Chapter 6: The weight of training

Winter in the mountains is a thing of brutal beauty. The snow falls with an almost ceremonial precision, layering itself across the landscape in progressively deeper drifts. The mornings are bitter cold—cold that seeps into your bones and makes you question whether you'll ever feel warm again. But there's also a strange clarity to it, as if the cold strips away everything unnecessary and leaves you facing only what matters.

Solace's training did that for us—stripped away the unnecessary and forced us to face what we actually were. Survivors, mostly. People who hadn't asked for the ability to fight, but found ourselves in a situation where that ability might be the only thing standing between us and extinction.

The first week was brutal. Solace worked us through basic forms—sword work, staff fighting, archery for those with the aptitude for it. My arm, freshly healed, protested vehemently, but I pushed through it. Solace had a way of making weakness feel like personal failure, and personal failure was something I'd learned to hate in the weeks since the attack.

"Again," Solace said as I stumbled through the third repetition of a basic sword form. "And this time, actually feel the weight of the blade. You're treating it like it's made of air. A real sword has weight. It has momentum. You need to learn to work with that, not against it."

I repositioned myself and began again, trying to feel the weight she was talking about. The wooden practice sword felt substantial in my hands now, an extension of my body rather than a foreign object I was awkwardly trying to control.

"Better," Solace said. "Dovette, show her the proper stance for the third position. Raina, watch her. Really watch her."

Dovette moved into the stance Solace described, and I could see immediately what I'd been doing wrong. My weight was too far forward, putting me off-balance. Dovette was perfectly centered, her weight distributed evenly, ready to move in any direction.

"The body is a weapon," Solace said, addressing the entire training group. "The sword is just a tool. But if your body isn't properly centered, properly strong, then the tool is useless. You'll tire quickly. You'll leave yourself open. You'll die."

There it was again—that constant refrain. You'll die. Die if you don't train. Die if you're weak. Die if you fail. Die if the Scourge comes back. Solace seemed to believe that the only way to motivate us was to keep death constantly in front of our faces, a thing that was always waiting, always hungry, always watching.

Maybe she was right. Because as the weeks went on, we stopped being a group of shocked survivors and started being something closer to actual fighters. Not good fighters—we weren't anywhere near Solace's level or even Vex's. But competent enough that I could spar with someone without immediately disarming myself, competent enough that I could actually hit a target with a bow, at least occasionally.

The training became almost meditative as the winter deepened. There was a rhythm to it—wake up, eat a quick breakfast, move to the courtyard, train until your body screamed at you to stop, eat, rest, and then prepare yourself to do it all again the next day. It was simple in a way that my old life had never been, simple in a way that required no thought, no decision-making, no anticipation of disaster.

It was almost restful.

But it couldn't last, because in mid-December, Vex returned from one of her scouting expeditions with news that changed everything.

She looked worse than I'd ever seen her—her face was gaunt, her left arm was bandaged heavily, and there was a kind of desperate urgency in her eyes. Corvin hustled her inside immediately, and the rest of us were kept away from the initial conversation.

But rumors spread quickly in the keep. Someone had overheard. Someone had seen something. By evening, everyone knew.

"The creatures," one of the younger refugees said, his voice shaking. "The Scourge. They're moving again. Vex saw them. A whole group of them, heading southeast, toward Karenthel."

"They're going to attack the city," someone else said. "They're going to destroy it like they destroyed Millbrook."

The panic that had been simmering beneath the surface of our carefully constructed routine suddenly boiled up. We'd spent the winter trying to pretend that we were building something, that we were preparing for a future. But the news that the Scourge was moving again, that the larger world was still being torn apart, was enough to shatter that delusion.

Corvin called us together that evening. Vex was present, and Solace, and the two other soldiers who'd survived the keep. Vex's arm was still bandaged, but she stood like she was ready to topple over.

"The Scourge is moving toward Karenthel," Corvin said, confirming what we'd already heard. "According to Vex, there are at least fifty of them, maybe more. She lost two of her scouting companions trying to get enough information to give us a proper estimate."

"Can Karenthel defend against that?" someone asked.

"I don't know," Corvin said honestly. "No city has faced that many creatures yet. The initial attack on Millbrook probably involved fewer than twenty. If Karenthel is attacked in force..." She trailed off, but we understood. Karenthel would probably fall, just like Millbrook had fallen.

"What do we do?" Solace asked.

"We could send people to Karenthel," Vex said, her voice hoarse. "They need fighters. They need anyone who can hold a weapon. We could make a difference there."

"We could also get killed," someone pointed out. "All of us. And if Karenthel falls anyway, then we'll have died for nothing."

"Or we could stay here," Vex said, her eyes flashing with anger. "We could wait out the winter, hope the Scourge doesn't find us, and eventually die anyway when our supplies run out and the world finishes collapsing. At least if we go to Karenthel, we die trying to do something."

There was an argument. There was always an argument now. Some people wanted to stay in the relative safety of the keep. Others were willing to consider the journey to Karenthel. A few, like Dovette, were actively pushing for it.

In the end, Corvin made the decision.

"We send volunteers," she said. "Anyone willing to travel to Karenthel and help with the defense goes. Anyone who wants to stay here can stay. But we can't force anyone to go die in a city we know nothing about, and we can't force anyone to stay if they want to try to make a difference."

"How many do you think will go?" Solace asked her quietly.

"I don't know. Ten? Twenty? Maybe fewer." She looked exhausted. "But I'm going to go myself. I came here thinking we could build something. Maybe I can help actually do that in Karenthel, instead of just surviving here."

"I'm going," Solace said immediately.

"I'm going," I heard myself say.

Dovette squeezed my hand briefly, a gesture of approval. "I'm going too."

By the end of the night, we had fourteen volunteers, including Vex and a handful of the other soldiers. The plan was to leave in the morning, to travel quickly enough to reach Karenthel before the Scourge did, and to help with the defense however we could.

It was a terrible plan. We were poorly trained fighters, traveling through winter mountains, to help defend a city against creatures we barely understood. At least half of us would probably die.

But as I lay in my bed that night, preparing for the journey, I realized that I didn't feel afraid. I felt ready for something. Ready to do something other than survive. Ready to actually matter.

I fell asleep thinking about what Solace had said—about dying fighting being better than dying hiding.

Tomorrow, we would find out if that was true.