Under the cold white stars of the sixth night, a dry gravel walk ran for forty paces along the southern side of the protected ward rooms, sheltered from the mountain wind by a high granite retaining wall and a row of ancient yew trees. Seyun stepped down onto the path while Daro Kesh remained on watch at the porch corner. He laid his walking pole against the stone border and took up the opening guard of Ash Reed Sect’s twelve base forms.
For eleven years—from the autumn morning he entered the outer yard as an eleven-year-old orphan to the winter afternoon he was expelled at twenty-two—Seyun had practiced these twelve sequences every dawn and every night with a devotion that bordered on superstition. His inward-closing return channels refused to open into Flame under standard solitary priming. Because of that, the younger boy had convinced himself that if he only made the external shape of the twelve stances flawless enough, the realm threshold would eventually be forced to yield.
He had measured the distance between his heels with a notched reed stick. He had practiced holding a saucer of water on his flat wrist during the Second Form (Heron Wading in Shallows). He had lined up his thumbs with the mortar seams of the courtyard wall until even Elder Hesh could find zero stance deductions on his seasonal check sheet. For over a decade, he had treated the traditional textbook shape of each stance as something sacred and untouchable.
