He woke to sunlight and terror in equal measure.

  The light was the specific quality of morning that had been going on for some time without him, present, committed and not particularly concerned with whether he was ready for it, and the terror was the immediate calculation of a person who had been given a precise instruction about timing and has woken to evidence that the timing may have passed.

  He was on his feet before the calculation had finished, the motion carrying the urgency of someone converting alarm directly into movement without the intermediate step of deciding to move.

  He stopped at the desk.

  The white paper was there with the certainty of something that had not been there when he fell asleep, its presence carrying the particular quality of objects that appear in spaces you have observed and find unaccountable.

  He picked it up, read it, and then he read it again because the first reading had produced questions that a second reading did not answer but confirmed, and then he looked at the desk and the silver cuffs were there, thin and simple and carrying the faint Ethra pulse of something waiting to be activated rather than something currently active.

  He put them on.

  The jolt arrived with the comprehensiveness of something that had been designed to communicate a single point as clearly as possible, not painful in the way of a wound, painful in the way of a message delivered at maximum legibility, the Ethra of the cuffs moving through his body in a wave that found every place where his own Ethra was not cycling in the pattern Joran had established and expressed its displeasure at those places specifically.

  He went to his knees on the wooden floor and stayed there for a moment, his body working through what had just happened, and then he started the cycling pattern and the pain became a level he could stand and then a level he could move through.

  He tried removing one cuff with his other hand.

  He did not try this again.

  When he stood, his knees had the memory of the floor in them and his cycling was running at the precise tempo Joran had demonstrated, the fear of another jolt functioning as the most efficient motivation he had yet encountered for maintaining a technique.

  He was, he reflected, becoming well acquainted with Elder Joran's pedagogical philosophy.

  The washroom contained warm water, which he was still not past being grateful for, the luxury of it unchanged from the first morning, the temperature consistent in the way of something that someone had decided was worth the resources to maintain consistently.

  He bathed with the cycling pattern running, which was awkward and occasionally produced small jolts when his attention was divided too far in the wrong direction, and dressed in his clan robe, and picked up his leather satchel with the books, and went downstairs.

  Lady Ryka was at the main table, cleaning it with the thoroughness of someone who had already been awake for several hours attending to things that required attending to, her red hair catching the early light from the windows.

  She looked at his wrists and then at his face and smiled the smile of someone who has just confirmed a hypothesis.

  "The elder came at dawn," she said, before he could ask.

  "He looked at you sleeping, wrote something, left the cuffs. I offered him tea. He declined and left."

  "You let him into my room," Tunde said.

  "He is an Outer Elder of the Verdan Clan," she said, with the gentle patience of someone explaining something they find self-evident.

  "The Red Blossom House does not decline Outer Elders of the Verdan Clan access to anything they request access to." A pause.

  "Also, he knocked."

  Tunde sat at the long table and the jolt that came from the brief lapse in his cycling knocked a spoon off the table, which Lady Ryka retrieved without comment.

  She set a plate before him, breakfast, the food still warm from the kitchen, and watched with the private amusement of someone observing a process they find entertaining without being unkind about it.

  "Breathing cuffs," she said.

  "Old technique. Not used much anymore because most elders find them too harsh for early stage students."

  "Most elders," Tunde said.

  "Elder Joran has a specific theory about the relationship between discomfort and learning speed," she said.

  "I have heard him explain it once, at length. It was persuasive. I still think the cuffs are harsh."

  He ate carefully, the cycling requiring enough of his attention that eating simultaneously was an exercise in distributed focus that occasionally failed.

  The failures communicated themselves immediately and specifically.

  By the end of the meal, he had spilled twice, jolted four times, and managed to maintain the cycling through an entire piece of bread without interruption, which felt like an achievement disproportionate to its apparent scale.

  Ryka gave him directions to the Hall of Knowledge with the efficiency of someone who knows a place well enough to navigate it in their description.

  He thanked her and left.

  ****

  The streets of Jade Peak in the mid morning had the full density of a place where people had somewhere to be and were in the process of being there.

  Vendors called from their stalls, the smells of food and metal and the particular sweetness of Ethra saturated materials layering into the general texture of the commercial district's air.

  Sky vessels passed overhead at intervals, their shadows moving across the street in brief, cool sweeps.

  He kept the cycling pattern running and moved through the crowd and heard his name twice in the first five minutes.

  Spoken by people he did not know in tones that suggested they knew something about him, the news of the previous evening having propagated through the lower district's information networks with the speed that interesting information travels in contained communities.

  He paid it the same attention he had paid the stares in the training hall, present awareness rather than reactive engagement, and kept moving.

  The jolts came when they came. He stopped treating each one as a surprise and started treating them as feedback, the cuffs functioning as an external monitor for the internal state of his cycling, which was a reframing that made them slightly less annoying and not at all less painful.

  He was learning, he understood, to maintain a process under conditions that made maintaining processes difficult, which was different from learning to maintain a process under ideal conditions and was probably more useful for the contexts in which the process would actually need to be maintained.

  Elder Joran's pedagogical philosophy was beginning to make a specific kind of sense.

  The Hall of Knowledge announced itself before he reached it, the white columns visible above the rooflines of the surrounding buildings, the scale of the structure communicating its purpose the way large buildings that hold important things communicate it, through the deliberate use of space and height to tell approaching visitors that what is inside is worth the architecture around it.

  The stone steps that led to the bronze doors were wide and smooth, and the statue that stood at the entrance, a woman with spectacles and flowing robes cradling scrolls to her chest, looked down at him with the expression of someone who has been looking down at people for a very long time and has developed opinions about most of them.

  The Disciples at the doors assessed his student badge, looked at him once each in the way of people who had expected to see him based on prior information, and let him through.

  Inside was more than the outside had suggested, which was the specific quality of spaces built by people who understood that the exterior's promise should be exceeded by the interior's delivery.

  The bookcases rose to heights that required the floating of their users to access the upper shelves, and the floating was occurring, figures drifting up to specific books or scrolls with the casual ease of people for whom this was the normal way to use a library.

  The rows of desks and tables between the shelves were populated with rankers in the concentrated posture of people doing the kind of reading that requires the rest of the world to temporarily cease existing.

  He stood at the entrance taking it in and a sound came from directly behind him, the practiced cough of someone who has deployed this specific cough before and knows its effect.

  He turned.

  She was short, the quality of her height absolute rather than relative, the top of her head arriving at a point that was considerably below the point where most adults' heads arrived.

  She wore robes that did not announce her rank through any insignia he recognized, though the way she occupied them communicated something about how long she had been wearing robes of authority.

  Her eyes, behind spectacles that sat on her nose with the settled presence of something permanently installed, were doing the specific work of assessment.

  She looked at him the way Elder Moros looked at things he was trying to find deficiencies in, which was a form of attention Tunde had developed enough experience with to recognize.

  "You don't look like much," she said.

  Tunde blinked.

  She turned and walked and was several meters away before she paused, not looking back, the pause carrying the precise quality of someone who has done something and is waiting for the other party to catch up.

  "I'm not going to ask you twice," she said, to the middle distance.

  He caught up.

  She led him through the hall with the navigational confidence of someone for whom this space was as familiar as their own rooms, the route she took through the shelves and tables carrying the efficiency of someone who knows exactly where they are going and has long since stopped noticing the things along the way.

  He noticed them. The depth of the catalogue, the organization of it, the specific categories of knowledge that occupied specific sections, the rankers who moved through it with the focused urgency of people who had been given a limited amount of time to find something important.

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  They stopped at a door. Bronze, with a golden handle, and a nameplate that read Elder Ming.

  Inside was a room that was simultaneously large and spare, its size unencumbered by the furniture that would normally fill a space of its dimensions, a soft seated chair behind a desk and another soft seated chair across from it and a corner occupied by books stacked in a system that was either very organized or the product of someone who had made peace with apparent disorder.

  She dropped into the chair behind the desk with the motion of something returning to its natural position.

  "Initiate Tunde," she said.

  "Shadow Ethra affinity. Rank fifteen. Red Blossom House. Student of Elder Joran." She looked at him with the eyes behind the spectacles.

  "Sit."

  He sat. The chair received him with the specific comfort of furniture that has been selected for comfort rather than appearance, and he noted this.

  "I am doing this," she said,

  "As a courtesy to my husband. Elder Wren is more diplomatically inclined than I am, and he believes that the student of his old friend deserves proper instruction in what I know. I find this an inconvenience and I am going to be direct with you about that fact, because I find directness more efficient than pretense and I am too old for pretense." She settled back.

  "With that established. How far have you gotten in the books?"

  He produced them from his satchel and showed her the one he had completed.

  She looked at it with the expression of someone receiving information that confirms a low but honest expectation.

  "The history of the Bloodfire continent. Tell me what you know."

  He told her.

  He organized it the way he had organized it reading it, the large structures first and the specific details after, the two empires and their territories, the two cults, the five major clans, the wasteland between the organized powers and what the wasteland contained that made it significant rather than simply empty.

  She interrupted him three times.

  The first time to call the official description of the empire's power structure a load of propaganda with the cheerful precision of someone who finds accurate characterization more satisfying than polite agreement.

  The second time to note that the Briar Clan's agricultural reputation concealed a capability that the official histories had been persuaded not to advertise.

  The third time to establish a principle that she returned to several times across the session: that official records are written by the entities they describe, and that entities describing themselves have interests that shape the description, and that an intelligent reader of official records reads between the lines of those interests.

  A jolt from the cuffs interrupted him mid sentence about the Acacia Clan and he lost the thread briefly, and Elder Ming looked at him with the expression of someone observing a process she finds both methodologically sound and personally irritating.

  "You abandoned the cycling," she said.

  "Briefly," he agreed.

  "The elder's approach is extreme," she said,

  "And also effective, which is the justification he would give if asked, and which I find difficult to argue against on the evidence, which is itself irritating." She waved at him.

  "Continue."

  He continued.

  The Thoren Clan produced the most questions, because the histories were the vaguest about them, the description of their beast taming function thin in a way that was different from the thinness of information simply not being included, the thinness of information being actively shaped by people who had decided that less was appropriate.

  "The books are uninformative about them deliberately," Elder Ming said.

  "The Thoren are the kind of clan about whom the official position is that they are beast tamers and valued contributors to the empire's military capacity, and the unofficial position is that their actual capabilities as warriors exceed anything the taming reputation suggests, that they have historical connections to Silvershade that predate the current political arrangements, and that the empire finds them useful enough to want them allied and uncomfortable enough to want them at a certain distance." She paused.

  "These are the things that official histories omit, and that you will need to understand as context for the things they include."

  He looked at her.

  "Why are you telling me things the official histories omit?" he asked.

  She looked back at him with the eyes behind the spectacles, the assessment in them shifting slightly.

  "Because my husband told me what you are," she said.

  "Not the shadow story. The other thing." A pause.

  "And because Elder Joran has not taken a student in two centuries, and the things he does not do for two centuries and then does are, in my experience, worth paying attention to."

  The cuffs delivered a jolt. He absorbed it, maintained the cycling, and said nothing.

  "The Second Age," he said, after a moment.

  She looked at him.

  "The book calls our current time the Second Age and then stops explaining it," he said.

  "The next page was blank."

  She was quiet for a moment, the quality of the quiet different from her previous silences, which had been the comfortable silences of someone thinking about what they had decided to say.

  This one had the quality of someone deciding whether to say something they had not initially planned to.

  "Two centuries ago," she said,

  "My teacher, who was not the kind of man who told stories for entertainment, told me something that he had heard from someone in the cults." She folded her hands on the desk.

  "His theory, or the theory as he relayed it, was that this world we inhabit is not original. That what we call Adamath is the product of multiple worlds having been pressed together, the boundaries between them ground down over an incomprehensibly long time until what was separate became one. It was his explanation for why the continents have such distinct characters, the Bloodfire continent and its battle oriented cultivation, Silvershade with its absolute rejection of technology, the Technocracy and its absolute embrace of it. Things that seem like cultural choices but that he believed were the residue of entirely different worlds being compressed into a single one."

  Tunde was very still.

  "He believed the rifts were boundaries," she continued.

  "Places where the compression was incomplete, where the edges of what had been separate worlds were still present rather than having been fully ground into the general substance of Adamath. And the things that come through rifts during beast surges, the creatures, the Ethra concentrations, the affinity crystals, were fragments of those other worlds still in the process of being incorporated."

  "A new age," Tunde said.

  "Every surge brings more of what was outside into what is here," she said.

  "His theory was that the surges are the mechanism of the compression, the world incorporating its fragments surge by surge, and that the Second Age was the beginning of the final stages of that process." She looked at him with the eyes that had been assessing him since the hall entrance.

  "I call it the speculation of an old man who read too much and thought too much and had too much time in which to do both. It has no practical application to your training."

  She said this, he noted, in the tone of someone who does not entirely believe the last sentence.

  "But it stayed in your mind," he said.

  "It stayed in my mind," she confirmed, with the honesty of someone who has decided that pretending otherwise would require more effort than it was worth.

  "Now. The books on Ethra affinities. We will move to those next. The history of the continent is background. The structure of Ethra paths is the house you are going to be living in." She stood.

  "Come back tomorrow at the same time. Read the affinity book tonight. All of it."

  He rose and bowed, the bow carrying the genuine respect of someone who has received something worth respecting. She waved this aside with the brisk gesture of someone who finds ceremony less interesting than substance.

  "One more thing," she said, as he moved to the door.

  He turned.

  "The blank page," she said.

  "After the Second Age entry. In the book."

  He waited.

  "It was not blank when the book was written," she said.

  She sat back down and opened something on her desk and did not look up again.

  He left.

  ****

  The midday sun had committed to its position by the time he descended the Hall of Knowledge's stone steps, the heat of it different from the wasteland's heat, less aggressive and less comprehensive, a warmth that had something pleasant in it rather than merely functional hostility.

  He stood at the bottom of the steps with the leather satchel over his shoulder and the Ethra of the cuffs maintaining its patient monitoring of his cycling, and considered his options.

  The Red Blossom House and an afternoon of reading. Or the training hall, where Joran had told him to present himself when the knowledge hall session concluded.

  He turned toward the training hall.

  Moving through the streets, he pushed Ethra into his body in the configuration Joran had been teaching, not the full output of training but the traveling rate, enough to extend his stride and reduce the time the journey took without exhausting reserves that would be needed for whatever the afternoon held.

  He had been doing this more naturally since the previous day, the Ethra flowing into the requested configuration with slightly less deliberate effort than it had required initially.

  He came to a roof.

  He was not sure afterward what had prompted the choice, whether it was the sight of the roof's edge or the instinct of the body moving toward something before the mind had offered an opinion.

  He vaulted upward with the Ethra in his legs and landed on the flat section above a storage building, and the world changed.

  From the street, Jade Peak was a crowd, everything at the scale of immediate experience, the buildings and people and sounds filling the available perception so completely that there was no space for anything else.

  From the roof, it was a place, the whole of it visible in a way that the street never allowed, the spread of the clan's territory in the valley below the mountains, the walls and their jade caps catching the light, the banners, the vessels moving through the air above it all in their organized patterns.

  He activated his Ethra sight.

  The world resolved into its deeper layer, the ambient Ethra of the compound visible in its distribution, the denser concentrations over the areas of cultivation and commerce, the pathways that the Ethra followed through the compound's geography the way water follows terrain.

  He could see, at the edges of his sight's current range, the faint pulse of the training hall's Ethra, the residual presence of the cultivation that had happened there and would happen there again.

  He breathed.

  Something in the breathing changed. Not the cycling pattern, which was running in its established form beneath everything else.

  Something under the cycling pattern, something older and less constructed, the breath of a body that was simply present and aware and not currently managing anything, the breath of someone who has arrived somewhere and is taking a moment before the arriving becomes the next thing.

  He thought about the settlement.

  The specific smell of it, the underground air with its particular quality of air that has been breathed by many people in an enclosed space over a long time, the smell that he had grown up inside and therefore had not been able to smell from outside until he left.

  The tunnels and the growing spaces and the carefully rationed light from the surface openings, the people who moved through all of it with the efficiency of people whose world has a precise size and they know every inch of it.

  His mother's hands had been the specific kind of work worn that did not look work worn to him until he had seen hands that were not, and then he had understood what years of what she did had cost her in the specific currency of the body.

  His father had told stories about ancestors in a voice that contained both pride and grief in proportions he had not understood as a child and understood better now, the pride being real and the grief being the knowledge that the pride was for something that had been taken.

  His sister had been five when she stopped being five.

  He stood on the roof of a storage building in Jade Peak and felt the tears arrive with the completeness of something that had been waiting for a moment that was both safe and honest, the moment where the body decides that it has been managing something long enough and that managing it is no longer what is required.

  He let them come.

  He wiped them away with the back of his hand and breathed through the cycling pattern and looked at the sky above Jade Peak, which was the same sky that was above the settlement's surface openings, which was the same sky that had been there when all the people he was thinking about were still beneath it.

  He made promises.

  Not to the unknown being rumored to be staring down from beyond the clouds, because the settlement's relationship to those lofty beings was complicated and personal and he had not resolved his portion of it.

  To the people themselves, or to the space that the people had occupied and that he now carried rather than inhabited.

  He promised his mother and his father the specific promise that their choices had been worth something, that the cost of what they had paid had purchased something real.

  He promised his sister the promise that is made to people who did not have time to know what was possible, the promise that someone who did have time would find out on their behalf.

  He promised the settlement that the thing they had tried to be, the thing that the stories of their ancestors described, was not a thing that had ended with their ending.

  He was not, currently, capable of keeping these promises.

  He was rank fifteen among the Initiates of a single clan in a single empire on a continent that contained considerably more than a single empire, and he was beginning to understand what that meant in terms of scale, and the scale was not reassuring.

  But he had been not alive. He had been the lowest possible thing, a resource, an object, a body in a pit.

  And through a sequence of events that included his own choices and other people's choices and a skeletal figure's decision to press a pebble into his chest without asking his permission, he had become something that had possibilities attached to it.

  He would reach as high as he could.

  Not because he was certain he would reach the height the promises required. But because the alternative was not reaching, and not reaching was not a thing he was willing to choose when reaching was available.

  He would bleed in this training, as he had told Joran, and he would fail, as he had told Joran, and he would fail again, and somewhere in the failing there would be the not failing, and the not failing would accumulate into something that bore some relationship to the heights the promises described.

  One day.

  He wiped his face.

  The cycling pattern ran steady in his chest, the cuffs monitoring it with their patient Ethra, the afternoon sun warm on his face. Below him, Jade Peak continued its ordinary business with the indifference of a place that has a great deal going on and does not pause for the private moments of Initiates on rooftops.

  He descended.

  He had a training hall to get to, and an elder who had expressed what getting there late would mean in terms he had elected to take seriously, and a satchel full of books to read before the next dawn, and a month before a duel that an elder had announced without consulting him.

  Somewhere in the compound a Disciple he had not yet found a way to reach, and somewhere else in the clan’s domain, a Revenant whose situation he could not currently influence, and beyond the compound's walls a surge that was coming on a timeline it had not been asked to share.

  He had a great deal to do.

  He did it one step at a time, which was the only available method, and walked toward the training hall with the Ethra moving through his body in its practiced configuration and his face carrying the particular composure of someone who has just made promises they intend to keep and has decided to begin immediately.