Elvensia did not measure a season’s worth by harvests or trade the way human kingdoms did.
It measured a season by how many of its blades had grown sharper since the last one, and by that particular standard, the court had not stopped talking about Saria since the morning of her Awakening.
Three months had passed since that day in the Hall of Blades, and the girl who had stepped up to the monument with a modest, respectable thirty four had already, through a training schedule most grown swordsmen would have broken under, climbed well past it.
She trained in the private courtyard behind her family’s estate at first light, the way she had every morning since she could hold a blade at all, only now the blades were paired, one in each hand, a discipline her mother had specifically discouraged for years before finally relenting the week after the Awakening.
“Most swordsmen spend a lifetime mastering one blade,” her mother had told her, standing exactly where she now stood watching from the courtyard’s edge, arms folded, expression unreadable in the particular way of someone who had long ago perfected the art of hiding pride behind discipline.
“You want to master two before you’ve even finished growing into your own height.”
“Then I’ll simply have to be better than most swordsmen,” Saria had answered, and her mother, despite herself, had smiled.
The dual blade style had come to her faster than either of her parents expected, not through raw talent alone but through a stubbornness that ran in the family more than anyone liked to admit out loud.
She moved through her morning forms now with a fluid, layered rhythm, left blade leading into a strike while the right blade circled to cover the opening it created, the two weapons never quite moving independently, always answering each other the way a conversation answers itself.
Her mother watched the full sequence in silence, then finally spoke once Saria lowered both blades, breathing hard, sweat darkening the collar of her training tunic.
“Better,” her mother said.
“Rank Ten trains at the western academy grounds three days from now. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
The court wants to see whether the rumors about you hold up against something real.”
Saria’s breath caught, not from exhaustion this time.
“They’re serious about the challenge.”
“The court is always serious about spectacle,” her mother said.
“Whether you’re ready is a separate question entirely, and one only you can answer honestly.” She studied her daughter for a long moment.
“Are you ready?”
Saria thought of the number sitting quietly behind her eyes these last three months, the level she’d climbed to through relentless, obsessive training, still short of Rank Ten’s own standing but closing the distance faster than any child of her generation supposedly had any right to.
She thought of her father’s quiet approval, harder won than her mother’s and worth more for exactly that reason.
She thought, distantly, of a boy her exact same age half a continent away that she had never met and would have no reason to think about at all, if not for a strange, persistent feeling she couldn’t quite name that something out there in the wider world was shifting in ways the sheltered comfort of this courtyard hadn’t prepared her to notice yet.
“I’m ready,” she said.
The walk from the training courtyard to the estate’s outer gate took her past the market district that bordered her family’s grounds, a route she’d taken a thousand times without much thought, elven merchants calling out over stalls of silverwood carvings and enchanted silk, the everyday rhythm of a capital that had never known real hardship inside its own walls.
She noticed the caravan only because it moved slower than the rest of the street’s traffic, a covered wagon flanked by two armed guards, its cargo visible in brief glimpses through gaps in the canvas whenever the wind caught it wrong.
Younger than her, most of them, thin in a way the capital’s own citizens rarely were, their ears marked with the plain, undecorated cut that immediately told anyone watching exactly what tier of Elvensia’s own society they’d been born into.
Low level elves, unawakened to anything worth the court’s attention, being moved from one estate’s ownership to another’s, likely bound for households or entertainment houses in cities she’d never bothered to ask the names of.
It was not an unusual sight.
She had grown up walking past caravans exactly like it without ever once stopping to look closely, the same way a person stops noticing the particular color of their own front door after enough years of walking through it.
Elvensia’s beauty was famous across the continent, its women especially sought after by nobles and merchants alike who could afford the arrangement, and the lower tier of that same beauty, the elves born without a level worth writing home about, simply became the currency that funded the court’s endless, glittering excess.
She had never questioned it before.
She found herself questioning it now, standing at the edge of the market watching a girl no older than twelve peer out through a gap in the canvas with an expression Saria recognized, uncomfortably, as identical to the fear she’d felt three months ago walking up to a monument that might have shown her a number worth nothing at all.
The only difference between them, Saria understood with a discomfort she couldn’t quite shake off, was the number the monument had actually given each of them.
She did not stop the caravan.
She did not know, standing there in that moment, what stopping it would even accomplish, or whether a sixteen year old girl three days out from her first real test against a ranked fighter had any standing at all to challenge a system that had built the very estate she trained in every morning.
She simply watched it pass, filed the discomfort away somewhere she couldn’t fully name, and continued on toward the gate, telling herself there would be time enough later to understand why the sight had bothered her as much as it had.
She had no way of knowing, walking away from that market with her mind already circling back toward the fight in three days, that the boy she’d thought of so briefly in the training courtyard, the one she’d never met and had no reason to think about, was at that exact moment walking away from a village of his own, carrying a sister who’d just chosen him over everything she’d ever been taught, and a growing, quiet understanding that the world he was about to step into was built on exactly the same kind of cruelty Saria had just watched roll past her without stopping it either.