The urge to make the circuit tidy didn’t feel like arrogance when it rose in Seyun’s fingers. It felt like safety.
At the bronze metal ring between Pera’s fifth and sixth ribs, the sub-floor common test needle was pressing upward with eleven shares of smoothed, relentless Crown weight. Inside Seyun’s right collarbone, Daro Kesh’s Deeper Bronze echo was pressing downward like a heavy stone top door beam demanding a wider arch. Caught between those two huge loads, Seyun’s mind flashed to the cut cleanly stone surface of Master Uren’s tablet inside his cloak. Specifically the clean, balanced oval that Uren had carved to show how an inward-closing lung channel turns breath behind the center of the chest bone.
On Uren’s stone diagram, the left and right return branches met at a neat, even junction two fingers below the xiphoid joint padding. If Seyun shaped his Flame buffer at the metal ring to guide Pera’s rising breath straight into that textbook centerline, he could lock his own wrist into Ash Reed’s fourth base stance and hold both the pipe hub’s backwash and Daro’s echo along a single straight axis.
For half a heartbeat, as Pera’s warm-foot breath climbed past her left hip and approached the rib cage, Seyun nudged a guiding thread of Flame inward past the metal ring. Steering her breath flow away from its ugly, lopsided detour and toward the clean even centerline of Uren’s diagram.
