Kyle pulls me aside one morning before the yard properly fills, a seriousness in his expression that makes me brace instinctively for bad news.
"I want you to help with the new intake this season," he says instead, and it takes a moment for the actual meaning of the words to land properly. "Six new children starting next week. Youngest is barely five. I want you working with them directly — not just demonstrating forms from a distance, actually teaching."
"Me?"
"You." He says it plainly, like the question itself is faintly absurd. "You're eight years old and you've surpassed everything I have to teach on the sword side. That leaves you with two choices — sit idle waiting for a challenge this yard can't provide, or start giving back some of what you've been given. I'd rather you do the second. Village needs more people willing to teach than it needs one more person quietly outpacing everyone around him."
I don't have an immediate answer. The idea sits strangely, turning over slow and unfamiliar in my chest — three years ago, I was the newest face in this yard, terrified and grieving and desperate for something solid to hold onto. Now Kyle wants me standing on the other side of that exact moment, offering someone else the same ground to stand on.
"What if I'm bad at it?"
"You probably will be. At first." Kyle says it without any particular concern, like the prospect of failure barely registers as a real obstacle. "I was terrible at teaching, my first year running this yard. Yelled too much. Explained things in ways that only made sense inside my own head. Ava had to sit me down more than once and remind me that a good swordsman and a good teacher aren't automatically the same person." He shrugs, unbothered by the memory. "You'll figure it out. Mostly by getting it wrong first, same as everything else worth learning properly."
"I don't know how to teach," I admit finally.
"Nobody does, the first time." Kyle claps a hand briefly on my shoulder, warm and certain. "You'll learn it the same way you learned everything else. By doing it badly first, and then doing it less badly, until eventually you're doing it well without quite noticing the exact moment it happened."
I think of Level 8, arriving silently while I wasn't watching, and understand exactly what he means. Some things, apparently, only ever reveal themselves properly in hindsight — a lesson I'm beginning to suspect will keep repeating itself throughout this strange, borrowed life, in one form or another, for as long as I keep choosing to grow.
"Why me, though? Toren's older. He could do this too."
"Toren's a fine swordsman. He's not you." Kyle considers his next words carefully, weighing something. "You've got a way of actually seeing people, when you bother to look. Most children your age are still learning how to see past their own noses. You've had to learn that skill early, and harder than most. I think that makes you exactly the right person to hand it to someone who needs it."
Toren finds out about my new role before I've even had the chance to tell him myself, news having already made its way around the yard by the time our own session starts.
"Kyle's making you a teacher?" he says, equal parts impressed and put out. "You're eight. I've been training two years longer than you and he's never once suggested I teach anybody anything."
"I think it's more about the sword gap than seniority."
"That's insulting on multiple levels, you know that?" But he's grinning despite the complaint, nudging my shoulder with easy affection. "Guess I should start calling you 'sir' now, or something equally ridiculous."
"Please don't."
"Sir Lucifer, Teacher of the Yard, Disarmer of Kyle Rotchelle." He announces it with theatrical grandeur, drawing a few curious glances from nearby trainees. "Has a nice ring to it."
"I will end you."
"You could definitely try." He grins wider, unbothered by the threat. "But seriously — good for you. You'll be good at it. You've always noticed things about people the rest of us miss. Kind of unsettling, honestly, but useful, apparently, when it's aimed at helping instead of unsettling."
I appreciate the teasing more than I let on, the familiar rhythm of it settling something anxious in my chest that's been sitting there since Kyle first made the offer. Toren has a way of making even large, unfamiliar changes feel smaller and more manageable, simply by refusing to treat them as anything more serious than they need to be.
The six new children arrive the following week, clustered together near the yard's entrance with the particular mixture of excitement and terror every new trainee seems to carry on their first morning.
I recognize the shape of it immediately, having worn that exact expression myself once. Kyle introduces me as one of the yard's senior students — a title that still feels borrowed, somehow, despite three years of evidence suggesting otherwise — and sets me loose on the youngest of the group, a small, wide-eyed girl named Petra who can't seem to decide whether she wants to be here at all.
"You're going to teach me?" she asks, skeptical in the particular way small children manage when confronted with someone barely older than themselves claiming authority.
"I'm going to try," I tell her honestly. "I'm not very good at it yet. But I promise I'll actually pay attention to whether it's working, which is more than some teachers manage."
That, at least, earns a small, surprised laugh — not quite trust yet, but something adjacent to it.
We start with the same first lesson Kyle gave me, all those years ago. Stance. Balance. The particular, patient work of teaching a small body how to hold itself steady against its own instinct to wobble.
Petra struggles with it exactly the way I once did, though watching her struggle from the outside teaches me something I never quite understood from the inside — how much of learning is really just enduring the discomfort of being visibly bad at something in front of people who are watching you fail.
"You're doing fine," I tell her, when frustration starts pulling at the corners of her expression. "Better than fine, actually. It took me three tries just to understand what balanced weight even meant, and I had — " I catch myself before finishing the sentence, some instinct warning me against explaining exactly how uneven my own first lessons had been, shaped by a card she doesn't need to know exists.
"Had what?"
"Had a good teacher," I finish instead, which isn't a lie, even if it isn't the whole truth either. "Same as you do now."
She squints at me, unconvinced but apparently willing to let the half-answer stand. "You don't look old enough to be a good teacher."
"Probably not. I'm learning that part as I go too."
That, at least, earns something closer to a real laugh, small and surprised, and I count it as its own small victory — proof, maybe, that honesty works better with children than false confidence ever could.
Over the following days, I learn the particular rhythm of teaching the way I once learned the rhythm of the sword itself — clumsily, then less clumsily, correcting my own mistakes as quickly as I correct Petra's. I learn that shouting corrections, the way Kyle sometimes still does out of old habit, only makes her flinch and freeze rather than adjust. I learn that patience, offered consistently rather than in occasional bursts, does more to build genuine confidence than any amount of praise ever could. I learn, mostly, that teaching someone well requires paying the exact kind of close, deliberate attention Ava's been trying to teach me to practice all along — not just watching for mistakes to correct, but actually seeing the person making them.
By the end of the first week, Petra holds her stance without wobbling at all, and the pride on her face when she manages it unassisted for the first time settles something warm and unfamiliar behind my own ribs — a different kind of satisfaction than passing my own milestones ever gave me, quieter but somehow more complete.
Petra, it turns out, lost her older brother to the same raid that took Aileen — a detail I learn from Ava, quietly, a few days into the new intake, offered with the careful gentleness of someone deciding I deserve to understand the full weight of who I'm working with.
"She doesn't talk about it," Ava tells me. "Doesn't like anyone treating her differently because of it, either. But I thought you should know. Given everything."
I think about that carefully, watching Petra across the yard the next morning, small and stubborn and trying so hard to hide how much every failed swing costs her.
I don't treat her differently, not exactly. But I understand her differently now, the particular quality of fear beneath her frustration, the way certain small failures probably feel larger to her than they would to a child who hasn't already lost something enormous and unfair.
"You know," I tell her, during a break in that morning's lesson, choosing my words with more care than I usually manage, "it's alright if some days are harder than others. Doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. Just means some days carry more weight than the sword does."
Petra goes very still, staring at me with an intensity that makes me wonder if I've overstepped.
"How did you know?" she asks quietly.
"I didn't, not for certain," I admit. "But I recognized the shape of it. I've carried some of that weight myself."
She doesn't ask what I mean. She doesn't need to. Something passes between us instead — quiet, wordless, the particular understanding of two people who've both learned, far too young, exactly how suddenly the ground can shift beneath an ordinary morning.
"Does it get easier?" she asks finally. "The carrying?"
I think of Vereen, and the small wooden wolf finally finished after six long years, and the particular, hard-won peace we've built together out of grief we once each carried alone.
"It gets different," I tell her honestly. "Lighter, eventually, though not all at once, and not on its own. You have to let people help carry it with you. That part's not optional, even when it feels like it should be."
Word of the new intake spreads through Blumund the way most small news does, carried mouth to mouth across the square until half the village seems to know I've taken on students of my own.
The elder finds me one afternoon, leaning on his cane at the yard's edge, watching Petra work through her forms with the particular patience I've been trying to model for her.
"Heard you've started teaching," he says, settling onto the low stool someone's left for him. "Didn't expect that quite so soon."
"Kyle asked. I didn't feel like I could say no."
"Good instinct." He studies me for a long moment, sharp eyes softened by something that looks almost like satisfaction. "I remember you at four years old, golden-eyed and half-convinced the world had already decided your fate for you. Strange, watching that same child stand here now, giving someone else the ground to stand on instead." He shakes his head slowly. "Village used to talk about you like a fragile thing. A miracle to be protected. I don't hear that particular tone anymore."
"What do they say instead?"
"That you're becoming someone worth watching," he says simply. "Not because of golden eyes, or old superstition about blessed children. Because of what you're actually choosing to do with the years you've been given. That's a different kind of remarkable. Harder-earned. Longer-lasting."
I don't have an immediate response to that, the words settling somewhere heavy and warm in my chest all at once.
"Your mother would recognize that particular kind of remarkable," the elder adds, quieter now. "She was the same, in her own way. Village miracle who turned out to matter far more for her choices than for anything she was simply born with."
We sit together in comfortable silence for a while, watching the yard's various small dramas play out around us — Petra finally managing a clean strike and beaming with pride, Toren loudly narrating his own sparring match to anyone who'll listen, the general, chaotic warmth of children learning to become something more than they started as.
"Can I ask you something?" I venture eventually, curiosity outweighing my usual caution.
"You can ask. Can't promise a satisfying answer."
"Do you think the golden eyes actually mean anything? The old stories, about greatness or danger. Or is it just superstition people needed something to believe in?"
The elder considers the question with unusual gravity, tapping his cane thoughtfully against the packed dirt. "I think," he says slowly, "that stories survive because they're occasionally true, often enough to be worth remembering. Whether that's fate, or coincidence, or something in between, I couldn't say for certain. But I've watched golden-eyed children before you, boy. Not many. Every single one of them ended up mattering, one way or another, to something far larger than the village they were born in." He fixes me with a look sharper than his age usually allows. "I suspect you'll be no different. I only hope, when your particular mattering finally arrives, that it treats you kindly."
He pushes himself up with his cane before I can fully respond, pausing once more at the yard's edge.
"Keep going the way you're going," he says. "Whatever's waiting for you past Blumund's borders — and I suspect, watching you, that something eventually will be — I think you're building exactly the foundation you'll need to meet it properly."
He leaves before I can ask what he means, the way he always does, and I'm left standing in the yard turning his words over, wondering how much the old man actually suspects about a future I haven't even fully mapped out for myself yet.
That evening, walking home, I tell Vereen everything — Petra, the elder's visit, the strange, unfamiliar weight of being looked at differently by people who once only ever saw a grieving child.
He listens carefully, the way he always does now, and when I finish, something proud and thoughtful settles over his expression.
"Feels like a shift, doesn't it," he says. "From being someone people worry over, to being someone people rely on."
"It does. I don't know if I'm ready for it."
"Nobody ever fully feels ready for that particular shift," he says. "I certainly wasn't, the first time the Guild started trusting me with real responsibility. You grow into it. Same as everything else." He glances down at me, something warm and searching in his expression. "Though for what it's worth, watching you with that little girl today — Ava mentioned it, when I stopped by the Guild — I think you're further along than you realize. Some people take years to learn how to actually see someone else's pain clearly enough to help carry it. You managed it in a week."
"She lost her brother in the same raid. I didn't know, at first. Ava told me."
Vereen goes quiet at that, something old and understanding passing over his face. "That explains a great deal, then. About why it landed the way it did for you both." He's silent a moment longer, weighing something. "Grief recognizes grief, I've found. Sometimes faster and more honestly than anything else manages to."
"I had good teachers," I tell him, echoing what I told Petra without quite meaning to.
"You did," he agrees, quiet pride plain in his voice. "Still do."
That night, lying in bed with the small wooden wolf watching over me from its shelf, I think about turning points — the strange, quiet ways a life can shift direction without any single dramatic moment marking the exact hinge of it.
Three years ago, I arrived in that yard as someone else's responsibility, small and grieving and desperate for solid ground. Today, I gave a piece of that same solid ground to someone else who needed it just as badly.
I don't know yet what waits for me past Blumund's borders, though the elder's words linger stranger and more prescient than he probably intended.
But I know, lying here at eight years old, that I've stopped simply being taught, and started, in some small but undeniable way, becoming someone others can actually lean on.
That feels like the real turning point — not a number on a Skills list, not a rank or a title or anything the System could ever properly measure.
Just a small, stubborn girl named Petra, learning to stand a little steadier because I chose to stand beside her while she found her footing.
I fall asleep thinking of her determined expression, and Vereen's quiet pride, and the elder's strange, certain words about a future I'm only just beginning to actively shape rather than simply endure.
Whatever's coming, I decide, drifting toward sleep, I intend to meet it as exactly this version of myself — the one who finally learned to look up, and reach back, and give away some of what was so hard-won to begin with.
It feels, for the first time in a long while, like more than enough to be proud of.
Tomorrow, Petra will arrive again, ready for whatever small, stubborn victory the day has waiting for her. I intend to be there, watching closely, ready to notice it when it comes.
Whatever else Blumund's borders eventually ask of me, I suspect that particular habit — showing up, watching closely, ready to notice — will matter more than any single number my Skills list could ever show. It's a small thing to build a life around. But small things, I'm learning, have a way of turning out to be the ones that matter most, long after the bigger, louder victories have faded into just another number on a very long list.