The Dark
Chapter 10
The Dark
The mountain air carried the dry scent of approaching snow, that particular sharpness promising winter would arrive soon and without mercy. Merauve climbed the tower stairs, his mind still turning over Major Thorne’s warnings and flames dancing along Tachet’s edge. The blade nestled in his boot today: a small precaution that felt appropriate after last night’s visitation.
When he entered the tower room, he found Elenden at his usual seat by the window, but Elenden sat forward in his chair, shoulders tight. He rose, and the sea-blue eyes that turned to meet Merauve were wide, the muscles around them drawn taut.
“With whom have you been consorting?” The question came without preamble, Elenden’s voice carrying an urgency that cut through the tower room.
Merauve paused mid-stride, his hand moving unconsciously toward his belt where Tachet usually rested, a movement that now felt foolishly transparent. Instead, he smoothed his uniform with deliberate calm.
But Elenden’s gaze dropped, fixing on Merauve’s boot as though recognizing an imminent threat. His right hand moved in a sharp, decisive gesture: fingers splayed wide, then closing into a fist before opening again with violent rejection. The movement spoke of absolute negation, of something that must be cast away.
In that instant, Merauve felt something snap—not physically, but in some space between thought and sensation. A cord severed, a tether cut. The feeling was so distinct, so unexpected, that he stumbled slightly, catching himself on a stuttered step. Tachet seemed to ring in his boot, and for just a moment, he could have sworn it felt warm.
“What did you just—”
“It’s all over you.” Not a question. Elenden’s eyes returned to Merauve’s face, and in them was something that might have been pity. “The shadow clings to you like smoke. And that blade... was ensnared...” He shook his head slowly. “What happened?”
Heat rose in Merauve’s chest, not the controlled burn of irritation, but something rawer. His prisoner was questioning him like a schoolboy. The absurdity of it, the sheer presumption, made his jaw clench with fury.
“You forget yourself. I am the interrogator here, not you.” The words came clipped, each one a blade: “You. Will. Remember. Your. Place. Or I will ensure that our current... hospitalities... come to an immediate end.”
Elenden studied him with those impossibly steady eyes, seeming to look past the threat to something deeper. Seconds of silence stretched between them, anticipation building like an unresolved chord increasing in dissonance. Merauve felt his rage building, a pressure behind his eyes that demanded release. This could end right now. Perhaps it should end right now. His thoughts turned to Tachet, imagining the bend, the grip, the throw, the rotation that would be required.
Then, as surely as it had come, the anger began to ebb. Not naturally, but like water draining through sand, leaving him oddly hollow. He blinked, trying to recapture the fury that had seemed so justified moments before, but it slipped away like smoke through his fingers.
Elenden exhaled. “Of course,” he said quietly, his voice gentle. “Threats are unnecessary. I gave my word to tell you truth, and I shall. I merely wished to caution you that you are trafficking in more than you know.”
Merauve straightened to his full height. His professional mask slipped back into place, though he could still feel the cracks in its foundation. “Your concern is irrelevant, but noted.”
Elenden nodded slowly, but before turning back to the window, he spoke once more. “The Dark leave shadows, Inquisitor. On blades, on souls... on contracts. The Dark is not content merely to corrupt: it moves to consume.”
“You know nothing of—”
“I know enough.” Elenden’s interruption was soft but final. “I know that last night a servant of shadow dressed in the light stood in your quarters and made promises that tasted sweet as honey. I know that your blade has been... handled. Given new purpose; it hungers. And I know that you stand at many crossroads, though you cannot yet see all paths before you.”
The accuracy of it, the casual certainty with which Elenden spoke of things that should have been impossible to know... He forced himself to settle calmly into his chair, withdrawing his tobacco pouch with hands that wanted to tremble.
“Your truth,” he said, pleased that his voice remained steady. “You were about to describe your time in Earth School, I believe?”
Elenden turned back to the window, and when he spoke again, his voice had taken on that now-familiar cadence of memory given voice.
“Yes.” Elenden took a steadying breath, rare for him. “After the Wisdom Council, I climbed high above the monastery to think...”
They gave me the day, really my first sanctioned rest since I arrived, and I knew I needed to escape the monastery’s walls. My mind churned with the morning’s events: five schools in five seasons, and somehow Master Limerick claiming me for the mysterious Fifth. The undyed wrappings he’d given me felt odd in my hands.
The paths that wound upward from the monastery beckoned like wise friends offering counsel. Near the gates, the stones had been worn smooth by countless feet seeking solitude or revelation. But I pushed past these comfortable meditation spots, drawn upward by a need I couldn’t name, climbing into terrain that demanded attention lest it exact its price in bruises.
What called to me was a scree slope that whispered with the metallic song of shifting stones. Here was no place for the careless, yet I was thirteen and still believed my body’s promises of invincibility. The moors had taught me to dance across uncertain ground, hadn’t they? Surely this was merely another variation on the theme.
The mountain had other lessons in mind.
I was stepping from what seemed a reliable foothold when the world tilted. Not gradually, but with a sudden cascade. The stones beneath my feet became water, flowing away in a betrayal that took me with it. I remember the strange clarity of that moment—how the sky wheeled overhead, how each moment seemed stretched out, how each attempt to recover felt like another hope dashed, how my wrappings tore.
When stillness finally returned, I lay among the stones like one of them, breathing hard and taking inventory. My palms had paid the highest price, opened in places that would make tonight’s chores an education in endurance. My shins bore their own geography of insults. But nothing was broken except my assumption of easy victory over the mountain’s face.
There’s a difference between persistence born of wounded pride and Fortitude rooted in something larger than ourselves. I wondered, as I gathered myself and continued upward, which force now drove me: the boy who wouldn’t admit defeat, or something else.
The ledge I finally reached seemed less a destination than a gift. Here, where the stone drew back into itself, creating a shallow cave just large enough for contemplation, I could rest my back against the mountain’s back and look out over all I’d left below. The monastery spread beneath me like a text written in architecture. From this height, patterns emerged that proximity had hidden: the buildings weren’t scattered according to convenience but arranged in a deliberate mandala, each structure intentionally placed. Even the paths between buildings traced sacred geometry—the most traveled routes forming the edges of a vast flat cube inscribed upon the earth. Clever. Something no one would know without this vantage.
I unwound the wrappings Master Limerick had given me, spreading them across my bloodied palms. The afternoon light, thin and precious at this altitude, revealed what casual observation had missed. The weave itself. Where my original wrappings had been plain, these carried a secret: tiny pentagons woven throughout the fabric, connected by threads that caught light differently.
Five-sided figures for the Fifth school. Of course.
I thought back to all the undyed students I’d seen in my weeks at the monastery. How many were truly uncommitted, waiting for their calling? And how many wore these subtle markers of the Fifth, hiding in plain sight among those still searching? It was, I realized, a perfect disguise: to be unremarkable was to be invisible, to be undyed was to be dismissed as unimportant.
As I wound these new wrappings around my torn hands, it felt like belonging.
Master Limerick’s parting words returned to me: “Listen well.”
Here, pressed between stone and sky, seemed the perfect place to attempt what I’d been trained and told to do. I closed my eyes and tried to quiet the chorus of my thoughts—about the council, about the schools and seasons, about what it meant to be claimed by Master Limerick.
At first, the world offered only its usual music: wind playing the mountain’s edges like a flute, the distant percussion of monastery sounds, the whisper of my own breathing still ragged from the climb. But as my inner noise subsided, something else emerged. Not sound, but the presence of emotion.
Joy. Fierce, unreasonable, absolute joy radiating from the stone at my back.
I opened my eyes and turned, confused by the intensity of the feeling. There, in a crack so narrow it might have been drawn with a knife, a single plant had claimed its space. Nothing remarkable to look at—some mountain flower whose name I never learned, its leaves more grey than green. Yet it blazed with life, with the profound satisfaction of existence against all probability.
The feeling was so unexpected, so pure, that laughter bubbled up from somewhere deeper than my throat. I felt like I had just been told a secret. Here was this insignificant plant, growing where growth should be impossible, and something knew it was there, something was proud of it – I was proud of it. Every fiber of this little tuft was filled with vicarious life, of forcing roots into stone, of drinking light from a stingy sky.
It felt like the Truth was taking me into its confidence, sitting here up high where we could see the cube shape of the monastery drawn in the ant-like lines of acolytes traveling between buildings, the fortitude of that little plant and the joy of life it brings.
As that feeling faded, something else rose to take its place. What started as gentle concern gradually amplified into sharp recognition. Someone I cared about was in danger? The feeling came with images: shadows that had weight and malice, darkness reaching with fingers that were not fingers.
Master Limerick. He was in trouble.
He was the only master who had claimed me, the only one who had looked past what I was to glimpse what I might become. If something happened to him before I could even begin to understand what he’d seen in me...
“Please,” I heard myself say, the word carried away on wind that suddenly felt colder. “Please take care of him.”
I didn’t know whom I was addressing. The mountain? The plant in its crevice? The Truth? The words felt both necessary and futile.
No answer came. No cosmic reassurance, no sense of being heard. Just wind and stone and the growing shadows of late afternoon. But I sat with that concern for Master Limerick, holding it like a prayer until the monastery bells below began marking the evening hour.
Evening bells already! I had lost all track of time. Kitchen duty waited after the evening meal, and I was a mile away from where I needed to be. The descent proved even more treacherous than the climb, loose stones eager to send me sliding again, adding fresh scrapes to my collection. By the time I reached the monastery gates, the dining hall was already emptying, students heading to their evening tasks with the dutiful rhythm of this place.
I hurried to the kitchens, expecting to find Gregorin’s predictable displeasure at my tardiness.
“Cutting it close,” a familiar voice observed as I skidded to a halt just inside the doorway.
I found Brother Abram at one of the massive sinks, his sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms corded with strength from decades of honest labor. Since that first day when he’d shown me the Arthis flower’s secret, I’d rarely seen him outside of passing encounters in corridors. Yet here he was, up to his elbows in suds, looking as though he did this every night.
“Brother Abram,” I said, surprised. “I didn’t expect... I mean, I haven’t seen you in the kitchens before.”
His smile was kind, patient as mountain stone. “The monastery teaches that no work is beneath any of us. Every task, properly approached, becomes a form of prayer.” His eyes took in my general dishevelment: scraped hands, torn wrappings, the detritus of afternoon adventure clinging to my robes. “It seems the mountain has already begun your education.”
“I fell,” I admitted, suddenly aware of how foolish my afternoon expedition must appear to someone who had probably walked these paths for decades.
“If the Spirit did not permit suffering, we would not know our limits nor our shortcomings. We would not grow deep roots,” he replied, neither dismissing nor dwelling on my injuries. “Master Kairn has asked me to guide you through these coming months of Earth study. We’ll work together most evenings so we can share what we’re learning together.”
He hung his apron on a nearby peg with the same intentional movement he’d given to the dishwashing. “But first, let’s tend to those hands properly. Fortitude doesn’t mean abandoning wisdom; suffering needlessly when healing is available is vanity.”
As I followed him, my mind drifted back to that moment of shared joy on the mountainside: the sense that something vast and loving had allowed me to feel what it felt, to know its delight in small, secret life.
The memory warmed me, but it couldn’t quite silence my stomach’s complaints. I was, after all, a thirteen-year-old boy who had missed his meals, though I dared not mention my hunger, lest it, too, seem like vanity.
Dawn brought the bells heralding the morning, their bronze voices echoing off the stone walls. The first meal followed in companionable chatter, accented by the soft sounds of wooden spoons against earthenware bowls. Then came the dispersal to morning duties: some to the gardens, others to workshops, still others to the careful maintenance that kept our mountain sanctuary functioning.
For me, that meant joining Brother Abram in whatever task he’d chosen for the day. Sometimes we tended the herb gardens, learning to read the subtle signs that distinguished thriving plants from struggling ones. Other days found us in the workshops, where he taught me to read the grain of wood before attempting to cut it. “Everything has its way,” he would say, his weathered hands demonstrating techniques my eyes could follow but my muscles were still learning.
I enjoyed those sessions with Brother Abram and wished they lasted the entire day. Instead, I would head off every other day to scholarly instruction. While every monastery taught the basics of all subjects, each specialized in a particular area of learning. Earth School’s focus was geometry—encompassing mathematics, algebra, applied calculations for logistics, and the structural physics that governed how things stood or fell. Because of my accelerated path through all five schools, I would study each monastery’s specialization directly rather than receiving their diverse weekly lessons alongside regular students.
This meant my geometry classes were populated mostly by students from Air, Water, Fire, and Spirit schools who had been sent to Earth specifically for mathematical instruction. The Earth students themselves received a broader curriculum throughout their stay, touching on other subjects like rhetoric, life sciences, logic, and philosophy in their regular rotation.
I had always assumed mathematics to be a minor art—useful for merchants, perhaps, but hardly essential for a third son whose future lay in... well, whatever futures third sons typically claimed. My education had touched on numbers only lightly, focusing instead on the social graces my mother deemed more appropriate. This proved to be a costly miscalculation.
Brother Matthias was perhaps fifty years of age. His movements never wavered—each gesture executed with exactness. His voice carried no warmth, no encouragement, only the inexorable presentation of mathematical truth.
“Geometry,” he announced to our small class on that first afternoon, “is the language with which the Creator spoke the world into being. Circles, triangles, squares—these are not inventions but discoveries. These are the building blocks of eternal principles.” His chalk scratched across the slate board with mechanical precision. “You will learn to speak this language fluently, or you will fail to understand the very foundations upon which our world rests, and you will fail my class.”
Our class was an unusual mixture. Alongside myself sat Pait and Sebastian—my grey-wrapped friend who had taught me proper binding techniques, and the red-wrapped boy whose steady presence had made kitchen work bearable. Both had been struggling with math in their respective monasteries and had been sent to Earth School for specialized instruction. It was not lost on me that my closest friendships were being forged among the academically struggling.
“The cube,” Brother Matthias continued, drawing perfect lines with confident movements, “represents Earth and Fortitude. Four equal sides, four right angles, absolute stability. But observe...” He began adding diagonal lines. “Within every square lives the potential for triangles, smaller squares, an infinite regression of possibility contained within apparent simplicity.”
I watched Sebastian lean forward, lamplight from the window catching the copper in his hair as his eyes tracked the emerging patterns. Pait frantically copied the diagram while occasionally glancing around seeking confirmation that confusion was universal. A strand of brown hair had fallen across his eyes, and he kept blowing it away with quick puffs—a gesture so unconsciously comical that I had to suppress a smile despite my own bewilderment.
“Elenden,” Brother Matthias said without turning from the board, somehow sensing my wandering attention. “Perhaps you can tell us the relationship between the diagonal of a square to its side?”
The silence that followed felt pregnant with impending disaster. I stared at the diagram, willing understanding to spontaneously generate, but the lines remained stubbornly meaningless.
“I... that is...” I cleared my throat. “The diagonal appears longer?”
A collective wince rippled through the class. Brother Matthias turned slowly, his expression the particular disappointment reserved for students who had failed to grasp even the most elementary concepts.
“Appears longer,” he repeated, investing the words with enough condescension to flatten mountains. “Young man, mathematics does not deal in appearances. It deals in facts. Precise, measurable, eternal truth.” He approached my desk with the measured steps of an executioner. “The diagonal of a square is exactly the square root of two times the length of its side. This is not opinion. This is not approximation. This is Truth.” He said the last with the finality of the mantra.
The term “square root” meant nothing to me, though I nodded as if the concept was merely slipping my mind temporarily rather than being entirely foreign.
“Furthermore,” Brother Matthias continued, “this relationship holds whether we speak of a square drawn in sand or carved in stone, whether it measures the breadth of a thumbnail or the span of a kingdom. The ratio remains constant because it reflects the unchanging nature of geometric truth.”
I felt heat rising in my cheeks, not just from embarrassment but from a growing frustration with the entire experience. What did knowing the length of a diagonal have to do with the practical business of living?
Brother Matthias smiled with satisfaction.
“I can see the question forming behind your eyes. ‘What use is this?’ you wonder. ‘How does this serve virtue?’” He returned to the board, adding new lines with precise strokes. “Consider: when an architect designs a tower, he must understand these relationships or watch his creation fall. When a craftsman cuts stone, he must respect these proportions or see his work crack...”
He drew what I recognized as a pattern similar to the monastery’s layout viewed from my mountainside perch.
“The very ground upon which this monastery rests was designed according to geometric principles. The placement of each building, the width of each path, the proportions of each room—all calculated to create harmony, stability, function.” His chalk tapped against the board for emphasis. “Geometry is not abstract philosophy. It is the foundation upon which the physical world rests.”
Despite my incompetence, hunger for this knowledge stirred within me. The idea that the layout could be understood through mathematical relationships, that there might be hidden order underlying what had seemed like natural growth...
“Your assignment,” Brother Matthias announced as the afternoon bells began their marking of the hour, “is to measure and calculate the proportions of your own chambers. Length, width, height, and all diagonal relationships. Tomorrow we will discuss what those measurements reveal about the principles underlying our daily environment.”
As we gathered our materials and prepared to depart for evening duties, Sebastian caught up with me in the corridor.
“Don’t let Matthias discourage you,” he said quietly. “He’s harsh, but he’s not unfair. The work gets easier once you start seeing the patterns.” His smile carried genuine encouragement. “Besides, at least we’ll all get through this together.”
Pait nodded agreement, but I’m not sure he believed it; I wasn’t sure I believed it.
Their friendship became one of the unexpected gifts of this place. My mother’s protections and my father’s ambitions had isolated me my whole life. Having companions who shared my struggles was like discovering relatives I hadn’t known existed.
The evening’s duties varied according to the monastery’s needs. Sometimes we worked in the kitchens under Gregorin’s gruff supervision. Other evenings found us in the gardens, harvesting herbs for the various workshops and the infirmary. Tonight’s assignment took me to the latter: gathering the particular mountain plants that Brother Merin—the monastery’s chief physick — required for his ministrations.
The herb gardens sprawled across terraced southern slopes starting from the main courtyard and moving down, positioned to catch both morning and evening light while remaining protected from the harshest mountain winds. Brother Abram had taught me to recognize the plants by their scents as much as their appearance: the sharp bite of feverfew, the soothing sweetness of chamomile, the complex earthiness of valerian root.
As I worked my way through the physick’s list, filling my gathering basket with careful attention to quality, the evening light painted the monastery with the greys of winter’s onset. From this vantage point, I could see the geometric patterns Brother Matthias had described: the way paths intersected at precise angles, how the spacing between terraces, buildings, and plants created pleasing proportions, the subtle mathematics supporting the light and protecting against the weather.
My basket filled, I made my way to the infirmary with the satisfaction that came from meaningful work well done. The building occupied the monastery’s quietest corner, positioned away from the workshops and training areas where noise might disturb those requiring rest.
Brother Merin met me at the door while directing an assistant to fetch more water. He was around forty, grey touching his temples. His hands were steady as he reached for the basket, his eyes already cataloging its contents before he’d fully taken it from me.
“Ah, Elenden. Excellent timing.” He accepted the basket with obvious relief. “I’m particularly in need of the arnica—we have a patient requiring its specific properties.”
As he sorted through my gathering, checking each plant for quality and proper preparation, I caught a glimpse of the infirmary’s interior. Clean white walls, narrow beds in neat rows, the sharp scent of vinegar and healing herbs.
In one of the far beds, I thought I recognized a familiar figure: Fiske, the older Earth student who had defended me from harassment during my first week. He looked diminished, pale, his shoulders curved inward beneath the blankets.
Brother Merin noticed my stare. “You know Fiske?”
“He... helped me when I first arrived.”
The physick’s expression softened slightly. “He’s fortunate to be recovering well. Both of them are, considering what they faced.”
“Both?”
“Fiske and Willem—another Earth student. They accompanied Master Limerick when he went to deal with the Dark a few days back.” Brother Merin spoke with toneless seriousness. “What they encountered... well,” he gave me an assessing look, “perhaps it would help for Fiske to tell it. The burden of bearing such experiences alone can impede healing.”
He led me into the infirmary’s quiet interior, past beds occupied by monks recovering from various ailments—a brother who had taken a fall in the workshops, another suffering from a fever. Fiske sat propped against several pillows, his legs stretched out beneath blankets. When he saw me approach, his eyes kindled with something like relief.
“The dancing boy,” he said, his voice carrying most of its former strength. “Good. I’m glad you made it through the council.” He gestured ruefully toward his feet. “I won’t be dancing for a few more days, but Brother Merin says the feeling should return completely.”
Overcome by curiosity, I blurted out: “What happened?”
Brother Merin arranged a chair beside the bed, then settled onto a nearby stool. “Sometimes revisiting difficult experiences helps the mind process what the spirit has endured. If you’re willing, Fiske?”
Fiske’s eyes found mine and held them. Silence stretched between us. I nearly spoke up to excuse myself, but he began before I could.
“We followed Master Limerick down the south face trail,” he began, his voice gaining strength as he settled into the rhythm of testimony. “Willem and I. Master Limerick said the threat was significant but manageable—something about boundaries. He implied that the confrontation probably wouldn’t be physical, but we were there in case it was.”
He paused, his mind settling into the story.
“Master Limerick moved ahead of us, seeming to know exactly where we should leave the trail, where the lightest undergrowth and easiest crossings would be.”
“We found them waiting in a clearing that shouldn’t have existed—a perfect circle of dead earth surrounded by living forest. Five figures in dark robes that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. When they moved...” Fiske shuddered. “They moved wrong.”
Brother Merin leaned forward slightly, listening like he was cataloguing symptoms. “What happened?”
“The one in the center stood taller than the others, and when he spoke, his voice sounded like multiple people speaking the same words. Discordant. It made my teeth ache. He seemed to know Master Limerick by name—but he called him other names I’ve never heard, or in some other language.” Fiske’s eyes grew distant. “The tall one said something about ancient agreements, about boundaries that had been ‘renegotiated.’”
“What did Master Limerick do?” I asked.
“He laughed.” Fiske’s weak smile held traces of wonder. “Not nervous laughter, but genuine amusement. As if a child had declared themselves emperor.” His expression grew serious. “Then he turned to Willem and me, his right hand signed danger. ‘Hold hands,’ he said quietly. ‘Stand fast.’”
“Did you?”
“We tried. But it happened so fast...” Fiske struggled for words. “Master Limerick raised his head. Held both hands out flat before him, palms to the sky, and started singing.” Fiske shook his head, “I couldn’t make out the words, but the melody felt simple and... old?”
Brother Merin made a soft sound of curiosity.
“The Dark ones began to scream.” One of Fiske’s hands clenched into a fist. “Not with voices—like metal tearing and glass shattering, all at once, aimed at my chest. I shut my eyes and dropped Willem’s hand to cover my ears—that was a huge mistake. Through my earth sense, I felt it crawling up through the ground itself. Ice-cold numbness starting at my feet, creeping upward like death.”
He paused, accepting the cup of tea-steeped water Brother Merin offered.
Fiske continued: “Willem fell first. The cold reached his heart and he just... stopped. Collapsed like a marionette with severed strings. I tried to reach toward him, but the numbness was past my knees, climbing toward my chest. I thought I was going to die.”
“How did you resist?”
“I didn’t, really. I started listening to Master Limerick’s song.” Fiske’s voice carried wonder. “It took all my concentration to listen. The melody was so simple, so clear; when I lost it, I found myself forgetting anything but that encroaching numbness. When I focused on the singing, I could remember who I was, where I was...”
“The battle, if you could call it that, seemed to last forever. Master Limerick never raised his voice, never strained. He just kept singing into that clearing. And gradually the screaming began to fade. Irrelevant. Like shadows fleeing from sunrise.”
“When silence finally returned, the Dark weren’t there. Simply gone, as if they had never existed. I could swear the light seemed brighter in that clearing... “
Fiske’s voice caught slightly, and I saw his eyes grow bright. “A bird called then—just a simple mountain thrush. But hearing it...” He paused, wiping at his eyes with obvious embarrassment. “I hadn’t realized until that moment how beautiful those things were. During the attack, I thought I’d never hear anything lovely again: only that screaming darkness. When that little bird sang...” He struggled for words.
“And Master Limerick?”
“Standing just where he began, but...” Fiske searched for words. “Distant? Like he’d poured everything he was into that song and was only slowly remembering anything outside of it.” His voice dropped.
“What did he do about Willem?”
“Knelt beside him and spoke—just one or two words, so quiet I couldn’t hear it. Then he touched Willem’s forehead.” Fiske’s eyes brightened slightly. “Willem’s eyes opened immediately, like he’d been having a pleasant nap. No confusion, no fear. Just... awake. Unfortunately, our legs were not as quickly revived.”
“What did Master Limerick say happened?”
“Very little on the way back. Willem kept asking questions, but Master Limerick would only say that some boundaries needed defending, and that he was sorry we’d been exposed to that.” Fiske shook his head. “When I pressed him about the song, he just said he’d been ‘reminding the darkness about the light.’ It was hard to walk with numbed legs, but we managed. He delivered us to the infirmary, made certain Brother Merin understood our condition, then said he needed to speak with Master Kairn before he left. Haven’t seen him since.”
Brother Merin considered us for a long moment. “Master Limerick has many responsibilities beyond teaching. The monastery exists in... delicate balance with forces that would prefer we didn’t exist at all.” He touched Fiske’s shoulder gently. “Rest now. Your legs will be stronger tomorrow.”
Tomorrow would bring the morning bells and the beginning of martial training with the war hammer. The rhythm of monastic life would continue, as it had for centuries.