The air inside Aric's fenced yard felt suddenly smaller, emptier, since the White Beast had departed. The palpable presence of Shiva's Heart of Darkness, which had always muted the pervasive darkness of the Forsaken Land and smoothed the edges of Elric's perception, was gone. Now, the boy felt the cold, hard reality of the ground beneath his feet and the unnerving, steady gaze of the former knight.
Aric stood near the heavy timber door of the cabin, his hands no longer crossed, but resting by his sides, radiating a silent, unwavering command. Elric, clad in the oversized, dark wool garments that smelled faintly of storage and human effort, felt the weight of his new circumstances settling over him. He was a creature of absolute instinct now confronted by a mountain of inflexible rule.
Aric did not waste a single moment on pleasantries or easing the transition. His training was immediate, rooted in the cold necessity of survival.
"We will begin with foundation," Aric announced, his voice a low, rough rasp that tolerated no argument. He disappeared briefly into the shadows of the cabin porch, emerging a moment later with two metal buckets. They were old, dented, and heavy even empty—rusted relics of the convoy he had salvaged decades ago. He tossed them onto the dry earth at Elric's feet.
"The river," Aric ordered, pointing with his chin toward the ravine they had just climbed. "Fill these. Bring them back."
Elric looked at the buckets, then at Aric. His bright red eyes, usually so sharp and predatory, were clouded with confusion and a mounting frustration. His instincts screamed that this was meaningless labor, an insult to the lessons of the hunt.
"But... the training," Elric said, his low voice tight. He spoke the human language perfectly, having absorbed it directly from Shiva's complex, resonant thoughts over the years, but using his mouth still felt awkward and slow. "Shiva said you would teach me to hide the Heart, to fight. This is not training. This is... labor. You want me to be your servant."
Aric's lips did not move, but his eyes conveyed a silent, profound censure. He walked forward, stepping over the buckets, his tall form looming over the boy. The air grew colder around them, the residual aura of the seasoned warrior cutting through Elric's childish defiance.
"Your understanding of the Human Realm is based on myths and the corrupted whispers of the deep lands," Aric grated out. "You think training is only the swing of steel or the summoning of darkness-power. Foolish."
Aric knelt, his knees cracking audibly, and picked up a handful of the obsidian grit. He let it trickle through his scarred fingers.
"The Human Realm is built on discipline. On routine. On the absolute, unquestioning submission of the body to the will of the mind. Your body," he said, nodding to Elric's wiry frame, "is feral. It moves with the efficient grace of the wild, but it has never known the grind. It has never known the purpose of pain applied over time. That is the true weakness of the wild: they break beneath routine."
He dropped the rest of the grit. "Training is always labor, boy. The physical labor will burn off the animal wildness and create the necessary shell of endurance. Once your body accepts that the only command is forward, the true mental training—the suppression of your Heart—will be possible. Now, return to the river. Fill the buckets. I will not ask again."
The finality in the command was absolute. Elric hated it. He hated the rough wool on his skin, the stiffness of the bucket handles, and the cold, unyielding power of Aric's gaze. It felt like a betrayal of Shiva's pure, instinctual life. But the purpose—the desperate, burning need to learn the secrets of deception—was too strong to ignore. He would not give Aric the satisfaction of disobedience.
Elric snatched up the two buckets. He knew exactly the path to the river.
Shiva had ingrained in him the principle of unconscious memorization. Every time they moved, she compelled him to mentally map every rock, every bend, every unique darkness-pattern, knowing that a single lapse in the Forsaken Land meant being eternally lost or devoured. Elric's memory was now crystalline and spatial.
He descended the steep ravine path with the near-silent efficiency Shiva had taught him, the heavy buckets swinging loosely from his hands. His speed was unnaturally swift for a six-year-old on difficult terrain. His steps were economical, his feral senses still sharp for any Stone-Gore or Ash-Crawler that might be lurking. He reached the riverbank in under three minutes, his breathing barely disturbed.
He set the buckets down, carefully submerging them in the clear, cold spring water. The metal handles bit into his small hands as he lifted the heavy vessels, the unexpected weight of the volume shocking him. He was used to carrying the weight of prey, which was organic and yielding; this was dead, dense weight that fought him at every step.
He turned back, climbing the ravine path. It was steep, and the full buckets required him to move slowly, using his legs and core to stabilize the sloshing water. Still, the journey back was executed with surprising speed.
Aric was in the yard when Elric returned, but he was no longer idle. He had retrieved a heavy-headed axe, salvaged from the same convoy, and was systematically attacking the immense pile of neatly stacked firewood. The rhythmic thwack of the steel blade against the dense, dark timber echoed sharply in the silent valley—the sound of human discipline meeting resistance.
Elric placed the two buckets down at Aric's feet, water sloshing over the rims. He looked up at the knight, expecting a nod, a sign of cessation, or at least the start of the next phase of training.
Aric, without pausing his work, glanced down at the buckets. His eyes were wide for a fraction of a second—a fleeting display of surprise that the boy had returned so quickly, and alone. Aric had expected the boy to get lost, struggle with the weight, or perhaps even give up on the path. The perfect return confirmed the boy's unnatural mental acuity.
Aric immediately masked his reaction, his face settling back into its severe mask of indifference. He drove the axe down again, splitting a thick log with a clean, explosive sound.
"Good," Aric said, the praise entirely absent from his tone. He lifted his head slightly, indicating a structure that Elric had not fully noticed before. "Now, look there."
Elric followed Aric's gaze. Tucked neatly against the shadowed side of the cabin, almost blending in with the dark wood, was a tub. It was a massive structure—a rectangular trough fashioned from rough-cut stone and clay mortar, built directly into the earth. It was clearly Aric's bath, his reservoir, his means of maintaining the cleansing ritual that kept the corruption at bay.
Elric felt his breath hitch. The tub was enormous. It spanned the entire width of Aric's cabin wall, and its height rose to nearly double Elric's current height. It was a monolith of simple, brutal construction, designed to hold an impossible amount of water.
The tub was empty.
"That vessel is my personal reservoir," Aric stated, planting the axe head firmly in a log and finally leaning on the handle, his gaze cold and challenging. "The river is a quarter mile away. I require that tub to be full by the time the moon-shard returns to the crest of the peaks."
Elric stared, the sheer scale of the task registering as a physical blow. A minute passed while he stood frozen, his mind calculating the futility.
The tub required perhaps five hundred gallons of water. His two small buckets held maybe two or three gallons total.
"That is... that is impossible," Elric stammered, the words thick with disbelief. "I would have to make... hundreds of trips. My arms are already burning from the first trip."
The boy's inner resistance flared up—the wildness rejecting the uselessness of the routine. The burning hope he had felt earlier curdled into anger.
"I will not do it," Elric stated flatly, his red eyes blazing up at the knight. "You are lying. This is not training. It is punishment. I will go back to Shiva. I will return to the hunt. I would rather sleep on the cold rocks than break my body fetching water for your bath."
Aric's expression remained unchanged, but his eyes grew sharper, the grey metal glittering with a profound, dismissive disappointment.
"Then go," Aric replied, his voice dangerously low. He picked up the axe and resumed his methodical, unhurried chopping, the thwack becoming the only sound in the yard. "The gate is open. Run back to your beast. Run back to the easy darkness of the shadow-lands."
He stopped, holding the axe poised for a final, crushing blow. He did not look at Elric.
"A weak creature does not deserve to cross the Barrier, boy. Weakness belongs here, among the things that crawl and hide. Only discipline and ruthless will survive the deception of the Human Realm. If two buckets of water are too heavy for your arms, then your Heart of Darkness is useless, and your fate is to be a forgotten wild thing. Go. I have no use for a failure."
The word was a whip-crack: weak.
It ignited the first true, uncontrolled emotional fire in Elric since his birth. It was not the ambient darkness of the Forsaken Land that fueled this rage, but the purest, most human emotion of pride and shame. Aric had not threatened his life or his power; he had insulted his essence.
Shiva had never called him weak. She had trained him to be the most efficient predator of his kind. To be called weak by this withered, old human—a thing that had failed in the world of Light and been exiled—was an unbearable offense.
The rhythmic thump-thump of Elric's Heart of Darkness, which had been steady beneath the strain of the first fetch, suddenly accelerated. It pulsed with a concentrated energy that felt hot and violent.
Elric turned, seizing the buckets with a furious, desperate energy. He strode over to the massive stone tub. Without a pause, and with a raw, unnecessary violence, he slammed the two full buckets of water over the rim, the splash scattering droplets onto the dry stone. It was a negligible amount, disappearing instantly into the vast emptiness of the tub, but the act was a declaration.
He would not be weak.
He pivoted and ran. He did not descend the ravine path with quiet efficiency; he scrambled down it with a desperate, sliding frenzy, driven purely by the adrenaline of wounded pride.
The hours that followed became a single, continuous, grinding cycle—a slow motion fall into physical agony.
Down. The descent to the river, still swift, still guided by Elric's perfect, photographic memory, became harder as his legs protested. The cold, clear water was a momentary baptism of relief for his hot, aching hands.
Lift. The weight of the two buckets, once manageable, became an intolerable burden. His small muscles screamed. The rough twine used as a belt for his shorts began to chafe his skin where his back was pressed taut from lifting.
Up. The ascent of the ravine. This was the trial. Every step was a conscious negotiation against gravity and the sudden, debilitating fatigue that crashed down on him. His breath grew ragged, stealing the focus he needed to contain the essence of his Heart of Darkness. He had to stop halfway up, leaning against a sheer rock face, his chest heaving, listening to the relentless, distant thwack of Aric's axe—the sound of his tormentor's unwavering discipline.
He wanted to quit. Every fiber of his feral mind, trained to conserve energy and only engage in necessary violence, revolted against the monotonous, searing pain. He could easily drop the buckets, slip away, and be lost to the darkness in minutes.
But then, he would hear Aric's grating voice in his memory: A weak creature does not deserve to cross the Barrier.
He would clench his jaw, the faint, noble lines of his face hardened by determination, and force himself back onto the path. He would reach the yard, his steps shuffling, his shoulders slumped, and dump the meager contents into the waiting stone maw of the tub. The splash was always the reward, the brief sound of success before the sight of the nearly empty reservoir drove him back out.
Aric worked on the woodpile. Log after log split cleanly beneath his axe. He did not look at Elric. He did not offer water. He did not offer rest. He simply worked, the relentless rhythm of his own discipline setting the pace for the boy's suffering.
Elric lost track of time. He was no longer walking; he was a machine of pain and effort. His consciousness narrowed to the simple command: Fill the tub. The Heart of Darkness, starved of the ease and primal freedom of the hunt, now throbbed with the dull, constant ache of resistance. The pure darkness of his heart, usually so vibrant, was being suffocated by sheer, monotonous physical stress.
The sunless twilight began its slow shift into the true, inky black of night. The moon-shard, now far to the west, was climbing back toward the crest. Elric was nearing his limit. His porcelain skin was slick with sweat and grime, and his legs trembled uncontrollably with every step.
He took his last trip. He could see the line of water, now agonizingly close to the rim of the immense tub. It had taken him hours—a blurring sequence of failure and forced ascent. His arms were numb.
He reached the cabin, the buckets scraping the stone ground. He staggered the final steps, his red eyes focused only on the final, glorious line of the rim. He lifted the two heavy buckets, but his strength failed him. He poured them over the edge, but instead of a clean splash, the buckets slipped, clanging loudly against the stone, and he collapsed onto the dry earth.
But the tub was full.
Water spilled over the rim in a slow, triumphant sheet, flowing down the side of the stone trough and soaking into the parched ground—a small, flowing river of victory.
Elric lay prone, his face pressed against the cold, gritty earth, his chest heaving with deep, painful gasps. The rhythmic thump-thump of his heart was now labored, heavy, and slow. The power was still there, but the wild, unrestrained ferocity had been momentarily beaten into submission by two buckets and a mile of granite path.
Aric stopped chopping. The yard fell into absolute silence. The knight turned, surveying the scene: the full tub overflowing, the overturned buckets, and the small, dark figure of the boy lying utterly defeated on the ground.
Aric walked slowly toward the tub, his grey eyes assessing the water level, then the boy's exhausted form.
He did not offer help. He did not offer comfort. He simply stared down at the small body that had just achieved the impossible.
"Not bad," Aric thought, the assessment cold, precise, and entirely internal. The boy had the noble blood for the effort and the Heart of Darkness for the resilience. He did not stop. The first layer of the wild has been sanded down.
He looked up at the black sky, where the moon-shard was only halfway up its final climb. The boy had finished too soon.
"The labor is complete," Aric said, his voice flat. He looked down at the boy and offered the first, cold lesson of the new world. "Now, the washcloth."
Elric, barely capable of speech, lifted his head slightly, his red eyes clouded with pain.
"You earned the water, boy. Now you will learn what it is for. You will wash the grime from your face, and you will learn the words for everything you touch."