The tower was impossible to miss, exactly like Emma had said — squat and heavily fortified in a way that made the rest of the wall look almost decorative by comparison, like it had been built by someone actively hoping something would try it.
A guard at the base gave him a once-over when he asked for the Captain — dirty-blonde hair, a dark military-cut uniform, sword worn high on his right hip — then jerked a thumb toward the stairs without much interest. "Top. He's always up top. I'll walk you — save you getting lost in there, first time."
The stairwell wound up longer than Kaelid expected, and the air changed well before he reached the top — a creeping cold that had nothing to do with the wind outside, settling into his lungs a full flight before the guard finally pushed open the door onto the wall walk itself.
"Captain," the guard called, already backing toward the stairs like he had no intention of lingering. "Someone for you."
Yami didn't turn around right away. He stood near the tower itself, arms crossed, gaze fixed south toward the Death Mountains like he expected something to come out of them at any moment — tall and heavily built, more so than the role strictly demanded, short black hair catching what little light made it up here. And the closer Kaelid got, the more the cold sharpened, air around the man himself noticeably colder than anywhere else on the wall, like standing too near an open icebox that had never once needed a door. It wasn't unbearable. It was just there, constant and faintly threatening, a low hum under everything else.
Is that just him? People can do that?
He didn't have the first idea what he was looking at — nobody back home had ever mentioned a person could carry their own weather around with them.
"Emma sent me. I want to train under you."
Yami finally turned, pale blue eyes cold and unimpressed, looking Kaelid over slow, the way someone might inspect a horse they had no intention of buying — lingered a beat longer on the still-healing wrap around his forearm, though he didn't comment on it. "Run five laps around the walls. And don't even think about ditching your gear or sword."
"That's it? No fighting, no—"
Yami just looked at him. Said nothing at all, waiting him out, arms still crossed, like the silence itself was supposed to answer the question.
"Do it or don't. I don't care which you choose."
He went.
It was, without question, the single worst physical experience of his life up to that point — worse than the crabta, worse than the wolves, worse than the tree that had nearly strangled him, because none of those had lasted twelve straight hours. The first few laps went almost fine, a hard pace but a sustainable one, sun climbing while his legs found some kind of rhythm to settle into. That didn't last. Somewhere past the halfway mark the running stopped being running at all and became something closer to negotiation — sprint until his lungs gave out, drop to a jog, drop further to a walk when even the jog became too much, stop dead for a minute with his hands on his knees when the walk stopped being enough either, and then start the whole cycle over again because stopping for good wasn't actually on the table. The sword and gear he'd have barely noticed on a normal day turned into dead, dragging weight somewhere around the second lap, every strap and buckle finding a fresh way to chafe, the longsword's weight at his hip turning what should have been a straight stride into something lopsided and exhausting to correct for, over and over, mile after mile. Afternoon bled into evening and the wind off the mountains got sharper with it, cutting through every layer he owned, his still-healing forearm throbbing in time with every stride whether he was running or barely shuffling. He stopped counting the laps somewhere past the third, stopped thinking in words at all somewhere past the fourth, and finished the last stretch in full dark on something that wasn't quite willpower anymore, just stubbornness with nothing left to back it up.
He collapsed the second he crossed back to where Yami stood waiting, hands on his knees, dragging air like he'd never properly breathed before in his life.
Yami watched him for a long moment, unreadable. "Huh," he said eventually, which didn't sound like much, but seemed to mean something. Then, without any particular ceremony: "Get up. We're not done."
"We're—" Kaelid straightened too fast and regretted it immediately, the world tilting sideways for a second before it settled. "It's dark."
"It'll get darker." Yami nodded at the sword already on Kaelid's hip. "Draw. Vertical cuts, one thousand. Then horizontal, both directions, one thousand each. Then thrusts, one thousand. You stop when you hit the number, not before."
Four thousand. He wants four thousand of something after I just ran thirty miles.
He didn't argue. Arguing felt like it would cost more than it was worth, and some small, stubborn part of him — the same part that had gotten him this far in the first place — was almost curious to see if his arms would actually give out before his legs did.
They didn't, not exactly. What happened instead was worse: his form went first.
Somewhere past two hundred cuts his shoulders started dropping the angle without his permission, the blade drifting shallow instead of clean, and the first time it happened Yami's sheathed sword caught him flat across the ribs before he even registered the man had moved.
"Wrong," Yami said, already stepping back into place like nothing had happened. "Again."
I didn't even see him move.
He reset the angle. Cut again. Somewhere around six hundred his wrist started rolling on the follow-through, shaving power off every strike without him noticing until the sheath found his shoulder blade this time, a flat, precise crack that stung worse than it should have for something that wasn't trying to actually hurt him.
"Wrong."
By the time he hit a thousand vertical cuts his arms had stopped feeling like arms and started feeling like something borrowed, heavy and slow to answer, and the horizontal cuts that followed were worse in a new way — the switch in motion woke up muscles the verticals hadn't touched, and for the first fifty strikes every single one of them ached like it was the first swing of the whole night instead of the thousand-and-first.
Again. Again. Again. Again. Don't think about the number. Thinking about the number makes it worse.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
The sheath found him twice more in the first direction, once for a dropped elbow, once for a cut that landed a half-second late off his back foot. He stopped counting how many corrections that made total sometime after the fourth. It felt like giving something up he didn't want to lose track of, and also like exactly the kind of thing that would make the rest of the night unbearable if he kept doing it.
By the second horizontal direction his hands had gone numb enough that he wasn't entirely sure the sword was still in them between strikes, only confirming it each time by the weight snapping back at the end of the swing.
Three thousand. Just the thrusts left. Just a thousand more.
The thrusts nearly finished him in a different way than exhaustion — precision instead of raw repetition, every strike supposed to land the same narrow point in the air over and over, and his aim had gone soft enough by then that Yami's sheath found him three times in the first hundred alone, sharp corrections to elbow, hip, and the angle of his back foot in quick succession.
"You're compensating with your shoulder instead of your hip," Yami said, flat, not unkind, not kind either. "Fix it, or you die. I guess."
Bit dramatic for a training exercise. Fine. Noted.
He fixed it. Badly, at first, and then less badly, somewhere in the low hundreds of thrusts a version of the motion finally clicking into something that didn't need correcting every tenth strike — not good, not close to good, but something his body could repeat without a sheathed sword reminding it how.
There it is. Finally.
He finished the last thrust somewhere past two in the morning, by his own rough count, though he'd lost any real sense of time somewhere around the second thousand. The sword slipped out of his hand the second the count hit zero, and he didn't bother trying to catch it before it hit the stone.
Yami looked him over, arms crossed, that same faint cold radiating off him that Kaelid had stopped noticing hours ago somewhere under everything else that hurt worse. Whatever he saw didn't seem to impress him much.
"You look terrible." His gaze dragged once more over the fresh bruises before settling back on Kaelid's face, unreadable. "Go shower. You stink." He turned back toward the tower without waiting for a response. "Be back here at ten tomorrow."
Kaelid didn't remember most of the walk back to the inn. He remembered the stairs being a personal insult, and Eve's face doing something complicated when she saw him come through the door, and very little after that beyond the mattress finally taking his weight.
He didn't dream of anything at all.
***
He woke to sunlight and the specific, full-body betrayal of muscles that had been hit with a sheathed sword roughly a dozen times the night before
The shower told him the whole story before his eyes even had to. A dark bruise bloomed clean across his ribs where the first correction had landed, another lower on his hip, a matching pair on his shoulder blade and elbow, and one ugly yellow-purple mark just above his knee he genuinely couldn't place a strike to. He turned under the water a while longer than he needed to, cataloguing all of it with a kind of detached, exhausted interest, like counting damage on someone else's body.
He barely even swung hard. Imagine what he could actually do if he meant it.
There wasn't time to sit with that thought properly. He'd slept as long as the morning would let him, which wasn't nearly long enough, and by the time he'd toweled off, pulled his leather gear back on, and buckled his sword at his hip, the sun was already well up. Breakfast came and went in about four bites — bread, something with egg in it he didn't taste properly, gone before he'd really decided to eat it — and then he was out the door and moving, half-jogging toward the tower because walking felt like it would eat time he didn't have.
The stairwell felt shorter than it had the first time, or maybe he was just too tired to notice it properly. Yami was where he'd been the day before — up top, near the tower itself, gaze fixed south toward the Death Mountains like he hadn't moved an inch since Kaelid last saw him.
"One lap," Yami said, without turning around. "Go."
One. Just one. I can do one.
He went.
It was, by every honest measure, still miserable — his legs remembered exactly what yesterday had cost them and complained the entire way, his ribs pulling with each stride where the bruise sat — but six miles after twelve hours and thirty of them the day before felt almost like nothing, a lap around a training yard instead of an ordeal, and somewhere past the halfway point he caught himself actually enjoying the burn instead of dreading it.
He crossed back to where Yami stood, breathing hard but upright, and couldn't quite stop the grin that came with it.
Hah. That was easy. Actually easy.
Yami looked at him for a long moment. Looked, specifically, at the grin.
"Two more."
The grin died fast. "What? I just—"
"You look happy." Yami said it flatly, like that alone was the entire explanation, and apparently it was, because he didn't offer anything else. "Go."
Should've kept my face still. Noted. Too late now.
He went, and this time there was no enjoying anything about it — twelve more miles on legs that had already spent themselves once this morning, the grin from lap one feeling like a memory from a different, dumber version of himself by the time he staggered back for the second time, chest heaving, nothing on his face now but the effort of standing upright.
Yami gave him maybe ten seconds to catch his breath. "Same order as last night. Vertical, then horizontal both directions, then thrusts. Go."
The swings went faster this time, if only because his body had already learned the shape of the motion the night before and didn't need to relearn it from nothing — the corrections came less often too, the sheathed sword finding him twice in the verticals instead of four times, once in the horizontals, not at all through the thrusts, which felt like the first real evidence in two days that any of this was actually sinking in rather than just hurting.
Getting better. Slowly. Very, very slowly.
He finished the last thrust with the afternoon light already starting to lean toward gold, arms shaking, and allowed himself exactly one second of relief before Yami spoke again.
"Sparring."
"Finally." Kaelid rolled his shoulder, wincing at the bruise there, sword already in hand. "What are the rules?"
"You don't attack." Yami drew his own blade — unsheathed properly this time, plain and unadorned and somehow more unsettling for it. "You dodge. You block. You parry. That's all. You so much as think about swinging at me and we start over from the wall."
Oh. Oh, that's not what I thought this was.
He didn't get the chance to feel nervous about it before Yami closed the distance, and the sparring, if it could even be called that, turned out to be less a lesson and more a controlled, methodical dismantling — strikes that came from angles Kaelid hadn't known were angles, a pace that never once let up long enough for him to think, only react, block coming a half-second too slow more often than not, parries that jarred all the way up into his already-aching shoulder, dodges that worked exactly as often as they didn't.
Block. Just block. Don't think, just—
He caught one wrong on the flat of his blade and the impact rang all the way up his arm, numbing it for a half-second that nearly cost him the next exchange entirely. He didn't swing back. He wanted to, badly, some old stubborn part of him screaming that he could take at least one clean hit if he just tried — and he didn't, because the one rule he'd been given felt like the one thing standing between this and something considerably worse.
Not yet. Not today. Just survive it today.
He didn't know how long it went on. Long enough that the gold light had gone properly orange by the time Yami finally stepped back, sword lowering, and long enough that Kaelid's arms had stopped feeling like they belonged to him sometime well before that.
"Better than yesterday," Yami said, which had apparently become the closest thing to praise the man was capable of. "Go eat something. Sleep. Same time tomorrow."
Kaelid didn't trust himself to say anything back that wasn't a groan, so he didn't try.