The transfer papers had been in Windas for six weeks when the training changed.
Not the content of it — Koba still ran the same sessions, the same output work, the same controlled increments of pushing past what was comfortable and pulling back before damage. What changed was the pace. The rest intervals shortened. The sessions ran longer. Koba arrived at the yard earlier than usual and stayed later, and the specific quality of his attention during the sessions — always focused, always reading — sharpened into something that had no patience for anything except the work.
Lore felt it without it being stated. He trained accordingly.
The weighted circuit was running at five hundred and fifty now, a number that had crept up over the months without either of them acknowledging it. The rods after went to three minutes. The sessions with Koba in the afternoon pushed his fire output to the ceiling and held it there for longer than before, and the second element — the thing that crackled at the base of his fire when he pushed far enough — was becoming less like something that appeared and more like something that was present and waiting. He couldn't call it yet. He couldn't shape it. But he could find it without crisis, could feel it sitting underneath the fire the way a root sat underneath ground, could hold his output at the depth where it lived and stay there without the crisis state that used to be the only way through.
Koba watched all of it. He said less than usual, which was already very little. What he said had the specific economy of someone who understood that the time for building framework had passed and what remained was refinement.
"Faster," he said, during a session where Lore was running fire discharge against the practice wall. Not louder. Not differently. Just faster.
Lore went faster.
Vrak arrived at the fifth hour every morning and his Pride Kord arrived with him. The four of them ran formation work in the eastern section of the yard while Lore ran his circuit, and the overlap of the two sessions had become its own thing over the months — the rhythm of the circuit and the rhythm of the formation finding a parallel that neither of them had planned. When Lore finished the circuit and moved to sparring, Vrak was already there, having read the transition before it happened.
The sparring had changed too.
Vrak had been holding back since the beginning — not significantly, not in a way that insulted the sessions, but enough that Lore could feel the ceiling in it. In the last six weeks that ceiling had lifted. The sessions were faster, closer, the contact harder and more sustained. Vrak was showing him things that hadn't been in the yard before — the specific grappling techniques from Linaxis hunting, the weight distribution that made a Lion-Folk body function differently in close contact than a human one, the angles that didn't exist in Order training doctrine because the Order had never systematically faced Lion-Folk across a line of engagement.
Lore came away from the sessions bruised in places he hadn't been bruised before. He came away having learned something specific every time.
One morning, a week into the intensified schedule, Vrak held him in a pin for three seconds longer than he needed to before releasing it. It wasn't a mistake. Vrak didn't make mistakes in close work. He was making a point about what the pin would have meant on Linaxis — the full acknowledgment that the position was complete and decisive before the release. Lore stayed still for the three seconds and understood.
After the session Vrak sat beside him on the yard wall and they breathed.
"Pride Kord follows," Vrak said. Not loudly. Not to anyone specific. He was looking at the eastern wall.
Lore looked at him.
"The four of them," Vrak said. "They have come this far. They will go further." He paused. "There is something here that is worth following. I told them this." He turned and looked at Lore directly. The amber eyes were steady and unhurried. "I believe it."
Lore held his gaze.
"You know what Firoxy is," Lore said.
"Hot," Vrak said. "Volcanic. Difficult terrain." He considered for a moment. "Not so different from parts of Linaxis."
"The operations there are different from Adobis."
"All operations are different." He looked back at the eastern wall. "On Linaxis, when a hunter follows a quarry into new ground, they do not stop because the ground is new. They learn the ground." He paused. "I have been learning the Order's ground for two years. I can learn Firoxy's ground."
Lore was quiet for a moment. Something in the yard had gone about its business around them — the morning session running on, the Pride Kord running their sequence, the senior Knights moving through their drills.
"Then come," Lore said.
Vrak nodded once, the way he nodded things that had already been decided. The conversation was done.
They went back to work.
The pace of the weeks had taken on a specific texture — full days, the training in the morning and the magic work in the afternoon and the evenings spent in the quiet administration of leaving a place properly. Reports to complete, equipment to account for, the small formal tasks that the Order required when a Knight transferred. Lore did them without resentment. They were what they were.
Koba reviewed his work in the evenings. He rarely corrected anything. When he did the correction was exact and specific and needed no explanation.
On a Thorvas evening in the fourth week before departure, Koba sat across from Lore at the posting's small administrative table and did not look at the paperwork in front of either of them for a long moment.
"There is something I want you to carry," he said.
Lore waited.
"You came here two years ago with a foundation and no ceiling," Koba said. "What you leave with is a different thing. The foundation is larger. The ceiling—" He stopped. "What you leave with is not something most Knights achieve in a full career. What you do with it in Firoxy determines what you become after Firoxy." He looked at the table. "I have nothing else to teach you that the work won't teach you better."
Lore looked at him. Koba looked at the table.
"I know," Lore said.
Koba nodded once. Then he picked up the paperwork and they worked through it to the end of the evening.
Three weeks before departure the training did not slow. Two weeks before it did not slow. One week before it did not slow.
On the last morning Koba came to the yard at the fourth hour the same as every other morning. He pulled a chair to the edge of the yard the same as he had pulled it in the first week, and he sat in it with his hands clasped at his back and he watched.
Lore ran the circuit. Farren was on his back for the first round, accepting his fate with the resignation of someone who had long since stopped arguing with it. The desert crows on the main building were three this morning — a smaller dispute than usual, the argument between the two senior ones apparently reaching some kind of resolution that the third found unsatisfying but was not in a position to contest.
Five hundred and fifty. Three minutes on the rods.
He set them down and breathed and looked at Koba.
Koba looked back at him from the chair. He said nothing. He did not need to.
Lore went to prepare for departure.