He could.
Aurelian stopped explaining things out loud after a while and just watched, only stepping in when Clyde wasted a motion or overcorrected too hard. Each time, Clyde caught the mistake almost before Aurelian opened his mouth.
Something's different about him, Aurelian thought, watching the particles move clean and steady under Clyde's control. He has a large reserve of lunar ichor, responds fast to sudden changes, and barely showing any strain. That's not normal for someone this new. Is hollow star ichor boosting his lunar ichor reserves? I don't think that's the case, the Hollow star in its first phase only provides hollow eyes and an increase in overall strength.
He kept the thought to himself.
"Your control is magnificent," he said finally, arms crossed, and genuinely impressed by his control of lunar ichor. "That's not nothing, Clyde. Most people don't get this clean of a result for months."
"You keep saying that like it's supposed to worry me."
"It's not supposed to worry you. It's supposed to worry me, a little." He laughed it off quickly."Alright. That's enough for tonight. Go home, sleep, come back tomorrow and we'll push it further."
"Tomorrow?"
"You got something better to do?"
Clyde thought about it for a second. "No, not really."
"Good. Then tomorrow." Aurelian stretched his arms above his head, cracking his knuckles. "And Clyde, don't practice alone tonight. I know you're going to want to, but don't. Let your lunar ichor recover first, otherwise you're gonna turn into a howling."
"Is that what you did when you started?"
"Absolutely. Spent a week recovering and I almost fainted due to the lack of ichor." He grinned. "Learn from my mistakes. It's the only reason I share them."
"Alright, got it." Clyde said.
They wrapped up not long after. The hall settled back into its quiet, the grooves in the floor dimming as the moonlight slowly dimmed. Clyde wasn't tired, not even a little. His ichor still hummed dense and steady under his skin, like it had picked up something tonight.
Aurelian went to the bench Eira was sleeping at and pokes her face and said. "Eira, wake up, the training session is over."
Eira slowly gets up and asks Aurelian "So did the training go smoothly?"
"Yes, but something is off about him. You sense that too don't you?"
Eira yawns while stretching "Yeah, he is stronger than average people. Do you think that he joined a sketchy cult or that he isn't human?"
"I hope that's not the case, Can you research about his background information during your free time, and send me a letter about the reports"
"It's rare seeing you this serious Aurelian, but I will do it."
"Thank you, Eira"
Eira nods, a silent way of saying 'Your welcome'.
Outside, the lanterns were all out.
The clock mechanism had done its work while they were training. The city's engineered darkness settled across every street and lane in sequence, the warm amber rows of flame extinguished one after another until only the cobalt bleed above and whatever moonlight reached through the cloud cover were left to light the world.
It wasn't completely dark. It was never completely dark in Cristae, but it was the closest thing to it that the city had.
Clyde pulled his coat tighter and walked.
The canal district's lanes were quieter than they'd been on the way in, but not empty, not even close. Near the corner of one of the wider streets, a woman was setting up a small stall by arranging flat breads in neat rows by lamplight from a single hand-held lantern, her movements quick and precise, the movements of someone who had done this exact thing in this exact darkness more times than they could count. Down the next lane, two men were stacking crates of vegetables against a wall, talking in low voices, their breath visible in the cold air.
Clyde slowed his pace slightly, watching them.
This late, he thought. And they are still setting up, and still working.
He knew why, because Morning trade started so early that if you weren't ready before the lanterns came back on, you'd already lost the best hours to someone who'd prepared the night before. So you worked in the dark, you set up in the cold, and you had to make sure everything was ready before the city woke up and the competition started, because if you didn't, someone else would.
He kept walking.
The rich don't do this, he thought. They don't set up in the dark and they don't count every coin and figure out if they made enough today to afford tomorrow. He thought about the people he'd seen in the nicer districts. They are the ones with proper lantern systems built into their buildings instead of just the street fixtures, the ones whose windows stayed bright even after the city's mechanical night fell. They just live and do nothing, while the rest of us have to work twice as hard for half as much as they make and call it just the way things are.
It wasn't anger exactly. It's the particular feeling of noticing an unfairness so large and so settled into everything that most people had stopped seeing it as unfair at all. It was just the shape of the world. The rich had options, the poor had effort. That was the arrangement, and the arrangement had been going long enough that it barely got called an arrangement anymore.
I'm going to be rich one day, he thought, and then almost laughed at himself for thinking it. Properly rich, not the twenty-shillings-a-month rich, like actually rich. For Luchian, for the garden that shouldn't have to be a source of income and for the house that should just be a house and not a calculation.
He turned onto his street.
The house sat at the end of it, dark and quiet, the small front garden just visible in the cobalt light. He stood looking at it for a moment and began to admire the view of the freshly painted door, the windows they'd cleaned themselves, and the low fence they'd agreed looked better than they'd expected when they first saw it. Clyde couldn't help but smile at the view.
This house might be small, he thought. But it's finally ours.
He went inside.
The kitchen was clean. Luchian had washed up before going to bed and the plates stacked neatly by the sink, the table wiped down, the small vase of dried herbs he'd brought in from the garden sitting exactly where he always put it. Evidence of a normal evening, neatly arranged.
Clyde looked at his brother's door for a moment.
No light underneath it, and no sound. Just the easy, settled stillness of someone who'd had a full day and gone to bed without anything chasing them into their sleep.
Good, Clyde thought. He is finally sleeping peacefully without worrying about daily necessities.
He went to his room, shut the door gently behind him, and sat on the edge of his bed for a moment without doing anything in particular. His ichor hummed faintly under his skin, dense as usual. The training hadn't drained him. If anything it had left him more settled than he'd started.
He got changed.
Lay down.
Stared at the ceiling for a while, running the Cage through his head one more time without actually forming it just feeling the particles locking together, the lattice finding its shape.
Tomorrow, he thought. We go again.
His eyes closed.
The house stayed quiet around him, and for once, nothing came to interrupt it.