The training was already harsh before Engan understood what harsh meant.
By eight he was running the forest path before sunrise, barefoot in summer, boots in winter, Shiro somewhere behind him at a pace that never varied and never hurried and always arrived exactly when it was supposed to. By nine he could disarm three out of five grabs without looking, his body reacting before his mind could complicate it. By ten he was running combinations with a wooden blade that Shiro corrected with two fingers — a touch on the wrist, a pressure at the elbow — without breaking his own stillness.
He never explained why. He never said what any of it was for.
Engan stopped asking. The asking had never produced answers. The doing produced something else — a kind of fluency in his own body he hadn't had before, that accumulated quietly until one day it was simply there, the way language is there after enough years of being surrounded by it.
The village was called Astrael. It sat on the slope of a hill country where the roads were narrow and the stone walls were old and the market ran four days a week and everyone knew everyone in the specific, wearing way of places small enough that knowing is unavoidable. Engan moved through it like someone fluent in a second language who still dreams in their first. He filed people. He tracked the way conversations shifted when certain topics came close. He noticed what the vendor on the corner watched and what she pretended not to watch, and he noticed that Shiro knew this too, and that knowing it produced in Shiro a quality of alertness he wore under everything else, the way a structure wears its load-bearing walls.
One afternoon when Engan was ten, walking back from the market and not looking at the market, Shiro stopped in the middle of the road.
Engan stopped too. He followed Shiro's gaze.
There was nothing there. Just the road, and the houses, and the afternoon light.
"What are you looking at," Engan said.
"Nothing," Shiro said. Then, after a moment: "Everything looks the same as it did yesterday."
"Is that bad?"
Shiro looked at him. Something moved through his face — not worry exactly, something more patient than worry, something that had already made peace with a specific difficulty and was simply carrying it.
"Not yet," he said.
He walked on. Engan filed it. He was getting good at filing things Shiro said that didn't resolve.
That evening Engan sat at the table while Shiro made tea, and looked at the gap in the shelf where something used to be, and thought about the word yet. About what it implied. About what you had to know to use it with that specific quality of calm.
He didn't ask.
He went to bed and ran the forms in his head until he fell asleep, correcting the same error in the same place until the correction was automatic.