It was the most difficult thing Leonel had ever come across. His thoughts wandered off. His leg itched. The flame within him went up and down like a candle in a draft. Yet with each and every intentional and controlled breath, he became aware of a change.
The maddening flicker starts to slow down, to join together, turning from a fiery mess into a single, calm, bright, pulsating dot of warmth. It was a tiny sun no bigger than a coin but it was his. A secret, living power he had carried all along, unknowing.
"Good," Alistair let fall his voice filled with deep and earnest pride like a low rumble. "That is the first and the greatest lesson. Control. Without it, power is merely destruction. A fighter without control is a threat to those he swears to protect."
They did not for what was like an eternity, practice a single strike, a single block. Instead they practiced breathing. They practiced standing, feeling the link between the bottoms of his feet and the ground.
They practiced holding that tiny, steady sun in his core. It was dull, tough work that made his young mind ache and his body shake for want of being still, but Leonel did not find fault with it. He realized he was laying the foundation of a cathedral.
As the sun started lowering and the sky was changing color to bruised shades of violet and gold, Alistair was sitting on a worn-out training bench, the wood creaking under his weight. He signaled Leonel to come over. The boy's frail body was pulsing with a pleasing fatigue.
"The path of the sword is the Graythorn path," Alistair began, his eyes staring into the far off and long-gone place. "It is a fair way. Your power is yours, a result of thorn and callus and discipline. The enemy is visible for you to meet his blade with yours.
The equation is straightforward" He broke off, deciding on his next words as carefully as a man laying a trap "But that's not the only path"
Leonel lifted his eyes to the speaker, his mind immediately immersing into the topic. His father was a man absolutely grounded in reality land, steel, loyalty. He seldom talked in abstracts.
"Mother's family... the Moonshadows... they don't follow the same way," Alistair kept on, his tone getting quieter. "They are masters of Mana. They don't keep their power in a core of physical strength, down here," he indicated Leonel's belly, "but in the heart. The seat of love, and fear, and spirit.
They don't take the energy from their own flesh, but from the world around them from the air, from the ley lines of the earth to do their magic, to call the wind and the water. The is a power of great subtlety and vastness."
Leonel's blue eyes grew so large that they looked like they were going to take up his whole face. Magic. It was a word from the past, from the legends that the minstrel sang. It was just like being told he can breathe underwater when he hears his father talk about it as something real and something in his blood.
"Still, it is a way full of mirrors and snares," Alistair's voice got tough, the soldier in him coming back. "It depends on will and imagination, which can be changed by a single moment of doubt or a sudden feeling of anger. It can even corrupt the heart if the heart is not an iron fortress. Your uncle… my brother, Kaelen… he took that way."
The name seemed to linger between them, charged and heavy. Leonel had only ever heard of Uncle Kaelen in hushed tones. An extremely intelligent and terrifying man who had gone his own way a long time ago.
"He was always after things that were gone, looking for answers to questions that shouldn't have been asked," Alistair recalled, a hint of sadness appearing in his eyes. "He went far into the areas which mixed life with death and which asked to be untied first the very knots of creation.
The knowledge devoured him. The brother I knew… he became a stranger, a ghost haunting the outer edges of forbidden lore." He turned his eyes straight to Leonel and his stare was quite strong. "He wanted to know the fabric of the world, and as far as I'm concerned, he only succeeded in tearing his own soul."
The warning was like a rock wall, it was very clear and it couldn't be moved. But for Leonel, the part that was his mother's son, the part that craved knowledge and could see patterns in the falling rain, the warning only made the forbidden path shimmer even more alluringly.
The memory of the Vitalis Energy his little sun was a comforting, steady pulse in his core, that night when he was lying in the dark of his chamber. He was a Graythorn. The sword's weight and the sword's purpose were his birthright and his destiny. He would be the one to master it. He would be the one to make his father proud.
Yet, just before he fell asleep, his mind wandered away from sword forms and to the uncle he never met.
"will i able to get strong as them"
Next day....
The manor was spread out beneath it, a small kingdom, but young Leonel Graythorne at the age of five couldn't see beyond the training yard which was a dusty, hard-packed circle that had become his whole world.
The temperature was cool and the air was full of the scent of turned earth from the gardens and the distant, pure smell of forge-smoke. Leonel's little chest was going up and down in a very soon, already, instinctively, the rhythm of a fighter.
In his hands, a mock sword a mere piece of oak very well sanded for his small hands was not a toy but a very life-line for him to get strong.
His concentration was on-point, a crease between his eyebrows that would have been laughable on another child.
He didn't see the way the evening light made the world look in different shades of purple and gold,
He didn't hear the nice sounds coming from the kitchens,
He didn't see or hear anything except the big, straw-stuffed figure which was his enemy, his teacher and his beloved father.
He is here to tecah him how real fight looks. It was not the smooth movement of the masters whom he saw through his window, but it was not the uncontrolled movements of a child either.
It was a string of very deep, very focused attempts. He took the lunge that was too far and his recovery was too slow.
Every movement was a question that his body was asking the world: How? How do I do this?
The noise of a boot dragging over the gravel was as loud as a shout. Leonel stopped, turned, and looked at the source of the sound.
His father, Alistair Graythorne, Duke of the Northern Marches, and a man whose name was often mentioned in close association with 'sword,' was standing at the side of the yard.
He was not a great big man but he had such a dense kind of a presence that it seemed that the space around him was changing. He did not fill a room; he became its center.
His hair was short and the same storm-cloud gray as his eyes and his face was a map of calm command. Though he wore a plain tunic and breeches, yet he looked more regal than the kings in their finery.
Leonel's hand with the wooden sword still in it went down to his side. "Father!" The word was a breath, part respect, part fear.
Alistair's stare was like a tangible weight. His eyes went from Leonel's feet which were badly positioned to the small shoulders of the boy which were tense.
"Leonel, your back foot is not firm. It is trying to find a place in the air. The ground is your friend. If you turn against it, you turn against yourself."
He came nearer, his steps inaudible. He did not take the practice sword out of Leonel's hand. Instead, he went down on one knee, with a crack accompanying his knee-bending motion that indicated years of strain and combat.
His big, roughened by work hands and gentle at the moment, helped to realign Leonel's ankles, they did it more by the sole of his left foot which they pressed more firmly into the earth.
"Do you feel that? The ground is hard. It will support you. Let me see you put your trust in it."
Leonel was agreeing with his head. His little face was covered with an expression of utmost seriousness. He went back to his stance with the lesson not just as a direction but as an emotion. He drew in a breath, held it, and made a vertical strike with his practice sword.
The thwack of the wooden piece on the dummy's post was cleaner, more precise than previously. A little bit of pride was making the chest of his warm with its glow.