Breaking the Dam

[Ashin Varanin]

Faalo's Cadences were, all things considered, unspeakably difficult, even at the lower levels. By any objective standard, she'd been screwed out of her ability to do them properly when her mastery of the Force had been taken from her.

The frustration approached significance. She could remember doing them, and doing them perfectly. She had seven centuries of patchwork memories of Je'gan doing them perfectly. A blademaster and heir to a blademaster, she'd been known for this.

Such were the sacrifices of conscience.

But now, back in the saddle, back to Jedi Knighthood, with more recent experience than most Masters could boast at all, she could afford to pull a little of that sacrifice out of the fire. The gods wouldn't begrudge her a bite.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Faalo's first cadence involved no less than one hundred ninety ball bearings and nineteen candles, each separated by five degrees of arc. But that was just the horizontal placement. The candles stood in groups of two or three, on candlesticks of various sizes -- and of various heights. The highest was on a level with her shoulder, the lowest on a level with her upper thighs. The top of each candle, unlit, held a single ball bearing embedded in wax, embedded shallowly; the ball bearings sat there in simple indentations.

Her sabre licked out in the first motions of the cadence, as familiar to her as breathing. A good velocity, a good kata, got into your bones, and Faalo's cadences were very good velocities. They incorporated footwork, breathing, economy of movement. No momentum wasted here, no flailing or overcommitment -- that was the goal, and the Shii-Cho variant of the cadence had been part of her life since she was fifteen. Even the intervening years, even as a young Master, she'd been as weak in the Force as she was now, but she'd been able to do this anyway. There was no reason for her failures, her flaws, except perhaps lack of confidence.

Ashin Varanin, suffering from lack of confidence. Moridin would laugh.

She slashed the nineteen ball bearings from the candles without a mistake. Nineteen more wobbled up from their box and took their places atop the undamaged candles. She blurred through the cadence again, a process of about five minutes, this time emphasizing speed, and a candle fell bisected. With a grimace, she finished the second runthrough -- the full cadence took ten repetitions -- and held the candle-top in place again until it cooled into solidity.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The third round was better; the fourth, infinitely worse. A handful of candles took the brunt of her ire, paid the price for her mistakes. Her technique, her Shii-Cho technique, was considered perfect. She'd faced the finest blademasters in the galaxy as an equal.

Perfection still made mistakes; that was mortality. And she'd learned a long, long time ago -- and seven centuries of others' memories told her the same -- that full mastery was not about the flawed strike, but about the ten thousand strikes to follow.
In blademastery, and in Faalo's higher cadences, that number was not an exaggeration.

She fixed the candles, got out some extra ball bearings, and repeated the fourth round. Her legs were hot, her skin warm and taut beneath her clothes; she'd reached the point where aerobic respiration provided her energy. Mentally, she'd hit flow. She'd hit her groove.

The fifth round, sixth, seventh went by without a hitch. The eighth lost her a pair of candles; she repeated it, then nailed nine and ten. Faalo's first cadence was supposed to take around an hour; with two repeated rounds, she'd clocked in at an hour and twelve minutes. At least her pacing was still accurate, she reflected.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

She launched straight into the second, rather than lose momentum. This training hall on Bluespire, largest of the Spires of Hell, had seen her instruct many who now called themselves Masters. With Je'gan's memories, and her own, she'd taken the time to set up the first three cadences in here, before starting even the first.

The second cadence was, like those that followed it, an exponential expansion on those that had come before. It expanded on the first in the following ways.

First, in degrees of arc. The first cadence formed a semicircle; the second surrounded her, to the point where getting into the circle required a careful sidestep. Seventy-two candles, five degrees of arc between each, every one set at a different level from those beside it. You would think that made it easier; it did not.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The second cadence also surpassed the first in number of repetitions. A full performance of Faalo's second cadence required thirty-seven and a half repetitions, plus a single ball bearing. The meaning of that number had always eluded Ashin; her issues with the second cadence were more practical than ancient Jedi numerology.

And a full performance of Faalo's second cadence required a far greater time commitment. Two hours. One hundred twenty minutes of two thousand seven hundred and one individually mundane movements, linked together without a break in focus.

Then there was the issue of orientation. No, not that kind of orientation, though it had been less than twelve hours since she'd seen [member="Spencer Jacobs"]. The second cadence had to be completed without turning the body. It required absolute mastery of one's surroundings, perfect clarity of awareness, total precision of movement. And this was only the second cadence out of five.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Thirty-seven point five repetitions, plus one ball bearing. Thirty-eight resets, pausing to get a mouthful of water, pausing to pull waves of seventy-two ball bearings from their case and set them, telekinetically, on the tops of candles. Faalo's cadences required a high level of attention to telekinetic detail; they served as a brutal TK training regimen disguised as the necessary but menial tasks incident to other training. Talk about wax on, wax off.

She did not, she realized, need this, need the validation. She'd consistently thrashed many, many skilled people, and matched the finest. She didn't need to get back her grip on Faalo to think well of herself. She did, however, need to get back her grip on Faalo for practical reasons. These velocities tasked her heavily, tasked everyone heavily. They functioned as a pretty solid benchmark for focus, and all true technique relied on focus repeated at infinitum.

Her starfire blade, brilliant gold, lashed out around her in virtually all directions; Faalo's second cadence had little to do with things directly beneath or directly above. A flaw, and one she'd considered addressing through creation of a zero-gravity variant. Faalo's second point one cadence, perhaps.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Thirty-eight rounds gave her plenty of time for mistakes. Two thousand, seven hundred and one ball bearings evaporated one at a time, filling the air with an acrid tang, but she smelled tallow on more than one occasion. She didn't repeat a full seventy-two-candle round for her errors; there was such a thing as overzeal. She would have, though, if her mistakes had reached a threshold where she found repetition appropriate. They didn't.

When at last she wound down after three solid hours of lightsabre training -- her daily average -- the Fringe owned two thousand eight hundred ninety-one fewer ball bearings, plus a couple of dozen from her mistakes. The candles and their stands remained apparently intact; she'd welded more than a few candles back together. None of the candlesticks, though, which was a blessing. Repairing those would have been a chore.

That completed the first and second cadences, but she took a long while to ponder what she'd learned. There weren't words for that sort of thing; these were lessons that spoke to her in the lines of her shoulders, the calluses on her fingers, the way she found herself breathing in extremis.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The final moves of the second cadence wound down like a clockwork monster running out of steam. Tension and momentum bled away into silence.

Every day for a week, she'd done the second cadence twice -- four hours of training on that solitary velocity -- plus the first cadence as her warmup and cooldown. The body, the mind, had limits when exposed to this kind of sustained exertion. Faalo's cadences were far, far more about the mind than about the body. They were about discipline. And thus, Sith and Jedi alike had found them useful; one of her Dark Side idols, back in the day, had been Adalric Brandl, who had lived by these.

While she could track her growth in the Cadences by ticking off one at a time, a long career focused on velocities had taught her that one could never really call a velocity complete, not in the sense of leaving it alone anyways. Velocities were a tool for constant practice, and, conversely, required constant practice to keep them sharp.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The greatest difficulty she faced -- apart from invoicing Fringe for tens of thousands of ball bearings and candles, to say nothing of the candlesticks -- was memory. Oh, she remembered years upon years of practice at these cadences, and she'd never really stopped, but she also had centuries upon centuries of memory from Je'gan, and he had done these cadences in a decidedly different way. She found herself adopting his Makashi grips on occasion, shifting into his Soresu derivations, and that wasn't her. She didn't know those Forms, she didn't use those Forms; Shii-Cho was her game. And doing the cadences with Shii-Cho took something different than doing them with Makashi or Soresu.

His memories couldn't override long-entrenched muscle memory, of course, not in any serious way, but she found herself prone to confusion the more she made herself compatible with his experience. To more fully integrate his memories was to enhance the need for practice. She couldn't finalize the process of herself as one person without consolidating what he had known with what she had been. The composite being was doing pretty well at the second cadence, but the second cadence was only the second cadence.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

There was no avoiding the realization that this was boring, but just about any work was. Part of her, a surprisingly large part of her, wanted to throw up her hands and go do something more productive, like end a war or glass a Sith world. It had been a while since she'd done that sort of thing. But work tried the soul, tested the nature, and a large portion of that had to do with modulating and refining how one approached monotony. Retaining precision for tens of thousands of lightsabre blows, many of them outside her line of sight -- day in, day out, the same movements, until she saw them when she closed her eyes, dreamed about the cadences.

The final result could not be called perfection. Nobody could claim to do a velocity perfectly, in her estimation, not even one with measurable benchmarks like Faalo's ball bearings. These cadences were about all the components of motion, not just whether the candles stayed up and the ball bearings hissed away. To perform it 'perfectly' -- every ball bearing and candle receiving its just deserts -- was to take the first step on the path.

She took to watching tapes of herself, evaluating each factor in each movement. Absent another grandmaster-level sabre practitioner to review her, it would have to do.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The third cadence was, frankly, not something Ashin could set up on her own, not in the time frame involved. It required sixteen thousand two hundred ninety ball bearings, broken into repetitions of one hundred and eighty (plus one half-set). That meant she had to run through the placement and eradication (or avoidance) of one hundred eighty ball bearings nearly forty times. A set of droids took care of that, far faster than any Jedi Master could manage the process, and allowed her to spend most of her time on actual lightsabre work. She wasn't here to move sixteen thousand ball bearings one by one; this wasn't to be some godlike telekinetic exercise.

One hundred eighty ball bearings at a time, each balanced on a candle, each candle separated by two degrees of lateral arc and offset from the rest. Every fifth ball bearing needed to be removed, without jeopardizing the rest; that meant thirty-six ball bearings per runthrough. Manageable numbers. Precision was what counted.

Manageable numbers...except that each runthrough needed to hit every fifth, and five did not divide equally into thirty-six. That offset would pull her around the circle several times per runthrough. Thirty-six was an illusion. Around and around until all one hundred eighty were gone. Then set up another one hundred and eighty, and get to work for a second time. Out of just under forty.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

That was Faalo's third cadence, a brutal, Master-level exercise designed to grind down the competent practitioner and humble the ambitious. Faalo's third cadence had broken more students than any other, in her not insignificant experience. She'd been good at it once, her muscle memory crisp, but one didn't always have sixteen thousand ball bearings on hand. At some point, you just needed to get on with real life.

But there was no harm, and perhaps some good, in stepping back to recapture old skills. Not that her lightsabre abilities had faded, but her connection to the Force wasn't what it had once been, and that had consequences for speed and power, if not technique. She'd suspected more than once that the Force helped learning, helped to entrench muscle memory. If true, that had consequences for relearning things like this with a lesser Force connection. A disturbing thought, lending itself to yet another strand of elitism relative to the Force.

Ultimately, too, work was work. Work, no matter its form, could get her where she needed to be, mentally. Could reaffirm to her that she was capable of this kind of hours-long focus (the third cadence required three).