“It sounds like something Corin would say while pretending he isn’t emotionally invested.”
“Your lifespan is no longer progressing along a strictly human scale. The bond does not freeze you. It does not make you like me. It creates a shared temporal field when our channels are aligned. You may age very slowly. You may not age at all while the structure holds. We will need observation.”
I stare at him. “That was dangerously close to a comforting answer.”
“I apologize. I will try to be more cryptic.”
“Please don’t.”
He places his hand over the outer circle, and the moving ring brightens. A leaf drops from a branch above us, entering theair over the circle. It slows as it falls, drifting so lazily it seems suspended in honey, while outside the ring another leaf hits the ground at once.
I reach toward it.
Rhazek catches my wrist. “Do not put your fingers into untested temporal shear.”
“See, that was the cryptic menace I was expecting.”
“It can peel a nail back through yesterday.”
I withdraw my hand. “That was vivid and disgusting. Thank you.”
“You asked to understand.”
“I did, regrettably.”
His thumb strokes once over my wrist, right above my pulse. “I will show you all of it. The beautiful pieces, the inconvenient pieces, the pieces that make mortals invent religion because confusion feels better with architecture.”
I look at the suspended leaf, golden and trembling in altered time. “And the frightening pieces?”
His expression sobers. “Especially those.”
By the third week, I stop checking the mirror every morning. By the fourth, I forget once and only remember after tea, which feels like victory enough to make me suspicious of it.
That same afternoon, I find Corin in the yard.
He has turned the far side of the garden into a training ground, though he refuses to call it that because, apparently, naming a thing honestly encourages expectations. Iron stakes line the perimeter in neat rows. A rack of weapons leans against the fence: short blades, rods, hooked implements, throwing spikes, a slender spear that looks too elegant to be friendly. The air smells of oiled metal, churned dirt, and crushed mint from a poor herb bed that has suffered beneath everyone’s boots.
Corin moves through the space with a short iron blade in each hand.
Too quickly.
I stop near the porch steps and watch.
He pivots, strikes, reverses, ducks under an imagined blow, then comes up with one blade angled toward throat height and the other guarding his ribs. His coat hangs on the fence, sleeves rolled to his elbows, pale hair tied back with a strip of black cloth. Sweat shines along his temples. His breathing is controlled. His posture has changed in a way I cannot stop noticing, less decorative languor, more coiled readiness.
Rhazek stands across from him with his arms folded.
“Again,” Rhazek says.
Corin lowers the blades. “I am beginning to suspect you enjoy saying that.”
“I enjoy improvement.”
“You enjoy being insufferable near weapons.”
“Again.”
Corin lunges.
