The taste of the pastry was ash on Kyon's tongue. He let the rest of it fall from his fingers onto the damp undercroft floor, a meaningless offering to the shadows. Master Corbin's kindness was a weak, diluted thing, a sentiment as easily discarded as the crumbs. It had no nutritional value for the new hunger growing inside him.
He looked at his bandaged hand. The cloth was a lie. It suggested an injury that needed tending, a vulnerability that required care. Beneath it, the cut was just information. A closed file. The old man's world, a world of mending and healing, felt like a quaint and foolish dream. Kyon had awoken into a starker, truer reality.
He left the undercroft, emerging into the late afternoon light. The world seemed different. The laughter of students skipping their last lectures was not a sound of joy, but a specific, sharp frequency of carelessness. The scent of blooming night-flowers was not pleasant; it was a chemical lure, a sophisticated trap for pollinators. Everything had been reduced to its base components, its underlying function. He saw the strings on the puppets, the gears turning behind the faces.
He needed a new subject. The rat had been a lesson in sustained agony, but it was a passive one. He needed to conduct a proactive experiment. He needed to apply a stimulus and observe the reaction. He needed to write the first word of his thesis, not just read one that was already written.
His feet carried him not toward the dormitories, but toward the training grounds near the fencing salle. The air here smelled of sweat, leather, and the metallic tang of ambition. This was where the concept of dominance was practiced and performed. And its prime exemplar was a boy named Torin.
Kyon found a shadowed archway overlooking the sandy practice yard. Torin was there, as expected, his loud, braying laugh echoing off the stone walls. He was practicing with a blunted rapier against a hapless junior, a smaller boy named Petyr whose family owed money to Torin's. It was not a spar; it was a display.
"Keep your guard up, Petyr!" Torin shouted, not as advice, but as a taunt. His blade slapped hard against the boy's wrist, leaving an angry red welt. Petyr flinched, his eyes wide with a mixture of fear and humiliation. "You fight like your father counts coins! All hesitation and fear of loss!"
Torin was a collection of easy tells. His chest was puffed out, his chin held high. He moved with a swagger that was meant to convey confidence but spoke only of a deep, unexamined insecurity. He was a caricature of strength, a hollow shell that made a great deal of noise to prove it wasn't empty. To Kyon, he was a walking, talking definition of fraudulent power. Unraveling him would be… instructive.
Kyon watched, his mind cold and clear. He saw the precise angle of Torin's sneer. He noted the way Petyr's shoulders slumped in defeat long before the match was over. He was studying the grammar of subjugation.
The match ended with Torin disarming Petyr with a flourish and a final, stinging blow to the shoulder. The small boy scrambled to retrieve his practice blade, his face flushed with shame.
"Run along, little coin-counter," Torin said, wiping his brow with a dramatic sigh. "Tell your father I expect the interest by week's end." He turned to his sycophantic friends, who laughed on cue. "The problem with the world," Torin announced to his audience, "is a lack of quality opposition. It's so dreadfully dull to be the best."
This was his opening. Kyon stepped out of the shadows.
"Is it?" Kyon's voice was quiet, but it cut through the laughter like a shard of glass.
Torin turned, his expression annoyed until he saw who had spoken. A slow, condescending smile spread across his face. "Kyon. The library ghost. Did you get lost on your way to dust some manuscripts?"
"I was considering your proposition," Kyon said, his hands clasped behind his back. "About a lack of quality opposition."
Torin's friends snickered. "And what would you know about it? The only thing you fence with is a sharp tongue."
"I know that true strength isn't announced," Kyon said, his tone conversational, almost bored. "It's demonstrated. You perform strength, Torin. Like a bad actor in a cheap play. You use a blunted sword against weaker opponents and call it victory. It's a convincing performance, I suppose, for those who don't know what real strength looks like."
The smile vanished from Torin's face. The air grew still. His sycophants fell silent. This was not the script. Kyon was supposed to shrink away, to mutter an apology.
"What did you say to me?" Torin's voice was low, dangerous.
"I said you're a performer," Kyon repeated, tilting his head as if analyzing a curious insect. "A simulacrum. You've never been truly tested, so you have no idea what you actually are. You might be strong. You might be weak. The mystery must be frustrating."
It was a perfect thrust. It bypassed all of Torin's defenses and went straight to the core of his insecurity. His face darkened with rage. "You think you can test me, bookworm? You?"
"I have no interest in testing you," Kyon said, a faint, cold smile touching his lips. It was the same smile he'd given the dying rat. "I'm simply pointing out that you haven't been tested. There's a difference. It's an observation of fact. Your reaction to it is… telling."
He was turning Torin into a subject right there in the yard. Isolating the variable of his pride and applying the pressure of truth.
"You want a test?" Torin snarled, grabbing a practice rapier and tossing it at Kyon's feet. It landed in the sand with a soft thud. "Pick it up. Let's see how sharp your tongue is when I'm done with you."
Kyon looked down at the sword, then back at Torin. He made no move to pick it up. "Why? So you can add another meaningless victory to your collection? So you can prove to your friends you can beat a scholar who has never held a sword? That doesn't sound like a test. That sounds like another performance. A predictable one."
He was backing Torin into a psychological corner. Every option was wrong. To fight was to prove Kyon's point about bullying the weak. To not fight was to be branded a coward in front of his followers.
"Fight me," Torin demanded, his voice tight.
"No," Kyon said simply.
The word hung in the air, absolute and immovable. It was a refusal so complete it was more powerful than any attack.
Torin stood there, seething, his knuckles white on the hilt of his practice blade. He was trapped by the narrative Kyon had built around him. His friends were watching, unsure. Petyr had stopped his retreat and was staring, his mouth slightly open.
Kyon took a step closer, closing the distance. He kept his voice low, for Torin alone. "You see? This is the problem with building your strength on the fear of others. When you meet someone who isn't afraid of you, you have nothing left. You're just a loud noise in an empty room."
He saw the exact moment the fracture appeared. The rage in Torin's eyes flickered, and for a split second, it was replaced by something else. Something raw and unguarded. Confusion. A sliver of doubt. A terrifying glimpse into the hollow space behind the performance.
It was more intimate than any touch. Kyon had just performed his first live dissection. He had peeled back the layers of arrogance and seen the trembling insecurity beneath. He had understood Torin.
And the understanding was… disappointing. The essence, when he finally consumed it, would be thin, brackish stuff.
He didn't need to see any more. The experiment was a success. He had applied a precise psychological pressure and documented the resulting collapse. He turned his back on Torin, a gesture of such profound dismissal it was more devastating than any sword thrust.
He walked away, leaving the fencing captain standing alone and defeated in the center of the yard, not by a blade, but by a truth he had no idea how to parry.
The victory was not satisfying. It was data. Torin was a simple text, easily read. He needed a greater challenge. A more complex subject.
His feet carried him instinctively toward the Athenaeum, but not to the main halls. He climbed a narrow, spiraling staircase to the scriptorium, a quiet room where the most precious, hand-copied manuscripts were illustrated. The air here was filled with the smell of ink, vellum, and concentration.
Elara was there, as he somehow knew she would be. She was bent over a large vellum folio, her hand moving with a delicate, precise grace as she illuminated a capital letter with lapis lazuli blue and gold leaf. A single lock of her dark hair had escaped its tie and fell across her cheek. She was humming softly, absorbed in her work.
She was the antithesis of Torin. Where he was loud and hollow, she was quiet and deep. Her strength was not a performance for others; it was an internal, generative force. She created beauty. She nurtured it. She was a living embodiment of a concept Kyon could not yet name, but was desperate to understand.
He stood in the doorway for a long time, watching her. He saw the faint frown of concentration between her brows. The way she bit her lower lip slightly when making a particularly delicate stroke. The warmth in her eyes as she brought the ancient text to life. She was a system of immense complexity.
She sensed his presence and looked up. Her frown melted into a smile of genuine pleasure. "Kyon! This is a surprise. Did you come for some light reading?" She gestured to the dense theological texts surrounding her.
"I came to observe a master at work," he said, stepping into the room. His voice was softer here. The clinical tone he'd used with Torin was gone, replaced by something that mimicked warmth. It was a more sophisticated manipulation.
She laughed, a sound like bells. "Hardly a master. I'm just trying not to ruin this with a shaky hand. It's a psalm of healing. It felt… important to get it right."
A psalm of healing. The words felt alien to him. An attempt to put a pretty frame on the brutal reality of cellular regeneration and scar tissue.
He moved to stand behind her, looking over her shoulder at the manuscript. The artwork was stunningly beautiful, all flowing lines and radiant color. It depicted a benevolent figure with hands outstretched, light streaming onto a crowd of supplicants.
"They look so peaceful," Kyon observed.
"They're being healed," Elara said, her voice full of warmth. "Their pain is being taken away."
Kylon's eyes were not on the healed figures, but on the one doing the healing. The figure's face was serene, but to Kyon, the act seemed not benevolent, but… possessive. It was taking their pain. Absorbing it. Consuming it.
Is that how it works? he wondered. Does the healer understand the pain by taking it into themselves? Do they, in their way, consume the definition of another's suffering?
The thought was a lightning bolt. It presented healing not as mending, but as a form of consumption. A transfer of essence. Master Corbin thought he was putting the vase back together, but wasn't he, too, consuming the knowledge of its breaking? Was the difference between Kyon and the healer just a matter of intention? One sought to understand suffering to end it. The other sought to understand it to possess it.
Perhaps they were not opposites, but two sides of the same coin. The healer and the psychopath, both students of pain, just using different textbooks.
"Do you think," Kyon asked, his voice barely a whisper, "to truly heal someone, you have to understand their pain completely? To… know it?"
Elara paused, her brush hovering over the vellum. She considered the question with a seriousness he found fascinating. "I think so," she said softly. "I think all true compassion is about understanding. You have to be willing to… I don't know, to sit with someone in their pain. To acknowledge it. To make it your own for a little while, so they don't have to carry it alone."
To make it your own.
The phrase echoed in the silent room. She saw it as a temporary, empathetic act. A sharing of burden.
Kyon saw it as a recipe. A formula for the most profound consumption imaginable.
He looked at Elara, at her kind eyes and her skilled hands that created beauty. She was sitting in a room full of words about light and healing, utterly unaware that she had just handed the key to a much darker kingdom to the man standing behind her.
"Thank you, Elara," he said, and for the first time, the smile he gave her felt almost real. It was the smile of a man who has just found the title of his next great work. "That was… very illuminating."
He left her then, descending the spiral stairs back into the gloom of the main Athenaeum. The world had shifted on its axis once more. He had his first principle, discovered not in the agony of a rat or the humiliation of a bully, but in the gentle scriptorium, from the lips of a healer.
To know a thing, you must make its truth your own.
And he knew, with a cold and certain thrill, exactly where he would find the next, greatest truth. He would find it in pain. Not the petty, physical pain of a cut, but the deep, complex, soul-rending pain of a human heart.
He had a new subject. And she had just taught him how to begin