He kept training.
The third eye had begun to feel less like a foreign thing grafted onto him and more like a sense he had always possessed but only recently learned to use. He moved through his forms with it open, practicing the particular discipline of perceiving two realities at once — his own direct sight and the eye's detached, hovering view of the world around him. The estrangement he had felt at first was gone. It had become his.
He discovered, somewhere in the middle of that session, that he could move it.
Not just open and close it — move it. Across his body, away from his hand, up along his arm. He held it over his shoulder and felt the difference immediately. It hovered there like a sentinel, watching the space behind him with a calm and unblinking patience that his own eyes couldn't manage. It was an improvement in every meaningful sense, and he spent the remainder of the session simply getting used to it — the weight of the extra perspective, the way the world looked from slightly above and behind himself.
When he was done he went back to his room, cleaned up, and slept well.
The next morning he explored.
The manor was large enough that exploration felt like a genuine undertaking, and eventually it led him to the library.
He stopped in the doorway.
The room was vast and lined from floor to ceiling on every wall with shelves, each shelf packed tightly with volumes of every size and age. The collection was so large it ceased to feel like a collection and began to feel more like a geography — a terrain you could get lost in, mapped by subject and era and language rather than altitude and distance. The knowledge contained in that room alone, he thought, was more than any single person could absorb in a lifetime of serious effort.
He walked among the shelves for a while, running his eyes across the spines without any clear direction.
There was, of course, a bookkeeper.
Of course there is, Ivel thought — not unkindly, but with the particular dry awareness of someone still adjusting to the scale of wealth the Frost family operated at. The man was short and stockily built, and he appeared from between two shelves with the quiet efficiency of someone who had spent a great many years knowing exactly where everything was.
"What type of book are you looking for, sir?"
Ivel thought for a moment.
"Something on the history of the world. If you have it."
"I'll be right back."
He was. He returned with an armful of volumes and laid them out with a slight apology for the modest selection. Ivel looked at the stack — five books, each of considerable length — and felt something close to relief.
"No," he said. "This is exactly right. Thank you."
The bookkeeper nodded and withdrew, and Ivel settled in.
Hours passed.
He made good progress — better than he expected — and worked through two of the books before pausing to sit back and let what he had read settle.
The past, it turned out, had not been peaceful. Not even close. Minerva's history was soaked in war and the appetite for conquest, entire kingdoms rising and consuming one another across centuries, most of them leaving behind little more than names in the margins of other kingdoms' accounts. The ones that had ruled the land were gone now. The landscape had been remade several times over by the ambitions of people long dead.
One name surfaced more than once and refused to stay still in his mind.
The Kingdom of Light.
He turned the name over slowly, certain he had encountered it somewhere before — not in a book, not here, but somewhere older and closer than that. The feeling was frustratingly imprecise. A half-recognition, the way you know a face but cannot place where you've seen it.
He moved on.
By the time he finished the remaining books the sun had gone, and the library had grown dim around him. He rose, stretched, and noted — with some dissatisfaction — that the majority of what he had read concerned wars. Border conflicts, campaigns, sieges, treaties made and broken. The great kingdom of Intra, one of the largest powers the continent had known up until three centuries ago, reduced to a chapter. Everything was conflict. Whatever else these people had been, whoever else they had been, the record that remained was mostly blood.
He shelved the thought alongside the rest of them and went back outside.
The sun was setting.
He drew the katana and let the last of the light work with him — the blade catching it on each pass, throwing brief bright lines across the training ground as he moved through his steps. The eye hovered at his shoulder, vigilant, turning slowly.
"Your eye is quite interesting."
Ivel spun, raised the blade, and had it leveled at the figure before his mind had finished processing the sound. Then the figure resolved into Vas — wine bottle in hand, the same size as the last one, expression entirely unbothered by the sword pointed at him.
Ivel lowered it.
"Are you a ghost, or something?"
"I wouldn't want to be a ghost," Vas said. "They're dead, after all."
"Ah." Ivel exhaled. "I see."
He sheathed the blade and looked at the man.
"What are you doing out here?"
Vas considered the question with more genuine thought than it seemed to require.
"Same as you, I imagine. The ball."
He took a sip from the bottle, then tilted it slightly in the direction of the manor.
"Your father and sisters are out enjoying the capital. Shouldn't you be doing the same?"
Ivel looked away. The horizon was burning down from orange to red at the edges, the sea somewhere beyond it.
"I'm still weak," he said. The shame in it was quiet but there. "And I can't do what I want until I'm stronger."
Vas was silent for a moment. Then he made a low sound — something between a laugh and a sigh — and shook his head.
"You young ones. Always so imprudent. So hungry."
He took another slow sip.
"You all want to grow up so fast, you—"
He stopped. Let the sentence go somewhere unspoken.
"Never mind, kid. Just remember this."
He stepped forward — not close, but closer — and his voice shifted into something quieter and more direct.
"Do not take for granted what you have. You have a family that loves you. In this world, that is rare."
He paused.
"And even when it isn't rare — it doesn't last for as long as you think it will."
He turned his gaze toward the last of the sunset. Something moved across his face then — something old and still and not for sharing.
Ivel said nothing. He let the silence sit and held the man's words somewhere careful inside himself.
Then Vas exhaled, and his tone changed.
"You know there's going to be a tournament at the ball."
Ivel looked up.
"What kind of tournament?"
"Families show their best. Children your age, mostly, competing against one another."
He scratched the side of his head with one finger, bottle still loose in his other hand.
"First place takes home a nexus orb. A good one."
He glanced at the boy sideways.
"Take that for what you will."
He said nothing further on the subject. He simply turned and walked back toward the manor, his footsteps unhurried, disappearing through the doorway as quietly and suddenly as he always did.
Ivel stood alone in the cooling air of the training ground.
A tournament.
He looked down at the katana at his side, then back at the door Vas had walked through.
He stayed outside a little longer, thinking.