They trained in the workshop before dawn.
Dain cleared the floor — the benches pushed back, the ordinary work stacked and covered — and the space became what it apparently had been designed to be, though never officially acknowledged as: a training floor. The proportions were correct for it. The ceiling height allowed for full extension. The floor was flagstone, even and solid, the specific quality of a surface laid by someone who understood that uneven footing was a practitioner's enemy.
"The Listening," Dain said. He stood at the room's centre with the specific quality of a man transitioning from one mode of self into another — from craftsman to instructor, from hiding to functioning. "First form. Foundation of everything that follows. Do you know anything about it?"
"I know the theory," Corvin said. "The forms are not combat techniques in the conventional sense. They are resonance frameworks — each one establishes a specific relationship between the practitioner, the metal, and the target. The Listening establishes reception. Before you can direct anything, you must be able to receive accurately."
Dain looked at him. "Where did you learn the theory?"
"The Order's deep archive has fragments. Incomplete — someone edited them at some point, removed the practical instruction and left the philosophical framing. I suspect deliberately." He paused. "Theron's people, probably. Removing the functional knowledge while leaving the conceptual so it would not be obvious the documents had been interfered with."
"Yes." Dain said this with the flat certainty of someone confirming something they had long suspected. "The editing happened about twelve years ago. We noticed — those of us who were tracking the archive records — but by then it was too late to recover what was taken." He looked at Corvin. "Show me what you know."
Corvin moved into the first position.
He had constructed the Listening form from the theoretical fragments in the archive, supplemented by the specific physical knowledge he had accumulated over seventeen years of managing his own resonance — the compression technique, the projection, the particular way his body had learned to handle the flow of the Echo-Sight through long practice. The form he held was not identical to what Dain's expression said he was expecting. It was not wrong, exactly. It was — different.
Dain circled him slowly. Looking.
"Your feet," he said finally. "You're grounded differently than the traditional form. Lower centre. More connection to the floor."
"I read the floor," Corvin said. "I have always read through contact. The grounding gives me more to read."
A pause. "The traditional form is designed for practitioners who project outward and receive from the air — the ambient resonance of an environment. You are describing something different."
"I receive through the earth." He felt it now, standing still in the Listening — the deep geological resonance of the flagstone beneath him, the old patient frequency of things that simply were and had been and intended to continue, flowing upward through the points of contact between his feet and the floor. Not an echo, not history. The current resonance of stone that had been doing this for ten thousand years and had no intention of stopping. "I always have. I thought it was a limitation of my technique. I think now it is a feature of my bloodline."
Dain was very still. "Your mother received from water," he said slowly. "She always worked best near the coast. Near the river. Seren said once that water spoke to her directly — not metaphorically, not as a poetic description of sensitivity, but literally. She could feel current patterns in her hands." He looked at Corvin with an expression that was reassembling itself. "The Aelwyn gift."
"Receiving through material rather than air," Corvin said. "Yes. I think the traditional form was built around the Valerius baseline, which is aerial. The Aelwyn variant is different." He shifted his weight slightly, feeling the floor's resonance adjust to the movement the way a string adjusts to a new fingering. "I have been building my version of the Listening since I was seven years old. I just did not know it had a name."
Dain looked at him for a long moment.
"All right," he said. "Show me what your version does."
What it did was considerable.
The demonstration took forty minutes and covered the equivalent of what Dain would have taught across the first month of traditional Warden training. Not because Corvin rushed through it — he was methodical, thorough, stopping at each new application to ensure he understood the mechanism before moving to the next. But the mechanisms arrived for him with the specific ease of things that were not being learned from the outside but remembered from within.
The fragment was doing something he had not fully understood until now. Every time he engaged a new application of the Listening form, the fragment responded — not with instruction, not with direction, but with confirmation. A resonance that said, in the language that had no words but was nevertheless unmistakable: yes. That. Exactly that. As if it had been waiting for him to find each thing, and the finding was the point, and the confirmation was the reward for finding correctly.
Dain watched the entire forty minutes without speaking.
When Corvin stilled at the end of the sequence, the workshop was quiet except for the forge's low tick and the distant morning sounds of the craftsmen's quarter waking up outside.
"How much of this is the fragment?" Dain asked. His voice had a quality it had not had at the start of the morning.
"I don't know yet where I end and he begins," Corvin said honestly. "I think that may be the point. I think the distinction may be less important than I have been assuming it is."
"He," Dain said. For the second time noting the pronoun.
"He," Corvin confirmed. "I do not know his name yet. Not fully. My father found half of it." He looked at Dain steadily. "I will find the rest."
Dain was quiet for a moment. He looked at the blade on the bench — where it had been resting since the forging, where it had been quietly iridescent in the workshop's low light, where it had been doing nothing except being present in the specific way that things with a great deal of potential waiting to be expressed are present.
"The second form," Dain said. "The Asking. You want to try it."
"Yes."
"It is traditionally introduced in the third week."
"I know."
A long pause. "The Asking requires the blade."
Corvin crossed to the bench and picked up the blade and felt the fragment's resonance deepen in the instant of contact — the singing that had settled into a background presence since the forging now coming forward again, attentive and ready.
He turned back to Dain.
"I am ready," he said.
Dain looked at him with the expression that had been building across the morning — the expression of a man who had spent fifteen years waiting for something to coalesce around, watching it arrive, and discovering that what had arrived was both exactly what he had hoped for and considerably more than he had prepared himself to receive.
"Yes," Dain said quietly. "I believe you are."