Chapter 125. It Hadn’t Been Mentorship, It Had Been Engineering
The tremor began at her elbow, a fine, involuntary shudder that traveled down her forearm before seizing her wrist. Aetherion, the blade that had felt like an extension of her own soul only moments ago, now felt like a foreign object, impossibly heavy and slick with other people’s blood.
The sword’s tip dipped toward the blood-soaked earth, betraying her. Her eyes had gone distant, glazed with the particular, hollow horror of someone watching a cherished memory refuse to stay buried, only to rise up as a corpse.
Without conscious thought, her boot dragged backward through the gore, taking a half step away from him as if the very air around Corwin had turned poisonous.
The face before her was a grotesque dissonance. It didn’t match the cold, mocking monster who had stalked her nightmares for days, yet that mismatch was infinitely worse.
The cognitive dissonance screamed in her skull like a physical wound.
In the space between heartbeats, the battlefield dissolved.
The smell of smoke and iron was replaced by the sweet, cloying scent of turned soil from her mother’s garden. The screams of the dying faded into the gentle rustle of late afternoon wind through summer leaves.
She was ten years old again, breathless, her lungs burning with the honest ache of exertion, grinning wildly because she had finally matched Corwin’s blocking speed.
She remembered the sunlight slanting warm through the trees and the way the dust motes danced in the air. She remembered the specific, comforting texture of that afternoon.
She remembered Corwin’s low, steady voice, patient and unshakable, correcting her stance for what must have been the thousandth time that summer.
At the time, she had mistaken his relentless discipline for something sacred, a kind of love she hadn’t possessed the vocabulary to name. A grown man, a retired soldier with nothing to gain, spending hours of his life on a carpenter’s daughter that the village had overlooked.
’He was my hero,’ she thought, the realization tasting like ash. ’ He was the first person who saw me...’
’Not as a child, not as a burden, but as something... capable.’
She remembered him lowering his practice sword, a rare, genuine expression of pride breaking across his weathered features. He had knelt to her level, his hands rough but gentle, and pulled her into a brief, fierce hug that had made her feel invincible.
"You’re going to be a legend one day, little one," he had said, his voice rough with an affection that had felt like the closest thing to fatherly protection she had ever known. "Mark my words..."
"The whole kingdom’s going to know your name."
She had believed every syllable. She had spent fifteen years chasing that ghost of a promise, never once questioning why a man with no connections had taken such a specific, surgical interest in her training.
She had never wondered why he had pushed her toward speed and reaction time above all other virtues, the very skills needed to survive an assassination, not to win a war.
Now, the memories flooded back with the cruelty of a poisoned blade. The books he had given her always focused on unit tactics, sacrifice, and the cold calculus of attrition.
The stories of knights who died for ’greater causes’ are always framed as noble martyrdom rather than tragic waste. Every lesson, every encouraging word, every moment of perceived kindness... it hadn’t been mentorship.
It had been engineering. Every word had been a brick laid carefully into a foundation designed for a purpose she had never once suspected. She wasn’t a student; she was a project.
"You remember," Corwin said.
His voice shattered the memory like a hammer through glass. There was none of the warmth from that sun-drenched yard; it was cold, clinical, and utterly devoid of humanity.
"I can see it on your face..."
"That’s rather touching, actually... Sentiment has a way of outliving its usefulness."
Catherine’s throat felt constricted by thorns.
"You," she managed, the word barely escaping her lips, a broken fragment of a scream. "You were the one who found me..."
"You were the one who sent me to the academy."
"I was the one who recognized potential worth cultivating, yes." Corwin’s mouth curved into something that mimicked a smile, but it was a predator’s expression—hollow and hungry. "Your reaction is oddly well timed, White Sword..."
"I confess I’ve waited rather a long while to see it."
"Why," she whispered.
The word carried the crushing weight of eight years of grief and fifteen years of betrayed trust. It was a plea for a logic that didn’t exist.
"Why me? Why any of it? Why this?!"
"Patience, White Sword..." Corwin’s pale eyes locked onto hers with terrifying calm. "You’ll have your answers in time..."
"Tonight is not that night."
William saw it with the visceral clarity of a soldier who had learned to read the minute tells of a breaking line. He saw the exact moment Catherine’s composure didn’t just crack it shattered.
Her sword arm began to betray her with violent, uncontrolled tremors that rattled the steel of Aetherion. Her breathing became shallow, erratic gasps that sounded more like the whimpering of a wounded animal than a warrior.
She was drowning on dry land, sinking into a psychic abyss where the past was swallowing her alive.
He moved before his mind could register the tactical risk. He didn’t move to disarm her; he knew better than to take her weapon when she was this vulnerable, but he closed the distance until he was planted firmly at her flank.
He became a physical anchor, a solid, immovable wall of steel and muscle designed to prevent her from drifting further into the void.
"Catherine." His voice wasn’t gentle.
Gentleness would have been a kindness she couldn’t afford. Instead, he made it sharp, cutting through the suffocating fog of her shock like a blade through silk.
"Look at me! Not him, but me!"
She didn’t respond. Her pupils remained blown wide, fixed on Corwin with a glassy, hollow stare that suggested she was seeing through him, through the clearing, through time itself.
William reached out, his gauntleted hand clamping onto her shoulder with enough bruising force to pierce through the haze. He needed her to feel something—pain, pressure, anything real.
"Listen to me," he growled, his voice low and unrelenting. "You lifted that sword last night with your own two hands."
"You went down into that hellish memory alone... you crawled through the wreckage of eight years of guilt, and you came back out without anyone dragging you free."
"You forgave yourself for something that took nearly a decade to even face..."
"That man standing there? He isn’t more powerful than what you’ve already survived, Catherine."
"He’s just a man wearing an old memory like a weapon... hoping it still cuts the way it used to."
Catherine’s breath hitched. A single, shuddering gasp escaped her lips as a fraction of clarity flickered behind her eyes.
"Think about what you told me," William pressed, his grip tightening as if he could physically hold her soul inside her body. "In that room full of swords..."
"You said real strength isn’t never freezing... It’s what happens after the freeze."
"You proved that tonight... You proved it when you stood up after the slaughter and trauma!"
"Now prove it again! Prove it right now, in front of the architect who spent fifteen years trying to design you into a tool."
The wind howled through the clearing, carrying the metallic tang of blood and the distant screams of the dying, but William kept his focus laser locked on her.
"He’s not a ghost, Catherine," he said, his words each one a hammer blow against her paralysis. "He’s not some unstoppable specter haunting your childhood..."
"He’s flesh and blood. He’s bone and sinew."
"He’s bleeding from wounds I already carved into him tonight... You are allowed to be furious, yes, but you are also allowed to want to tear his throat out for what he stole from you."
"But you are not required to fall apart in front of him."
William watched the transformation with grim satisfaction. It was painful to witness the way she had to claw her way back from the precipice of madness, but it was necessary.
The trembling in her arm began to subside, the erratic gasps smoothing out into the measured, deliberate rhythm of a predator preparing to strike. The horror in her eyes was being consumed by something far more dangerous: a cold, white-hot rage that burned with the intensity of a dying star.
"He’s a man," she whispered.
The words were quiet, almost hollow, but they carried the weight of a death sentence. "He’s just... a man."
"That’s it," William urged, his voice steady as she found her footing.
"He spent my entire childhood deciding what I was for," she said louder now, the words dripping with venom. "Deciding what I would become..."
"Deciding how I would die."
"And tonight," William said, stepping back just enough to give her the space to hunt, "you get to decide something else."