Chapter Text
Everyone had scars.
Most of them were small, just faint silvery lines that gathered along fingers and palms. Evidence of harmless lies, the kind spoken out of politeness, convenience, or simple habit. They were as ordinary as the words that caused them. Someone claimed not to mind an inconvenience, praised a meal they had disliked, promised they were listening when their thoughts had already wandered elsewhere. These marks came and faded until there was little reason to pay attention to them, the sort of words spoken without thinking and marked just as thoughtlessly.
Larger scars were less common. Those stretched over forearms and shins in thin, pale lines, left by falsehoods with enough consequence to linger. Mistakes concealed when they should have been admitted. Omissions that changed what someone believed. Words that mattered because someone, somewhere, had cared enough for them to hurt.
Sometimes they appeared higher, along the jaw or across the cheek, where clothing could not easily hide them. People had their own explanations for scars that marked the face: lies about appearance, reputation, or some other truth too closely bound to how one person wished to be seen by another. Regardless of the excuse, such scars always invited scrutiny.
The deepest scars were rarer still. They did not soften into silver with time, remaining dark against the skin, uneven at the edges and often jagged, appearing across the ribs or back where the body could bear them. Deep marks were seldom made by a single lie. They came from words repeated until the falsehood became something that had to be maintained, each telling cutting into the same wound until what remained could no longer fade.
Most people went their entire lives without carrying one. Those who did rarely explained them.
People lied. That was simply part of living among other people, accepted and generally forgiven.
Yuder had more scars than anyone seemed willing to forgive.
They had been there as long as he could remember. There was no first mark preserved in his memory, no childhood morning when he had looked down and discovered something new upon his skin. They had simply always been there.
His hands were crowded with them. Fine silver lines crossed his fingers and palms so densely that in places it was difficult to tell one from another, the remnants of countless trivial falsehoods belonging to a person he had never met. His forearms and legs carried fewer marks, but those were longer and deeper, intersecting in uneven patterns that had accumulated steadily through the years.
The ones across his torso were another matter entirely.
There were several of them, darker and deeper than those on his limbs, crossing his ribs and chest in uneven lines. Two were worse than all the others. One cut across the center of his back, broad and jagged enough that even years had done little to soften it. The other lay over his heart, an ugly dark mark that seemed almost carved into the skin. Both still ached at times, a deep soreness that pressure could wake into something sharper.
Few people ever saw those.
They did not need to, there were already more than enough scars visible on Yuder’s hands, arms, and legs to draw attention. Even fully dressed, there was no hiding the dense silver lines crossing his fingers or the longer marks disappearing beneath his sleeves. Anyone who looked at him for more than a moment could see that there were far too many.
They were not his. Everyone knew that.
That knowledge did remarkably little to stop anyone from behaving as though they revealed something about him. Yuder had watched the same conclusion form on strangers’ faces often enough to recognize it before they spoke. Their eyes lingered. Their expressions tightened. Some became careful with their words; others simply moved farther away.
If his soulmate lied like that–
Well. Apparently it was only reasonable to assume he would as well.
The reasoning made little sense to him. He had never told a lie in his life. Not because he considered himself particularly virtuous. Yuder had no strong opinion on whether lying was inherently wrong, and he certainly had no desire to organize his life around some moral principle merely because other people found it admirable. Falsehood simply seemed unnecessarily complicated. A lie required remembering what had been said, considering who had heard it, then altering later answers so that everything continued to fit.
Why bother? If Yuder wanted someone to know something, he told them. If he did not, he said nothing. It was far simpler.
Other people, inexplicably, seemed to find this difficult.
When someone attempted conversation with him, they often began with remarks that seemed to contain neither useful information nor any obvious request for a response. The weather was pleasant. Dinner had been better yesterday. The road was crowded. Someone they both barely knew had done something mildly amusing.
At first, Yuder had answered those statements as literally as he could: Yes, the weather was clear. He had not eaten yesterday’s dinner. The road was visibly crowded. He did not know the person they were discussing.
This rarely seemed to be the correct response.
Conversation would falter afterward, the other person wearing an expression Yuder could not decipher while an awkward silence settled between them. Occasionally they tried again. More often, they did not. Yuder noticed the pattern long before he understood what he was doing to cause it.
Eventually, most people stopped trying. That was easier. At least, it usually was.
There had been a time, when he was younger, when the scars had made him furious. The marks on his hands had never mattered much. There were too many, and most faded too quickly to resent individually. The deeper scars were different. When a new one appeared along his ribs or he woke because the skin across his back had begun burning without warning, anger came easily.
Somewhere in the world, someone he had never seen was doing this to him. Someone who could hurt him without knowing his name, while Yuder was expected to simply endure the evidence of whatever came out of their mouth. For a while, that unfairness had infuriated him enough that he considered retaliating.
The thought had been satisfying. He had imagined choosing something significant rather than wasting the effort on a meaningless falsehood. If this unknown person insisted on carving marks into him, then perhaps they ought to understand what receiving one felt like.
Yet every time the impulse rose, Yuder found himself confronted by the same irritating problem – He would have to think of a lie. Then say it. Then presumably remember that he had said it. By the time he had considered all of that, his anger had usually cooled enough that the entire exercise seemed tedious.
So his soulmate remained unmarked by him while Yuder continued collecting theirs.
As the years passed, even his anger dulled. The marks settled into the ordinary shape of his body, no stranger to him than his hands or the sound of his own voice. Something noticed only when something disrupted them. His grandfather had explained what they meant when Yuder was young, answering his questions in the plain manner Yuder preferred, and afterward there had seemed little need to discuss them again. When his grandfather died, there was no one left in the mountains who might have remarked on them anyway.
He had nearly forgotten how other people reacted to them until he left the mountains for the capital.
There were considerably more people on the road than there had ever been around his home, which meant considerably more people available to stare.
Travelers kept their distance from him at campsites. Men who had been laughing loudly beside the road lowered their voices when he passed. At inns, proprietors glanced once at his hands and found that every room had suddenly been taken, even when Yuder could see the keys still hanging behind them. Others named prices so obviously inflated that even someone with as little experience traveling as he had could understand what they were doing.
The first few times, he argued. But not for long. Yuder had little patience for pretending not to understand an insult merely because someone had delivered it politely.
“If you do not want me here, say so.”
That generally ended the conversation.
Afterward, he stopped bothering. If they refused him, he slept outside. If they demanded twice the normal price and night had already fallen, he paid it and remembered the place well enough never to return.
He had expected some suspicion when he left home. He had not expected people to be so monotonously consistent about it. By the time he reached the capital, irritation had settled beneath his skin almost as persistently as the scars themselves.
The city did nothing to improve his temper. There were too many people packed too closely together, their voices layering over one another until he could no longer follow any single conversation. Shoulders brushed his in the street. Merchants called to him from both sides. Strangers attempted greetings merely because their paths happened to cross. Even moving from one district to another seemed to require navigating a constant succession of people who expected him to acknowledge them.
Yuder had spent most of his life with mountains for neighbors. The capital felt determined to compensate for that all at once.
By the third day, he had ceased making even a token attempt at courtesy. He ignored hands extended toward him, stepped around anyone who stopped directly in his path, and answered questions only when he judged them relevant.
People could think whatever they liked about that. He had not come here to impress them.
He had come for the Arcane Legion.
Stubbornness carried him through everything else: the staring, the muttered remarks he was presumably not intended to hear, the officials who looked at his scars and suddenly became much more interested in whether every line of his registration documents had been completed correctly.
It took until the final day of recruitment for Yuder to reach the Blue Pavilion and put his name forward.
The evaluation itself did not take long. The usual suspicion lingered only until he demonstrated his ability, then there was no room left for it. Fire answered first, gathering eagerly at his command before vanishing beneath a sweep of wind. Water followed, twisting through the air in a clear ribbon, then earth rose beneath his feet with enough force to send startled murmurs through the watching crowd.
Yuder did not mind them this time. Whatever they thought of his face, his manners, or the scars covering his skin, none of them could argue with what they had just seen.
He was strong. That much, at least, required no explanation.
It did not make the other recruits like him. If anything, the distance around Yuder became more pronounced once he entered the Arcane Legion headquarters. Before, he had merely been unsettling. Now he was unsettling and powerful, which apparently represented a considerably greater offense.
Yuder did not bother to conceal the scars. He had never done so before, and beginning now would have felt uncomfortably close to admitting there was something about them he ought to be ashamed of.
There was not. The person who had made them could answer for them someday, if Yuder ever happened to meet them. Until then, anyone troubled by the sight was welcome to look elsewhere.
A few people attempted to speak with him regardless.
One of them was a red-haired man whose name Yuder heard several times and failed to retain. He approached more than once during those early days, usually with some casual observation about training, food, or the day's schedule. Unlike most people, he did not seem bothered by Yuder's brief answers, and when Yuder gave none at all, he would often fill the silence himself and continue.
Yuder was not certain what he wanted.
If the man required something, he could simply ask. Instead, he seemed to keep offering remarks that led nowhere, occasionally pausing afterward as though Yuder had missed some part of the exchange. The first few times, he resumed easily enough.
Yuder found the habit strange, but not especially unpleasant. The red-haired man did not crowd him, ask foolish questions, or seem offended when Yuder chose not to speak. There were worse people to have standing nearby.
Once, in the middle of one of those conversations, the man's gaze dropped toward Yuder's hands. Only for an instant. He looked away quickly enough that someone less accustomed to noticing such things might have missed it.
Yuder’s attention sharpened, irritation already beginning to stir in anticipation of the question he had heard in various forms throughout his life.
It never came. The red-haired man hesitated, then continued what he had been saying. His tone remained the same, though the conversation ended somewhat sooner than usual.
Yuder considered addressing it himself, then discarded the thought almost immediately. What was there to explain? The scars were his soulmate's. Anyone old enough to understand what a scar was already knew that. If the man wanted to know something else, he could ask.
After that, his attempts gradually became shorter. A comment that once might have turned into several minutes of conversation ended after Yuder answered it. Questions came less often. Sometimes the man appeared to be about to say something, only to give a small nod instead and continue on his way.
Yuder noticed the change, though he could not see what had caused it. He had answered when there was something to answer and listened when there was not. As far as he could tell, nothing between them had gone particularly badly.
Eventually, the red-haired man settled for greeting him when they passed, and even that faded into the same polite distance most of the others maintained.
Yuder told himself he preferred it that way, there was less interruption. After all, he had not joined the Arcane Legion to make friends. He had joined to become stronger.
On that point, at least, the Legion did not disappoint him.
Yuder threw himself into training with a focus that made most other concerns easy to ignore. Physical conditioning was simple enough. Learning greater precision with his ability demanded more concentration, but power itself had never been difficult for him. The elements responded almost before he consciously called them: fire gathering hot and eager, wind changing direction with the turn of his wrist, water following the shape of his intent.
Those things he understood instinctively. Swordsmanship was another matter.
Yuder had not expected every member of the Arcane Legion to be required to learn the sword regardless of their ability. It was, apparently, considered indispensable. The sword was the Empire's favored weapon, surrounded by so much reverence that half the instructors seemed offended by the mere possibility that someone might question its usefulness.
Yuder did not particularly care about any of that. If the Legion expected him to learn it, he would learn it. The problem was that he had never held one before.
Most of the recruits had at least some familiarity with a blade. Noble children learned formally, but even those without proper instruction had spent years imitating knights with sticks, watching local guards practice, or being shown a few basic movements by an older relative.
Yuder had done none of those things.
There had been very few children near his home and the handful he encountered over the years had generally been pulled away once their parents saw the scars crossing his hands.
His grandfather had taught him to split wood, butcher meat, repair a roof, recognize the first signs of a mountain storm and judge whether a path would hold after heavy rain. An axe sat naturally in Yuder's hands. Its weight made sense to him: broad motion, decisive force, a clean understanding of where strength ought to go. Knives and cleavers were much the same.
A sword demanded something else entirely: The balance felt wrong, the movements too narrow in places where his instincts wanted breadth, too exact where he was accustomed to relying on force. His wrists turned a fraction too late. His feet ended up where they should not. Even when he understood an instructor's correction perfectly, his body seemed determined to remember the previous mistake one more time before obeying.
Yuder hated it. More precisely, he hated being bad at it.
The others noticed quickly. Of course they did.
The first few remarks were almost playful, but once it became apparent that the recruit who could wield four elements with infuriating ease genuinely had no idea what he was doing with a sword, restraint disappeared.
Someone laughed when his footing slipped. Someone else wondered loudly whether the weapon had offended him personally, considering the way he was holding it. Each new mistake seemed to give them more confidence.
Yuder kept his eyes forward. It was not that their mockery failed to anger him - on the contrary, by the end of several sessions his teeth hurt from the pressure of keeping his jaw shut - but the most irritating part was that, beneath the laughter, they were correct. His swordsmanship was poor. Turning around and demanding they stop saying so would not make it less poor.
Yuder had never understood why people wasted time defending themselves from truths they disliked. So he said nothing.
He listened to the instructor. He repeated each correction. When laughter broke out behind him, he fixed the movement that had caused it and continued. If the others were so pleased to have found something he could not do, then there was an obvious solution.
He would simply learn to do it.
That thought settled into him with considerably more satisfaction than arguing ever could have.
Each evening, after the scheduled drills ended and the headquarters gradually quieted, Yuder left his quarters and made his way behind the main building to one of the smaller training grounds. Few people used it even during the day. At night, it was completely deserted.
That suited him perfectly. There was no laughter there, no instructor waiting impatiently for him to catch up, no line of recruits forced to repeat a sequence because Yuder had missed the transition again. Only the sword and whatever he had failed to understand that day.
He began with the forms exactly as he remembered them.
Slowly. The first movement. Then the second. When the third pulled his weight too far forward, he stopped, adjusted his stance, and began again from the first.
The blade dragged awkwardly through the fifth.
He reset again.
His wrist bent incorrectly on the eighth.
Again.
Yuder repeated each sequence until the movements began to lose their strangeness. He corrected his grip by degrees, altered the placement of his feet, forced his shoulders to remain loose when fatigue made them tense. Sometimes an error he had thought corrected returned as soon as he increased his speed, and a hot flare of frustration would rise through him.
Then he would stop. Set his feet. And begin again.
There was something satisfying in the simplicity of it. Problems elsewhere rarely presented themselves so cleanly. People said one thing and meant another. They expected answers to questions they had never actually asked then became offended when Yuder failed to provide them. The sword did not do that.
If he fell out of stance, it was because his balance was wrong. If his grip was poor, the blade told him through the strain in his wrist. If a motion failed, there was no hidden meaning to decipher. He had simply done it incorrectly.
So he corrected it.
Night after night, Yuder returned. His hands blistered. The skin hardened, tore, then hardened again. His shoulders ached in unfamiliar places, and on some mornings he woke with his forearms so stiff that opening his fingers required conscious effort. He went to training anyway.
During the day, the others continued to outpace him, but the difference no longer felt fixed. It narrowed in increments small enough that no one else seemed to notice at first.
But Yuder did. A transition that had once required thought began happening on its own. His stance stopped collapsing whenever he turned too quickly. The sword no longer felt quite so determined to pull against his grip.
Then one afternoon, someone made the same mocking remark about a mistake Yuder had heard a week earlier. Yuder corrected the movement on his next attempt.
They had nothing more to say.
The satisfaction that gave him was probably less mature than it should have been. Yuder did not particularly care.
He continued practicing.
What had begun as a refusal to remain inferior gradually became routine. Once the noise of the headquarters faded each evening, he found himself anticipating the empty training ground, the cooler night air against his face, and the uncomplicated rhythm of repetition.
There was still irritation in it, certainly. Every flaw he discovered seemed to challenge him personally, and Yuder was increasingly unwilling to leave one unanswered once he knew it existed. But there was something else now as well.
He did not have a name for it. He simply knew that some nights he remained long after the correction he had intended to practice was already fixed, moving from one form into the next because stopping felt less appealing than continuing.
The sword rose. Turned. Fell.
His footing followed.
Again.
His progress remained uneven, but it was his, earned one correction at a time until movements that had once felt foreign began settling into muscle and bone.
After a while, Yuder's nightly routine had become so familiar that he no longer gave much thought to the solitude surrounding it.
Which was perhaps why he did not immediately notice when, little by little, he stopped being alone there.
