Part Eighty-Four — An Old Teacher, A New Student

　Vance settled into Horizoncrest with the specific, restless energy of someone who'd spent forty years wanting a genuine challenge and had finally, unexpectedly, been handed several at once.

　"Your domain," she told me, on her third day properly living among us, "is a scholar's fever dream. A functioning barrier unlike anything in recorded theory, an internal dimensional seal I still haven't been permitted to examine properly, and — apparently — Ignivar, alive and teaching, when every account I'd heard suggested he'd simply vanished from relevance decades ago."

　"You say that like it's a compliment," Ignivar said, dry, watching her unpack a truly alarming quantity of instruments into the small workspace Elaine had arranged for her.

　"It is one," Vance said. "The highest compliment my field has, actually. Fascinating and slightly terrifying is precisely what keeps someone like me getting out of bed in the morning."

I like her. Genuinely.

Didn't expect to, given how our first meeting went, but here we are.

　I found myself curious, more than once that week, about the exact shape of her history with Ignivar — enough that I finally asked outright, over a meal the three of us shared with Eris and Ace one evening.

　"How does someone go from training under a dragon," I asked, "to studying dimensional theory in a private tower?"

　Vance considered the question with the same careful precision she brought to everything else.

　"I trained under Ignivar for combat, originally. Family expectation, mostly — my bloodline had some minor martial reputation to uphold, and my parents assumed a dragon's tutelage would secure that reputation properly."

　"And?"

　Eris prompted, genuinely interested.

　"And I was mediocre at it," Vance said, entirely without embarrassment. "Competent, never gifted. Ignivar recognized that faster than I did, honestly, and rather than continuing to drill a skill I'd never excel at, he suggested I might find something more suited to my actual talents."

　"I suggested," Ignivar said, "because I noticed she spent considerably more time asking why a technique worked than actually practicing it. That's not a swordsman's curiosity. That's a scholar's."

Huh.

That's genuinely thoughtful, for a teacher. Recognizing what someone's actually built for, rather than forcing them toward what's expected.

　"Best advice anyone's ever given me," Vance said. "I left combat training within the year, found my way toward dimensional theory shortly after, and never looked back. We lost touch, eventually — my own fault, mostly, given how thoroughly I buried myself in research once I found the right subject."

　"No resentment, I hope," Ignivar said, something almost uncertain in the question, rare enough from him that I noticed it immediately.

　"None," Vance said, warm in a way that softened her usual clinical precision considerably. "You gave me permission to actually become myself, rather than what my family wanted. That's not something I've ever resented, not once, in forty years of thinking about it."

That's a nice moment.

Wasn't expecting dinner tonight to turn into something this genuinely touching.

　Elian, predictably, gravitated toward Vance almost immediately once her academic reputation became clear — the two of them falling into easy, animated conversation about the domain's unexplored reaches within days of her settling in.

　"There's a resonance pattern in the eastern sections," Elian told her, spreading his own carefully assembled notes across a table clearly not built for the volume of parchment currently covering it.

　"I haven't been able to properly categorize it. Spirit energy, certainly, but layered with something I don't have the training to identify."

　"Show me," Vance said, already leaning in with the specific hunger of someone who'd been academically starved for considerably longer than was healthy.

Good pairing, those two.

Elian's been wanting a real collaborator for a while now, and Vance clearly needed somewhere to actually point forty years of expertise.

　I gave them both my blessing to properly survey whatever safe sections of the domain they could manage, with the explicit understanding that anything resembling the dimensional seal itself remained strictly off-limits until I decided otherwise.

　"Understood," Vance said, already halfway to gathering her instruments for an immediate expedition. "There's more than enough mystery out there to keep me occupied without needing to push past a boundary you've made clear."

　Ignivar and I resumed our own training the following morning, harder than before, exactly as I'd asked for after the incident with the knight.

　"Again," he said, once I'd hit the ground for what felt like the fortieth time that week alone.

　"Again," I agreed, pulling myself back up.

　"You're improving," he said, something genuine in the observation despite its brevity. "Not just physically. I've noticed you catching yourself, twice now, in moments that might have once slipped past you unchecked."

Small progress.

Still progress, though.

　"Feels slower than I'd like," I admitted.

　"Most worthwhile things do," Ignivar said. "Ready?"

　"Ready," I said, and meant it a little more fully than I had the week before.

　We trained until the light started fading, and it was only afterward, both of us catching our breath, that a question I'd been quietly turning over for weeks finally found its way out.

　"Can I ask you something," I said. "Not about training."

　"You may."

　"Why haven't they come for me," I said. "Vahlreth and Skorne. It's been years since the mountain. Years since I've been visible enough — Roshan, the guild, Horizoncrest itself — that finding me shouldn't be difficult for beings that old and that powerful.

　So why haven't they?"

　Ignivar considered the question a long moment, genuine thought behind the pause rather than simple hesitation.

　"I don't know," he said, finally, honest in a way that unsettled me more than a confident answer would have. "It's a fair question, and I don't have a satisfying answer for it. Dragons of their stature don't typically show restraint out of mercy. If they haven't come, it's either because something else currently holds their attention more urgently than you do, or because they're waiting for a reason that hasn't yet presented itself."

That's not comforting.

That's actually the opposite of comforting.

　"Should I be more worried that they haven't come," I asked, "or less?"

　"I genuinely don't know," Ignivar said again. "That uncertainty is, itself, worth taking seriously. Beings like them rarely do anything without reason. The absence of action is rarely actually the absence of intent."

Filing that away too.

One more thing to stay alert for, on top of everything else already demanding my attention.

　That evening, watching Vance and Elian pore over shared notes, watching Eris spar with her own trainees at a level that would have been unthinkable a year earlier, watching Ace judge the quality of dinner with his usual self-important air — I felt something settle in my chest that had nothing to do with the tension of the past week at all.

Whatever's still coming — the Church, the knights who now know how to breach my barrier, whatever eventually happens with Vahlreth and Skorne — this is still worth protecting.

Every single unremarkable evening like this one.

I intend to keep protecting it, however hard I have to work to actually deserve that job.