Gilded Ashes-Chapter 41: Pinned Lesson

Two students trailed behind them like guilty ducklings, trying not to stare.

"Wasn’t luck" one murmured. "I was right there. His foot hit, the tiles twitched, and he just... wasn’t where he’d been."

"People don’t move like that!" the other answered.

"Yeah. That’s what I mean."

Esen fell in step backwards, engaging in the conversation.

"I put chalk where Raizen’s legs hit" he said, delighted. "The pattern’s weird. He just told geometry to wait outside."

"Can you do it?" one asked.

Esen grinned. "That dash was kind of impossible. I can annoy angles and geometry, sure. It’s a start."

Raizen heard them without wanting to, but he smiled, them not knowing the toll it had on his body.

Kori took them beneath a set of carved arches into a long. Stained glass threw petal colors over the flagstones - crimson, rose, amber - and the images never repeated - each pane was the same badge they wore, in different forms.

Four points at first, then the points lengthening, then a crescent grew to cradle the star from below, then the full star nested inside the crescent, and finally a second crescent curving down from above, the true Vanguard crest complete.

Raizen’s eyes caught that final pane and held there for a few seconds too long.

That’s what he wanted. To become a real Vanguard.

"You’re not allowed to stare at that one for more than three seconds" Kori said lightly. "Don’t get too many ideas."

"Ideas? About what?" Keahi asked.

"About making you feel important before you’re useful."

They came out into the eastern court where the training grounds spread in order. Spar rings inlaid with dark wood, some archery lanes with targets painted like rotating petals. An enormous climbing tower with handholds that looked completely random, with no pattern. If you squinted, you’d see that it watched over all of the academy. Students were already working - forms that were more discipline than pure function, drills that made muscles learn to obey on command.

Two squads moved in unison near the far wall, something between a tactical dance and a threat. Their blades flashed, then pinned still in a perfect shape that had no weak points, if you looked closer. The instructor tapped a staff twice and the pattern shattered back into motion.

Raizen felt the urge to move sink into his bones - old habit, maybe, or hunger. His calves made a small, private complaint.

"Public grounds" Kori said. "You can spar anyone here as long as you promise you won’t blame me when you trip over your own legs. The huge climbing tower’s called Crown Spine. Don’t ask why, unless you want to hear Arashi deliver a lecture on architecture."

"It’s named for the crest line of the western facade" Arashi said on cue, without sounding smug about it. "Gothic curves want to meet at a point. The Crown Spire gives them that."

"See?" Kori chirped. "Never opens his mouth unless he can sound like a museum guide. I love it in general, but hate it sometimes."

They then entered a hall tucked behind the courts. It smelled like paper and ink. The first library appeared with no warning - a nave of shelves so tall they felt like towers, brass staircases curling up to galleries, lanterns that flickered from time to time.

Raizen tilted his head. If he closed his eyes he could feel a faint thrum under the floor – strange, but not magic. A machine’s heartbeat buried far below the stone.

"Main Library" Kori explained, keeping her voice low, respecting the library’s requirement of quiet. "Don’t touch the books if you don’t have permission. Unless you want to get yelled at by an archivist who has been alive since before sarcasm was invented. We have more libraries than sense. Half the city’s research heads got their first bad grades here. It’s almost sweet."

Lynea seemed to stand taller among the shelves. "We’ll be assigned reading lists?"

"You’ll be assigned reading lists, watching lists, crying because of lists, and nap on lists," Kori explained cheerfully. "Yes, Raizen, even you. Especially you. People who cut the world in straight lines need to learn how to read curves."

They wandered past tables where students hunched over blueprints and old maps, past a cluster of first years arguing about the correct way to inscribe a line of Eon so that it didn’t fail and rewrite your intentions. When Kori tugged her forward by the sleeve, Hikari almost apologized to the books she was staring at.

"You’ll get your turn" Kori promised. "For now, we’re collecting impressions. Library number one - impressive. Library number two - haunted. Library number three - has a tree in it for reasons nobody will explain to me."

"Trees improve cognition" Lynea said.

"Trees drop leaves on my notes" Kori said. "The relationship is adversarial."

They left the stacks for a corridor lined with arched windows. Beyond the glass, Neoshima fell away in levels, new glass buildings reflecting sunshine. The Academy’s detailed buildings mocked Neoshima’s minimalistic steel structures.

A tram streamed by on an elevated rail, lit from below so it looked like it was flying on a line of sunlight.

Far towards the horizon - much farther - the sea crashed its waves against the base of the cliffs.

In the next building, a long room held training dummies posing in rows, their surfaces scored with old cuts and new repairs. Each dummy could be set to a different resistance, stance and action. Keahi reached out, pressed a palm to one, then drew back like it had surprised her.

"They reset themselves..." she said.

"Obviously! Everything in here resets itself" Kori said. "Except my tolerance for people who decide they’re experts because they read half a page."

"If we want to be experts, we’ll need an instructor, right?" Keahi asked.

Esen rolled his shoulders like he was warming up for a joke. "And our instructor is you, Kori, right?"

"Yeah, most of times" Kori said. "Sometimes you’ll get a professor. Sometimes the Headmaster is bored and decides he wants to watch you cry. But yes. You’re in my class."

Esen flashed a grin that had charmed people into bad bets. "So why you?"

Kori tilted her head. "Because I’m very good at teaching people where the knife is before they notice they’ve been cut."

"Or because you’re not the strongest Phalanx alive" Esen continued. "And maybe the Headmaster wanted the heavy hitters on the upperclassmen. Nothing personal! Just trying to understand allocation of assets."

The room went still in that particular way rooms go still when someone says the thing nobody wanted to hear.

Kori’s smile didn’t move. Her hand did. It was a flick so small, but instant. Esen’s badge vanished from his chest like it had never existed. At the same instant, the sharp little pin that had secured it got pinned into the wooden dummy beside him so close to his eye that Esen’s eyelashes flinched, before he could blink.

Nobody breathed for exactly two seconds.

"Asset allocation" Kori said, still sunny. "Lesson one - don’t weigh a knife by the shine. Lesson two – I don’t like to say this, but I am, in fact, the strongest Phalanx alive."