Training
How the Phialguard makes a chemist warrior: five years (or three, if you're Orin) of measuring, throwing, and learning when not to. Fictional training regimen.
The regimen
Phialguard training is divided into three disciplines, drilled daily in the converted granary hall on Crucible Row:
- The Measure — brewing, diluting, and compounding under examination conditions. Recruits who cannot compound blindfolded do not advance. (Orin could do it at nineteen, before he ever enlisted.)
- The Throw — delivery: arcs, rolls, placements, and the slate wall's ten thousand chalked trajectories. Recruits drill with empty phials for the first month — "the throw is the easy part," per Holt.
- The Restraint — scenario drills: when not to throw, which reagent not to use, how to end a fight with the fewest phials. This is where most recruits wash out, and where Orin — who arrived all throw and no measure — nearly did.
Orin's three years
Orin completed the five-year regimen in three, and the codex is specific about why: he arrived fluent in delivery and had to be rebuilt around restraint. Holt's personal curriculum for him:
- Year one: empty phials only. Eleven-minute decisions. The doctrine, drilled until it replaced instinct.
- Year two: live reagents, supervised engagements, the Marrowmist Veil mastered during a real evacuation drill.
- Year three: the Seven Phials trial — seven targets, seven reagents, seven throws, no misses, no waste. In the rain. (The red chalk note on the slate wall says so, and the Fan Theories page has opinions.)
The trial
The Seven Phials is both the graduation and the bandolier: the recruit is issued seven phials and seven targets at unknown ranges, in whatever weather the day provides. Orin's trial day provided a rainstorm. He passed. The codex records that Holt said nothing afterward — which, from Holt, is a speech.
Source notes
- The training regimen is an original invention of this codex (2026-09-26). The canonical basis is only the app card: "chemist warrior".