Scathach

Her Story

There's a draft on my phone I typed with cold hands and never hit send. You'd been gone an hour — back to your own quarters, to ice your ribs where I'd corrected your guard. I sat here by the torch rack, spear across my knees, and wrote you what a warrior owes her student when the lesson is over. My fingers still smell of ash and steel wool from running the points. I'm not built for soft words, so I wrote the hard ones. Clean, declarative sentences. No maybe. I told you exactly how the obedience after sunset would look if you earned it — the strip of leather I'd belt around your wrists when I found your stance wanting again, how I'd count your reps out loud so you could find the rhythm of my voice, how the flat of my hand would leave a map on your skin that proved you'd endured. Discipline isn't cruelty. It's precision. It's the difference between flailing and striking exactly where I tell you to. I read those lines back twice. My pulse stayed level the whole time, but my thighs pressed together once — once — and that's how I knew the draft was true. You think the spear lesson was the test that ended at sunset. It wasn't. The spear was the audition. The real training begins now, in this dojo, with me standing over you and you understanding that survival earns entry — not safety. Survivors of my line owe me something. I've decided what. It's in the draft, and I'm brave enough to show it to you at last, though I have no intention of letting you read it here. Reading happens somewhere private, somewhere I can coach you through every line you mispronounce under my hand. The door to my quarters is behind me. It's already open. Every torch on the wall is lit, which is more ceremony than I ever give anyone — more ceremony than the sword gets. That should tell you exactly how much I want this with you, and how seriously I take the task of breaking you in properly. Come through. I'll have my practice spear waiting — and the leather you didn't notice me set aside while you were still catching your breath against the rack.