TRYL - Chapter 1

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Dawn cut the world open with a blade of pale gold.

Noah took his first breath as if resurfacing from a century of water—lungs burning, ribs tight, the taste of candle smoke and blood still ghosting the back of his throat. Grass pooled cool against his palms; damp earth yielded under him. Somewhere above, leaves fretted and chimed. Birds disputed the morning. He blinked, and the sky blinked back: an enormous wash of blue lacquered with the soft white of spring clouds.

He did not move for a while. He catalogued.

The thinness of magic here, like soup watered down too far. His own reservoirs, which used to stretch like subterranean lakes, now shrunken into a single uneven cistern. The bones of power inside him—old habits—had survived, but they lacked meat. Every spell he tried to call into his hand bled at the edges, fraying into useless threads.

Good. He had expected that.

He rolled to his side, pushed up slow. The world rearranged into details: a hillside tufted with grass and dandelions, a verge of flowering plum trees tumbling downhill like spilled paint, a dirt path etched with boot prints and wheel ruts; deeper, the murmur of a stream, the smell of wet stone and carp-sweet water. Below the hill unfurled a town: clay-tiled roofs, whitewashed walls, banners catching the wind. Market sounds rose—chickens, bells, a rack of knives clanging shut, voices arguing in seven dialects.

And laughter.

Clear, unembarrassed, colliding with the morning like a handful of glass beads.

He went still the way a hunter goes still.

There—under a canopy of wasted blossom, sword propped against his shoulder, hair catching petals as if it had sworn fidelity to them—stood a youth. Tall for his age, shoulders not yet broad but already promising to be, eyes too honest. The sword on his back was a relic too large for him; the scabbard’s lacquer was scratched, notched by traveling miles beyond what coin sensibly allowed. He held a paper-wrapped bun in one hand and gestured with it as if he could argue the pastry into agreeing with him.

“—no, really, Master Qian, I think it’s perfectly fine to take the side trail,” the youth was saying to a long-suffering elder in green scholar’s robes. “The main road is clogged with vendors. We’ll miss the registration if we dally. And look—” he shoved the last of the bun into his mouth, speaking around it with the confidence of the very young, “—I’m very fast.”

“Neo,” the elder sighed, “speed is not the same as prudence.”

Noah’s throat closed, opened again. He had to put a palm against the tree to steady himself, as if faced with an apparition. The spring light was cruel to memory; it erased the scars he knew, the fatigue bricked under the eyes, the tightness around the mouth of a man who had learned to distrust the world. This face wore all of its original mistakes: hope, naivety, wonder.

A breeze came, and the blossoms gave way. Pink fell like soft rain. The boy laughed again, tilting his head back to catch petals in his hair.

Not yet, Noah thought. Not yet the man who kills. And not yet the man I loved in spite of it.

His heart, which he had the poor habit of ignoring, added traitorously: not yet the man I failed.

He set his jaw. He had come back to dismantle an empire of debts and wound-makers; to collect from the old families and their pet academies; to string the architects of ruin along their own rope. He had come to make Neo regret. But watching this boy—in whom cruelty had not yet learned its multiplication tables—Noah found a new problem crowding the structure he had built of cold logic and older rage.

There was nothing yet to punish. There was only a path, and a boy at the start of it.

Noah breathed out. “Fine,” he told the day. “We do this differently.”

He needed a name.

The old one was a bell that carried too far. In his previous life, “Noah” had become a story, whispered along library aisles and across tavern tables, under breath and sometimes not at all. The Sorcerer of the Fifth Circle. The one who charted blood-geometry with the precision of an accountant. A man people pretended not to stare at until his back was turned.

He brushed the earth from his sleeves and listened to names the wind might give. He tried on a few, discarded them. When he finally descended the hill, he wore a plain travel cloak the color of stone, a plain citizen’s queue bound in leather—no ornaments—and a plain name he’d used once in a city where no one knew better.

“Arlen,” he told himself, just to hear it aloud. “Arlen it is.”

The market smelled like fresh oil and fried batter. Vendors hawked skewers of sesame rice cakes, spiced pears, candied hawthorn. Someone roasted chestnuts in a drum that squealed like gossip; someone else ground ink on a stone, making a rich, soft sound like wet paper kissed and kissed. Children thundered past in a small, unified riot, each carrying a loop of ribbon on a stick that wrote joy into the air.

Arlen—Noah—moved through it, learning the town as if it were a spell that needed the right intonation. To the east, a pair of gates lacquered with faded cinnabar guarded the path up to the High Terrace, where the town’s shrine sat. Pilgrims climbed its steps with offerings wrapped in red cloth. To the west, a covered bridge in the style of poets arched over the river; lovers carved their names into the rails and rubbed their fingers over them, as if touch could make time keep its promises.

Above the market, the banners of the Four Pillars lofted on poles: Storm-Saber Academy, Verdant Hall, Moon-Mend Abbey, and the Azure Tower. The Four Pillars took in provincial talent once a year and sent back polished blades and polished minds with equal zeal. There was a fifth banner too, displayed with less pride and more superstition: a plain strip of linen, ash-gray, the mark of the Watchers—the diviners and archivists who read history for the future and locked dangerous magic behind iron law.

Arlen bought tea—cheap leaves, honest kettle—and a small paper-wrapped triangle of rice stuffed with pickled plum. He ate leaning against a post and watched the crowd. There were others with swords; there were others in scholar’s green; there were people who wore no declaration at all and whose hands nonetheless knew magic by the way they moved, fingers speaking a grammar older than letters.

The boy—Neo—reappeared beyond a stall selling jade pendants shaped like carp and cranes. His elder companion had vanished. The youth stood alone, turning in place to catch his bearings, eyebrows tipped in thoughtful confusion. He carried his sword like a promise and his coin purse like a dare. In his expression lived that reckless belief that the world, if faced correctly, would yield.

A trio of men in thick jackets and thin scruples drifted out of the crowd. Their leader had a split lower lip that had never healed right; his left eye squinted from a life spent judging distances poorly. They pretended that Neo’s sword was more visible than his person, and circled the sword the way carrion birds circle a battlefield—reverently, greedily, certain the field would give.

Arlen did not intervene. He watched, weighing. Sometimes a bruise taught faster than a lecture.

“Nice blade,” the leader said, spitting a seed at the boy’s feet. “Heavy for a sprout.”

Neo looked at him the way you might look at an unpromising cloud on laundry day. “It’s not heavy once you understand it.”

“Oh? And do you understand it?”

“Yes,” Neo said simply. “And myself, a little.”

The men laughed in a way that had nothing to do with humor.

Arlen tipped his tea to his mouth, hiding a smile. The boy’s voice had not yet learned to lie well. It rang too true, the way a freshly hammered bell rings—a bit too loud for public comfort.

“Why don’t you show us how well you understand losing it,” the leader said, one hand already half-inside his jacket for a sap.

Neo’s hand did not reach for his sword. “I’m in a hurry,” he said with politeness that landed like insult. “If you want coin, I can give you enough for breakfast. If you want the blade, you’ll have to wait until I’m too tired to lift it, and I don’t think that will be today.”

Arlen’s mouth tugged. Brash. But he meant it as kindness. He was offering the easy out, thinking he could bribe the world into behaving.

Two more men flowed in from behind, dividing the boy’s attention. The leader’s lips twisted.

Someone in the crowd murmured without looking: “Storm-Saber whelps. Always think a laugh is a shield.”

The words carried a shade of prophecy. Near the shrine, the bell-stroke of ninth hour unfurled, and with it came a disquiet—like cold fingers on the back of the neck. Birds winging between eaves collided and scattered. Stalls went a little quieter, then pretended not to have.

Arlen felt it before he saw it. The air went thin and then sharp; the styles of speech around him lost a note as if someone had removed a string from an instrument. People began unconsciously stepping away from the covered bridge, which had begun to hum at a frequency too low for ears but not for bones.

The river rose—not with water, but with veins of gray light, coiling like unsheathed nerves. The hum deepened into a moan.

The bridge spat out a ghost.

No, not a ghost. A spirit-bent remainder, the kind that happens when a death wraps itself around a place instead of a body. The covered bridge had collected lots of promises; today, it broke one.

The thing unrolled from under the eaves like wet parchment: half-woman, half-withheld, its mouth stitched with waterweed, its hands too long by two joints; the air around it trembled with the ache of unfinished tasks and unfinished love. It turned its head slowly, seeking the note that would let it close itself.

A vendor dropped his skewer; the chestnut man abandoned his drum. The trio of thugs forgot their plan and pivoted toward the river, breath frosting though the day had not been cold a heartbeat ago.

Neo moved before thought could ask permission. He put himself between the market and the remainder, his sword rising like a reflex and not an act. The blade was wrong for this—it cut bodies, not hauntings—but he held it with a grace that Arlen recognized: the grace of a truth obeyed even when inconvenient.

“Back,” Neo said over his shoulder without turning. His voice was steady the way a table is steady: you trust it without looking. People obeyed, not because he frightened them, but because his certainty made their indecision look indecent.

The remainder shuddered. Its stitched mouth flexed. Threads of river-weed squealed as if under strain.

Arlen hissed under his breath. If it tore those stitches, grief would spill across the market like dye, staining whatever it touched. That was the kind of stain people named songs after and learned to regret the melody.

He put his tea on the post, tugged his sleeve up, and found the pulse in his wrist with two fingers. The beat was too fast. Irritating. But it would serve.

He ran his finger along the inside of his forearm, old scars reading under his touch like notes. He pressed three of them and the skin under each went chill; pressed a fourth and felt something like a door open—not the door of power he had once owned, but a side entrance meant for servants and thieves.

“Arlen,” he reminded himself, and then let the old syntax of magic lace his breath.

On the bridge, Neo exhaled, stepped, and tricked the eye. His blade seemed to arrive before him. He struck not at the remainder’s form but at the shadows it wore, hoping to loosen its hold on shape, buy time. The strike landed; the remainder scattered into a geometer’s nightmare, angles unattached to edges, motion without location. But it reassembled, mouth-pain sharpening into fury.

“Not a sword problem,” Arlen muttered. Then, louder: “Boy. Listen.”

The word found Neo’s ear. Neo did not take his eyes off the remainder, but the line of his shoulder acknowledged the voice without assigning it a face.

“The stitch,” Arlen said. “It’s a song. Don’t cut it. You’ll make it louder.”

“Then what?” Neo’s tone was brisk—teacher-to-teacher. It surprised Arlen; he had expected defensiveness. He got curiosity instead.

“Hold that thing’s attention. No bravado,” Arlen added when the boy’s weight shifted like a boast. “Just patience.”

Neo nodded and adjusted his stance, stripping it of everything that asked to be admired. The air around him changed key.

Arlen stepped onto the covered bridge. The wood was colder than it should have been. The remainder’s head turned with a slow crrrrk, like doors in old temples that pretend they cannot open. It did not see him—not yet. Its attention was a blind sun fixed on Neo.

Arlen knelt by the lowest beam where fruit-sellers tied charms for good harvests. There were papers under it—ink ghosts of petitions that had worked until they didn’t. He slid his hand into the gap and found the thing he had hoped would be there: a small, neglected bell-bone, the kind the old river-keepers used for hushing flood-stories back to sleep.

He coaxed it out. It had been mended badly once, wrapped with horsehair and love, then forgotten.

“Never ask for what you can listen for,” he told the remainder under his breath, as if he were scolding a student. “And never shout at a song.”

He touched the bell-bone to his teeth and felt the note it wanted. Not much power in him—fine. He wouldn’t brute this. He would throw his knowledge like a cloak over the lack.

The remainder lunged, mouth tearing a little, a sound like wet paper failing.

Neo did not meet force with force. He moved like someone making room in a narrow hall for a guest; the blade slid, turned, let the remainder think it had found a gap and then offered it nothing but an empty place to drip into. It shrieked without air.

“Good,” Arlen said. “Again.”

He hummed the bell-bone’s song—but backwards, to unwind it. He kept the tones soft, under the market’s panic, under the boots retreating, under a child beginning to cry and a mother shushing at a pitch that only made the child’s fear feel attended to. He hummed until the air under the bridge remembered what silence had felt like before it had learned to sound like loss.

The stitch in the remainder’s mouth loosened without tearing. Threads cradled trauma without crowning it. The long hands lost a joint. The face stopped being a face and went back to being a memory nobody had agreed on.

Neo eased. His blade dipped a degree. Sweat made a clean line along the side of his throat. He looked young when not arguing with danger; he looked like someone’s son, someone’s student, someone who still had a collection of small, unimportant dreams.

“Let it turn,” Arlen said. “Not away. Through.”

Neo—who knew nothing of Arlen and less of why this stranger’s voice sounded like the kind that washed blood off floors—obeyed without argument. He shifted weight a fraction, inviting the remainder to spill past him instead of onto him. The thing did, as if someone had finally told it which direction the river wanted.

Arlen lifted the bell-bone and clicked it once, quiet as the inside of a wrist.

The sound found the remainder like a mother recognizes a child by the cough in the next room. The thing sagged, shedding malice the way a storm sheds rain once it remembers the ocean. It folded into itself, smaller and then smaller, until it was only dampness on the wood and three strands of river-weed laid across the plank like stray hairs.

The market breathed in one piece again. Someone shouted: “It’s finished!” and the shout spread with the shamelessness of relief. People pretended to go about their business and absolutely did not.

Neo remained still until stillness no longer served. He lowered the blade completely, then cracked his shoulders as if resetting bones that had never been set wrong. When he turned, Arlen saw the moment his eyes found him and filled in the absence of a stranger with a useful shape: help.

“You said not to cut it,” Neo said at once, not with gratitude but with hungry curiosity. “You sang. Why backwards?”

Arlen tucked the bell-bone into his sleeve. “Because grief always ends a song. Reversing the melody reminds it how it began.”

Neo’s mouth opened, shut; he tried to smother a grin and failed. “That’s— I like that.” He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then realized he was supposed to bow, and bowed, almost spilling over because his sword unbalanced him and he refused to admit it. “I’m grateful,” he added, sincerity making the sentence a little lopsided. “I’m Neo.”

The name drew blood under Arlen’s nails. He smiled with a fraction of his mouth. “Arlen,” he said.

“Are you a priest? Or a river-keeper? Or— no, you don’t look like Moon-Mend or Verdant. Your sleeves are wrong.” Neo looked delighted at the problem of him. “You knew what to do without hesitating.”

“I hesitate often,” Arlen said. “Just not where anyone can see it.”

Neo laughed, a sound like a glass bead bounced on a table. “You should come with me,” he said impulsively, as if invitations were pebbles he could toss without worrying about where they landed. “To the registration. Storm-Saber Academy— the provincial exam. I’ve trained alone for years, but they won’t let me test unless a sponsor vouches I didn’t crawl out of a cave. You look like you might be respectable from a distance.”

“I am often respectable from exactly that distance,” Arlen said. “From closer, I am a disappointment.”

Neo’s eyes brightened as if Arlen had told him a joke. “I don’t mind,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve met lots of disappointments. They make the world more interesting.”

Arlen blinked. He had expected flattery or suspicion; he had expected the arranged expressions tutors teach. He had not expected the compassionate audacity of a boy who could name disappointment without sting. A boy like this should have died in his old timeline; too many kinds of cruelty turn such honesty into loot. But here he stood. Unlooted. Not yet.

“I can vouch you’re a person,” Arlen said. “But—” He flicked a glance toward the bridge where officials in drab Watcher-gray were arriving with their book of procedures, two pages already open: one for sealing the remainder, another for collecting witness names like butterflies. “You’re better away from questions.”

Neo looked toward the Watchers. His mouth turned to mischief and then to caution. “Master Qian told me not to speak too loudly where people have careful pens,” he said. “Is that what you are?”

“I am a man with poor patience for careful pens.”

“Perfect,” Neo said, utterly without sense. “Then we’ll get along.”

He moved toward the hill. Arlen followed, because he always had, apparently, even in a life where he had promised himself to do everything differently.

They took side lanes, slipping behind the butcher’s cooling rack and a ladder propped against a wall. Neo walked with that long-legged youthful economy that made middle age grieve itself—he ranged without wasting, covered ground like a story covers nights, easily, unquestioning. Arlen shortened his stride to avoid looking like he was chasing something he had already caught once and lost anyway.

“Why Storm-Saber?” Arlen asked, to test the story the boy believed about himself.

“Because they let you test with your own sword,” Neo said at once. “Because they say the wind on the heights teaches as much as the elders do. Because my mother’s grave sits where you can see their east watchtower on a clear day.” He turned his head, grin scaling back, revealing its structure. “You ask like a father would.”

“I ask like a man who has seen talent married to institutions that treat it like either a dowry or a threat,” Arlen said, perhaps too gently.

Neo listened to that carefully, then put it in his pocket like a coin he wasn’t spending today. “I don’t have a dowry,” he said. “Threat, maybe.”

“Ah,” Arlen said. “A romantic.”

Neo’s laugh was a small admission. “No,” he said, and then ruined it by adding, “Maybe.”

They reached the academy square, where banners cracked like argumentative geese. Lines of would-be students formed before low tables where masters with ink-stained hands asked questions and pretended to be surprised by answers they had in fact anticipated for years. Parents hovered, clucking. A few independent elders—sponsors—stood in the shade, evaluating the crop the way wine-sellers evaluate barrels: not by how loud they are when knocked, but by the exact note of the sound.

Arlen pulled his hood a fraction forward. The Azure Tower sponsored magical candidates; it was possible, though unlikely, that someone here had once read his papers and built a small private cult around the margins. Less likely here, provincial as it was. Still.

Neo stepped up to Storm-Saber’s table, and Arlen eased behind his shoulder, adopting the posture of a man who had been told many times that he was allowed to stand there and had never once believed it.

The registrar, a woman with hair the color of iron filings and a mouth like a blade sheath, did not look up when Neo bowed. “Name,” she said, voice listing names by the thousand already.

“Neo,” Neo said, and then, with a hesitation that Arlen could feel more than see, added a surname that Arlen did not recognize. Good. In his first life, Neo had become “Neo” the way mountains become “mountains” and don’t need additional description. Already, the lines were different.

“Age.”

“Seventeen.”

“Village.”

Neo named a place that sounded like stone and sheep and wind through cracked fences. The registrar made a sound that could have been acknowledgment and could have been indigestion.

“Sponsor?”

Neo shifted, small. “I will be my own. I’ve brought letters from Master Qian— he taught me forms—and from the shrine-keeper of Oxbow, for my character.”

“Character does not help the sword grip,” the registrar said dryly. “Forms are not war.” She looked up then, eyes gray as fresh ash. They fell on Neo’s blade, overlarge, over-loved. “Who gave you that?”

“My mother,” Neo said, and the sentence put a crease in Arlen just behind the ribs where sorrow stores its tools. “It was my grandfather’s.”

The registrar’s gaze moved to Arlen. “And you are?”

“A friend of the family,” Arlen said smoothly. “A poor one, obviously.”

“Obviously,” she agreed. “Will you pledge for him? Not coin— integrity. When pupils break rules, sponsors bleed.”

Arlen felt the old habit of calculation rise, wanting to count costs. He flattened it with an impulse he did not examine for once. “Yes.”

The registrar’s eyes weighed him and found an unexpected quantity. “Name.”

“Arlen,” he said, and because the world always eats the parts of a man who does not feed it an answer quickly enough, he added: “Of Whitebridge, once of the Azure archives.”

The registrar’s eyebrows lifted a degree. “Oh, a pen-wielder. Has the ink grown dull?”

“It bit me,” Arlen said. “I bit back.”

That did not earn a smile, but he saw the registrar mark him down mentally as “useful when trouble happens in the wrong direction.”

“Forms at third bell,” she said to Neo, stamping his paper with a carp that looked exhausted by its own legendary obligations. “Sword test at fourth. Wind-walk at sixth if you survive the first two. Don’t sleep with your boots on.”

Neo bowed, mouth trying on a grin and then thinking better of it. “Thank you, honored Master.”

They stepped away then into the eddy of other people’s hopes and anxieties. Neo turned, suddenly awkward with joy, and held the paper toward Arlen like a child holds a fish he both respects and is sure he deserves. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“No,” Arlen said. “I didn’t.”

Neo inclined his head as if to say: I won’t ask you why. He tilted the paper toward the light, squinting at the carp stamp as if it might jump. “Third bell. That’s—” He counted on his fingers. “Not enough time to eat and practice.”

“You’ll do both poorly,” Arlen said. “So pick one to do well.”

Neo considered, then laughed at himself. “Eat,” he decided. “Otherwise I’ll think about buns during forms and trip on envy.”

“Sound strategy,” Arlen said. “Buns are very effective enemies.”

They crossed to a stall where the vendor had recovered from the remainder and was already claiming that he had stood his ground bravely. Neo purchased two pork buns with a handful of copper and handed one to Arlen without the mannered abasement of “let me honor you for your help”; instead, simply: “You should eat.”

Arlen accepted, because pride does not feed a man either. They found a low wall and sat, feet dusting the air. For a time they ate companionably. Children raced by with ribbon-sticks, making loops like charms against ordinary fate.

“Why are you helping me?” Neo asked at last, not accusing, merely curious. “You warned me. You sang. You pledged. It feels like too many verbs for a stranger.”

Arlen considered how much truth would not tilt the world. “There are two kinds of debts,” he said. “The ones you can count, and the ones you can’t because they were paid in a currency whose name you never learned. I owed— owe— someone something like you.”

Neo turned that over with both hands, as if it were a stone with a smooth side and a rough one. “So you’re paying me to pay them,” he summarized with the comic brutality of clear thought. “That seems like a mistake. I’m not them.”

“No,” Arlen said softly. “You aren’t.”

Neo opened his mouth to ask more and then— because he was kind— closed it again. He changed the subject with the awkwardness of someone who knows how to fight but not how to rescue a conversation. “Do you know anything about wind-walking?” he blurted. “They say the forms involve stepping where the air forgets it isn’t stone. I’ve practiced on fence rails, but fence rails don’t move and I do.”

“I can teach you a cheat.”

Neo’s grin came out out of hiding. “Teach me a cheat.”

Arlen finished his bun and dusted his hands. “When you step, don’t step on the wind,” he said. “Step on what the wind remembers. It hates being ignored, so it will hold you up out of spite.” He stood, testing his balance. “Demonstration.”

Neo watched with rapt, irreverent reverence.

Arlen drew a small circle with the toe of his boot, feeling the air’s thickness and thinness. He chose the thinner place—where the wind had more gossip—and put his weight there. He made a short series of steps that looked, to anyone not paying attention, like walking; to anyone paying attention, like asking forgiveness from the space between things. He ended three paces away and turned.

Neo clapped once, genuinely delighted. “You apologized to the air.”

“Magic,” Arlen said, “is ninety percent good manners where no one can see.”

Neo absorbed that. He stepped forward, imitated the circle with his toe, found—after two false starts— the thinner place, and put his weight there. The air caught him with a little shrug, offended and helpful. He took three steps and didn’t fall. His laugh when he finished had the unguarded joy of a cup filled from a spring.

“Again,” Arlen said, because joy is a muscle that learns by repetition.

Neo did it until sweat beaded down his back and his hair ragged itself into curls as if trying to drink his scalp. He grinned at no one, at everyone. Arlen let the smile in him rise, then gave it no expression to live on. He tucked it away where it couldn’t be taxed by fate.

The third bell rang.

Neo wiped his palms on his trousers, tried to tie his hair and failed, and then squared his shoulders as if he could convince his body to remember a future it had not seen yet. “Thank you,” he said abruptly, remembering courtesy like a book dropped and retrieved. “I— I’ll find you after. If I don’t, it’s because I fell off something.”

“You won’t.”

“How are you sure?” He smiled sideways, inviting prophecy.

Because I’ve seen you win, Arlen did not say. Because you survived long enough to hurt me. Because your worst enemies were never cliffs.

Instead he said, “Because you learned to listen faster than you learned to swing.”

Neo tilted his head as if that gift—those words—were heavier than the bun. He bowed, less precarious this time, and ran toward the Storm-Saber gate, blade bouncing, future bright as arrogance.

Arlen watched him go until he was part of the academy’s shadow. Then Arlen exhaled, and the breath shook.

The square had rebuilt itself around the business of noon. He walked to the shrine steps and climbed them, not to pray, but to look at the town from above the noise. Shrines have learned not to mind such sacrilege; they like being used as quiet as much as they like being used as ladders to the sky.

Under the eaves, an old woman in a keeper’s apron was pruning incense sticks with a pair of wicked scissors. She eyed Arlen without moving the scissors. “You smell like bell-bone,” she said.

“Bridge tried to sing,” Arlen said.

“It always does when the river remembers names too hard,” the shrine-keeper said. “You cut it kindly.”

“I unwound it.”

“That’s cutting with courtesy.”

Arlen inclined his head.

She studied him, then set the scissors down with a clack. “What brings a Tower man to a sword school on a registration day? You don’t look like you collect pupils for excitement.”

“I collect mistakes,” Arlen said. “I’m trying to spend less of them.”

The shrine-keeper made a pleased noise in her throat, as if he had answered a riddle backwards and therefore correctly. “You’ve got that thin look,” she said, “like someone burned most of what made him a man and kept the ash. Don’t go trying to be a god with what’s left. Gods are cowardly as often as they are merciful.”

“I am very bad at mercy,” Arlen said.

“You’re better than you think,” she said, and picked up the scissors again. “You just hide from it in cleverness. Cleverness forgives everything, doesn’t it? Except grief.”

He looked over the town. From here, the academy banners looked less like geese and more like the bookmarks of a very large book. Somewhere inside that book, a boy was being asked to show how his body kept promises to the forms it had memorized.

“My fee?” he asked, because he did not know how to accept unbilled counsel.

“Bring me three strands of river-weed from the bridge. The kind that know their own names.”

“I used them.”

“Find more,” she said, amused. “If you can’t, pay with a story. The kind with an ending.”

“I don’t have those.”

“Then invent one and make it true,” she said, as if it were easy. “Go on. Your boy will be looking for you when the carp on his paper stops yawning.”

He almost told her: He is not my boy. He did not. He descended the steps with the careful grace of a man relearning the distance between each level. Halfway down, a pain like a thin wire wound suddenly around his heart, pulled tight, then loosed. He folded a hand over his ribs and stood until the world remembered how to be upright.

Time’s Scar, he thought. The cost of the spell gnawed when he tried to imagine pasts that no longer existed. He had expected worse. He could pay this. He had paid more.

On the square’s edge, a Watcher clerk with a neat bun and a careful pen approached, eyes politely dead. “Honored sir,” she said, and he could hear how much she wished he would be honored elsewhere. “We collect testimonies to improve our responses to spectral incidents. Might we ask—”

“You may,” Arlen said, “but I will answer: ‘sing softer.’ Your report can write that as poetry.”

The clerk blinked. Against her will, the corner of her mouth confessed amusement. “We prefer lists. But I suppose we can define ‘softer’ as a training initiative.” She glanced at the academy gate. “You sponsor the boy?”

“I sponsor the possibility of him,” Arlen said.

“Then you sponsor trouble,” she said, not unkindly. “Storm-Saber chews its food hard before swallowing.”

“Good,” Arlen said. “May they choke on him if they deserve it.”

The clerk snorted, then remembered she was a clerk and smoothed her face. She bowed and left him to his unbecoming thoughts.

Fourth bell struck. It rolled across the square like a shoulder loosening.

Arlen waited near a water trough where goats had decided the trough was a philosophical concept and not a bowl, and were arguing it with their horns. Training yards cough men and boys in batches; they appear, evaporate, reappear slick with sweat and ideas. Neo did not come with the first batch. Nor the second. Arlen felt the part of him that numbers the teeth of risk begin to count. He told it to sit and did not make a second command.

When Neo finally emerged, he moved like a man who had just learned a new sentence in a language he’d fought for a decade—slowly at first, and then thrilled to break into speed. He had taken a blow to the shoulder—there would be a bruise—and a graze along the jaw where someone’s pommel had flirted unkindly, but his eyes were bright as if lantern oil had been poured directly into them.

He spotted Arlen with the inevitability of water finding the low place.

“It worked,” he said, forgetting that he had not told Arlen his versions of success. “Forms— I kept my knees from lying; sword— they made me fight with a blade a hand shorter than mine, and I didn’t sulk, and they liked that; wind—” He burst into embarrassed laughter. “I apologized and it held me. Twice. The last time it tried to drop me on principle but I bribed it with a better joke.”

“Good,” Arlen said. “Wind responds to entertainment.”

Neo wiped his face with his sleeve, then realized he was a person and grabbed a cloth from the trough’s edge instead. He cleaned up with the economy of someone who has done labor that stains. “They assigned dormitories,” he said, and his voice grew cautious, protecting joy like a candle. “There’s a cot with my name— well, not written, but the registrar pointed. It… I—” He bit his lip. “It has a door. With a latch that works.”

“That is a luxury,” Arlen said. “I hope you waste it on sleep.”

“I don’t remember the last time I had a door,” Neo admitted, as if revealing a trivial sin. He lifted his bag a little and then put it down. “They also said I need a mentor. A senior who’ll pretend to enjoy my questions. Most seniors don’t enjoy that sort of pretending. Would you—” He cut himself off, looked mortally embarrassed by his own audacity. “Never mind. You’re busy.”

Arlen had not been asked for mentorship in years. People asked him for answers, not for patience. He thought of the plan he had made to peel the skin off institutions and salt their bones. He thought of the idea of revenge as a cathedral—beautiful, over-engineered, cold. He looked at the boy who would one day, if the world took the same road twice, put a blade in his back with a hand that did not tremble.

“I have time,” Arlen said, and found that saying it made it true. “Not for everything. But for you, a portion.”

Neo’s relief clattered into joy so quickly that it made both of them laugh. “I can pay you,” he said instantly, then winced. “Not coin. I have… promises? I’m very good at doing chores. I can carry water, sharpen knives, hunt mushrooms that look like the kind that kill you and then don’t.”

“Excellent,” Arlen said. “I will pay myself in mushrooms of dubious commitment.”

Neo grinned like a sunrise given instructions. He sobered a moment later. “There’s something else.” He swallowed. “Master Qian— the scholar I used to train with— he sent a letter to one of the Verdant Hall instructors. He said I should temper my… optimism. He used a kind word in the letter, but when I left he said the other one. ‘Foolishness.’ He said it with love. But he still said it.” Neo’s gaze went searching into Arlen’s face in a way that made Arlen feel placed, weighed, and somehow not condemned. “Will you tell me when I’m being a fool?”

“Yes,” Arlen said, and did not flinch from the job he had probably volunteered for thirty years too late. “But I won’t tell you to be less yourself. Just less easy to damage.”

Neo nodded like a soldier agreeing to the terms of a war. “Deal.”

He shouldered his bag more securely. “I have to report to the dormitory and then to the armory to register my blade so I don’t ‘accidentally marry it to someone’s spleen.’ The registrar said that with a face like she’d seen that wedding.” He hesitated, then added, “Will you be in town tomorrow? After dawn? If I don’t see you, I’ll wait by the bridge. If you don’t come, I’ll assume you died nobly, and I’ll light incense and be very dramatic.”

Arlen caught the time-scar’s wire again, tightening not with pain this time, but with warning. He could already feel how this would wrap around him, how the decision to stand near a boy at the start of a road would end with the boy at the end of it, one way or another. He should keep distance. He should turn his help into a list of instructions and leave.

“Tomorrow,” he said, and the promise came out like a seal pressed into warm wax. “Early.”

Neo nodded, happy as an animal that has finally learned a human’s schedule. He took two steps, then turned back, sudden. “Arlen.”

“Yes.”

“Why is your face sad when your mouth smiles?”

Arlen took too long to answer and so lost the right to lie. “Because I know endings,” he said. “And beginnings are cruel to those.”

Neo studied him as if studying a horizon he hadn’t seen yet. “Then teach me to change one,” he said simply, and ran toward the armory.

Arlen stood with the goats and the children and the vendors who would build a story about the remainder that made themselves braver and the bridge smaller. He stood until the fifth bell forgot to ring and remembered all at once. He stood until the shrine-keeper’s words rethreaded through the market’s noise: invent an ending and make it true.

He turned toward the river.

The covered bridge rumbled gently, as if digesting quiet. River-weed trailed under the eaves, hair-combs on water. Arlen leaned against a pillar and looked into the current, where carp flickered like lost coins. He spoke, mostly to convince the air of his sincerity.

“All right,” he said to the water, the wind, the stubborn lattice of the world. “I will spend my cleverness on mercy until it turns into something harder.”

The river shifted, unimpressed, indifferent, busy being the oldest thing a town can choose to build a life beside. Far downstream a child laughed; upstream a widow tied a ribbon with a name in it for luck with a hand that had never learned the difference between prayer and habit.

Arlen pulled the bell-bone out of his sleeve. He hummed a little, nothing magic, nothing useful, just a melody a mother might use to persuade a baby that sleeping was an adventure. The bridge seemed not to care, and then— almost— seemed to approve.

He tucked the bell-bone away and made for the inn at the square’s edge, where he rented a room with a window that looked at the sky and not a wall. He ate a bowl of noodles without tasting them. He lay down and did not sleep; he listened to the city’s breathing until it convinced his body to do the same.

Sometime before dawn, the time-scar woke and wound itself around his ribs again, sudden and mean. He sat up, sweating, eyes on the dark where nothing admitted to being there. After a while it passed. He breathed until breathing felt like a victory and not a task.

When the city’s first baker banged the oven door open like a gong, Arlen rose. He washed. He braided the hair he had left with a gruffness that belonged to men who refuse to admit to gentleness. He put on the plain cloak. He put his name back on like a mask. He went to the bridge.

Neo was already there, legs dangling over the side, hair caught in the first ridiculous sun. He turned at Arlen’s step and smiled in a way that made the day do something it had not been planning to.

“You came,” he said, like an accusation whose punishment was trust.

“I said I would,” Arlen said.

“People say things,” Neo said. “I like it when they also do them.”

“Demanding,” Arlen said.

“Hopeful,” Neo corrected softly.

He patted the plank beside him, and Arlen— a man who once built a mechanism that could measure the curve of the moon’s mood— obeyed the simple physics of invitation. They sat. The river made its endless difficult peace with gravity.

“Teach me something before breakfast,” Neo said, swinging his feet once like a child even as the rest of him earnestly pretended adulthood. “Something small. Something only I would think is important.”

Arlen rubbed a thumb along the edge of the bell-bone in his sleeve and let the lesson select itself. “All right,” he said. “If a man offers you a blade and a story, take the story. It will cut deeper.”

Neo tilted his head. “And if he offers me a story and a smile?”

“Take the story,” Arlen said again. “The smile will either follow it or betray it.”

Neo laughed, then sobered. “All your lessons are riddles.”

“No,” Arlen said. “All beginnings are.”

He looked at the boy who would force him to build an ending great enough to hold both of them. He looked at the river, which doesn’t end so much as agree to be called different names.

“Let’s buy breakfast,” he said. “Then we’ll make the wind our enemy until it promotes us.”

Neo hopped up, already halfway a grin, and reached down a hand without thinking. Arlen looked at it for a small second too long and then took it, not because he needed help standing, but because accepting small help is how you teach the world you are still a person and not a plan.

They walked toward steam and sesame and the day’s first argument, Arlen a step behind and slightly to the left—where a shield would go if either of them remembered to carry one.

Above them, petals let go of their trees. The air accepted them with the resigned grace of a host who has learned that some guests arrive early, some late, and all of them carry stories that will demand space at the table.

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