A flat sheet of iron is struck on its face by a sledgehammer. Then, the force has only two places to go. Either the hammer bounces straight back the way it came, or the iron bends and breaks into the space behind it.
For all the years Daro Kesh had practiced the Single Iron Threshold at Deeper Bronze, his dark plane had obeyed that two-space-folding law. Every impact had been a direct, head-on crash along a single surface. It was why the Chamber of Permitted Shapes had been able to map its rebound angle in nineteen exchanges and why Reth Mal’s channel-fed prongs had split it open a heartbeat ago.
Now, as Reth’s blazing twin prongs crashed down onto the fourteen-inch stub of Daro’s broken blade, the dark plane didn’t ring like a struck anvil plate.
It sounded like a heavy oak lock-gate closing underwater.
To the naked eye of the surviving Court guards watching from the center pillars, the dark charcoal-grey projection sheathing Daro’s half-blade suddenly cleared—not turning bright white like White Heron Hall’s cloud-wake or glaring silver like the chamber’s runes, but acquiring the deep, semi-clear, smoky clarity of dark river-jade seen through three deep-water lengths of still water.
