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"Again."
Eirik picked himself up from the cobblestones. His right knee was going to bruise, which was irritating but not the relevant information. The relevant information was that Leif had tagged him across the ribs in the half-second he'd spent reading the opening—exactly what Skeggi had told him not to do.
"You paused," Skeggi said from the bench.
"I saw it."
"You saw it, measured it, and by the time you were done, Leif had closed it and opened a new one." He hadn't moved in two hours. He watched with the patience of a man who had watched people do things wrong for fifty years. "What's the rule?"
"Don't think."
"What did you do?"
"Thought."
"Again."
Leif was breathing hard, bow in hand—Skeggi had told him midway through the second run to use it like a short weapon, not a ranged one, purely to give Eirik a different shape to deal with. Leif looked apologetic about landing the hit. He shouldn't have. Eirik waved him off.
They reset.
The second run, Eirik took it in the shoulder. The third, across the knee—the same knee, which was starting to feel personal. The fourth run was better: he stayed ahead of Leif for almost ten seconds before the habit returned.
He’d tracked Leif’s weight shift, decided what it meant, and while he was still deciding, Leif had changed his mind and gone the other way.
"He can see you thinking," Skeggi said.
"He can't see me thinking."
"He can see you slow down while you do it. Same thing."
Leif, to his credit, didn't look smug. He just reset his stance and waited.
Eirik rolled his neck and tried—again—to find the part of himself that had killed the boar without asking permission first.
"Again," Skeggi said.
· · · ? · · ·
On the sixth run, Skeggi spoke without heat. "Your problem is you treat combat like a text. You're trying to read it while it's hitting you."
"That's worked."
"Against a wounded boar. With a hunting knife. And you still got hit."
Eirik didn't answer. That landed where it was meant to.
"The Touch, the Sense, the Eye—always feeding you data." Skeggi stood, joints voicing their opinions. He walked closer and stopped just outside Eirik’s reach. "You're not going to stop being perceptive. That's not the point. You can't do the seeing and the doing at the same time. You have to choose which one leads."
"In real combat—"
"In real combat you had the sense to close and finish." Skeggi's gaze flicked to Leif. "One more run. I'm not stopping it this time. Whatever happens, happens."
Leif rolled his neck and raised the bow.
Eirik felt the difference immediately. No observer waiting to break it. No correction coming in from outside. The part of him that usually kept a running commentary reached for its usual grip on the moment and found nothing to hold.
Leif moved.
Eirik moved.
He didn’t read. His feet were already placed before his mind caught up to where they were. Leif adjusted, and Eirik was already adjusting with him. The bow came up in the tight arc Leif used when he wanted a jab instead of a swing—and Eirik was already past it, inside the arc, and Leif’s momentum carried him forward and Eirik wasn’t there.
They stopped.
Leif stopped two feet past where Eirik had been.
For a heartbeat neither of them moved.
Then Eirik noticed his feet.
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His feet were reading the cobblestones the way his Touch read a thing—grain, slick spots, the places worn slightly lower by years of traffic. Not a thought. Not a decision. Just there.
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Warmth started at the arch of his left foot and ran up through the channel-path he’d used for Earthroot for two years—and instead of stopping where it always stopped, it continued. Into the core. Into the upper routes. Settling there.
Not new, exactly.
More like a door in a wall that had always been there, and he’d finally found the handle by not looking for it.
The Wyrd notification did not arrive in the usual Grár tone.
Dark gold threaded through deep blue. A color he didn’t have a word for yet. The border of the box was different too—cleaner, heavier.
A Blár-grade notification.
· · · ? · · ·
? Grade Breakthrough ?
Earthroot · Grár Lv.20 → Blár Lv.1
· · · ? · · ·
The skill did not level. The skill changed.
What was a Grár-grade anchor—stable, reliable, effective—has become a Blár-grade foundation. The path between your feet and the earth has deepened from contact to connection.
At Grár you could hold a stance.
At Blár the earth holds it with you.
You did not do this consciously.
That was the point.
S?fnun gained — significant.
You have raised a skill to Blár through cultivation work rather than birth.
You did not receive it.
You grew it.
Welcome to Blár.
Leif had gone quiet. The air around Eirik’s feet had done something—nothing dramatic, nothing visible, just a settling, like dust after a fast movement.
Skeggi looked at him from across the courtyard.
"Good," he said.
That was all.
Eirik stood with the new sensation in his channels and tried to understand what had changed. The cobblestones were still cobblestones. But the ground had weight now—a presence, like a background sound resolving into a true note.
"Don’t get attached to how it feels right now," Skeggi said as he walked back to the bench. "It settles. In a week you'll forget it was ever different."
"Does that happen every time?" Eirik asked.
"Every time." Skeggi sat. "Progress doesn’t feel like victory. It feels like a new floor. Then you find out the ceiling moved with it."
Leif came over, still processing. "The cobblestones did something."
"Earthroot went Blár," Eirik said.
"What does that mean?"
"It means it isn’t just a trick I do with my feet anymore." He tested it carefully—let the connection extend, felt stone, mortar, foundation beneath. He could feel the rough edge of each block. "Three feet deep, maybe. More if I push it."
"That’s terrifying," Leif said, and meant it as admiration.
· · · ? · · ·
Rí had spent twenty minutes with the cleaning pole trying to shift a row of hanging smoked eels that were at a height designed for someone taller than five.
The pole was seven feet of old oak, heavy enough to be inconvenient. Torsteinn had expected her to give up or ask for help. She did neither.
Too light to muscle it. Too long to control from the base. Wall twelve inches to her right.
After three failed attempts and one near-miss with the eel rack, she found what worked: a grip near the balance point, hip braced to the wall as a third contact, the pole moving from her core instead of her arms.
The eels moved.
When Skeggi came back, she was holding the pole and rotating it slowly between her palms, feeling how the balance shifted when her hands shifted.
"Who showed you that grip?" Skeggi asked.
"Nobody," Rí said. "It was the only one that worked."
He looked at the grip. Then at her. Then at Torsteinn, who shrugged like he’d been outvoted by physics.
"Come back tomorrow," Skeggi said.
Rí set the pole back in its place. "What are we doing tomorrow?"
"I’ll decide when you’re here."
"Okay," she said, and left as if this were the most reasonable arrangement in the world.
Torsteinn waited until the door closed. "She reorganized the dried fish by brine concentration."
Skeggi looked at the rack. It was better. He made a sound that was very close to approval and refused to become one. "And?"
"I thought you should know."
Skeggi turned away. "I already knew."
Which was not technically true.
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The smithing quarter was four streets east of the market, announced by hot metal before the sound of it.
Bj?rn walked. Eirik walked beside him. Neither filled the silence because neither needed to.
The smith Bj?rn brought him to was a broad woman named Gróa, forearms built by someone who never learned moderation and hands burned and healed so many times the scar tissue had its own texture. She was finishing a piece when they came in. She didn’t stop. She worked until it was done, set it down, and then looked at them.
"What do you need?" she asked.
Eirik told her.
He gave her specifics: length, thickness, grip sized for hands that would grow. He explained the weighted-bat idea in the simplest terms—a heavy training piece that made the real thing feel lighter later. He told her his budget.
Gróa looked at him. Then at Bj?rn.
Bj?rn didn’t say a word.
Gróa looked back at Eirik. "Show me your hands."
He held them out. She studied the calluses—post-work thickening, the rough edge of the right palm, the fresh bruising from the morning’s drills. She pressed two fingers into the base of his thumb, testing the development there.
"You’ve been hitting something hard," she said.
"Striking post. Two years."
"Weighted?"
"No. That’s why I’m here."
She let his hands go. "If I balance it for the boy you are, it’ll pull wrong when you grow into it. You want the distribution for the person you’re becoming."
"I know," Eirik said. "The pull is the point."
Gróa watched him for a long moment. Then she went to the back and returned with iron blanks and calipers and started taking measurements she didn’t explain, making notes he couldn’t read.
That was apparently what yes looked like.
· · · ? · · ·
He came out with it wrapped in oilcloth.
Unfinished—Gróa needed two days and said it flatly—but she’d fit a rough handle onto the near-final blank so he could confirm grip and weight before she completed the work.
Even unfinished, it was heavier than it looked.
He shifted it from right arm to left after thirty feet.
That was already the point.
"Your mother," Bj?rn said.
"I know."
"She’s going to have something to say."
"I know."
"More than once."
"I know that too."
Bj?rn kept walking. The evening market was beginning to shut down, vendors packing, street noise dropping to the lower register of people going home. The Wyrd-shrine pulsed two streets over.
"The Earthroot," Bj?rn said after a while.
"Yes."
"I felt it," Bj?rn said. "From upstairs."
Eirik looked at him. "You were inside."
"I was inside." A pause. "Skeggi told me to stay there. Said it needed to happen without an audience." Another, shorter pause. "He was right."
Eirik thought about the last run. The empty space where the thinking usually lived. His feet already correct before his mind could argue.
"He usually is," Eirik said.
Bj?rn made the sound that wasn’t a laugh.
They walked back through the cooling city, the heavy iron blank tucked under Eirik’s arm in exactly the weight it was supposed to be.
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