SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Rhosyn stepped up to the shimmer and walked into it, and the instant she touched it she was gone, folded out of the world the way anything is that passes through a Gate. Trafalgar had done it more times than he could count. There was nothing new in the sight of it, so he went through after her without breaking stride.

Caelvyrn and Dravok came through behind him a moment later.

The first thing Trafalgar noticed about the place on the far side was that there was almost nothing to notice.

It was vast. That much pressed on him at once, a sense of enormous open distance running away in every direction. But all of it was black. The ground under his boots was black and gave back no shine. Overhead, where a sky should have been, there was more black, and whether it was a sky or a ceiling or simply the edge of the world giving out, he couldn't have said. There was neither sun nor horizon, and nothing at all to mark where one thing ended and the next began.

A few things broke the emptiness, and they looked absurd sitting in it. One was a scatter of furniture, actual furniture, a pair of chairs, a low table, a wide couch, set down on the black ground as though someone had lifted a corner out of a sitting room and set it down in the middle of nowhere. The other, some way off, was a pool.

The pool pulled at him before anything else did. It sat low in the black like a spring, flat and dark, and he couldn't tell by looking what was in it. But the furniture was closer, and stranger, so he asked about that first.

"Why is there furniture out here?"

Caelvyrn dropped into the couch as if to prove a point. "Because when I want to rest, I'd rather not lie down on the floor like an animal." He stretched his arms along the back of it, at home. "Don't let the little corner fool you, though. The place has no edges worth the name. You can walk kilometres in any direction you please and find nothing but more of the same. It's as big as it needs to be."

"I see." Trafalgar's eyes went back to the pool. "And that?"

"That is what will put you back together." Dravok crossed to stand at its edge, looking down into the dark water. "The liquid in it mends you. Whatever the training does, whatever you break or tear or lose, you go in, and you come out whole. And if you sit and meditate in it, it does more than mend. It'll carry your core along faster than it would ever climb on its own." He glanced back. "Faster. Not fast. Don't confuse the two. It'll take everything you've got regardless."

Trafalgar looked from the pool to the black distance and back again. "And how does this place actually work?"

This time it was Rhosyn who answered, from where she'd lowered onto the arm of a chair, sparing what little strength she had left.

"The design is our own. Nothing borrowed." Her voice was quiet but steady. "The heart of it is time. It moves differently here. A hundred days within this place amount to a single day in the world outside."

She let him absorb that before continuing.

"Your body will still feel those days. You will tire. You will hunger, sleep, heal, and grow stronger exactly as you would anywhere else. But those years will not be taken from your natural lifespan. Your aging remains anchored to the world beyond this place. Spend a year here, and when you leave, only a handful of days will have passed for your body."

A graver note entered her voice.

"Your mind is another matter. It will live every second. Every day. Every year. Nothing will be spared simply because the world outside has barely moved." Her eyes remained on him. "So you will guard it carefully, Trafalgar. What awaits you will not be gentle, and there will be a great deal of it."

Trafalgar went quiet. He was thinking. Three days away in the world was three hundred days in here. A season outside was most of a lifetime within. Even if his core crept along at the pace Dravok promised and no faster, three hundred days of drilling and correction and fighting things that could genuinely hurt him would do something to his technique, his skills, and the plain hard-won feel for combat that no amount of raw power ever replaced. He would come out of a handful of outside days an entirely different fighter.

He had one more thing to ask, and it was the one that counted.

"How safe is this?" He turned to Rhosyn. "Truly. Can nothing get in here? No rift opening on its own, nothing forcing its way past the rules you've laid on the place, no road into this dimension but that Gate?"

"It's safe. We've tested it more times than I can count, from every angle we could think of." Rhosyn met his eyes. "The only thing in the world that could reach in here uninvited is a mind greater than my own, and there are very few of those left. And if one ever tried, I would feel it the instant it did. My mind is bound to this place. Nothing touches it without touching me."

Trafalgar caught the edge of that, the way he caught most things.

"And if something did happen to this place," he said slowly. "Would it happen to you as well?"

Rhosyn didn't look away from him. "It might. Whatever struck the dimension would reach me as well, all of me. I simply can't tell you what it would do once it got there."

The furniture, the black, the pool, all of it fell a little distant for a moment as he looked at her. She was already worn to the bone holding this place together. And she was telling him, plainly, that if it ever broke, it might break her with it. She had built the whole of it anyway. For this.

"Are you certain about this?" It was to her, and only to her. "Standing this close to a thing that could drag you down with it. All so I get to train a little longer."

Rhosyn's expression softened, which it did for almost no one, and she looked at him with something half reassurance and half something older and more tired.

"Don't worry about me. Nothing is going to happen." She said it gently, and left no room to argue with it. "And you know as well as I do that we lose a little more time with every day and week and month and year that slips past us. This is the best thing there is, for all of it. For you, and for what comes after." A faint, dry lift touched the corner of her mouth. "So stop looking at me like that."

Trafalgar held her gaze a moment, let it go, and nodded once.

He turned to Dravok, and whatever softness had been in his face went out of it, replaced by the thing that had walked three years to stand here.

"So." He rolled his shoulders. "What do we start with?"

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