The dawn on Ahch-To was not a sunrise. It was a slow bleeding of gray into blue, the kind of light that did not so much illuminate things as reveal them, reluctantly, one edge at a time. I was already awake when it came. I had not slept well. The stone walls of the hut held the cold like a promise and the ocean below did not quiet through the night the way I had hoped it would.

  I dressed in the dark and went out early.

  The high shelf was a flat plateau of black rock worn smooth by what must have been a thousand years of wind. By the time the others arrived I had already been standing there long enough to feel the cold settle into my boots. I did not mind. It was better than lying in the hut staring at the ceiling thinking about the way Vane's voice had sounded at dinner, or the way the bench had emptied when I sat down.

  Master Morvin arrived with Thorne at his side, Thorne's thick spectacles already fogging in the salt air. Morvin planted his cane on the stone and looked at us each in turn with those unhurried, ancient eyes.

  "Today the steel speaks," he said. "To control the blade is to control the self."

  Warren went first.

  I told myself I was watching for practical reasons. To understand what would be expected of me. To study the technique. I told myself that right up until the moment he stripped off his outer tunic to move more freely and I forgot entirely what I had been telling myself.

  He was not performing the way Kit had performed in the High Circle. There was nothing theatrical about it. He simply fought the way he did everything else, with a loose, unhurried efficiency that made it look less like training and more like instinct. His shoulders were broad and mapped with the faint white lines of old scars and he moved between strikes with a fluid economy that was almost uncomfortable to watch, the way watching something perfectly adapted to its environment is uncomfortable. A predator in the right terrain.

  He was not elegant. He was effective. There is a difference, and I was old enough to know it.

  He disarmed his opponent in four exchanges and caught the practice blade out of the air before it hit the stone. Then he glanced over at the sidelines and his eyes found mine for just a moment. He tilted his head slightly, a small private thing, as if we shared a joke I had not been told yet. I felt the flush climb my neck and I looked away and hoped the cold morning air would explain it.

  He is dangerous, I thought. The word dangerous sat in my chest and I did not examine it too closely.

  Kit followed, a blur of blue skin and clashing iron, and finished with a Force shove that sent his opponent skidding three feet across the wet stone. The group along the sidelines made a sound of appreciation. They always made that sound for Kit. And for Warren. The sounds they made were easy and collective, the sounds of people who recognized each other.

  I stood at the edge of the shelf and watched and did not make any sounds at all.

  Then Morvin's cane pointed at me.

  "Princess Velara. To the circle, come."

  From the back of the group came Vane's voice, bright with amusement. "Do not chip a nail, Highness."

  A ripple of laughter. Not everyone, but enough.

  I walked to the center of the circle and picked up a practice blade. The grip was heavier than the ones I had trained with on Misith, balanced differently, made for someone with less patience than me. I adjusted my hand and turned to face my opponent.

  Morvin had paired me with Kit.

  Kit grinned at me across the circle. He spun his blade once, loosely, the way someone does when they are trying to be generous. "I will go easy on the shoulder you fixed, Velara."

  "Do not," I said.

  He lunged.

  I did not flinch. On Misith I had trained in the palace gyms since I was twelve years old, not because I was expected to fight but because I needed somewhere to put the energy that moved through me when I could not sleep, which was often. I knew how to be still inside a moving thing. I knew how to let force flow around me rather than into me. When Kit tried to push me back with a concussive wave I planted my feet and let it break against me and moved through the gap it left. Two steps, a turn, my hand closing on his hilt. I swept his leg.

  Kit hit the stone hard. My blade was at his throat.

  The silence was total. I straightened and looked up and found Warren's face in the crowd. The smirk was gone. His eyes were wide and dark and he was looking at me differently than he had before, with a focused attention that felt less like amusement and more like recalculation.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  I did not know yet whether that was good.

  I walked back to the sideline and set down the practice blade and no one said anything to me. Not congratulations. Not acknowledgment. The group simply reformed around the next pairing and the moment closed over like water.

  Lunch was a long, quiet lesson in how many ways a person can be alone in a crowd. I carried my bowl to the end of the stone bench and sat, and I watched the space around me stay empty as each person found somewhere else to be. Not hostile, most of them. Just elsewhere. Even Kit, whose arm I had healed twice now, sat with Warren at the far end, their heads bent together over something that made them both laugh.

  I ate my food and watched the ocean below the cliff and did not let my face do anything in particular.

  The afternoon session was held in a sheltered hollow the others called the Circle of Whispers. Thorne sat cross-legged at the center on a flat stone, his scroll case beside him, his thick glasses catching the thin light.

  "Close your eyes," he said. "Find the pulse of the island."

  I settled into the position and closed my eyes and reached for the golden hum. It came easily, the way it always did, rising up through the stone beneath me and the air around me and the distant crash of the water below. I felt the roots of the Great Tree above, deep and slow. I felt the Lanai moving in the rocks, small and quick and wary. I felt the other students around me, each of them a different texture in the Force, Warren like banked heat, Kit like a coiled wire, Mobe-Joan like deep still water.

  Then the gold changed.

  It did not fade. It curdled. It shifted from warm to something bruised and wrong, a color that had no name in any language I knew, and the island disappeared.

  I was somewhere else.

  A corridor of black stone. Narrow. The walls slick with moisture. The light wrong, too red, coming from no visible source. And at the far end of the corridor, Warren. And Kit. Both of them backed against the wall with their hands up and their faces open with a fear I had never seen on either of them, not in training, not in anything.

  Something was coming toward them through the dark.

  I felt it before I saw it. A pressure in the Force like a hand closing around something living. Heavy. Deliberate. Patient in the way that things are patient when they know they have already won.

  Then I saw the light.

  Not the gold I knew. Not the white of healing. Red. A deep, bleeding red, the color of something that had once been bright and had been turned inside out. It came from a blade, but not a blade of metal. It was a dagger of pure condensed light, perhaps three inches of it, held in a fist I could not see clearly, and it hummed with a sound that was not mechanical. It was organic. Like a voice held at the very bottom of its register, like a sound a living thing makes when something vital has been taken from it.

  The dagger rose.

  I felt the Force surge around it, not the clean current I moved through in training but something vast and pressurized, like standing at the bottom of a very deep place. The stone of the corridor cracked along the wall where the blade passed near it. Warren and Kit were screaming and the sound was wrong, too far away, as though I was hearing it through water.

  The dagger came down.

  I gasped.

  My eyes opened and I was back in the Circle of Whispers and my hands were shaking so badly I had to press them flat against the stone to make them stop. The cold of the rock helped. Barely.

  "Velara." Thorne's voice was sharp and close.

  Around me I heard the soft sounds of the other students surfacing from their meditations. A few of them looked at me. Vane's mouth curved.

  "The Princess had a nightmare," Vane said pleasantly.

  "I saw a red dagger," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "It was not metal. It was light. It was in a corridor and it was coming toward Warren and Kit and the Force around it felt like nothing I have ever touched. It felt like the Force had been inverted. Like something had taken the current and reversed it."

  No one laughed that time. The quality of the silence was different.

  "Stay," Thorne said to me. To the others: "You are dismissed."

  They filed out. As they passed through the stone archway I saw Warren pause for just a moment, his eyes finding mine. Then Kit said his name from somewhere ahead and he went.

  I sat alone with Thorne while the hollow emptied and the wind moved through the gaps in the stone above us.

  "How often do you have visions of this kind?" he asked. He had not opened his scroll. He was looking at me directly over the rims of his thick glasses.

  "Never," I said. "That was the first time. Is that what the Force does here? Is this normal for Ahch-To?"

  "No," Thorne said simply. "Tell me exactly what the dagger felt like. Not what it looked like. What it felt like."

  I looked at my hands. The trembling had stopped but the memory of the feeling had not. I tried to find the right words for it, the way I would try to describe a symptom to a healer, precisely, without embellishment.

  "It felt like the Force," I said slowly. "It felt like what I do when I heal, the same current, the same depth. But pulled in the opposite direction. When I heal I draw the light toward the wound. Whatever was in that corridor was pushing. Expelling. It was using the same mechanism I use but in reverse and the scale of it was..." I stopped. "It was not small."

  Thorne was quiet for a long moment. The wind moved through the stone.

  "The Force is a balance," he said finally. "For every sun, a shadow. We have known this in theory since the first scrolls. We have simply never seen it wear a face." He leaned forward slightly on his crossed legs and looked at me with an expression I could not fully read. "You are a healer, Velara. You understand the living Force better than anyone I have trained. So tell me. In your vision, did the red light feel like a sickness?"

  I knew what he was hoping I would say. I could hear it in the careful way he had framed the question.

  "No," I said. The word came out quietly and it frightened me as I said it. "It felt like power. Pure, clean power with nothing holding it back. No anchor. No limit." I pressed my hands harder against the cold stone. "That is what frightened me most. Not the dagger. Not the corridor. The feeling that whatever was holding it had stopped being afraid of anything at all."

  Thorne looked at me for a long time without speaking.

  "Go and eat something," he said at last. "Sleep if you can. And Velara." He waited until I met his eyes. "Do not go looking for that feeling again."

  I nodded and rose and walked out of the circle into the gray afternoon.

  I did not tell him that I was not sure I would have to go looking. That it had come to me. That even now, standing in the cold salt air with the ordinary sounds of the island around me, I could still feel the faint electric trace of it humming in the bones of my hands like a second heartbeat I had not asked for and could not yet explain.