Seyun held the front left pole of Vey’s litter on the eastern bridge neck. He watched the fourth and fifth exchanges through the test lens that eleven years of foundation failure had sharpened in him. Every time Ilyra drove a high branching thrust toward Arel Fen’s left shoulder or feinted low toward his shin to pry open an eighteen-inch lane along the low roof wall, Arel simply tightened his twelve-inch sphere of Bronze focus over the exact flat stone slab between her boots and the western bank.
He was using the eighty-foot gorge drops on his left and right as two invisible shield-brothers. The only path for the litters ran through the two square yards of limestone Arel had claimed at the bridge’s crown. So long as that held, his mature Bronze was practically iron-hard by an Early Bronze spear.
Yet as Arel stamped his lead boot back into its settled ice groove after blocking the fifth pass, Seyun’s eyes dropped from the gleaming silver tassel at the spear throat to the commander’s heels. To generate that unmoving, bedrock-anchored pushback against Ilyra’s branching wake, Arel had dug his iron cleats two inches deep into the frozen mortar seam of the keystone.
