The three months following the confrontation in the training yard had been a silent war.
The "knowing" that now existed between Asterion and Elian was a cold, hard thing—a shared border, heavily patrolled but uncrossed. The other children, with their simple joys and childish cruelties, faded into a dull, monochrome background. They were the herd. Asterion and Elian were the wolves, and the revelation in the yard had been the first time they had truly recognized each other's scent.
Their singular, obsessive focus did not go unnoticed. Father Gregor, whose gaze always seemed to hold a flicker of knowing pity, watched them. He saw how they outpaced the others, how they absorbed doctrine and drill with an adult's grim determination. He saw their isolation, their "stillness," as he called it.
And so, on a cold morning just after their eighth birthday, they were summoned.
They stood in Father Gregor's austere office, the scent of old parchment and beeswax thick in the air. Beside the priest stood a man who seemed carved from mountain stone. He was tall, broad, and wore the heavy, unadorned plate armor of a veteran Knight of the Shield. His iron-grey hair was cropped short, and a latticework of white scars mapped his face, culminating in one that sliced through his left eyebrow and lip. This was Sir Kaelen, the "Iron Bastion" of the Aegis Sanctum, a man whose name was spoken with equal parts reverence and fear.
"These are the two I spoke of," Father Gregor said, his voice soft. "Asterion and Elian. The God-touched, and the Model Child."
Sir Kaelen grunted. His eyes, the color of a winter sky, moved over them. It was not a glance; it was a physical weight, a pressure. "They are small."
"They are... different," Gregor insisted. "They have a stillness one does not find in children. A focus. I believe their potential is being wasted on children's drills.
Kaelen was silent for a long moment. He stepped forward, leather and steel creaking. He loomed over Asterion, casting him in shadow. "Stillness? Or hollowness?"
He did not wait for an answer. He lifted a gauntleted hand and placed one thick, bare thumb on Asterion's forehead.
A spark of pure, focused Faith, hot as a forge-ember, lanced into Asterion's skull. It was not a gentle blessing; it was an interrogation. It was pain, sharp and invasive.
The 29-year-old mind within the 8-year-old body did not recoil. It analyzed. It cataloged the sensation, the spike of energy, the way it tried to make his nerves scream. Asterion met Kaelen's gaze, his ruby eyes unblinking. He focused on the memory of Mishel's hand in his, the warmth of the farmhouse, and used the sudden, burning loss as an anchor against the knight's power. His breathing did not hitch.
Kaelen's scarred eyebrow rose a fraction. He moved to Elian.
He pressed his thumb to Elian's forehead. Elian's reaction was terrifyingly different. He didn't just endure the pain; he welcomed it. A faint, cold smile touched the boy's lips, an expression so alien on a child's face that even Gregor shifted. Elian leaned into the burning thumb, his eyes bright and challenging.
Kaelen pulled his hand back, staring at them both. He turned to Gregor. "You are right, old friend," his voice was a low rumble. "They are not children. They are weapons waiting to be forged."
He looked back at the boys. "You are no longer orphans of the Sanctum. You are my squires. Your old life is done. Come."
Kaelen's quarters were not in the main barracks. They were in a small, isolated tower keep built into the Sanctum's outer wall. It was cold, damp, and spartan. Their new "room" was a stone alcove with two hard cots, separated from Kaelen's own by a heavy curtain.
Their training began before the sun rose the next day.
"What you have learned," Kaelen said, his voice echoing in the small, private training yard behind his keep, "is nothing."
He stood before them as they shivered in the pre-dawn chill. "The Flame Breathing Method is for children and priests. It draws the Aether, the gaseous ambient Faith, into your lungs. It gives you stamina. It mends small wounds. It is a party trick."
He slammed his gauntleted fist into the stone wall beside him, leaving a spiderweb of cracks. "The Tainted are solid. Their malice is material. To break them, you must be solid. To be a true Shield, you must be harder than stone, more durable than steel."
He paced before them. "The priests take this Aether and, through prayer and ritual, refine it in great fonts. They condense it into Holy Water. That is their path. Our path is internal. We do not have the luxury of fonts and chapels in the dark. We have only our bodies. You will become the font. You will become the crucible."
He stopped, his gaze pinning each of them. "You will learn the Method of the Inner Crucible. It is the first and most vital secret of the Path of the Shield."
The mechanics were, in theory, simple. The practice was a new circle of hell.
"You will draw in the Aether, just as you were taught," Kaelen instructed, his voice a relentless drill. "But you will not circulate it. You will compress it. You will pack it down, into the Font of Grace, the nexus of power just below your navel."
Asterion, with his 29-year-old's understanding of physics and biology, understood immediately. Condense a gas into a liquid. It required immense, sustained pressure.
"It will fight you," Kaelen warned, his voice grim. "It will feel like you are being crushed from the inside. It will burn. Most acolytes fail here. Their will breaks. They let the Aether dissipate. You will not."
The goal was to compress the diffuse, gaseous Faith until it liquefied—forming a single, dense, infinitesimally small drop of what Kaelen called "Crucible Faith."
"Once you have that drop," he continued, "the second stage begins. You will circulate it. Not the gas. The liquid. It will be heavy. Slow. It will burn like acid as it moves through you. This is the forge. The liquid Faith will scour your body, your muscles, your bones. It will break them down on a level you cannot see, and rebuild them. Stronger. Denser. More flexible. It will forge you."
He looked up at the pale sliver of moon. "This is not a miracle. This is willpower made manifest. The first drop can take a year. A gifted acolyte might do it in seven months. You have seven months. Do not disappoint me."
The next three months were a blur of structured, agonizing routine.
Mornings: Physical Forging. They were forced to hold deep, body-shaking stances for hours, their muscles screaming. They ran laps around the Sanctum's perimeter carrying heavy sacks of stone. All the while, Kaelen's voice was a constant roar: "Breathe! Compress! Use the pain! Do not waste it! Turn your suffering into pressure!"
Afternoons: Weapons Drill. They were given blunted steel swords, not wood. Kaelen was a relentless, brutal master. He did not go easy on them. He beat them. He swept their legs, struck their ribs, rapped their knuckles. "A shield is not just wood and steel!" he'd bellow, as Asterion spat blood onto the packed earth. "Your body is the shield! Be harder! Get up!"
Evenings: Study. Tactics, Tainted anatomy, Church doctrine, and texts on the Argent Hand—Kaelen wanted them to know their "spiritual cousins" and heretical rivals.
Nights: Meditation. This was the true battlefield.
For Asterion, it was a war on two fronts. His 29-year-old mind gave him an incredible, inhuman advantage in focus. But his perfect memory, his curse, was a constant, screaming distraction.
He sat on his cot, legs crossed, forcing his breath into the rhythmic pattern. He drew in the gaseous Faith. He packed it down. The pressure built, an agonizing vice in his core. And with the pressure, came the memories.
The farmhouse door splintering. Mishel's scream. The glint of the knife across his mother's throat. The smell of blood and cordite. "You know too much."
He gasped, the pressure dissipating. The memory, triggered by the stress, had shattered his concentration. He was drenched in cold sweat, his 8-year-old's heart hammering.
He heard a quiet voice from the other cot.
"It's loud tonight, isn't it?"
Asterion opened his eyes. In the dark, Elian was a small shadow, sitting perfectly still. His eyes, though, seemed to glitter.
Asterion nodded, unable to speak, his throat tight.
"You're fighting it," Elian's voice was the cold, hollow, "adult" one from the yard. "You're trying to push it away while you push the Faith down. You're fighting yourself."
Asterion stared. "What... what do you do?" he whispered.
"I use it," Elian said simply. "Don't fight the memory. Make it do the work. The hate. The rage. Make it the hand that crushes the Faith. Make it your servant."
Asterion's mind, the Nobel-laureate's mind, reeled. It was brutal. It was genius. Elian wasn't just enduring his own dark past; he was weaponizing it. He was harnessing his trauma as a tool.
This, Asterion realized, was the beginning of his admiration. Elian wasn't just a fellow survivor. He was a fellow strategist.
Asterion closed his eyes. He let the memory come. He didn't just see the blood; he willed himself to smell it. He felt the phantom rage, the agony of his teeth tearing flesh. He let the raw, black, 22-year-old fury rise up... and he focused it. He aimed it at the Aetherial Faith in his core.
Crush it.
The pressure in his abdomen spiked. It burned like nothing he had ever felt. It was no longer a cage; it was a forge. It still hurt. It still threatened to break him. But now, it was his pain. It was controlled.
He and Elian sat in silence for hours, two small boys waging invisible wars in the dark. A strange, unspoken friendship was forged in that shared misery. It wasn't built on laughter or games. It was built on sparring sessions where they truly tried to hurt each other, on shared nods after Kaelen's beatings, and on the quiet understanding that they were both, in their own ways, monsters in the skin of children.
They were just shy of the three-month mark.
Kaelen was observing their night meditation, a silent statue in the corner of their room. Asterion was deep in the crucible, his entire being focused on the "slushy," half-formed pressure in his Font. He was close. The gas was becoming thick, viscous...
Suddenly, the ambient Faith in the room lurched.
It was not a gentle flow; it was a vortex. The Aether, which normally pooled in the chapel or high in the tower, was being dragged from the air, pulled into a single point.
That point was Elian.
The boy's small body went rigid. A sharp, audible hiss escaped his lips, like steam from a cracked valve. His skin, pale in the moonlight, flushed a deep, painful red before draining to a ghostly white. A sharp, ozonic smell, like lightning-struck stone, filled the tiny room.
Then, silence.
Elian opened his eyes. They were not the eyes of an 8-year-old. They were cold, clear, and ancient. He slowly lifted his right hand, uncurling his fingers. He clenched it.
A faint cracking sound, like pebbles grinding together, came from his fist.
Kaelen was across the room in a single, silent stride. His scarred face was, for the first time, a mask of pure shock. He grabbed Elian's arm. "Show me."
Elian, in that terribly old voice, said, "It's done."
He pushed a flicker of his internal energy into Kaelen's grip. The knight recoiled as if he'd been burned, snatching his hand back.
"Liquid," Kaelen whispered, his voice rough with disbelief. "Pure. Already... dense."
He stared at Elian. "Three months. Three months." He ran a hand over his scarred face. "The annals state the youngest Hierophant took eighteen months to form the first drop. A common genius, a once-in-a-generation talent, takes two years. What are you?"
Elian's gaze slid from Kaelen to Asterion. He gave no explanation. He offered only a simple, declarative statement. "I used it."
Asterion felt a complex cascade of emotions. His 29-year-old pride stung. His analytical mind raged at the impossibility of the data. But beneath it all, there was a cold, clear, profound sense of admiration.
There was no jealousy. Jealousy was for rivals. This was... a benchmark. A confirmation. Elian was not just a fellow survivor; he was a prodigy of this new world, a force of nature. His trauma was a perfectly honed weapon. Asterion's was still a blunt instrument.
He is my equal. He is my challenge. He is the variable I cannot predict. I must learn from him.
Asterion nodded once to Elian, a sharp, respectful acknowledgment. "Good."
The word hung in the air, sealing their bond. Kaelen stared at them both, his expression unreadable. "Get to sleep. We leave at dawn."
The next four months were on the road.
"The Sanctum breeds softness," Kaelen had declared. "You will see the world we fight for. And you will see what we fight."
Asterion, still grinding away at his own breakthrough, welcomed the change. They were given small, sturdy ponies, and they rode with Kaelen as he began a long circuit, a tour of the local parishes and outposts under the Aegis Sanctum's protection.
They moved from village to village, staying in the small, wooden churches. Here, Asterion's analytical mind drank in new data. This was the "Faith" at its most raw. Not the refined, concentrated power of the Sanctum's chapel, but the simple, desperate belief of farmers and blacksmiths praying for rain and healthy children. He saw how the local priests, far less powerful than Gregor, used simple charms and "blessed" trinkets—local "gods" and "saints"—to channel and focus this weak, but plentiful, energy. It was all part of the system.
His admiration for Elian grew into a true, if strange, friendship.
Elian, now circulating liquid Faith, was impossibly strong. During their roadside spars, he could parry a full-strength blow from Asterion and send him staggering back, his arm numb. The liquid Faith, Kaelen explained, was not just making him stronger; it was making him heavier, his "existential weight" increasing.
But Elian never beat Asterion needlessly. He taught him.
"You're fighting the sword," Elian said one evening, after disarming Asterion for the tenth time. They were 8-year-old boys, but they moved with the lethal economy of seasoned veterans.
"How?" Asterion demanded, retrieving his blade, his frustration palpable.
"You're fighting the sword," Elian repeated, his voice patient. "I'm fighting you. Your body is still just a body. Mine... is becoming a vessel. The Faith is part of me now."
He tapped Asterion's chest. "You're still in your head. You're thinking like a 29-year-old, trying to outsmart the problem." The words were a quiet shock. Elian knew. "You need to think like a stone. Solid. Simple. Heavy. Stop thinking and be."
The advice was a revelation. Asterion's adult intellect was a liability. He was over-analyzing the feeling of the power, rather than just commanding it.
That night, camped under the stars, Asterion sat in meditation. He stopped thinking. He stopped using his trauma. He simply became the 8-year-old body, the cold, the hunger, the singular will to forge.
He became the stone.
The slushy, viscous pressure in his Font of Grace, which he had been wrestling with for seven months, finally... clicked.
The agonizing burn vanished, replaced by a sudden, terrifying cold and a profound weight. A single drop of liquid, heavy as mercury and bright as a star, condensed in his core.
He had done it.
He opened his eyes. Elian was watching him, a faint, approving smile on his face. Sir Kaelen stood by the fire, his back to them, but Asterion knew he had sensed it.
"We're here," Kaelen said, his voice carrying on the wind.
Asterion stood, feeling the new, heavy power inside him. He looked up. Ahead, silhouetted against the rising sun, was another fortress. It was not the Aegis Sanctum. This one was different—starker, more martial, its banners depicting a crossed sword and shield.
"Where are we?" Elian asked.
Kaelen turned, his eyes glinting in the dawn light. "The Paragon's Rest. A sanctum dedicated to sparring, to the test of steel."
He looked at his two squires, at the two 8-year-old boys with the eyes of men who had seen too much.
"You have learned to build your foundation," Sir Kaelen said, a grim satisfaction in his voice. "Here... you will learn how to break another's."