A warrior's first strike is not a blow, but a breath.

Before you react—in argument, in sport, in any crucial moment—claim your ground with one slow, deliberate breath. Let the world wait for you.

One… two… breathe…

One… two—!

The crack of the willow switch against his skull was a punctuation of pure fire. Nikolai startled, his concentration shattering as his eyes flew open.

“But I was focusing!” The protest was out before he could cage it.

The switch whistled again, a stinging rebuke against his lips. “I am your master, not your friend. You will not raise your voice to me.” The old man’s sigh was a sound of profound weariness, a leaf scraping over stone. He turned his back, his robes whispering of disappointment. “Once again, Nikolai. Connect to the mana. Do not command it. Listen to it.”

Gritting his teeth against a fresh wave of shame, Nikolai sank back onto his heels. He forced his breath to slow, in and out, until the sharp sting in his scalp and on his mouth faded. The world narrowed: the droning of a bee, the rustle of leaves in the orchard, the sweet scent of damp earth and the press of grass beneath his palms.

Thought dissolved. Sensation remained. He felt the latent energy within him, a warm, golden pool in his core. Slowly, he let it bleed from his fingertips, a gentle offering to the single, stunted lily before him. A faint shimmer hung in the air between his hand and the petals. The plant shuddered, and a new inch of green stem uncurled towards the sun.

A small triumph—but it cost him. His head grew light, the vibrant warmth in his veins cooling to a dull chill. The world began to grey at the edges, and in that hollowed-out emptiness, a memory surged, unbidden and sharp.

The scent of smoke. A woman’s scream, cut short. A shadow falling—

‘No!’

He wrenched his hand back as if burned, severing the connection. The flow of mana snapped, and the lily seemed to wilt in disappointment. Gasping, Nikolai shook his head, trying to dislodge the ghosts. When his vision cleared, he saw his teacher retreating back, disappearing into the grove without a single, backward glance. The silence he left behind was heavier than any blow.

Dammit.

The curse was a hollow thing in the quiet. His strength spent, Nikolai let his body fall backward onto the grass, the sky a vast, uncaring blue above him. “Why must I be like this?” The question was a raw whisper, meant for the heavens or the worms beneath the soil—he didn’t know which.

All he wanted was a flicker of approval in the old man’s eyes, a single nod of pride. Yet he couldn’t perform the simplest of tasks without the past rising up to drown him. What had the master seen in him? A scrawny, fatherless boy with no name and no connections? An orphan to mold without the inconvenience of a family to question the methods? Or something else entirely—something Nikolai himself could not yet see?

The sky was a relentless, polished blue, the sun a merciless eye that forced him to squint. From his bed of grass, Nikolai watched the avians weave through the branches of the old oak. A fledgling chirped, a sound of pure want, and was answered as its mother settled beside it, offering a morsel. Further off, a pair soared in effortless unison, a perfect dance against the azure. A family.

A hollow ache bloomed in Nikolai’s chest, a familiar and unwelcome envy. He possessed no memory to attach to the word ‘family,’ no echo of a lullaby or the comforting weight of a hand on his brow. His world began at five, with the stern, robed figure of his teacher leading him from the forest’s edge. Theirs was a transaction of knowledge for obedience, a contract etched in willow switches and sighs. Nothing more.

And before that? A void. The master spoke of a feral child, nursed by wolves and raised by the silent, watchful trees. No grieving parents had ever come searching. No legacy, no name, just an empty space where a past ought to be.

Why? The question festered. Why this relentless drilling? This torture of mind and spirit? The world was not crying out for a hero; it was peaceful, complacent, and sun-drenched. If some unseen doom lurked on the horizon, why must he—the boy who couldn’t even make a flower grow—be the one to face it? Why had the master chosen this particular orphan to waste his years upon?

Driven by a restless frustration, Nikolai pushed himself up and trudged toward the small, stone-and-timber hut where his teacher meditated. Through the open doorway, he saw the old man seated in the lotus position, his face a mask of serene detachment, his breathing deep and even. For a long moment, Nikolai hesitated on the threshold, uncertainty rooting him to the spot.

He did not need to announce himself. One of the master’s eyes slid open, a sliver of sharp, discerning brown in the hut’s dim light. His expression, once peaceful, hardened into grim lines. The eye closed again, as if the sight of his student was too great a disappointment to bear.

“What do you seek from me,” the teacher muttered, his voice low and devoid of its earlier meditative calm, “after you have done nothing but disappoint?”

“Master Luohua, I wanted to ask you…” Nikolai began, the words feeling clumsy and heavy on his tongue. He gathered his courage, forcing them out. “Why did you take me in? Why do you persist in teaching me, when all I do is fail you?”

The old man did not answer immediately. Instead, a low, dry laugh escaped him, a sound like stones tumbling down a distant hill. He unfolded himself from the floor with a grace that belied his years, and finally, he fixed his gaze upon Nikolai. His eyes were not angry, but ancient and terribly clear.

“A great evil has come.”

The words hung in the air, simple and absolute. Nikolai’s breath caught in his throat, his own frustrations vanishing in an instant, replaced by a cold dread.

“I have trained you since you were small,” the master continued, his voice devoid of any warmth, “because you were expendable. You had no family, no connections to the world. Nothing to love. Nothing to make you weak. Nothing to stop you from doing what must be done.”

Nikolai felt the floor tilt beneath him. “…What?”

His teacher turned away, moving to a low table where a simple clay cup sat. He knelt, picked it up, and took a slow sip. “Too cold,” he murmured, not to Nikolai, but to the air. He hovered a gnarled hand over the cup, his eyes closing. A faint shimmer of heat rose from the water. He took another sip, and this time, a faint, clinical smile touched his lips. “Better.”

Nikolai sank to his knees beside the low table, his legs unable to support him. “Master Luohua. What do you mean? What you… foresaw?”

The master stared into the depths of his tea as if scrying its very leaves. “My first vision came when I was a student. Your age.” He took another deliberate sip. “I saw the calamity that would befall this earth. A shadow, born not of this world. A force of foreign power that would scour the land until nothing remained but ash and silence.”

“This is… this is stupid!” Nikolai blurted, a hot wave of denial crashing over him. It was a fantasy, a cruel joke. He shoved himself up, turning to flee the hut and its mad pronouncements.

The door slammed shut with a force that shook the walls, not from a wind, but from a will—a sharp, focused command of the air that his teacher had bent to his whim without so much as a glance.

“I was not finished.”

The voice was quiet, yet it held the finality of a locked gate. Heart hammering against his ribs, Nikolai turned. He slowly walked back and knelt once more, the fight draining out of him, replaced by a numb submission.

“Before I came to this forest twelve years ago,” the old man continued, his tone even, “I had another vision. Of this very grove. And in it…” He finally lifted his eyes from the cup, and his gaze pinned Nikolai to the spot. “I saw you, Nikolai.”

He paused, letting the weight of it settle.

“It was a message. A summons from the great Rhya herself. She did not show me a hero. She showed me a weapon. And she made it clear I was to be the one to forge it.”

The master leaned forward and gently blew across the surface of his tea. The steam did not dissipate. Instead, it coalesced, twisting into a swirling, multi-colored mist that hung between them. Within its ethereal folds, images flickered to life—fragments of memory, pieces of prophecy.

The memory shimmered in the colored mist, a vision within a vision. A man from a distant land moved through the primordial silence of Sylvakion, a foreign silhouette against the ancient, breathing trees. A thread of fate, spun by the goddess Rhya herself, had drawn him across continents to this sacred grove. And there, amidst the roots and loam, he found his reason.

What you seek hides in plain sight, waiting for your eyes to slow down. The man chanted the old mantra to the forest’s heart.

The boy was a feral thing, a creature of leaf and shadow more than of man. A matted mane of hair fell to his knees like a pelt. He crouched on all fours, and from that wild tangle, two eyes of startling husky-blue watched, intelligent and utterly untamed.

“This is the one,” the master breathed, the certainty of the vision settling like stone in his bones. He approached slowly, his robes whispering through the ferns. The boy did not flee. Instead, he mimicked the movement, crawling forward with a low, curious rumble that was more beast than child.

The pounce was a sudden explosion of dirt-streaked limbs and bared teeth. With a fluid motion born of decades of discipline, the man snapped his fan open and wedged it between the boy’s jaws, holding the snarling child at arm’s length.

“For an instrument of the divine, you are decidedly uncouth,” he murmured, his heart hammering not from fear, but from a profound, aching pity. He closed the distance, ignoring the guttural growls, and gathered the tense, wiry body into his arms. “So utterly alone.”

The boy, understanding nothing but the tone, stilled. It was then the master saw it: a strip of cloth, once bright, now stained and frayed, tied around a thin wrist. He worked the knot loose, his action met with a fresh, frantic struggle of claws and teeth. With a weary sigh, he applied precise pressure to a point on the boy’s neck, and the small body went limp against his shoulder.

Cradling the child, he examined the scrap of fabric. Ground-in dirt and time had yellowed it, but a single word was stubbornly embroidered there, a ghost from a forgotten world: Nikolai.

At the whisper of the name, the boy stirred. The master hushed him, a calloused hand smoothing back the wild mane. “Nikolai,” he breathed, and the name was a vow etched in stone. “So you are the clay the goddess has given me to shape.”

He looked down at the peaceful, sleeping face, and a terrible, grievous weight settled upon his soul—the full, cruel measure of his duty. “I will teach you all I know,” he whispered, a single tear tracing a path through the dust on his cheek. “Before my visions come to pass. Even if it means I must strip you of the very things that make a life worth living: affection, freedom, the comfort of a name.”

His voice hardened, not with cruelty, but with a resolve that shattered his own heart. “A hero cannot be bound. He must have nothing left to lose.”

The mist swirled, reforming into a new scene within the cave. The stern man pointed a finger at his own chest. “Master. Luohua.” He then pointed at the boy, now cleaned but still wary and silent. “Nikolai.”

The boy’s brow furrowed, his new name strange on the air. “M…?” he grunted, the sound of a rough, unused stone in his throat.

Luohua sighed, a long-suffering breath as he pinched the bridge of his nose. The silence stretched, heavy with the immense task ahead. “A river carves stone not with force,” he murmured, “but with time.”

His eyes lifted to the cavern ceiling as if seeking a divine ear in the rock. ‘You did not make this easy for me, Lady Rhya.’

The mist shifted again, to a windswept cliff edge years later. A ten-year-old Nikolai trembled in a balanced stance, the chasm below yawning wide beneath him.

“Keep your head up! Do not sway like a sapling in the wind! Be still, like the ancient oak!” His teacher’s voice was a whip-crack in the thin air.

“Up!” Nikolai shot his arm out, extending his empty hand in a desperate, pleading gesture.

The older man placed a short, blunt stick in it. “Touch me with this. Your feet will not move.”

The boy strained, his small arm outstretched, but his teacher stood a full ten meters away. The branch in his hand contorted weirdly, splintering and cracking under the force of his will instead of growing. As Nikolai struggled, his face a mask of furious effort, the master took a branch of his own and walked to the edge of a rain-filled granite bowl beside them.

“Magic is not a hammer. It is a pond.”

Master Luohua struck the water’s surface harshly. The pond churned, turbulent and opaque, scattering light and any hope of a clear reflection.

“Still water reflects the sky;” he intoned.

He then stilled the water with a thought and inserted the stick gently into its depths. The water remained perfectly calm, holding the stick's perfect, mirrored image.

“Stormy water shows nothing.”

With a whisper of magic, his own stick elongated, snaking across the distance to tap Nikolai sharply on the head.

“Incompetent. Neither of us moves until you succeed.” Vines, dark and thick, erupted from the rocky soil, binding both their feet to the earth. The lesson lasted for days, through blistering sun and shivering night, until finally, Nikolai’s stick shuddered and grew a few precious inches, its very tip just brushing the silk of his master’s robe like a sigh.