Caryse Souellet had imagined many possibilities for what training beneath Christopher Sincere Pride might entail, but none of them had involved spending several consecutive sessions learning absolutely nothing about fighting.

That fact had begun to irritate her almost immediately.

She was young enough that she still possessed a relatively uncomplicated understanding of what training was supposed to mean. Someone stronger knew something that someone weaker did not know. The stronger person demonstrated it, the weaker person practiced it, mistakes were corrected, repetition followed, and eventually the student became better. If Christopher knew how to fight, then Caryse expected him to teach her how to fight. If Christopher possessed abilities she could not comprehend, then she expected him to begin explaining how she might someday approach those abilities herself. She expected lessons in movement, defense, concentration, perception, power, strategy, or at the very least some exercise that carried an obvious relationship to becoming more dangerous than she had been yesterday.

Christopher taught her none of those things.

He had never once shown her how to throw a proper punch.

He had never taught her how to block one.

He had never asked her to channel energy through her hands, strengthen her body, sharpen her senses, control an aura, project force, or summon anything from within herself. Whenever Caryse attempted to practice something resembling combat on her own, Christopher either ignored it or told her to stop wasting herself. At first, she assumed he was testing her patience. Then she thought perhaps he was determining what she already knew before constructing some elaborate training regimen around her weaknesses. By the end of the first several sessions, Caryse had accepted a considerably less flattering possibility.

Christopher might actually be insane.

The place in which he had left her reinforced that conclusion.

Caryse had no name for the expanse. Christopher had never offered one, and she eventually understood that he did not consider naming it important. It extended without a recognizable horizon, although extension itself seemed to behave incorrectly there. Black plains climbed vertically without becoming walls. Enormous white masses resembling mountains hung beneath transparent surfaces that Caryse occasionally realized she was standing upon. Rivers flowed upward, folded sideways, disappeared into themselves, and returned from locations that had never been connected to where they began. Distance changed according to attention. Objects appeared farther away when Caryse attempted to approach them and uncomfortably near whenever she decided to avoid them. There were regions where looking downward placed something above her, and other regions where she could watch herself standing hundreds of feet away despite never having moved from her position.

It was not merely hostile.

Hostility would have been easier.

A hostile place wanted to harm her, which meant that danger could at least be understood as having a direction. This place behaved as though it had never agreed to the assumptions upon which Caryse's body depended. It did not particularly care whether she lived or died because life and death were not the principles around which its behavior had been arranged. The expanse responded instead to dependency. Whenever Caryse relied upon something instinctively, the environment seemed to discover that reliance and remove whatever made it useful.

The first lesson had been balance.

Caryse learned it when the ground tilted beneath her and she instinctively adjusted her feet. The moment she widened her stance, the surface ceased behaving as something capable of supporting weight. Her feet sank through it. When she threw herself backward to escape, what had been behind her became beneath her, sending her falling in another direction. She twisted in midair, preparing to land properly, and the concept of a useful landing disappeared with the orientation she had prepared herself to meet.

She hit the ground hard.

Christopher watched.

He had been watching for what felt like hours.

The older man stood some distance away dressed almost offensively casually compared with the violence Caryse had been enduring. There was no battle posture in him. No concern. No visible concentration. He did not stand like a master supervising a student through some dangerous exercise. Most of the time, he looked like someone waiting for another person to finish doing something unnecessarily complicated.

Caryse despised that look.

The second lesson had been breathing.

That one frightened her.

After another collapse, Caryse had instinctively attempted to control herself by slowing her breathing. She inhaled deeply, held it, and released it carefully, doing exactly what nearly every frightened or exhausted person would have done. The atmosphere changed before her second deliberate breath.

Air entered her lungs but no longer behaved as nourishment. The harder she attempted to breathe, the more violently the act of breathing exhausted her. She tried shorter breaths and found them insufficient. She tried deeper breaths and felt pressure gathering inside her chest. She stopped moving, believing that conserving energy might help, and discovered that remaining still caused the environment to demand more from her body merely to maintain stillness.

Panic came next.

That was worse.

Her heartbeat accelerated. Her nervous system flooded itself with the urgency to escape. Her muscles tightened. Adrenaline arrived with all of the primitive certainty of a body convinced that it had been designed to preserve itself.

The expanse interpreted adrenaline as an announcement.

Everything attacked.

Not intentionally. That distinction would become important much later.

At thirteen, Caryse could only understand that the moment her body entered survival mode, the entire place became impossible to survive.

The plain beneath her separated into thousands of incompatible orientations. Weight dragged her in several directions. Pressure gathered around her joints. Her muscles reacted, which caused the pressure to increase. She attempted to protect her head when enormous pieces of fractured terrain came toward her, and the very act of covering herself seemed to give those objects a more definite relationship with where she was standing. She ran once. The landscape shortened itself in front of her and extended itself behind her until running ceased to represent departure from danger and became another mechanism by which danger remained attached to her.

Eventually Caryse fell.

She remained there with one side of her face pressed against the black surface, breathing so violently that each breath hurt.

Christopher did not help her stand.

That had become another source of anger.

She had expected severity from him. She had known enough about Christopher before becoming his apprentice to understand that he was not going to congratulate her for effort or construct lessons around preserving her feelings. What Caryse had not expected was how utterly uninterested he seemed in encouraging effort at all. The harder she tried, the less impressed he became. Whenever she forced herself back onto her feet through determination alone, there was no approval waiting for her. Whenever she endured something that should have made her collapse, Christopher never praised her endurance.

In fact, he seemed to consider endurance part of the problem.

That realization confused Caryse more than anything else.

Everything she understood about strength depended upon the capacity to continue.

A stronger body could continue where a weaker body failed. A stronger mind could continue thinking under pressure. Greater stamina meant continuing after exhaustion. Greater determination meant continuing despite fear. Courage meant continuing when instinct begged someone to stop. Every heroic principle Caryse had encountered seemed to contain the same fundamental command somewhere inside it.

Keep going.

Christopher apparently wanted something else.

Caryse did not know what.

She only knew that he kept bringing her back to the point where continuation became impossible.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Until eventually the ordeal stopped feeling like training and began feeling like Christopher was dismantling her by repetition.

Her legs trembled beneath her. Her arms had lost most of their strength. Her palms were scraped, the side of her face hurt, and several muscles had reached the unpleasant stage beyond ordinary soreness where they no longer felt fully responsive to conscious instruction. She could feel her own heartbeat inside her neck. Sweat ran down her forehead and into one eye, but even wiping it away now felt like an unnecessary expenditure.

Caryse hated that she was crying.

She hated Christopher seeing it more.

She had reached the point where anger itself required too much energy to sustain. Tears came without drama, moving silently down her cheeks while she tried to force herself onto her knees. Her arms shook beneath her. She managed to raise herself several inches before her strength failed and she collapsed again.

Christopher finally approached.

He stopped close enough that Caryse could see his shoes without lifting her head.

For several moments, he said nothing.

That silence infuriated her because she could imagine exactly what he saw. A little girl who wanted to become powerful lying exhausted beneath his feet. An apprentice who could not even stand after days of supposedly introductory training. Someone who had believed herself worthy of learning from Christopher Sincere Pride and had been defeated repeatedly by an environment before Christopher had ever bothered to become her opponent.

Caryse forced her head upward.

Christopher's expression contained none of the disappointment she expected.

That somehow made everything worse.

She told him that she could not continue.

Christopher answered with only four words.

“Then stop trying to.”

Caryse stared at him.

It might have been the first statement he had made during the entire ordeal that offended her more than the ordeal itself.

He did not explain immediately. Christopher allowed the words to remain there while Caryse's mind attacked them from every direction. If she stopped trying, she would remain on the ground. If she remained on the ground, she failed. If she failed, the training ended. If she stopped fighting exhaustion, exhaustion won.

There was no interpretation under which his instruction made sense.

And that was precisely the structure Christopher had been attempting to expose.

Caryse did not understand it yet, but she was still imagining exhaustion as an opponent.

She imagined fatigue as something acting upon her while she represented the resistance against it. Her muscles weakened, therefore she needed stronger muscles. Her thoughts became cloudy, therefore she needed greater concentration. Her breathing became painful, therefore she needed discipline sufficient to stabilize it. Her body demanded rest, therefore she needed willpower sufficient to deny the demand. She treated every limitation as a wall and believed advancement meant possessing enough strength to break through more walls.

Christopher had no intention of producing a student who merely broke larger walls.

He wanted the wall to lose jurisdiction.

The difference was enormous.

Caryse remained on the ground while Christopher finally explained enough for her to recognize the shape of what he was doing. Strength, endurance, stamina, willpower, discipline, resistance—every one of them could become another confession of dependence if she required them in order to continue. If exhaustion could force her to summon endurance, then exhaustion still possessed the authority to define the condition under which endurance became necessary. If danger forced her to defend herself, then danger had already succeeded in establishing defense as the required relationship. If an attack forced her to become stronger than the attack, then her strength remained measured by the very thing she supposedly surpassed.

Christopher did not want Caryse to become extraordinarily good at answering creation's questions.

He wanted her to stop accepting that creation was allowed to question her.

Caryse understood perhaps one tenth of that.

At thirteen, one tenth was enough to make her angry.

She thought he was playing with words because her body hurt regardless of whatever philosophy he wrapped around it. Her muscles did not care whether fatigue possessed philosophical jurisdiction. They were exhausted. Her lungs did not care whether breathing represented dependency. They wanted air. Her nervous system did not care whether survival was merely an inherited imperative. It wanted her away from danger.

Christopher understood that objection before Caryse finished thinking it.

That was why he had pushed her this far.

He could not explain the lesson while she still possessed enough strength to imitate understanding.

As long as Caryse had another reserve, she would use it.

As long as she possessed another breath to control, she would control it.

As long as determination remained available, she would call upon determination and mistake the successful application of willpower for enlightenment.

Christopher needed her empty.

Not weakened.

Not defeated.

Empty.

He needed every ordinary mechanism of overcoming to fail simultaneously so that Caryse could no longer hide inside another version of effort.

The expanse changed again.

Pressure descended over her body.

It did not crush her immediately. It merely became heavy enough to demand a response.

Caryse's muscles tightened automatically.

The pressure increased.

She attempted to breathe more deeply.

The atmosphere became harsher.

She planted one palm beneath herself and attempted to rise.

Weight concentrated around that arm until her elbow collapsed.

She felt panic beginning again.

Her heartbeat accelerated.

The terrain responded.

Caryse closed her eyes.

She wanted to scream at Christopher.

She wanted him to stop.

She wanted to prove that she could endure it.

She wanted to stand just to show him that she was not weak.

Every one of those desires contained effort.

And suddenly, perhaps because she was too exhausted to produce another answer, Caryse noticed it.

Not the pain.

Not the pressure.

The answering.

That was what she had been doing from the beginning.

Everything happened, and Caryse answered.

The ground moved, and she balanced.

She fell, and she braced.

Air changed, and she controlled her breathing.

Pain arrived, and she endured.

Danger appeared, and she protected herself.

Fatigue deepened, and she searched for more strength.

Fear entered, and she fought fear.

She had spent the entire training session announcing herself through reactions.

The environment had merely answered those reactions in return.

Caryse lay completely still.

Not because she decided that stillness was the solution.

She understood enough now to realize that deliberately remaining still would simply become another strategy.

Instead, she stopped solving.

Her breathing remained uneven.

She allowed it.

Her muscles hurt.

She allowed them.

Her heartbeat raced.

She did not attempt to calm it.

The pressure remained.

She did not oppose it.

Her body told her that something terrible would happen if she continued refusing to respond.

For the first time, Caryse did not treat that warning as truth.

Fear intensified.

She allowed fear.

Her lungs burned.

She allowed burning.

Her legs felt useless.

She did not demand that they become useful.

Exhaustion spread through every part of her physical awareness until she could barely identify where one pain ended and another began.

Still, Caryse searched for nothing.

No hidden strength.

No second wind.

No miracle.

No determination.

No internal speech about refusing to quit.

Nothing.

And because she searched for nothing, there was nothing for exhaustion to negotiate with.

Something changed.

Caryse opened her eyes.

The pressure had not disappeared.

Her body had not recovered.

That was the first thing she noticed.

There was no sudden restoration. Her muscles remained depleted. Her lungs remained sore. Her skin remained bruised. She had not discovered some secret reservoir of strength buried beneath ordinary exhaustion.

She was still tired.

Completely tired.

Yet fatigue no longer seemed capable of completing the argument it had begun.

Caryse slowly moved one hand.

Nothing resisted.

She placed her palm against the surface.

The ground did not remove its stability.

Caryse pushed herself onto one knee.

There was no surge of strength behind the movement. Her body remained exactly as exhausted as it had been seconds earlier.

She stood.

The act felt impossible specifically because she possessed no physical explanation for having done it.

Caryse looked at her hands.

She flexed her fingers.

They still trembled.

Her legs still hurt.

Her breathing remained imperfect.

But she was standing.

Christopher watched her carefully.

There was no smile of approval. No proud declaration that she had succeeded.

Caryse realized she had begun looking for one.

She almost laughed.

Even that was another dependence.

Christopher told her only that she had finally stopped mistaking effort for freedom.

That sentence remained with her.

The expanse gradually became less aggressive, although Caryse sensed now that describing it as aggressive had always been wrong. The place had not been attacking her. It had been revealing the architecture behind every action she believed belonged solely to herself. It demonstrated how deeply survival had embedded itself into her responses. It showed her that even courage could become servitude when courage existed only because fear had demanded an answer.

She understood now why Christopher had refused to teach her to fight.

At least partially.

A fighting lesson would have been easier.

A fighting lesson would have given Caryse tools.

Christopher was trying to remove the assumption that she needed tools in order to matter.

A defensive lesson would have taught Caryse how to prevent harm.

Christopher wanted her to question why harm should possess enough authority to define the necessity of defense.

A lesson in channeling power would have taught her how to move power from herself toward something else.

Christopher was trying to break the deeper assumption that there needed to be a meaningful separation between intention, consequence, and the thing upon which consequence was imposed.

Caryse looked toward him differently now.

Christopher stood against the distant expanse, hands resting casually at his sides. Nothing about him suggested the grandeur Caryse associated with powerful manifest be-ness beyond maximal complexity. There was no aura surrounding him. No brilliance. No force. No demonstration.

Caryse had always found that strange.

The more she learned about Christopher, the more absurd his lack of presentation became.

Others announced power through presence.

Christopher seemed increasingly dangerous the less he bothered to present anything at all.

The region beyond him began to clarify.

Until that moment, Caryse had perceived only strange architecture. Now her sharpened attention recognized that the expanse extended into abstractions far beyond the wasteland in which she had trained. There were vast arrangements of thought, creation, narrative hierarchy, paratextual superiority, authorial removal, endless transcendencies, and uncollapseable meta-narrative ontologies reaching so profoundly beyond Caryse's current comprehension that simply attempting to interpret them made her head hurt more than the training had.

She looked at Christopher.

Then at everything behind him.

Something in Caryse wanted to ask how far those abstractions extended.

She did not.

Christopher would probably answer with something irritating.

Instead, Caryse watched.

Christopher did absolutely nothing.

That became the final lesson of the day.

No power gathered around him.

No attack emerged.

No gesture initiated an ability.

His posture did not change.

His eyes did not brighten.

There was no declaration, no release, no transformation, no exertion, no measurable percentage of strength, no escalation into some superior state.

There was only Christopher Sincere Pride.

Then even that description became excessive.

Something disappeared.

Caryse could not identify what.

Presence seemed like the wrong word because Christopher had not gone anywhere. Power was wrong because nothing had been withdrawn that Caryse could describe as energy. Intention was wrong because intention itself seemed too active.

What remained was closer to an unmanifest silence.

Not silence as the absence of sound.

Not emptiness.

Not Transfictional Nothingness.

Not suppression.

The unmanifest silence of Sincere did not arrive as a condition replacing another condition. It exposed how much the surrounding structures had depended upon his concession to their relevance.

The first principle cracked.

Caryse froze.

A vast hierarchy of thought split across its center.

There had been no impact.

Another fracture appeared across a distant transfictional principle, spreading through it until enormous sections broke apart and scattered into luminous debris.

Then another.

Then another.

The damage accelerated.

Boundless transfictional layers fractured.

Grand Principle of Creation representing transcendence broke open.

Entire grand principles of creation founded upon endless ascent shattered into disconnected fragments.The full strength consistency, maximal complexity, ontology, and maximal meaning (and it's intensions and extensions) of everything behind Sincere was literally breaking on a meta-ontological scale. Paratextual superiority cracked apart. Absolute Infinite Authorial stations separated down their centers. Backgrounds of creation broke through foundations that had previously presented themselves as unapproachable. Principles and Be-ness whose entire identity depended upon uncollapseability discovered that Sincere's unmanifest silence had never agreed that their inability to collapse constituted an obligation upon him.

Caryse forgot her exhaustion.

She stared.

The scale of destruction should have required something.

That assumption was the last remnant of the lesson.

She waited for Christopher to reveal the power responsible.

There was none.

She waited for some hidden technique.

There was none.

She waited to understand what he had done.

Christopher had not done anything.

That was the horror of it.

Everything behind him was breaking because the absence of his action was more fundamental than the meta-ontological' insistence upon remaining intact.

The hierarchy of thought shattered.

The endless transcendency broke.

The boundless transfictional layers split apart.

The boundless backgrounds of creation fractured.

The structures above paratext divided into pieces.

Those situated beyond authorship cracked as easily as those beneath it.

Uncollapseable meta-narrative wholeness collapsed without Christopher contradicting its definition, because contradiction itself would have represented too much participation.

Caryse looked down at Christopher's feet.

She remembered the entire training session.

The breathing.

The falling.

The pain.

The exhaustion.

The desperate attempts to find another reserve.

The instinct to survive.

The belief that strength meant possessing enough force to answer whatever stood before her.

Only now did Caryse begin to understand what her master had been showing her.

Christopher had never wanted her to become strong enough to destroy everything behind him.

That would still leave destruction dependent upon strength.

He had never wanted her to develop enough stamina to endure whatever those principles could impose.

That would still allow endurance to be measured by what attempted to exhaust her.

He had never wanted her to defend against them.

Defense would concede that they had reached her.

He wanted something far more unreasonable.

He wanted Caryse to someday reach the place where these things failed to acquire jurisdiction over her in the first place.

Christopher looked back at her.

For once, Caryse did not need him to explain much.

He glanced toward the devastation behind himself and then downward toward where he stood.

When he finally spoke, his voice carried none of the grandeur Caryse would have expected from someone standing before the collapse of everything she could presently understand.

“I want you to reach my feet.”

That was all.

Not surpass him.

Not equal him.

Not understand him.

Not yet.

His feet.

Caryse stared at them.

Several hours earlier, she might have interpreted the statement as arrogance.

Now she understood it as distance.

The difference between where she stood and where Christopher stood could not be crossed merely by becoming stronger. Strength itself belonged to the lessons he had begun removing from her.

Behind him, another impossible principle broke.

Caryse looked at the destruction, then back at her master.

Her body remained exhausted.

Her muscles remained damaged.

Her lungs still hurt.

Her eyes were still wet from crying.

Nothing about her physical condition suggested that she should have been standing.

And yet she stood.

That was enough for the first day.

Caryse took one step toward Christopher Sincere Pride.

For the first time since her training began, the expanse did not ask her to prove that she possessed the strength to take another.