Preparations

With little else to do in the week they waited for the defeated Lord's blacksmiths to arrive, Arran and Kaleesh spent much of their time training together, each instructing the other on their own insights.

Arran soon found that studying the captain's insight was exactly as difficult as he expected it to be.

The captain was a skilled teacher — even more so than Arran had expected — but studying an insight was no easy matter. It required gaining an understanding of a sliver of reality, and that was something that couldn't be achieved through mere practice.

Kaleesh had taught Arran several series of movements that clearly contained a hint of insight, but although learning the movements was simple enough, the true challenge was to truly understand the knowledge that was hidden within them.

And that, Arran knew, was a task that would take more than a single week.

Yet while Arran's task was a difficult one, Kaleesh faced an even greater challenge.