Returning from a long two years, he recognized the shape of it before he recognized anything else. The mountain had not changed. That was the first and most disorienting thing about arriving, that the path up its eastern face was exactly as steep as he remembered, the same switchbacks, the same outcropping of grey stone halfway up where you could stop and see the valley spread out below. He had climbed this path more times than he could count as a boy, sometimes at a run because that was the exercise, sometimes slowly because he was injured and pretending not to be, and his feet found the old rhythm of it without effort, the body remembering what the mind had tried, in some ways, to leave behind. He reached the training ground by midafternoon.
It too had not changed. The same flattened clearing near the summit, ringed by old pines, the ground packed hard from years of feet moving across it in the same patterns. The weather had worn at the edges of things, softened what had once been sharp, but the bones of the place were exactly as they had been. The dummy still stood at the clearing's center.
It had been repaired many times over the years, he could see that now looking at it properly, new wood grafted onto old where the original had splintered under enough impact, the canvas wrapping replaced more recently than the frame beneath it. But its shape was unchanged. The crossbar arms. The weighted base that let it absorb a strike and return upright. The faded mark near its center where, as a boy, he had been told to aim. He stood in front of it for a long time.
He had hit this exact dummy more times than he could number. He had hit it as a child too small to make it move and as an adolescent strong enough to crack the frame and as a young man capable of strikes that would have ended most fights in one motion. He had hit it in anger and in exhaustion and in the particular numb discipline of training that had stopped being about emotion at all and had simply become what his hands did when given the order.
He drew his sword.
He did not decide to. His body had been moving toward this since the path's first switchback, the old patterns reasserting themselves the way old patterns did in places built specifically to hold them, and he found himself in the ready stance without having chosen it, the dummy in front of him exactly where it had always been.
He struck.
The first blow was clean, textbook, the kind of strike he had been taught before he had been taught anything else, the foundation everything else was built on. The dummy absorbed it and swung back upright, patient, waiting for the next one, the way it had always waited.
He struck again.
And again, the forms coming faster now, the old discipline taking over, and somewhere in the rhythm of it something shifted, the strikes growing harder than the forms called for, less precise and more forceful, the particular quality of violence that arrived when technique gave way to something underneath it. He was not fighting the dummy anymore.
He understood this somewhere in the part of him that was still watching, still aware, even as the rest of him had stopped being entirely present in the moment and had started being present in every moment at once, every version of himself that had ever stood in this clearing, every iteration of the boy and the adolescent and the young man who had hit this exact target for reasons that had always, eventually, belonged to someone else. He struck and saw, briefly, his own face.
Not literally. Not a vision in the way visions were sometimes described, nothing so clean as that. But the dummy's faded canvas held, for the length of a single strike, the impression of himself, the version that had trained obediently because obedience was what had been asked of him, the version that had never once stopped to ask what are you for because the question had not yet occurred to him as something that could be asked.
He struck harder.
The dummy swung back. He struck the next blow before it had fully settled, catching it off balance, and the frame groaned under an impact harder than the wood was built for.
ALX: You don't get to do this to me.
He said it to the dummy. To the version of himself it held. To the boy who had trained in this exact clearing believing, with complete and uncomplicated certainty, that the purpose of all of it would always be obvious, would always be given, would always arrive from somewhere outside himself in the form of someone who needed protecting.
ALX: You don't get to just disappear and leave me with nothing.
The next strike cracked something in the dummy's frame, an old repair giving way, and it swung back unevenly now, off its true axis, and Alexander did not stop. He moved through it with the full force of every version of himself that had ever stood here, the boy and the soldier and the man who had walked north for a week with no destination and a sword he had almost left behind, and he struck the dummy the way you struck something that represented every choice that had ever been made for you instead of by you. He was breathing hard. His arms ached with the particular ache of overexertion, the kind that arrived when you had pushed well past the point training called for and into something else entirely. He stopped.
The dummy hung crooked on its damaged frame, swaying slightly, the canvas torn in two places from the force of the last several strikes. He stood in front of it with his sword at his side and his chest heaving and looked at what he had done. He had not destroyed it.
It still stood, leaning, damaged but upright, the way it had always stood, patient, having absorbed everything thrown at it the way it had absorbed every strike of every version of him across every year he had trained here. He lowered the sword.
ALX: I don't know what I'm for.
He said it quietly this time, to the dummy, to the clearing, to the mountain that had not changed while he had changed entirely, and the admission arrived without the violence of the strikes that preceded it, just honest, just present, the thing he had not been able to say in the first clearing on the road and had not been able to say to Corwin and was finally, here, in the place that had made him what he was, able to say to no one but himself.
The mountain held its silence.
The wind moved through the old pines the way it always had, indifferent to the boy who had become a man here, indifferent to the dummy hanging crooked on its frame, indifferent to the particular weight of a question finally spoken aloud after weeks of being carried in silence.
Alexander sat down in the clearing.
He sat there until the light began to change, his sword across his knees, the dummy standing damaged and patient in front of him, and for the first time since leaving the city he did not feel the need to move, to walk further, to put distance between himself and the question. He had finally just asked it. That, he thought, sitting in the fading light on the mountain that had made him, might be its own kind of beginning.