Beneath the sweat-damp linen bindings wrapping Seyun’s fractured ribs, directly beneath his right collarbone where Daro Kesh’s dark iron plane had grazed him during their sworn bout under the black roof in Oran, the second rival mark came alive.
It didn’t flare with the wild, reckless heat of a traditional empowerment magic charm, nor did it mend a single tiny fraction of an inch of the cracked bone in Seyun’s seventh and eighth left ribs. Master Uren’s Unfinished Edge had never been a magic wishing-well that handed out free power to save its bearer from the physical consequences of a fight.
Instead, the second mark rang through Seyun’s around the heart and chest channels with a single, deep, bell-clear shaking. It was like a heavy iron lock-bolt sliding home inside a stone pier.
In that clear, clear strike, Seyun felt the exact nature of what had just occurred on the western rim of the chalk circle, and the exact terms of what the Balance promise now owed him.
His second sworn rival—the river-ward schoolmaster who had once believed that a sword had to stand alone on a flat plane to remain honest—had genuinely, irreversibly crossed from Deeper Bronze into Early Jade. Daro’s breakthrough was not a temporary drug surge or a chamber-fed borrow like Reth Mal’s cable. Because of that, but a permanent load-bearing advance earned in defense of their shared battleground, the second rival mark registered the realm gap between Daro’s new Early Jade and Seyun’s current Early Bronze.
