The Magiker's name was Maren.
He learned this from the examiner who briefed them for Stage Two. A woman he hadn't seen before, mid-forties, with the field-worn economy of someone who had spent more of her career outside buildings than in them. She said both their names once, without preamble, in the tone of a person who expected names to be sufficient.
"Taelith. Maren. You are a pair for Stage Two." She tapped a wall-mounted district map of north Thornside. "Seven blocks from here. Residential building, three stories. A practitioner inside who has hurt someone. The person who was hurt has been treated and is stable. She's outside the building. The practitioner has barricaded himself on the third floor. The situation has already escalated beyond routine response."
She looked at each of them in turn. "Your task is to resolve it. I will be observing. I will not intervene unless the harm threshold is crossed." She crossed her arms. "Questions."
Taelith asked: "Tier?"
"Stone Hand. Barely."
Maren asked: "How long ago?"
The examiner tapped her shoes together deciding how much context to provide.
"Three weeks since awakening."
Three weeks. Stone Hand at three weeks meant a sudden awakening. The kind that arrived in a crisis rather than through sustained training. The practitioners who woke that way were usually the ones who hadn't chosen it.
Maren put her book away. The motion was precise. She slid it into the inner pocket of her coat, which had been tailored or modified for exactly this purpose. She stood differently than she sat. There was a directness to her that the intake room's seated stillness had not shown.
She looked at the district map, then at the door, then at Taelith. The look was not hostile. It was assessment. The same thing he had been doing to her since the intake room, returned without apology.
They left through a side exit. North Thornside was seven blocks through the waterfront end of the district, where the residential streets narrowed and the architecture shifted from repurposed commercial buildings to the older stone-and-timber housing that had been standing since before the Accord established its branch here. The wind off the harbour carried salt and the particular chill of Duncarrow's late morning. The clouds hadn't broken in the three weeks since he'd arrived, and he was beginning to suspect they wouldn't.
A young woman stood outside the target building. Not at the entrance. Across the narrow street, arms folded, leaning against the opposite wall with the posture of someone who had been standing there long enough to have stopped pacing. She watched them approach. She did not speak. She was not old enough for the patience in her expression to be fully earned.
Taelith read the building as they crossed. Three stories, stone base with timber upper floors, the Duncarrow working-class construction that was built to last and did. Front entrance unobstructed. Ground-floor windows curtained. The second and third floors had smaller windows, most of them dark. The building's age meant load-bearing internal walls. Chokepoints at every stairwell landing. If the practitioner was on the third floor, the stairwell was the only practical approach.
He was mapping entry points before he'd finished crossing the street. Two ground-level, one fire-access on the second floor, the stairwell as primary vector.
Stone Hand tier was a negligible combat threat, but a person who had already lost control once could do it again, and the variables increased with time. Speed reduced variables. A clean approach to the third floor, controlled contact, minimal space for escalation.
They entered through the front. The ground floor was a common hallway. Tiled, dim, the particular quality of a residential entrance maintained by whoever cared the most, which was usually one person. It smelled like other people's cooking. Something with onions from the second floor and the specific mustiness of a building whose windows hadn't been open in weeks. Lived-in. The kind of place where the sound of something breaking during an argument would carry through the walls, and the neighbours would know.
Staircase at the far end. The examiner followed at a distance that said: I am here, but this is yours.
Taelith took the stairs with purpose, with the pace of someone who had decided that speed between assessment and contact was an advantage. The stairwell was narrow, wooden, solid. Maren's footsteps were quieter than his. He attributed this to the Arca path's lighter kit requirements rather than to any specific intention.
Second-floor landing. Third.
The corridor held four doors, two on each side. Heavy residential doors. The kind that belonged to the floor where the original owners had lived. Three were closed normally. One, at the corridor's far end, was closed differently. Not latched but held. The particular quality of a door with something pressed against it from the inside.
He was three steps past the landing and already calculating the approach angle when he registered the absence.
Maren had stopped.
Not at the door. At the top of the stairs. She stood on the landing with the same stillness he had read in the intake room. Not passivity but management, the specific quality of someone holding a perimeter in their awareness rather than projecting toward a target. She was looking at the closed door at the end of the corridor. She was not moving toward it.
He turned back. The corridor between them was six feet, maybe less, but the distance felt structural. He was closer to the door. She was closer to the stairs. The disagreement was expressed in position rather than words.
"The approach is"
She raised one hand. Not a stop gesture. Something more precise. She pointed at the door.
Then she looked at him. And waited.
Not: follow my lead. Not: you're wrong. Just: read it.
What was behind it.
He reached. The same Arca sense that had triggered the hazard in the Stage One room forty minutes ago, opening the way it always did, like a second set of eyes adjusting to a darker room.
What came through was not a construct, not a calibrated test, not a scenario designed by an examiner who had done this before.
A person. On the other side of the door, sitting on the floor with his back against it, radiating the particular signature of someone whose Vis was active and uncontrolled. It wasn't burning with intent but leaking, the way a new awakening leaked before the practitioner learned to hold it.
The signature was not threat. It was grief. Recent, specific, and afraid of itself.