CHAPTER 44: STEEL WITHOUT MERCY

’Should have killed him properly,’ he thought blearily as they half-carried him through the darkened corridors. ’Then at least the punishment would be worth it.’

The shard against his chest pulsed once, neither warning nor encouragement, simply acknowledgment. Valenna was awake, watching through his eyes.

The eastern sky showed only the faintest suggestion of dawn as they emerged into the yard, a promise of light hours away, nothing more.

Torches guttered in iron brackets, their flames bending away from a bitter wind that cut through Soren’s thin shirt like it wasn’t there at all.

In the yard’s center stood Kaelor, a darker shadow against the night. The Swordmaster’s single eye caught the torchlight, reflecting it back like a beast’s in the forest.

His sword hung loose in his grip, the blade dulled for training but no less deadly for it.

"Chain him," Kaelor ordered, his voice a gravel-filled rasp that seemed to scrape the air itself.

The guards fastened iron manacles around Soren’s wrists, the metal biting cold against his skin. He didn’t resist. There was no point.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he noticed shapes huddled against the yard’s edges, other recruits, dragged from their beds to witness his punishment.

Some faces gleamed with poorly concealed satisfaction. Others watched with the blank detachment of those who knew they could be next.

Tavren’s smirk was visible even in the half-light, his teeth a pale slash in the darkness.

The guards stepped back, leaving Soren alone in the center of the yard. His breath clouded before him, small ghosts that vanished into the night.

Kaelor circled him slowly, boots crunching on the frost-covered gravel. "Seven days," he said, voice pitched just loud enough for the watching recruits to hear. "Seven days to learn what control means."

He stopped directly in front of Soren, close enough that the smell of cloves and brandy washed over him. "Or seven days to break. Your choice."

Soren met his gaze steadily. "I won’t break."

The Swordmaster’s mouth curved in what might have been a smile on a different face. On his, it looked like a wound reopening. "They all say that." He gestured to a guard. "The stones."

Two guards approached, carrying what looked like leather harnesses festooned with small iron weights. Each step they took made the weights clink together, a sound like distant chains.

"Arms out," Kaelor ordered.

Soren extended his arms, the manacles making the movement awkward. The guards strapped the harnesses around each limb, tightening leather straps until they bit into flesh.

As they worked, more weights were added, small iron discs that individually seemed insignificant but collectively pulled at his muscles like lead.

"First stance," Kaelor said once they finished.

Soren shifted into the opening position of the sword forms, feet planted shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent, arms extended as if holding a blade. The weights dragged at him immediately, his shoulders burning with the effort of keeping his arms level.

"Hold it," Kaelor commanded, stepping back to observe. "Until I say otherwise."

The first minute was manageable.

The second brought sweat beading on his forehead despite the cold.

By the third, his muscles had begun to tremble.

By the fifth, each breath became a battle against the need to lower his arms, to release the burning pressure building in his shoulders and back.

Kaelor circled him, watching with clinical detachment. "Pain is the only teacher worth listening to," he said, his voice carrying across the yard to the watching recruits. "It doesn’t lie. It doesn’t flatter. It tells you exactly where your weakness lives."

Ten minutes in, Soren’s arms shook uncontrollably. Sweat soaked his shirt despite the freezing air.

The weights seemed to have doubled, then tripled, defying the laws that governed such things. His shoulders felt as if they might tear from their sockets.

"Second stance," Kaelor barked suddenly.

Soren struggled to shift position, his body moving with the sluggish reluctance of a man wading through mud.

The second stance required a deeper knee bend, arms held at different angles. Fresh pain bloomed as unused muscles were called into service.

A mistake, his left foot slid an inch too far. Before he could correct it, Kaelor was there, the blunted training sword cracking against his calf.

The pain was immediate and shocking, a bright flare that momentarily eclipsed the deeper burn of overtaxed muscles.

"Again," Kaelor said, stepping back. "Properly this time."

Soren reset his stance, teeth gritted against the dual assaults of the weights and the fresh bruise forming on his leg.

The watching recruits had gone utterly silent, their earlier amusement replaced by a kind of horrified fascination.

This was no ordinary punishment...this was something older, more primal. Breaking a man to remake him.

The stances continued, one flowing into another in a grotesque parody of the sword forms they practiced daily.

Each transition brought new pain as the weights shifted, pulling at different muscle groups.

Each mistake, and there were many as fatigue clouded his mind, brought Kaelor’s training blade down on a new part of his body. Ribs. Thigh. Upper arm. Back. A constellation of bruises blooming beneath his clothes.

An hour passed. Then another. The sun crept above the horizon, painting the yard in pale gold that did nothing to warm the bitter air. Soren’s world narrowed to the next breath, the next stance, the next moment of enduring.

"Enough," Kaelor said finally, though it felt like days had passed. He signaled the guards. "Remove the weights."

They unfastened the harnesses, the sudden absence of weight almost as painful as their presence had been. Soren’s arms dropped to his sides like dead things, blood rushing back into numbed fingers with burning intensity.

He had perhaps three breaths to recover before Kaelor’s next command.

"Armor. Full plate. Now."

The guards brought what looked like ancient tournament armor...heavier than anything used in modern combat, plates thick with age and neglect. They strapped it onto him piece by piece: greaves, cuisses, breastplate, pauldrons, vambraces. Each addition felt like another stone laid upon a drowning man.

By the time they finished, Soren stood encased in metal, sweat-soaked and already exhausted. The armor had to weigh half again what he did, pressing down on bruised flesh and trembling muscles.

"Run," Kaelor ordered, pointing to the yard’s perimeter. "Until you can’t."

Soren took a step, then another, the armor creaking with each movement.

Running was a generous description, it was more of a shuffling jog, each footfall sending impact shudders up through his legs. The yard’s gravel shifted treacherously beneath his armored feet, threatening to send him sprawling with every step.

One circuit of the yard. Two. Three. His lungs burned, starved for air in the confines of the breastplate.

Sweat poured down his face, stinging his eyes, soaking the padding beneath the armor. His vision blurred, then sharpened, then blurred again as his body fought to maintain consciousness.

On the seventh circuit, his legs simply gave out. One moment he was moving, the next he was on his knees in the gravel, the armor’s weight pressing him toward the earth like an impatient grave.

Kaelor’s boot connected with his side, rolling him onto his back. The Swordmaster loomed over him, expression unreadable in the morning light.

"If you can’t rise after pain," he said, voice carrying to every corner of the yard, "you’ll never rise at all."

Soren stared up at him, chest heaving with the effort to breathe inside the constricting metal. Every muscle screamed for surrender. Every instinct begged for rest.

’Get up,’ he commanded himself. ’Get up or die here.’

With a groan that seemed torn from somewhere deeper than his throat, he rolled onto his side, then pushed himself up on one knee.

The armor fought him every inch of the way, its weight a malevolent thing intent on keeping him down. He got one foot beneath him, then the other, rising by slow degrees until he stood once more, swaying but upright.

Kaelor’s eye narrowed slightly...the closest thing to approval he seemed capable of expressing. "Again," he said, gesturing to the yard’s perimeter. "Faster this time."

The morning blurred into afternoon, a haze of pain and repetition. Run until collapse. Rise. Run again.

When he could no longer run, Kaelor ordered the armor removed and replaced it with different torments...holding impossible positions, striking at targets until his arms went numb, deflecting blows until his reflexes dulled and Kaelor’s training sword found his flesh with increasing frequency.

Each failure earned a new bruise. Each success was met with a harder challenge. There was no praise, no encouragement...only the next demand, the next test, the next pain to endure.

Through it all, the watching recruits drifted in and out. Some stayed for hours, seemingly fascinated by the systematic dismantling of a human body.

Others came and went, their training schedules allowing only glimpses of Soren’s ordeal. Tavren remained the longest, his earlier smirk fading into something more complex as the day wore on...not quite respect, but perhaps the dawning recognition that there were depths to Soren he hadn’t suspected.

Midday passed without food or water. The sun arced across the sky, offering brief warmth before beginning its descent toward evening. Soren’s world contracted further, awareness limited to the next movement, the next breath, the next moment survived.

It was during a series of endless strikes against a wooden post, the same movement repeated until his arm felt disconnected from his body, that Valenna’s voice finally cut through the haze of pain.

’Yes,’ she whispered, her tone carrying an edge of satisfaction that startled him. ’Break the flesh, and the will grows sharper. Do not fear this. He is forging you the only way that matters.’

Soren faltered mid-strike, the unexpected words breaking his rhythm. Kaelor’s training sword cracked against his ribs immediately, punishment for the lapse in concentration.

’You approve of this?’ he thought back at her, incredulous despite the pain.

’Of course,’ came her reply, cool and certain. ’Steel is born in fire, tempered by hammer blows. Your body is merely the vessel, it is what lies beneath that must be hardened.’

Something cold settled in Soren’s chest, a realization that went beyond the physical agony of the moment.

Valenna wasn’t his protector, not in the way he’d imagined.

She was a weapon seeking a worthy wielder, and this...this systematic breaking of his flesh...was her idea of necessary preparation.

"Strike!" Kaelor’s voice cut through his thoughts, the training sword whistling toward his shoulder.

Soren resumed the endless series of blows against the post, each impact jarring up through arms that no longer felt like his own.