Mira went very still at the sound of her own name, her hands tightening briefly around the practice sword she'd been holding with the particular loose, uncertain grip of someone who had spent considerably more time reading about combat than practicing it, and beside Arthur, Elsie leaned forward with open interest.
SUT: Doyle. Pryce.
ELS: Oh, this should be good.
ART: Should it?
ELS: Talon's never once looked at her without going slightly soft in the face. Watch.
Mira crossed to the ring first, her shoulders drawn inward, and Talon followed a moment later, and Arthur, watching the exchange, understood almost immediately what Elsie had meant. Talon's usual composed, watchful expression, the one he wore at Corin's side like a second skin, had softened into something considerably less guarded the moment Mira came into view, and he took his position across from her with visible reluctance, his practice sword held at an angle that suggested he had already, before the match even began, decided something about how this was going to go.
SUT: Begin.
Mira raised her blade in a stance that was, charitably, more theoretical than practiced, her weight distributed wrong, her grip too tight, and Talon looked at her for a long moment, and did not move at all.
MRA: You're supposed to attack.
TLN: I know.
MRA: Then why aren't you.
Talon considered the question with visible discomfort, glancing briefly toward the sidelines where Corin stood watching with his arms crossed, and then back at Mira, and something in his expression settled into quiet, resigned defeat.
TLN: I can't.
MRA: You can't?
TLN: I don't want to hit you.
He said it plainly, without embarrassment, the particular simple honesty of someone who had clearly already made peace with how this admission was going to sound out loud, and lowered his sword entirely, letting the tip rest against the packed earth.
TLN: You can win. I concede.
Mira stared at him, her own sword still raised in its uncertain, theoretical stance, clearly uncertain how to process a duel that had ended before it had properly begun.
MRA: That's not how this works.
TLN: I'm aware.
MRA: You're supposed to try.
TLN: I did try. I tried very hard, for about four seconds, to imagine swinging a sword at you, and I found I simply couldn't manage it.
Instructor Sutton, watching from the ring's edge, pinched the bridge of his nose with the particular long-suffering weariness of a man whose training exercises kept producing results he had not remotely accounted for in his lesson plan.
SUT: Pryce. This is a graded exercise.
TLN: I understand, sir. I accept whatever grade that earns me. I still can't do it.
Across the yard, several students had begun to laugh, quiet at first and then less quiet, and Corin, still watching with his arms crossed, closed his eyes briefly in what might have been embarrassment on his friend's behalf, or might simply have been resignation. Mira, still holding her uncertain stance, looked at Talon for a long moment, something working behind her pale, careful eyes.
MRA: You could at least pretend.
TLN: I'm not very good at pretending. It's rather a flaw of mine.
MRA: This is ridiculous.
TLN: I agree completely.
She lowered her sword slowly, and something in her expression, guarded as it usually was, cracked just slightly at the edges, a small, reluctant curve at the corner of her mouth that she seemed to be actively fighting against.
SUT: ...Match to Doyle, by concession. Pryce, see me after class.
TLN: Yes, sir.
He said it with the easy, unbothered acceptance of someone who had already decided the outcome was worth whatever consequence followed it, and Mira, sheathing her practice sword, walked past him back toward the sidelines with her cheeks faintly, unmistakably pink, and did not look back to see the small, helpless smile Talon wore as he watched her go.
Soul Theory occupied the academy's western lecture hall, considerably smaller and quieter than the Alchemy amphitheater, and Instructor Pratt stood at its front with the particular precise, unhurried composure of someone who had never once needed to raise her voice to command a room's attention.
PRT: Today we discuss origins. Where souls come from. Why some carry abilities and others, historically, have not.
She said the last part without looking directly at Arthur, though he felt the sentence land regardless, and continued without pause.
PRT: The oldest texts describe souls as fragments. Pieces broken from something larger, something that existed before the current shape of the world settled into place. Most scholars agree the metaphor is imprecise, but it persists because it captures something true. A soul is not the whole of a person. It is a piece of something, carrying within it the particular shape of what that larger something once was.
FNN: What was the larger thing?
PRT: Nobody knows. That's rather the point of calling it a fragment. You cannot examine the whole from a single piece, only infer its possible shape.
She moved to the room's central table, where a series of old, careful diagrams sat spread across the surface, faded illustrations of interconnected shapes that Arthur found himself leaning forward to examine despite understanding little of what they actually depicted.
PRT: Abilities, in this framework, are understood as the particular resonance of a fragment. Every fragment carries a different shape, and that shape, when a person is born, expresses itself as whatever ability we eventually see manifest. Lightning. Wind. The capacity to make one's shadow move independently. All of it, according to the old theory, simply different shapes of the same broken thing.
BRR: What determines the shape?
PRT: Also unknown. Family lines show weak correlation at best, which contradicts simpler inheritance theories. The prevailing academic position, and I stress this is a position, not a settled fact, is that the shape is assigned at the moment of birth by some property of the fragment itself interacting with the specific circumstances of that birth. Where. When. Under what stars, some of the older, less rigorous texts insist, though I'd encourage you not to repeat that particular theory in an examination.
A ripple of quiet laughter moved through the room.
PRT: What we do know, with reasonable confidence, is this. A soul ability is not learned. It is not earned. It is not, in any meaningful sense, chosen. It simply is, the way a fragment's shape simply is, fixed before the person carrying it ever draws breath.
She looked up from the table, her eyes moving briefly across the room, and this time, unmistakably, they paused on Arthur.
PRT: Which makes certain exceptions considerably more interesting to study than the rule itself.
She did not elaborate further, moving instead into the next portion of the lecture, something concerning the historical documentation of ability manifestation across different provinces, and Arthur, sitting with the weight of that brief, pointed pause still settling into him, found himself wondering, not for the first time, exactly how much Instructor Pratt already suspected about the particular shape of whatever fragment he did or did not carry.