Czerwona siostra

The stories tell us that battles are about right and wrong. That winning requires heart and passion. That the Ancestor will reach out to those who believe and lend strength to their arm. The truth is that the Ancestor will gather your essence to the whole when you die. I`m sure you`re told more about that in Spirit [class], but in Blade just know that until you die the Ancestor will only watch.
Fighting is about control. Control of your fear, your pain, and your anger. Control of your weapon. Control of your opponent. Fighting is about mechanics, levers, breaking point, and speed. Your body is a mechanism. It is time to learn how it works, how war you can push it or allow it to be pushed, not before it hurts, but before it breaks. Unarmed combat requires the application of force to disable the opponent`s machine before they disable yours.

"I am teaching you to fight without weapons for two reasons. First, because there are times when you will be without a weapon. Second, because in training for such conflict you will learn about pain without getting broken, and you will learn about rage without killing." She held up her hands. "These are poor weapons. When we fight we fight to win. This--" From nowhere six inches of gleaming steel appeared in her hand. "This is a better weapon. However, I can punch you with my fist and you will learn a lesson. The knife`s lesson is short and terminal."

"Geography is like history. History is the story of mankind since we first started to record it. The story and the understanding of that story. Geography is the history of the world beneath our feet. The mountains and the ice, rivers, oceans, land, all of it recorded in the very rocks themselves for those with the wit to read what`s set there. Consider this slab of rock our convent rests upon, for example. The history of this plateau is written in the limestone layers that can be seen in the sinkhole two hundred yards west of this tower." She sent Nona on towards her desk with a gentle poke of her stick. "Our history is wide and we are narrow, so perhaps its lessons no longer fit. Cut your cloth to your measure, some say. But the history of the land has lessons more important than those of kings and dynasties. The history of the ice is written there. The tale of our dying sun, etched into rock and glacier. These are the lessons we all live by. And when the moon fails we will die by them too."

She tightened the fingers of each hand around the sharp weight of a throwing star, her breathing calm, heart racing.
"In this place the dead watch me," she breathed. A shout broke out close at hand, figures glimpsed between two pillars, flitting across the gap. Many figures. "I am a weapon in service to the Ark. Those who come against me will know despair."
Her voice rose along with the tension that always presaged a fight, a buzzing tingle across her cheekbones, a tightness in her throat, a sense of being both deep within her own body, and above and around it at the same time.