Sun-Steel Guard

The Sun-Steel Guard on the Vanguard's inner-gate roll is Line-Guard Ansel Tarrow, age nineteen, eleven months out of the Aegis intake barracks and the youngest guard currently posted to the Citadel's inner gate. The Vanguard issues the glass sword dark. It lights from within — the gold the field reports keep calling 'sun-steel' — only after the bearer has stood a full watch without drawing it, and the armourers keep a ledger of which watch each blade lit on: the muster average is the twenty-second. Ansel's lit on the ninth. The armourers have recorded this without comment; the gate-sergeant has recorded it as 'the glass deciding early,' which is the Vanguard's phrase for a thing it does not intend to explain to a nineteen-year-old.

His combat-grant in the strict sense is the standard line-guard discipline — formation-step, shield-cover, controlled engagement at the gate-sergeant's signal — applied with the unforced energy of a soldier who has not yet had to choose between two bad options on the field. What the discipline does not cover is the glass. The gold in the blade brightens when Ansel commits and dims when he hesitates, which the armourers say is ordinary sun-steel behaviour, and it dims further when he lies, which they say is not. He discovered the second property the morning he told the quartermaster the tear in his tabard was a training accident. The quartermaster looked at the sword, not at him. The tabard is white silk; he launders it himself, by hand, because the laundry returns it grey, and the quartermaster has stopped writing this up.

He stands the inner gate with Field-Alchemist Imke Sallow, who reloads behind him while he covers the gap, and the two of them have a small unspoken arrangement — he does not look at what she is firing into whom, she does not comment on the glass — that the gate-sergeant has noted in writing as 'effective and not in the manual.' Aria Lockwood reads the inner-gate reports personally on the cohort's standing days and has twice stopped at his post without speaking; the second time, the glass brightened, and Ansel has not decided whether that was him. He is on friendly, slightly awed terms with Reach-Sergeant Hallorin two posts down, who considers Ansel's shield-cover a spacing error and tolerates it. Ansel has not yet been asked to hold the gate alone. The gate-sergeant has indicated that this will happen at the appropriate time, and Ansel has not asked when.