Five years is a strange unit of time to live through and an even stranger one to look back on, because it never once feels like five years while it's happening.
It feels like a single, unbroken morning that simply refuses to end, laps bleeding into pull-ups bleeding into sparring bleeding into sleep, until one day a boy who couldn't hold a wooden practice sword without embarrassing himself looks up and discovers he's become something else entirely, without ever once noticing the exact moment the change occurred.
Ragna's first year as a Hichus was, by any honest measure, a humbling that made his three months as a Zochus look almost gentle by comparison.
The quota of laps climbed again before the season was half finished, and again after that, until the number stopped feeling like an obstacle and simply became the shape of a morning — something his body performed the way it breathed, without the conscious dread that had once accompanied every single circuit of that enormous courtyard. He fell more times that year than he could reasonably count, driven into the dirt by opponents who had, by that point, three or four additional years of training behind them that he simply didn't have and couldn't manufacture through effort alone.
He broke a wrist in his second spring, sparring an older Hichus trainee who outweighed him by nearly forty pounds, and spent six miserable weeks relearning his grip afterward, more frustrated by the lost time than by the injury itself.
But somewhere in the grinding, humiliating middle of that first year, the thing Andell had spoken about on his very first day as a Hichus — the choosing of a path, knight or defender — stopped being an abstract philosophical exercise and started, slowly, to shape the way Ragna actually fought. He noticed it first in small ways.
Where the trainees who'd chosen the knight's path fought with a kind of visible restraint, holding back the killing blow even in practice out of a discipline that had already begun calcifying into instinct, Ragna found himself reaching, more and more often, for whatever ending actually worked, unconcerned with whether it looked clean or honorable to whoever happened to be watching.
It cost him friends' respect, occasionally, in matches where a cleaner win would have looked more impressive. It won him considerably more matches than it lost him.
By his second year as a Hichus, he had stopped losing to Garrick entirely, the smithy twin's raw strength no longer sufficient on its own once Ragna had properly learned to read the half-second telegraph in his shoulders that Hale had first pointed him toward years earlier.
He drew with Ronan more often than he lost to him now, their contests settling into the kind of even, grinding back-and-forth that Hale privately admitted, to no one in particular, he enjoyed watching more than almost anything else the yard produced that season.
Iris remained, stubbornly, his most difficult opponent — patient, economical, willing to let him exhaust himself against a guard that simply refused to break through conventional means — and it was in trying, repeatedly and mostly unsuccessfully, to find a way past her patience that Ragna first began experimenting, quietly and without telling anyone, with the thing Wren had shown the entire Zochus cohort years before.
He was terrible at it, at first. Genuinely, embarrassingly terrible. His earliest attempts at drawing even a thread of his own Will into a blade produced results that ranged from nothing at all to a wooden practice sword that had, on one memorable and widely discussed occasion, simply caught fire in his hand mid-swing and forced him to drop it, smoking, into the dirt in front of an audience that had not let him forget it for the better part of a month.
Fire, it turned out, did not want to be coaxed gently into a controlled edge the way Wind apparently did.
It wanted to be everything, all at once, the moment it was given permission to exist at all, and learning to hold it to something as narrow and disciplined as a single blade's edge took him the better part of two full years of failed attempts, singed eyebrows, and one genuinely alarming incident involving a training dummy that had ended the afternoon considerably more thoroughly destroyed than the drill had called for.
The breakthrough, when it finally came, arrived on an unremarkable Tuesday in his third year as a Hichus, during a routine spar against Devren that neither of them would later be able to fully reconstruct the details of. Ragna reached, out of pure frustrated instinct rather than any careful, deliberate technique, for the same thread of controlled heat he'd been failing to properly draw for two years — and this time, for reasons neither he nor Andell nor Hale could fully explain afterward, it simply worked.
A thin line of contained flame traced itself along the edge of his practice blade, steady and narrow and entirely, finally, his to control, and the wooden sword that met it a moment later didn't merely block — it scorched clean through, sheared in half by an edge that had, a heartbeat earlier, been nothing more than blunted wood.
Devren, to his considerable credit, laughed about it before he complained about his ruined practice sword, which Ragna took as roughly the highest compliment available under the circumstances.
From that Tuesday forward, the shape of his training changed again, less about catching up to years he hadn't had and more about discovering what, specifically, a body that could hold fire without being burned by it and a mind that had finally learned to stop thinking mid-strike could actually accomplish together.
He was not, by his own honest assessment, the most skilled swordsman in his cohort by the end of that third year — Kelly had long since ascended into a tier of ability the rest of them simply weren't competing in, and Ronan's three generations of inherited discipline still gave him an edge in pure technical form that Ragna's more improvised, instinct-driven style couldn't fully match.
But he had become, by every measure that mattered to the people who actually sparred against him, dangerous in a way that made opponents hesitate before committing fully to an opening, uncertain whether the boy standing across from them was about to parry with steel or with something considerably hotter.
His fourth year brought fewer dramatic breakthroughs and considerably more quiet, unglamorous consolidation — the kind of training that rarely made for a good story afterward but that Hale insisted, repeatedly, mattered more in the long run than any single moment of sudden discovery.
Ragna spent that year refining rather than reaching, tightening the gap between the opening he saw and the strike he landed until the two arrived close enough together that observers stopped being able to tell where the seeing ended and the acting began.
He earned his first genuine victory over Ronan that year, a clean, decisive win that both of them privately agreed, afterward, had been a long time coming and neither of them entirely enjoyed as much as they'd expected to, because winning against a friend, it turned out, carried its own peculiar weight that winning against a stranger never quite managed.
He also, that same year, finally beat Iris — once, exactly once, in a match that took nearly twenty minutes of patient, grinding exchange before he found the single opening her endless patience had never quite managed to fully close.
She shook his hand afterward with genuine warmth and told him, plainly, that she expected it to be the last time it happened for at least another year, and she turned out, infuriatingly, to be almost entirely correct about that.
Alongside the sword, his magic continued its own quiet, parallel climb. He crossed into his sixth circle sometime in his thirteenth year, a fact Sentel still insisted he keep carefully to himself, and by fifteen he stood at seven — a number that, had it ever become public knowledge in the training yard, would have unraveled every careful assumption his fellow Hichus had built about the quiet, foundling boy who fought with fire and never once mentioned exactly how much of it he actually had access to.
He continued studying the Wills under Sentel's patient tutelage in whatever hours training didn't consume, and slowly, gradually, began to understand what she'd meant, years earlier, about Fire committing to a battlefield before it had finished developing — because the same impatience that had once made his magic hard to control had become, with enough discipline layered over it, something closer to decisiveness.
He stopped waiting for the perfect moment to act, in sparring and increasingly in the rest of his life as well, and started trusting that the moment he'd already chosen was good enough to commit to fully.
There were failures scattered generously throughout all of it, because five years of genuine growth is never a clean, uninterrupted upward line no matter how satisfying that version of the story would be to tell. He lost matches he should have won through simple carelessness.
He overextended a shoulder badly enough in his fourteenth year that he spent an entire month watching drills from the sideline rather than participating in them, an experience he found considerably more frustrating than any single defeat had ever managed to be.
He argued, more than once, with instructors who'd corrected him in ways his stubborn, improvised style resisted accepting, and lost those arguments every single time, because Hale and Andell had both, independently and without ever comparing notes on the matter, concluded that Ragna's greatest strength and his greatest weakness had always been the exact same trait — a fierce, occasionally reckless unwillingness to be told the safe way was the only way.
By the time his fifteenth year properly arrived, the boy who had once stood at the training yard's edge in an iron bracelet, hated quietly by nineteen strangers for a birthright he hadn't asked for, had become someone the same nineteen strangers — now closer to friends than rivals, in the particular hard-won way only years of shared exhaustion could produce — genuinely respected, without reservation and without remembering, most days, that there had ever been a reason not to.
And yet, for all of it — the circles climbed quietly in Sentel's tower, the strokes and Wills and the fire he'd finally learned to hold without burning, the years of laps and losses and the one perfect Tuesday everything had simply clicked — Ragna found himself, increasingly, thinking about the books still resting on the library's study table, untouched now for months but never quite forgotten. Enlightenment. The God Eyes. Four strokes, and a fifth that no one had ever managed to properly explain. A history that had called itself, plainly and without apology, the source of its own pain.
He was fifteen years old, seven circles deep, dangerous enough with a sword that grown instructors had stopped underestimating him by reflex, and he still did not know what he was for. Not in the way the Watchers, somewhere two hundred miles north, apparently already claimed to know. Not in the way a prophecy delivered before his birth had, according to fragments he'd overheard and never quite dared ask Sentel to confirm outright, already decided for him.
He thought about it on the long walk back from the yard one ordinary evening in late autumn, the training grounds behind him gone quiet in the fading light, five years of accumulated effort settled into his shoulders like something finally, properly earned rather than borrowed.
He thought about Chavilon's empty chair, about the fire that lived under his skin without ever burning it, about a title on an old book's spine that had refused, for months now, to let him rest easy with not knowing.
By the time he reached the manor steps, he had made a decision he suspected he'd been circling for considerably longer than the walk itself had taken.
He was going to the Tower of Eyes.
Not because Chavilon had once demanded it, years ago, in a council room Ragna hadn't been old enough to properly understand at the time. Not because the Watchers had summoned him, or because Sentel had decided he was finally ready by whatever quiet measure she'd been keeping since the night she first refused to send him away.
He was going because he was fifteen, and dangerous, and utterly, thoroughly tired of not knowing what all of it had been for.