The lesson ended badly.
Not violently.
Not loudly.
That was what made it dangerous.
They had chosen the site for its silence—a wind-scoured plateau of pale stone fractured into long, shallow channels where rainwater once ran and never returned. Nothing grew here beyond thin bands of lichen that clung to cracks like an afterthought. The sky above was wide and blank, clouds stretched thin enough to be almost polite.
No ambush points.
No cover worth hiding behind.
A place where mistakes had nowhere to go.
Tein stood twenty meters away, hands folded behind his back, cloak unmoving despite the wind. El-Je faced him with the training saber held low, blade unlit, feet planted where Tein had told him to stand.
"You move when I move," Tein said.
"No Force," El-Je replied automatically.
"And?"
El-Je swallowed. "And no guessing."
Tein nodded once.
He stepped forward.
El-Je reacted half a heartbeat late.
Not slow—uncertain.
He shifted his weight, brought the hilt up, and tried to remember the shape Tein had drilled into him: Ataru without the leap, motion contained, aggression controlled. But his feet slid on the stone's fine grit, and the correction came from his shoulders instead of his hips.
Wrong.
Tein was already past him.
A light tap struck El-Je's ribs—two knuckles, not forceful enough to bruise, precise enough to be final.
"Dead," Tein said.
El-Je exhaled sharply and reset without being told.
Again.
This time El-Je moved early.
Too early.
He lunged the moment Tein's cloak shifted, trusting instinct instead of observation. The motion would have been impressive against someone who played by rules.
Tein did not.
He sidestepped, hooked El-Je's forward knee with his boot, and twisted—not hard, just enough to steal balance. El-Je hit the stone on his side, breath knocked loose in a sharp grunt.
Tein stepped back immediately.
"Up," he said.
El-Je pushed himself upright, jaw tight, cheeks flushed—not with exertion, but with something sharper.
Again.
They reset.
Again, El-Je hesitated.
Again, Tein closed the distance.
Again, the lesson ended before it began.
On the fourth attempt, El-Je didn't wait at all.
He reached.
Not consciously.
Not deliberately.
The Force surged in response—thin, unfocused, raw.
The air tightened.
Tein felt it instantly.
"Stop," he said.
Too late.
El-Je's footing held this time, but the movement was wrong—too fast, too committed. Tein pivoted and caught El-Je's wrist, twisting just enough to force the hilt free. It clattered across the stone and skidded to a stop at the edge of the plateau.
El-Je froze.
Not because he had fallen.
Because he had felt it—the Force answering him without permission.
The wind pressed into the silence.
Tein released his grip and stepped back, expression unreadable.
"That was not restraint," Tein said.
"I—"
"That was panic."
El-Je's fists clenched at his sides.
"I would've hit you," he said.
"Yes," Tein replied. "And then what?"
El-Je didn't answer.
Because he didn't know.
The truth sat heavy between them: against a real opponent, that surge would have left him open, predictable, loud in the Force.
It would have marked him like a flare.
Hunters loved flares.
Tein turned away first, retrieving the dropped hilt and returning it without ceremony. His fingers brushed El-Je's knuckles for only an instant—but in that instant, El-Je felt the difference between control and suppression.
"You're trying to win," Tein said.
El-Je swallowed. "Isn't that the point?"
Tein looked at him then.
Really looked.
"No," he said. "The point is surviving the moment after you think you've won."
El-Je looked past him, out over the empty plateau. The wind traced thin lines of dust across the stone, erasing footprints almost as soon as they were made.
"I don't want to hide forever," El-Je said quietly.
Tein did not answer at once.
Below them, far beyond sight, something shifted in the Force—not a pull, not a whisper.
Just the faintest tightening.
Like a held breath.
Fear—not sharp.
Not immediate.
Frustration.
The artifact stirred.
It did not awaken.
It did not speak.
It simply recognized the taste.
Tein felt none of it.
He was watching El-Je.
"Hiding keeps you alive," Tein said. "Visibility gets people like you taken."
El-Je's voice cracked despite his effort to keep it steady. "You mean like the Nightsisters?"
"Yes."
"And the Jedi?" El-Je asked.
The question landed clean.
Tein did not deflect it.
"Yes," he said.
The silence that followed was heavier than the earlier failures.
Not because of anger.
Because of distance.
They packed up without further instruction. No punishment. No reassurance. Just the quiet acknowledgment that something had shifted—not broken, not yet—but stressed.
As they walked from the plateau, El-Je stayed farther back than usual.
Not in defiance.
In thought.
Behind them, the wind erased the last signs they had ever been there.
And far away, sealed and patient, something ancient settled more comfortably into awareness—fed not by terror, but by the slow realization that power, once tasted, was hard to forget.
The lesson had ended.
The cost had begun.