Osen Tal finished explaining the nature of Heaven’s Measure. Then, a heavy stillness settled over the southern ward room. Around the lamplit pine table stood two Deeper Bronze fighters—one with a healing shoulder stitch and a marsh-iron spear, the other with a bruised arm and twenty inches of broken steel—beside a newly advanced Early Bronze fighter standing on a cedar-braced fourth toe, a nineteen-year-old apprentice pulse-reader, an aging incense seller, a disgraced sect steward, and four recovering captives on straw pallets. Above them in the freezing winter sky hung an autonomous ordering principle woven by ancient Crown ascendants that had erased entire sects without blinking.
In the kind of grand, heroic training myth that traveling storytellers recited in Oran’s teahouses, this was the moment. Just then, the young hero would slam his fist onto the table, point his weapon at the ceiling, and swear a blood oath to climb the nine heavens, shatter the cosmic sky-array with a single transcendent strike, and remake the laws of the world before spring.
Daro Kesh and Ilyra both looked across the lamp flame at Seyun. She waited to see how the bearer of the last Balance inheritance would answer an enemy that spanned the high sky.
