“Of course, of course. But I feel like I have lived a dozen lives, given all I have seen and the wars I have waged. This forge is my true home, child. I never feel like my roots are in place until it is properly lit. But smelting the ore, heating the steel, pounding out its imperfections to shape it into something beautiful and deadly… there’s a purity to it the rest of the world rarely allows.”

Cyrus suddenly felt, not just awkward, but unwanted. This was a moment of privacy for his master, and he was intruding upon it. He kicked the grass and muttered something about how he should go check on how Stasia was doing.

“Worry not for my daughter,” Thorda said. “It is time you focused upon yourself. You’ve spent two years held in the empire’s cage. Tonight, you sleep free. Go inside and choose one of the many available rooms on the second floor to be your own. For the foreseeable future, this is now your home.”

The next morning, before Cyrus was allowed to eat his breakfast, Stasia brought him out for laps around the mansion estate. Despite the cool morning, she wore a pair of loose trousers and a shirt with both its sleeves and the lower half cut off so it exposed her arms and abdomen. Stretches came first, and she ran him through a quick set to warm up his muscles and chase away the lingering sleep in his limbs.

“How far is the run?” he asked her at the start. The woman glanced at him, and she corrected his attempt at touching his toes before answering.

“Yours, or mine?”

“Will we not run the same amount?”

Her laughter should have been a dead giveaway to the horrors awaiting him, but he did not yet understand.

“For you, we’ll start with just a mile,” she said. “Worry about keeping up with me once you can handle that.”

Stasia lapped him twice before he finished his first mile, and multiple times he slowed to a walk to catch his breath. It was a dire sign of things to come.

“Everything you do, I do also,” she told him when it was time for her physical training. They met behind the mansion, in a patch of soft grass. A few needed supplies lay on a blanket nearby. “When you get angry with me, and you will, remember that. This training may be hard, it may be cruel, but at least when I instruct you, it is fair.”

They started easily enough, basic push-ups to strengthen his arms. He caught Stasia doing hers with one hand behind her back, and when she wasn’t looking, he attempted the same (the result was him nearly planting his face into the dirt). What followed after this was much more unexpected.