Day 7 of Training
Lucien stood alone in a black, circular stone room. The torches that adorned the walls hissed and shuddered. Inscribed into the ground at foot was a throb-hued coiled sigil, with a frigid purple light.
No weapons. No instructor. Only him and silence. Behind him, as the ancient oak door groaned shut, iron latches clanged like the bashing of a coffin lid.
From a rune etched up on the wall, a voice was heard thin and hollow, as if ghosts had spoken it. "Focus. Survive. Or be forgotten."
Lucien blinked
And the world distorted.
He was standing now inside a destroyed hall of an abandoned manorone oddly familiar. Mists filled the air and blood. Walls ballooned like lungs. Shadows moved without light.
Then he saw it—
Himself. Handcuffed on the floor. Disfigured. Alive.
A figure in a mask moved forward, blade at hand.
And the cutting began at the toes.
SLOW.DESTRUCTIVE.HARMFULLY
Lucien couldn't avert his gaze. Couldn't scream. He felt every tear of skin, every exposed nerve.
"You are not chosen."
"You are a fault in destiny."
"You don't belong here."
The knife to his throat—
Lucien woke up gasping, bedraggled with sweat. He was lying on the cold ground, shivering. Nails smeared with blood. Panting.
The door creaked.
Kaela stepped in, arms crossed, an eyebrow raised.
She examined him, and her tone was low and flat:
"Five minutes. Most beg by one."
Lucien got up. He didn't say anything but his eyes were more keen. His terror was there still, but it had fractured like ice under your feet.
Kaela nodded slightly.
"Good. You're starting to bleed right."
She turned and walked away, her boots echoing in the corridor.
Lucien followed, silent… but no longer the same.
The air overhead was slate-gray, perpetually on the brink of storming yet never doing so. Lucien was in the open training yard of the Vault if one could call it that. The ground was cracked stone and blackened earth, charred here and there. Rusted racks for weapons stood all around the yard, many still spotted with dried blood.
Kaela tossed him a blade not polished steel, but iron-forged, dull-edged, and heavy. It was meant to bruise, to break not kill. Yet.
"You'll train with this till it feels like a part of your arm," she said, stepping back.
Before Lucien could ask who his opponent was, the gate on the opposite side opened.
And out walked a masked brute, twice Lucien's size. Scarred. Shirtless. Silent.
Kaela called from the sidelines, arms crossed.
I have a friend for you we call him Vorrin. He doesn't talk. Doesn't hold back either. Try to survive the first three minutes. That's the lesson."
Lucien hadn't had a chance to prepare his defense when Vorrin struck.
Steel clashed on steel. Lucien recoiled. Vorrin struck like a wild animal, his punches crunching and merciless. Lucien lost his hold. His ribs got a punch. Blood trickled from his mouth.
Kaela didn't intervene.
She just watched.
Again."
Lucien rolled. Parried. Missed again. A kick to the gut. Another slash at the arm.
"On your feet."
Darkness crept up over the sky.
Lucien screamed not in pain, but frustration. And that's when whatever was inside him broke.
He stopped reacting, and started thinking.
He crept down, faster, letting the brute's weight against him. The sword didn't sing, but it took a bite out of Vorrin's thigh hard enough to make him grunt.
And when the third minute had elapsed, Lucien stood there barely.
Subsequently, Kaela found him sitting in front of a doused torch, clutching his side and wheezing for breath.
She sat down beside him, not saying anything at first.
Then:
"You're bleeding in the right places now. That means you're learning."
Lucien gave a dry laugh. "I thought you didn't care."
Kaela shrugged. "I don't. But you might live. And that matters."
Lucien looked at his broken blade. And then at the sky above, darkening with twilight, and wondered how many days remained until he broke again.
And just as he turned to tell
The Vault shook.
There was a low, muffled hum through the stone walls. Magical pulses. As though someone had entered the world again.
Kaela sprang up, face twisted.
".Oh here they go again what a pain."
Lucien looked up.
"What?"
Kaela didn't speak.
She only whispered—
Another summoning.".
Kaela took Lucien to the next floor of the Vault the next day.
It wasn't a tower, not the sort the name suggested. Closer to a pit beneath the Vault the ground was rough-stoned and resounded with water drips, bone-searing drafts that tore at the flesh.
No sparring. No swords.
A narrow path and a hooded instructor named Orran, whose voice was smooth and cold.
Your body is weak. Your mind, softer. Before you learn control, you must learn silence. Stillness. Suffering."
Lucien did not protest.
He could not.
His throat hurt from yesterday's beatings, and his ribs still twinged.
DAYONE He was sitting. Legs crossed, back straight, on cold stone. Hours. No food. No water. No movement. If he stumbled or fell, he was beaten with a cane. Not by Orran but by himself.
Because every mistake created a magic tether , and an incised, throbbing sigil in his back would ache with every stumble.
DAYTWOHe was immersed in ice water. Naked. Tied to a pillar below the ground. The whispering sounds echoed in the chamber illusions that tested his will. He heard his mother's voice, his sister's laughter, a scream he did not know.
He screamed back.
Nobody came.
DAY THREE Starved. Blindfolded eyes. Forced to travel through a maze in the dark. The traps triggering at the wrong steps. He bled. He wept once just once when he thought he saw light.
But it was a ruse.
The dark alone was waiting for him once more.
That night, he dreamed of warmth .
Of his bed back home at the orphanage.
Of rain against a window.
Then, a crack.
The world of dreams splintered like glass and Lucien fell into it, screaming. Down he went into a hall of black mirrors, each one reflecting his worst nightmares:
A younger self, running out of a burning house.
Himself, hanging from the gates of Altheria's cathedral.
Kaela, bleeding. Smiling.
And then a last vision
Himself older, colder leading a warband through the ruins, cloaked in black, eyes glowing with void.
Lucien reached out.
And the vision whispered:
"This is the only way you'll survive."
He gasped and woke up in the dirt. Covered in sweat. Blood. Tears.
Kaela stood over him, arms crossed.
"Good," she said quietly. "You're not broken yet."