and she wasn’t where the read said she’d be.
She’d flinched sideways a beat early, no tell at all this time, no shoulder-drop for him to have caught, already turning into the dodge before his blade had committed to the line.
That wasn’t you reading her, Wolfy said, and for once there was no teasing in it.
That was her reading you before you’d finished deciding.
Riya caught his look and shrugged, a little sheepish about it, like she still hadn’t gotten used to explaining it.
“Sometimes I just know.
Right before it lands.
Not what you’re going to do.
Just that it’s coming, and roughly where.” A small, wry twist of her mouth.
“Anchor’s decided you’re a permanent emergency, I think.
It’s been doing that since it showed up.
Comes and goes.”
It was, Varun thought, a strange kind of fair his edge built on a lifetime of reading bodies that weren’t hers, hers built on an ability that had picked him specifically to worry about.
Two different kinds of cheating, if you wanted to call either one that.
He didn’t say that part out loud.
She caught his blade a moment later on a thin sheet of blue-silver current thrown up in the last instant, sparks screaming off the steel, and shoved him back a full step with nothing but discharged air.
“Okay,” she breathed, grinning despite herself, hair sticking to her jaw with sweat.
“Okay, that one was good.”
It was, and it was also the moment Varun decided to cheat.
He didn’t plan it the way he planned most things.
It arrived the way instinct arrived a half-second gap in her guard opening on her blind side, too narrow for the blade, wide enough for something else and before the sensible part of him could argue, he let go.
Stormfang Alpha came apart in his hand in a wash of black-gold light, and where a sword had been a half-breath earlier there was suddenly an alpha wolf the size of a yearling calf, already airborne, already inside Riya’s guard before her sixth sense had finished screaming at her that something had changed.
“That’s cheating!” she got out, half a laugh and half a yelp, going down under two hundred pounds of very pleased wolf with no real force behind the tackle at all Wolfy pinned like a dog wrestling a favorite person, not a beast finishing a fight.
“It’s not cheating,” Varun said, already crossing the yard, already grinning in a way he hadn’t let himself grin all match.
“Nobody said weapon-form only.”
“Nobody said you could turn your sword into an actual wolf either!”
“Didn’t say I couldn’t.”
Wolfy, for the first time all match, spoke where everyone could hear him because a beast could talk to anyone, bond or not, and only the blade kept his voice locked to Varun alone.
“For what it’s worth,” he said to Riya, tail going, entirely unrepentant, “I’ve wanted to do that for six months.
He never lets me.”
“I don’t let you because it’s cheating.”
“It’s resourceful,” Wolfy said.
“There’s a difference.
Ask your father.”
Vikram had been standing at the low stone wall at the yard’s edge for longer than either of them had noticed Varun realized that only now, catching sight of him properly for the first time since the match started.
No urgency in his stance.
No hand near a weapon.
Arms folded, watching a spar the way he might watch weather, mildly interested in which way it would break.
Two years ago he’d come down those basement stairs like the house was on fire.
Now he just watched, and Varun understood, without anyone saying it, that this was its own kind of trust.
Wolfy folded himself back down into steel and silence as Vikram crossed the yard toward them, his voice retreating into that private space behind Varun’s ribs where only Varun would ever hear it again.
“Cheating,” Riya reported from the ground, still catching her breath, pointing an accusing finger at the sheathed blade at Varun’s hip.
“Resourceful,” Varun said.
Vikram looked between them, then at the fresh black scar in the dirt, and then, longer than either of the other two things, at his son.
“That last exchange,” he said.
“Before the wolf.
You read her ground-strike before she threw it, and then you answered a strike of hers that should have put you on your back.”
“Lucky guess.”
“You’ve made that same lucky guess forty times this year.” Vikram’s voice wasn’t accusing it never was, not with him, not at home but it carried the specific care of a man laying something down gently so he could look at it properly later.
“Two years with a blade, and you fight like you’ve had it since before you could walk.”
“Wolfy’s been teaching me.” It came out easy, because he’d practiced it being easy, the same way he’d practiced everything else he’d ever needed to say without quite lying.
“The bond’s gotten stronger over time.
He says it does that the longer we’re together, the more of him rubs off on how I move.
Nobody’s ever catalogued it.
Could be anything.” All of that was true.
None of it was the whole truth.
Varun had gotten very good, in five years of living twice, at handing over the parts that were true and keeping back the part that would ask harder questions.
Riya, hauling herself up and brushing dirt off her elbows, took it exactly the way he’d known she would with a small, satisfied nod, filing it under makes sense and moving on, because for her the world still mostly meant what it said.
Vikram didn’t move his eyes off Varun for one more second than the answer needed.
Then he let it go visibly, deliberately, the way a man sets down a weight he isn’t ready to carry yet and the moment passed, and nothing about his face said he believed it, and nothing about his face said he’d push either.
“Both of you, inside,” he said instead.
“There’s something we need to talk through before the term starts.”
Varun let Stormfang Alpha go before they reached the door black-gold light folding back into nothing at his hip.
Not gone.
Just resting.
The soul realm was where he went when there was nothing to fight and no reason to be a blade, curled up in whatever shape actually let him sleep, needing none of what a real wolf would no food, no water, nothing at all except quiet, and even that only when he felt like it.
Go on, Wolfy said, perfectly audible despite being nowhere Varun could point to.
I don’t have to be a sword for you to hear me.
Never did.
Habit, Varun admitted.
A dumb one.
I’ll be here regardless sword, wolf, or fast asleep.
Go get interrogated.
It’s not an interrogation.
It’s absolutely going to be an interrogation.
The kitchen still smelled like the tea Riya had left half-finished that morning.
Vikram sat at the head of the table the way he always did, big hands wrapped around a cup he wasn’t drinking from, and said it plainly, because that was how he said the things that mattered most.
“Academy registration opens next week.
You’ll need to give them an age for your awakening, Varun.” He paused.
“It won’t be five.”
Varun already knew where this was going, had known it was coming for months, and still felt something in his chest tighten at hearing it said out loud at the family table instead of just carried privately in his own head.
“Seven,” Vikram said.
“This year.
That’s what goes in the record, and that’s what you tell anyone who asks teachers, other hunters, anyone.
Not a lie so much as a kindness to ourselves.
Seven is still faster than the guild’s ever seen.
It’ll turn heads on its own.
It won’t turn the kind of heads five would.”
“That’s still lying,” Riya said, though without much heat in it more curiosity than objection.
“It’s timing,” Vikram said.
“We’re not hiding what he can do.
We’re choosing when the world finds out how much of it there is.” He looked at Varun, and something in the look was almost not quite, but almost an apology.
“You’ve carried enough of this quietly already.
I know that.
I’m asking you to carry a little more.”
“I know,” Varun said, and meant it, and didn’t say the rest of what he was thinking that two years from now, or five, someone smarter than Riya and slower to let a good explanation go than his father was pretending to be would ask the same question Vikram had just asked in the yard, and keep asking it until an easy answer stopped being enough.
That was a problem for later.
He filed it, the way he filed everything, and let the moment close over it instead.
Upstairs that night, alone, the house gone quiet around him, Wolfy’s voice came back anyway no summons needed, no blade laid across his knees.
From the soul realm he was always one thought away, and half the time now he answered before Varun had even finished forming the question, like he’d been lying there awake in the dark waiting for it.
He knows, Wolfy said.
Not the whole of it.
But he knows there’s a whole of it to know.
I noticed.
You’re not going to do anything about that, are you.
Varun stared up at the dark ceiling and didn’t answer right away.
Not yet, he said finally.
Not yet’s worked so far.
“Not yet” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this family, Wolfy said, and settled into quiet, and let him have the rest of the night.