Time lost its shape.
Kaen did not know how long he had been sitting there, against that trunk. An hour, maybe. Not much more. In this place, the sky did not change. The light was the same as when he had arrived — diffuse, everywhere, sourceless. No sun to slide across, no shadow to lengthen.
His awareness was still there. Set on the fabric. Barely.
He had ended up finding a point of balance — not really a radius, more a hazy zone around him, with hollows and gaps he could not control. As far as he could hold, and no farther. Already his body was cracking. A dull headache had settled behind his eyes. His hands, resting on his knees, trembled at moments — a brief tremor he could not stop. Five days of training had not been enough to harden his mind for this.
For now.
Beyond his reach, sometimes, something came to him. A vague vibration. Too blurred for him to know if it was a battle, a spell, or simply the dimension shifting. He could only note — not interpret. It was too much for him.
'How many fights already.'
He couldn't know. The vibrations he sensed were too blurred — impacts, flares of magic, blows struck at the edge of his perception. No one had fallen yet, as far as he could tell. Not yet. The first hours, usually, were for scouting. For positioning.
Somewhere, at some point, someone would die for real.
He pushed the thought away. Again. It was the third time he had pushed it away.
Something changed.
Not in the forest. Not in the air. On the fabric.
A ripple. Slow, broad, as if a sheet had been lifted by one corner and let fall. Not violent. Not localized. All around him at once.
Kaen's eyes snapped open.
His right hand had hit the ground before he thought to move it. His body knew what to do before he did. He was not breathing. His awareness had thrown itself at the ripple — not knowing where, not knowing how. Somewhere. Everywhere.
There.
He searched again. He tried to pinpoint it. He couldn't.
The ripple had no center. No point of origin. It moved with him, around him, everywhere at once. A breach, in what he imagined, would have been sharper. More precise. Something that tears has a place, an instant. Not this.
But he was sure of nothing.
Maybe it was the dimension itself shifting. Maybe the headmistress — or whatever played her role — had built this place to evolve over time. Maybe a biome had just opened miles from here, or closed.
Maybe.
He had no way to verify it. He could only choose: jump, or stay.
He stayed.
Kaen let his breath out slowly.
'False alarm.'
He closed his eyes again. His hand fell back onto his knee. Blood was pounding behind his temples — hard, uneven. He had jumped for nothing. And yet, he couldn't afford not to jump every time. Otherwise, the day it would be the real one, he wouldn't be ready.
He took a long breath. Another.
The blood settled.
The fabric became smooth again. Taut. Uniform.
He tried to hold.
He didn't hold long.
His concentration slipped a first time. He caught it back. It slipped a second time. The headache behind his eyes climbed. And every time he tried to push further, his perception blurred more — like a window being wiped with a dirty hand.
And slowly, the obvious took him.
It wasn't working.
'It won't work.'
He opened his eyes for good this time. Not halfway. Fully. And he looked at the forest around him — the dark trunks, the still leaves, the light that came from everywhere and nowhere. He looked at the dimension the way one looks at a problem laid out on a sheet of paper.
And he began to think.
His range was nothing. His perception, blurred. He couldn't tell a real breach from a shift in the dimension. He couldn't pinpoint what he sensed. And even if he could — even if he sensed the attack coming — he was in the wrong forest, in the wrong biome, miles from Azriel.
Five days of training.
He had overestimated what he could do with that.
'I won't see it coming.'
Not from here. Not like this.
He stayed motionless a moment longer, letting the idea settle in him. Not with disappointment — with the cold clarity of someone setting down a broken tool. The meditation, the fabric, the watch from a distance — it had been a fantasy. The fantasy of a beginner who thought he could make up for his weakness with cleverness.
But there was something else.
If he could not anticipate, he could maybe still intervene. Not before — during. At the very moment the attack would fall. And to intervene at the moment it fell, he had to be near. Not in another forest. Not miles away.
He had to find Azriel.
'Move.'
That thought came clean, without hesitation.
He unfolded his legs. Pushed himself up against the trunk. The blood rushed to his head and he had to close his eyes a second, wait for the vertigo to pass. When he opened them again, his hands had stopped trembling. The headache was still there, but it was fading — his awareness was no longer stretched on the fabric, it was free, and that alone was a relief.
He looked around.
He chose a direction — east, where he had felt the first disturbance on arriving. Not because he thought he would find Azriel there exactly. But because he had to start somewhere, and staying here meant he had already lost.
He took one step.
Then another.
The forest swallowed his outline.
He walked.
It was at some moment, he could not say which, that he sensed it.
Not a breach. Not a ripple. A presence. Close. Too close.
Someone walking. Toward him — or rather, on a path that would eventually cross his own. Very near. Nearer than anything he had sensed since the trial began.
Kaen stopped dead.
He slipped behind a trunk. Slowly. Without a sound. He was not breathing.
Between the trunks, he saw him.
A boy. Black hair. Not tall, not particularly built, nothing that would have made anyone turn around in the street. A relaxed gait. The kind of presence one would forget two minutes after passing it.
Kaen recognized him at once.
He didn't need to see the eyes to know they were black. He didn't need to hear the voice to know how it sounded. He didn't need the name — he had known it since the first day he laid eyes on him, at admission.
Leon Vesper.
The hero of the novel.
The real hero, the one the story used to follow — before Kaen had landed in it by accident and everything had drifted off course. The one who would, later, become a weapon against the gods. Today, still, he didn't look like anything. A teenager like any other. Naive, half-formed, learning too slowly for today — and just enough for tomorrow.
And he was walking in the same direction as him.
Without seeing him, maybe. Without sensing him, surely. Leon did not, himself, have a trained spatial awareness. He moved by instinct, by sight.
'Keep walking.'
Kaen still wasn't breathing.
Leon walked on. Closer.
Then he stopped.
In the middle of a step, with no apparent reason. As if something, in him — an instinct, an awakening, something that still slept but that would one day truly wake — had made him stop.
Leon turned his head.
And he looked exactly in the direction of Kaen.