Twelve years. Twelve years since the Anvil had become his world. The boy, now a young man of seventeen, stood perfectly still in the center of a dark chamber. The world was a tapestry of sound and pressure against his skin.
He wore the uniform of a senior candidate: dark, silent fabric that clung like a second skin, and a mask. It was a smooth, featureless plate of polished obsidian, identical to the one their first instructor had worn on that rainy rooftop. A rite of passage, they were told. A tool to teach them the most vital lesson of all.
"The eye can be deceived," a new voice echoed in the chamber, feminine, and sharp. A female Glaive. "Light creates shadows. Dust creates illusions. True warriors do not rely only on sight. They rely on the world's truths: the whisper of air over a blade, the vibration of a footstep through stone, the scent of fear on the air."
He tracked her voice. She was circling the perimeter, her steps perfectly silent. But he could feel the subtle shift in air pressure as she moved, a ghost in the darkness of his mask. He had learned to read these disturbances, to build a map of the unseen world in his mind.
"You have been trained to fight men," The instructor's voice was closer now, a silken threat to his left. "You have learned to kill the Marked. But there are things in the dark corners of this world that do not have eyes to meet or throats to cut. Things that hunt by the tremors of your fear and the heat of your blood. Against them, your eyes are a liability. They will show you only your own terror. Today's lesson is simple: you will prove to me that you are no longer afraid of the dark."
Suddenly, the air split beside his ear. He didn't flinch. He simply shifted his weight, rotating his body as a weighted chain whipped past where his head had been a fraction of a second before. He didn't need to see it; he had felt the compression of the air, heard the unique hiss it made as it cut through the chamber. He pivoted, his hand shooting out to where he knew she would be, only to find empty air.
"Good," the voice purred from across the room. "You are learning to listen. But you are not yet there."
The lesson ended. The obsidian masks were removed. He stood with two dozen others, breathing the familiar cold air of the Grand Proving Hall. But they were not dismissed. The great iron doors at the far end of the hall groaned open, and two figures emerged from the shadows. The first was the Glaive from the rooftop, the one with the quarter-circle and flame mark on his wrist. The second was Varien.
Varien's face was as severe and unyielding as the boy remembered, but his gaze seemed to hold a new, predatory weight. His eyes swept over the assembled candidates before settling on three of them.
"You," he said, his voice cutting through the silence. He pointed to the boy. Then, to a girl whose teardrop mark was a stark slash of black on her earlobe. Then to a young man whose hand, now corded with muscle, bore the familiar spiderweb of obsidian. "And you."
He gestured for them to follow. A fourth candidate was pulled from the line, a broad-shouldered stranger whose Mark was a jagged, lightning-like scar across his jaw. They were led into a smaller, circular chamber, the floor a grate of cold iron over a pit of darkness. The door boomed shut behind them, sealing them in.
Varien's voice echoed from an unseen grille. "Your final lesson. A weapon does not hesitate."
A single, large hourglass was illuminated in a recess in the wall, its sand already pouring.
"It was said that from the time of the first murder, the spilling of blood of kin, familiar, rival, but bonded was thought to invoke... more." Varien's voice was a cold eulogy. "Before the last grain of sand falls, you will each secure a kill. Failure to do so means your own life will be forfeit. The Forge has no use for hesitant tools."
The four of them stood in the stark light. The boy with the spiderweb mark, the girl with the teardrop, the stranger with the jaw-scar. His kin, forged in the same fire. The sick, terrible irony crashed down on him. This hard but routine task, this final test, was their First Kill. He did not know the names of his companions, because they had not been named yet. After all, only proven weapons that were not going to be discarded were worthy to be named, and they had not yet earned that right, yet they might all perish this day.
The instructor with the marked wrist stood in the shadows just beyond the edge of the fighting floor, a silent arbiter. A death sentence waiting to be carried out.
Spiderweb, Teardrop and the stranger shared knowing glances before backing away together and facing down the boy who stood opposite them in a display of brittle alliance. It seemed they would all attempt to neutralize him first.
A sound plan when dealing with a greater threat, as they had been taught, and they knew personally from years of interaction just how much more of a threat he was. After all, he had broken more of his sparring partner's bones than they had landed hits on him.
The girl with the teardrop mark met his eyes. Her own were wide, but her jaw was set. Her voice, when she spoke, was an unsteady whisper, but resolved.
"At least this way," she said to him and the boy with the spiderweb hand, "one of us stands a chance."
As one, she, the spiderweb-marked boy, and the stranger drew curved knives and turned to face him.
He remembered the carriage, the rain, the shared scraps of bread. He remembered the rooftop, the sting of the whip, the shared pain. He had anticipated this moment for years, the culmination of his training, but he'd always pictured it against a stranger, an enemy. The grim reality was a hollow ache in his gut. As they moved, he knew, with a certainty that surprised him, that he might miss them when they were gone but that was irrelevant, a weapon was not supposed to feel and it always obeyed orders.
The stranger charged first, a bellowing bull. The girl and the spiderweb boy fanned out, a classic pincer. A brittle alliance.
The battle was a chaotic dance of steel and desperation. They were trying to kill him, but he could see their eyes flicking to each other, seeking a moment of weakness, an opportunity. The girl feigned a stumble, and the stranger, seeing an opening, adjusted his attack. In that instant, Spiderweb lunged not at him, but at the stranger's exposed back.
The stranger roared and spun, parrying the blow. It was the opening he needed. As Spiderweb recoiled, he sidestepped the stranger's brutish swing. His hand shot out, not to strike, but to grab the young man's tunic. He pivoted on his heel, using the brute's own momentum to throw him over his shoulder.
The stranger crashed into the girl, who collapsed under his weight with a muffled grunt. In the same fluid motion, he spun back, his hand snapping up to catch the flat of a blade just inches from his throat. Spiderweb's. They were locked for a second, grim determination in both their eyes.
He broke the lock, shoving Spiderweb back and diving into a roll, coming up beside the stranger who was just getting up and elbowing his neck. Just in time, he used his hand to stop a knife from being stuck in his groin by Teardrop, who was only pretending to be incapacitated.
The knife drew blood from his fingers, but he didn't even pause as he suddenly yanked the knife and the hand it was holding hard and met Teardrop with a knee to her gut, knocking the wind out of her. He heard a whipping sound but could barely get out of the way of an axe kick from Spiderweb, who seemed to have recovered, having it knock against his shoulder instead of his collar bone and rolling off to the side where he noticed the stranger who was now trying to circle to Teardrop's exposed back, the few grains of sand left in the hour glass and the masked instructor who was at the edge watching and waiting.
Surprising Spiderweb by allowing himself to get stabbed in the gut and then punching his nose, which broke on impact and following up with a right hook across the temple, temporarily downing him, he spotted an approaching kick from the corner of his eye, a foot too small to be the stranger. He shifted his position slightly to the left. The kick connected squarely with his chest, sending him rolling near the edge of the grate, near the silent, watching instructor. He looked broken, defeated. The stranger, back on his feet, tripped Teardrop and charged towards him, sensing blood in the water..
It was a feint. As the stranger's blade descended, the boy who was crouched dropped and swept his leg out in a vicious arc, not at the stranger, but at the instructor. The masked man, caught completely by surprise, was knocked off balance. In that fraction of a second, the boy lunged.
Pain exploded in his gut as the stranger's blade, meant for his heart, tore through his side. He ignored it. He drove his own curved knife up under the instructor's jaw and into his neck.
The instructor's eyes went wide with disbelief behind his obsidian mask. He let out a choked gurgle. His hand, the one with the quarter-circle on the wrist, began to burn with a white-hot light. He grabbed the boy's chest. An agony unlike anything, unlike any whipping, any broken bone seared through him. The fabric of his tunic blackened and smoked, the scent of his own seared flesh filling his nostrils.
Gritting his teeth against the blinding pain, the boy ripped the stranger's knife from his own gut and plunged it into the instructor's heart. The light from the Mark flared, then died. The instructor slumped, a dead weight.
In the sudden silence, the girl, with cold, duplicitous precision, drove her knife into the back of the spiderweb-marked boy as he stared in shock. He crumpled without a sound.
Time seemed to stop. The stranger stood frozen, his kill stolen, his mind unable to process the turn of events. He finally shook himself from his stupor and took a step toward the wounded, kneeling boy.
He never made it.
"Time's up".
Varien was suddenly there. A blur of motion. A single, contemptuous backhanded strike to the stranger's temple sent the larger boy down like a felled ox, his neck snapping with a sickening crack.
Varien looked from the dead stranger to the dead instructor, then to the girl, and finally to the boy, who was clutching his two grievous wounds.
"Explain yourself," Varien commanded.
The boy gritted his teeth, his voice a pained rasp. "The objective was to secure a kill. It did not specify who."
Varien gave him a strange look, but not one of disapproval and nodded before muttering, "Prepare yourself".
Then, the burning started. Not from his wounds, but from within. A cold fire ignited at the base of his neck, tracing the hidden channel along his spine. It wasn't pain, but an invasive, chilling clarity. The world snapped into hyper-focus. He could smell the ozone from the dead instructor's extinguished Mark, taste the copper of the blood in the air, and feel the life fade from the two dead candidates like faint, cooling embers.
He looked down at his hand, then instinctively to the back of his neck in a mirror's reflection in his mind. He couldn't see it, but he could feel it. A single, perfect point of black ink had bloomed into existence just next to the origin of his channel, with more joining in a mysterious circular pattern until they became a quarter circle. A quarter-circle resembling that of the dead instructor.
His eyes shot to the dead instructor's wrist, where he saw the marks on the corpse fading. The quarter-circle wasn't a pattern. It was a cluster of dozens of those same dots-kills, and it would seem those who slayed the marked would carry their victims deeds as well. His gaze then, unbidden, found Varien's sleeve. He pictured the Mark beneath, the scimitar crescent, encircled by a perfect, darker ring. It wasn't a ring. It was a flawless circle of countless kills, so many that they had merged into one.