The three days before. After the results were posted.
....
thin calm that made the academy feel as if it were holding its breath.
Mira arrived at the training grounds in the middle of the day, the sun riding high enough to burn the last of the morning mist off the flagstones. She moved with the easy, purposeful walk of someone used to being seen: shoulders straight, eyes always measuring the space around her. A shout split the air nearby — the drill sergeant's clipped command cutting through the murmur of routine.
"All the newbies who joined today, two hundred laps. Move!"
Jack emerged from the corner of the ring, uniform stained with dust and his breath coming in sharp, worked pulls. He'd been running with the squad; the sight of Mira made him grin and wave, though the expression wobbled with fatigue.
She smirked at him, the same playful tilt she reserved for him at home. "So you're appointed to this unit?" she asked.
Jack stopped, one hand on his knee. "Sort of." He straightened, breath rasping. "They made me a corporal in Heavy Support. Means I get to carry heavy things and complain loudly."
Mira laughed, then her gaze slid beyond Jack toward the west path where the barracks clustered in their rough practicality. "And Leo? Ralph?"
Jack's grin softened. "Ralph's Second Infantry." He spat a thin laugh. "Lucky him. And Leo—he's with the 21st Recon." The grin vanished for a bare heartbeat. "That one's—different."
Mira's brow creased. "The 21st?"
"You know the talk," Jack said, jerking his chin toward the compound. "Storms, they call it. Dangerous assignments. They haven't taken new blood in years."
The word "dangerous" was a light that clicked on inside Mira. Without another word she turned and crossed the parade to the West Barracks, Jack running at her heels a moment before his captain called him back to line.
The corridor outside the 21st's common room stood oddly quiet, as if some small stone of sound had been dropped into the world and absorbed all the echoes. Mira's hand hovered over the heavy oak before she opened the door, then she pushed inward and stepped into the dim amber of the room.
Leo sat hunched at the long table by the single oil lamp, bundles of paper spread around him like a patient swarm. His fingers moved through the documents as if through water — careful, slow. At the sound of her name he looked up, surprise flickering across his face before smoothing into welcome.
"Mira," he said, lifting both hands away from the papers. "Come in."
She settled into the chair opposite him, eyes sweeping the scattered files and the red-leather tomes stacked like small monuments. "Why are you alone?" she asked, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
He scratched the back of his neck, a faint line of dust meeting the bandage on his temple. "Captain Ashton handed me these. Wants me to study the past cases and learn Vorak. Said the unit's secrets aren't something you stumble into, so—" He spread his hands and shrugged. "They left me to it."
"Good man," Mira said, reaching into a satchel and producing a neatly folded bundle. She set it on the table with a practiced efficiency. "I packed your things. I'll hand them to the quartermaster this afternoon. You'll want clean socks on your first mission."
Leo offered a breathy laugh, half relief, half gratitude. "You didn't have to—"
"You're not allowed to say that." Her smile turned sharp for half a heartbeat. "Go read. Don't get yourself killed before the unit can make a proper claim on you."
She rose then, the visit done as if it had never been needed and exactly what had been needed, and when she left the lamp light smoothed the shadow she took with her. Leo returned to the papers, to the Vorak characters that seemed to swim at the edges of his vision when he stared too long.
Two days slid by in the same concentrated haze. Leo read, annotated, cross-checked cases. He mapped incidents to villages, to times when the veil had thinned and the impossible had brushed mundane life. Small patterns began to show themselves like the first threads of a net: a certain coil of rune at the margin of a ruined chapel, a merchant's ledger with an entry in a hand that wasn't any dialect of the common tongue, a notation about a "silver moon" the witnesses swore flickered out of season.
On the morning of the third day he walked out of the barracks with a single red volume tucked beneath his arm and a list of syllables scratched on an inside page. He sought the large tree at the edge of the old parade field — a gnarled oak whose roots split the dry earth and whose low branches made a private dark within sight of the barracks windows.
The instructions in the Vorak book had been careful and blunt in the same breath: the words could be "sung" into the mind, the text read, the syllables threaded inward, but such an inward path could catch and shatter a mind unprepared. A mental invocation could reach places a spoken syllable could not — but if the mind stumbled under the cadence, the damage was private and catastrophic. The safer path, the author insisted with a scholar's sterile cruelty, was the voice: the words spoken aloud cut across the space, made manifest, and left the mind outside the spell's inner lattice.
Leo settled against the oak's trunk and let the shade cool his neck. He closed his eyes and rehearsed. The Vorak syllables were ugly and beautiful at once; their shapes were not meant for easy tongues. He practiced the consonants, the rush of air, the cadence. He tried to hear them as the book suggested — not as words, but as keys tuning to a lock.
A shadow slid across his periphery. He opened his eyes, feeling a small, cold prick of being exposed.
Across the field, in the barracks' high window, Captain Ashton's silhouette watched. He stood alone at first, hands clasped behind him in that rigid tension of trained men. He watched the oak, watched Leo. Then he turned, calling for voices with tight economy.
"Barrett," Ashton said, and Barrett stepped from beside a stack of packing crates, wry and lithe. "Carly."
Carly — boots on the table, arms crossed — sauntered to the window with her habitual edge. Gavin came with a brisk march; Cyrus rolled in with a boyish, half-curious bounce. Bridget followed, quiet as shadow.
"What do you see?" Barrett mouthed.
Ashton didn't bother with the pretense of whispering. He spoke low, full of the understated authority that moved mountains rather than shouting them. "He has papers. Vorak characters. He's where we left him."
"Does he know what he's doing?" Carly asked, voice a dry knife.
"Does any rookie?" Gavin offered. His face, always composed, didn't betray the flicker of concern in his eyes.
Cyrus leaned close to the glass, breath fogging the pane. "It's three days. If he's been chewing through the old logs like a rat in the granary, he's either found something or he's gone cross-eyed from the script."
They all watched. There was curiosity, yes, but also the unignorable thread of protectiveness — a unit's instinct to know the steps of the new blood in its pack.
Ashton's jaw was a hard line. "He's not alone," he said quietly, "not anymore. He carried the dagger trial farther than most. If something answers to those sounds, it could be the beginning of trouble — or the end of a lot of things we'd rather keep ending in records." He paused, eye on Leo mouthing syllables now, careful, deliberate. "Stay here. If anything flickers — any light that doesn't belong — you close the shutters. You bring him in. We don't let the academy have another funeral."
Carly's smirk faltered into a straight line. "Understood."
One by one they took stations at the window, the small circle of the 21st leaning against the glass to study their newest man. There was a solidarity to it, like a hand laid on a shoulder in a storm.
Back beneath the oak, the quiet closed around Leo. He had memorized the first line of Vorak: three syllables that the book insisted felt like stone in the mouth. The cautions echoed — not in the voice of Ashton, but in the scratch of the old scholar who had bound the book, in the margin notes of a hand that trembled in ink and said, in a sharp, cramped script: do not sing this inward.
Leo placed his palms on his knees, opened his mouth, and let the first syllable fall into the air.
It was small at first, nothing but breath shaped against the throat: kor—. The sound surprised him — dull and resonant, a flint strike against bone. The air took it without complaint. He drew the second syllable like a loose rope: thal—. The two met and rang between his ribs and the green curve of the tree.
Across the compound the 21st leaned closer to the window. Barrett's hand curled into a fist on the sill. Carly's jaw tightened. Gavin's eyes narrowed to slits. Ashton's expression thinned into steel; a low hum of attention moved like electricity through them.
Leo held his breath and let the last piece come, careful. He pronounced the final syllable as the book instructed, not as a chant but as a door hinge: ven.
Kor-thal-ven.
The air didn't flame, and there was no immediate thunder of wolves or the tearing of fabric. For a second the world held, clean and shocked and strangely expectant.
Then, very faint at first, something answered — not a sound but a pressure, a small change like when a tide first thinks about turning. The oak's leaves shivered though there was no wind. A single, pale moth rose and hung in the light, awkward and patient.
In the barracks the figures at the window went utterly still. Ashton closed his mouth around an oath that was half prayer, half order. "All right," he said in a voice that did not carry, "wait. He's only begun. Any further, and we step in."
Leo felt the hair rise along his forearms. The book had promised this: that the syllables would stir something beyond the screen of mundane hours. It had not promised what that something would think of being stirred.
He had learned to listen; he had learned to hold. He had not, yet, learned how to turn back.
He drew in the next breath and, with a steadiness that surprised him, read the following line aloud — one measured syllable at a time, letting them land in the evening like pebbles in still water.