Kalsar woke them both before proper daylight, the same deliberate absence of ceremony he seemed to bring to everything, simply appearing at the door and telling them to get up because there was work to do. No knock, no warning, just his enormous frame filling the doorway and the sharp, gravelled instruction that neither of them was in any position to argue with, exhausted as they both still were from the day before.
Ant followed him out into the main room, Mahkir still curled against his side, blinking against the early grey light. Maren was already there, sitting on an overturned crate near the wall, looking as though she'd been awake for a while. Kalsar settled into a chair across from them, arms folded, watching with an expression that gave away considerably less than it had the day before. The chair looked absurd under him, built for a person half his size, and yet he sat in it without apparent discomfort, as though he'd long since stopped noticing how poorly the world was built to accommodate him.
"Yesterday told me what I needed to know," Kalsar said, without preamble. "Not about how strong you are. About how hard you're willing to work when things go badly. That's rarer than talent, in my experience. Most people quit somewhere around the second hour. You didn't stop until your bodies made you."
Ant sat up properly, still working through the tiredness clinging to his limbs, every muscle from yesterday's efforts announcing itself in a dull, comprehensive ache.
"Yesterday you said you couldn't train arrogance out of anyone."
"I said that."
"So what changed."
Kalsar was quiet for a moment. Something in his weathered face changed, an old grief showing through that had nothing to do with anything happening in the room right now. His eyes drifted, for just a second, to somewhere neither of them could see. A memory, maybe, or several stacked on top of each other.
"I spent a long time at the academy watching students who had every advantage and no stomach for what actually mattered," he said finally. "Talent, resources, family names that opened every door, and the moment training got difficult, they complained. Went home to parents who complained on their behalf. Some quit outright. Others didn't quit in time, went out into the world convinced their gifts were enough, and died, because gifts without grit get people killed just as easily as having nothing at all." He said it plainly, no performance in it, though the weight of it hadn't gone anywhere either. "That wasn't the only reason I left. But it was part of it."
He looked between all three of them.
"You have nothing. No clan behind you, no name that opens doors, no guarantee any of this works out." Kalsar's eyes stayed on Ant as he said it, though the next part was aimed more broadly. "And the two of you still spent four hours in a yard, inventing your own training because nobody handed you a proper one, until your legs stopped working. That's worth something. More than raw stats, if I'm honest. I've trained plenty of talent that amounted to nothing because it never learned to work for anything."
Ant considered what he'd just been told. There was something in the way Kalsar had said died, hard and practiced, a tone that came from saying the word often enough that it no longer cost him anything to speak aloud, even though the weight of it clearly hadn't gone anywhere. Ant recognised that hardness. It was the same voice he sometimes used himself, talking about his father.
He kept it to himself. Bringing his father into this conversation felt like handing over something private to a man he'd known for less than a day, and he wasn't ready for that yet, however much the recognition had cost him to carry quietly.
Maren had gone quiet, watching the exchange with an intensity that suggested she was cataloguing every word for later.
"So," Kalsar continued, "here's what I'm offering. The equipment in the yard is useful. It'll build your speed, your endurance, sharpen the basics. But it does nothing for battle intelligence, and it does nothing for actual experience, the kind that only comes from real stakes, real opponents, real consequences for getting it wrong." He leaned forward slightly. "Have either of you heard of magic vortices?"
Ant shook his head. Maren frowned, clearly searching her memory and coming up short, which seemed to bother her more than the question itself.
"When I was younger," Kalsar said, "certain games were popular. Simulated ones, before the technology moved on to whatever Maren's clan builds now. Some of them had dungeon instances, enclosed spaces where you'd fight through escalating opponents toward something stronger waiting at the end. Think of a magic vortex the same way, except it isn't simulated. It's real."
"Have you heard about the battle against the Wraithkin?" he asked.
Ant nodded. "Maren mentioned it, just before we came here."
"Then you already know most of it." Kalsar continued anyway, the words coming easily, clearly something he'd worked through himself a long time ago and rarely got the chance to say aloud. "Three hundred years ago, when they unleashed all that magic to push the Wraithkin back, magic like that leaves a mark. It left pockets of magical residue, buried under the surface of our world. Given enough time, the pressure of it builds high enough that it pushes toward the surface on its own, cutting a passage down into whatever's accumulated below. That's what we call a vortex."
"That residue attracts things," Kalsar continued. "All kinds of monsters and creatures. Wraithkin included. And it doesn't just sit there once something arrives, that's the part most people don't understand until it's too late. Whatever gathers near it feeds on it, and if it's strong enough to actually thrive down there, it gives back more than it takes. The stronger the creature, the more magic it releases into the residue, and that residue in turn draws in something even stronger. It compounds. A small vortex becomes a bigger one, and a bigger one becomes something else entirely." His expression darkened slightly. "In the worst cases, the ones that go unnoticed too long, or attract something genuinely powerful before anyone catches it, it takes teams of the strongest people available just to contain what's built up before it becomes a problem for considerably more than whoever finds it first."
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"They get farmed," Kalsar said. "Once discovered, once cleared a few times, the magic and the creatures both thin out. Takes years, sometimes longer, before enough builds back up to make returning worthwhile. Some vortices are known, tracked, visited regularly by people strong enough to handle what's inside. Some are found by people who know the signs to look for. And some are found by Kithren sensitive enough to the residue itself to detect a vortex before anyone else even suspects one exists." He nodded once toward the door. "My own Kithren has that sensitivity. Weak magical inclination, but enough to find what's buried, given time."
He glanced toward Mahkir. "He clearly has some inclination of his own. I watched him use one fire skill yesterday, though he stopped well before the fight ended, so I'd guess his reserves ran out. Whether that translates to any sensitivity toward vortices, I have no way of knowing yet. That's not something you can measure from a single fight. We'll find out the same way anyone finds out, by testing it properly."
Mahkir's ears had come up slightly at that, some attention finally surfacing after the mostly disinterested start to the conversation.
I don't know if I have it, he said through the bond, plain and without embellishment. I've never had reason to think about it.
Ant relayed it, and Kalsar nodded once, unsurprised.
"Then we'll find out," he said. "That's all any of this is. Testing what's actually there instead of guessing."
"Do we know where this battle took place?" Ant asked curiously. "Surely that will be where the biggest vortices are located."
"Yes," Kalsar answered. "The battle took place in what today we call the Wastelands." He continued, "But that is one of the most interesting phenomena. As you say, with the most magic concentration in that area, you would expect it to be full of vortices, and yet, it is void of any magical residue at all. It is almost like something shielded or absorbed it all, and all we are seeing now is the leftover parts that whatever it was, was unable to stop."
Maren stopped being quiet.
"Why has nobody told me this exists," she said, and there was real heat in it now, sharp and immediate. "I've spent five years buried in research. My family has resources, connections, records going back generations. Why is there nothing about this anywhere I've ever had access to. Why didn't my parents mention it, even once, even in passing." Her voice rose slightly, the frustration compounding on itself. "I should have found this in a document somewhere. Anywhere. I've read everything my clan keeps on file about Kithren behaviour, about the Wraithkin, about the mages. How does something this significant simply not exist in any of it?"
She stood abruptly, pacing the small width of the room, hands moving as she spoke in a way Ant hadn't seen from her before, the composed researcher entirely displaced by something rawer.
"All that time," she said again, quieter now but no less sharp, "thinking I understood what was actually out there, and it turns out there's an entire category of danger and opportunity that nobody thought I needed to know about."
"You wouldn't have," Kalsar said, not unkindly, though without any particular softness either. "It's not a matter of your family withholding it from you specifically. This is imperial edict. Knowledge of magic vortices is restricted to those who've reached at least first evolution stage with their Kithren, and typically only within clans with combat specialisation rather than research. The Emperor decided, generations ago, that widespread knowledge of these things would produce exactly the kind of deaths I already described to you, thrill-seekers, undertrained adventurers, people convinced a vortex was a shortcut to power rather than a genuine hazard, all of them getting themselves killed chasing something they weren't remotely ready to face. Better to keep the knowledge contained to those already proven capable of handling it responsibly."
The anger stayed plain on Maren's face, though the explanation was settling into something she clearly recognised as reasonable despite herself.
"That's still frustrating," she muttered.
"It's meant to be," Kalsar said. "Restricted knowledge generally is, for the people it's restricted from." He stood, the chair creaking under the sudden absence of his weight. "But you're here now, and I'm telling you regardless of what the edict technically permits, because I've decided the two of you are worth the risk of me breaking a rule I've mostly ignored since I stopped answering to anyone who could enforce it."
He looked at Ant directly.
"So we're not wasting time on the equipment first. I need to see what you're actually capable of, and a friendly duel in my own yard doesn't show me that, you already proved that yesterday. What I need to see is how you both behave when your lives are genuinely at risk. That's the only way I'll know where the gaps actually are, and the only way I'll know what to build first. We're going to a vortex. Today."
Ant felt something in his stomach tighten, the words landing harder than the earlier explanation had quite prepared him for.
"You need to understand what that means before you agree to anything," Kalsar continued, his voice dropping into something more deliberate, more careful. "This isn't a duel with a clear stopping point. Whatever's down there won't hold back the way I told my Kithren to hold back yesterday. There's real risk of dying, both of you, if either of us judges something wrong. I won't take you unless you choose it plainly, with your eyes open. Nobody's making this decision for you."
Ant looked at Mahkir, who looked back with nothing in his expression that resembled hesitation, and found he didn't need long to answer.
"I'm in."
Kalsar's eyes moved to Maren.
"You as well," he said.
Maren blinked. "Me?"
"You." A faint, humourless smile crossed his face, though the seriousness underneath it didn't shift. "You'll be fighting alongside him. Not observing from the edge of a room this time. If I'm going to assess what training either of you needs, I need to see you both under real pressure, not just him."
"I'm level nine," Maren said, some of her earlier frustration resurfacing in a different form now. "I've never actually fought anything that wasn't a construct or a controlled drill."
"I'm aware," Kalsar said. "You always did need the training more than you wanted to admit, even back at the academy. This is simply the fastest way to find out exactly how much." He moved toward the door, the conversation apparently settled as far as he was concerned. "Gather what you need. We leave within the hour."