Chapter 125: Ulvakor [2]

Isabella’s eyes widened by the smallest fraction that still counted as widening. Then her expression closed back down and she folded her arms across her chest.

"Were you spying on us, Alden?"

"No! Not at all. I was looking for my trainer because today is my first day and I wanted to arrive early, and I came through that door and I—"

"And then crouched down and watched through the corner of the archway?" Ulvakor offered helpfully.

Alden stopped defending himself.

"That is an interesting approach to finding your instructor," Ulvakor added, with the gravity of someone describing a historical event.

"I wasn’t trying to—I just arrived at a bad moment and didn’t want to interrupt and then it was already too late to leave without being weird about it—"

"You knew he was watching?" Isabella turned to Ulvakor.

"Yes." Ulvakor raised his hands.

"And you kept talking."

"I was talking to you." He shrugged with complete placidity. "Why would I stop?"

Isabella stared at him.

Then she looked at the sky for a moment, as though seeking patience from the cloud ocean.

"I’m leaving."

Before either of them could say anything, she stepped once, a swirl of compressed wind erupted from under her boots, and she went straight up into the air with the clean efficiency of someone who has made exits like this many times before. She was gone in under two seconds.

Ulvakor watched her disappear toward the upper towers with a soft, fond sigh.

Then he turned to Alden.

"Look at what you’ve done."

Alden stared at him. "I didn’t do anything. You dug your own grave."

Ulvakor shook his head with the mournful expression of a man who has accepted his fate. "Come on. Let’s go train."

They walked back through the archway and across the main platform toward the center of the arena. The other trainees glancing up at them and then away.

Alden kept pace with Ulvakor for a moment in silence.

Then the question came out before he fully decided to ask it.

"Are you actually dating Lady Isabella?"

"Yes," Ulvakor said immediately.

"Seriously?"

"Is that surprising?"

"She’s human," Alden said. "And you’re a Primordial Lieutenant. Every other Primordial in this Skyland looks at humans like something they stepped on."

Ulvakor was quiet for a moment. He looked up at the cloud ocean visible over the edges of the island as they walked.

"I understand why that seems contradictory from the outside," he said finally, his voice settling into something more measured than his usual casual register. "Many of my people have been isolated in privilege for so long that they’ve started confusing it for superiority. They look down on humans because they’ve never needed to consider humans seriously." He glanced at Alden sideways. "I don’t find that perspective particularly compelling."

"How did it even happen," Alden said, genuinely trying to piece the timeline together. "Isabella and you."

"I trained her," Ulvakor said simply. "When she first arrived in Apothesis. She was strong already but rough in specific places, the same places most human Spire candidates are rough when they first come up here. I worked with her on it."

He smiled at the memory, something in it warm and private. "She never once complained about the difficulty level. She never asked for accommodations. She pushed back when she thought I was wrong and she was right more often than she should have been for a new arrival." A quiet laugh. "At some point I realized I was looking forward to the sessions more than I needed to for strictly professional reasons."

Alden walked beside him and didn’t say anything.

"Strength, character, resolve," Ulvakor said. "Those are things I respect. They don’t require a specific bloodline. The rest of what my kin believe is just inherited noise from centuries of not having to think about it."

The weight Alden had been carrying since yesterday, the low-grade tension that came from being in a place where everyone’s ambient reaction to him was hostility, loosened slightly without fully letting go.

He wasn’t going to be trained by someone who secretly resented him. That was worth more than he had expected it to be worth.

"I understand," he said.

Ulvakor stopped in the center of the main ring.

He turned around, and when he did, the easy casualness was gone. His posture had changed. The mana around him, which had been sitting quietly under the surface of his presence, shifted and made itself known in a focused, contained way. His eyes had the specific kind of sharpness that showed up in people who took their work seriously the moment the work actually started.

"Alright," he said. "Let’s officially begin."

His voice had dropped into something with real weight behind it.

"Show me what you’ve got, Alden Gre—"

He stopped.

A fraction of a second where his expression went somewhere it hadn’t intended to go and then caught itself.

He cleared his throat.

"...Alden."

But Alden had heard it.

He stood very still, his eyes fixed on Ulvakor’s back as the Primordial turned toward the weapons rack.

’He almost said it. He was about to say Grey. He had it on his tongue and he caught it at the last possible syllable.’

’When the time comes.’ Alden pulled in a slow breath through his nose. ’Fine. Then I’ll get there faster.’

He walked to the weapons rack and picked up a training blade. The weight of it was real and solid in his hand.

Whatever they were waiting to tell him was sitting on the other side of something. Some threshold he hadn’t crossed yet. Some level of strength or understanding they had decided was the entry point.

He looked at the training ground around him. The open sky above the arena. The cloud ocean at the edges. The towers of the Windsky Skyland rising in every direction.

He had been an author who ran out of Chapters.

Now he was going to write the rest of this the only way left.

He turned to face Ulvakor.

"I’m ready," he said.