Back at the pine medicine table, Mina laid three blank sheets of coarse grey hemp paper before Seyun and stated the cold and exact objective with her usual economy.
“If you linked them to your marks, they would need your body sitting beside their beds every four hours,” Mina said. She pointed through the gap in the linen curtain where Maren, Tov, and Vey lay listening. “What they need is a written breathing set they can practice when you’re ten miles away—something that teaches their own ribs how to tell three feelings apart before the four-hour constriction locks.”
She ticked the three states off on her fingers.
“First: ordinary physical tiredness from walking and shivering, which only needs sleep and broth. Second: the arrival of forced external pressure from the summit seam. It they must pause against so it doesn’t re-groove the wire scar. Third: their own genuinely chosen Coal breath flow, which they need to pull inward even when it feels heavy.”
Seyun dipped his brush into the inkstone, grateful for a concrete pedagogical problem where his eleven years of foundation analysis could be put to honest work.
Seyun drew on the clearest sections of Ash Reed’s foundation primer and the introductory breath-sorting verses of Master Uren’s tablet. He spent the first hour of the afternoon drafting a clean, uniform four-step set. Step One: draw a three-count breath in down to the lower umbilical pool.
