She stood on the edge of the smoking shale trench with her walking staff grounded beside her boot. Nara Soth felt the ancient stonework inside her spirit veins reorganize itself from the root. In the training valleys, the Crown realm was defined by the ability to join several distinct intentions without destroying their single natures. A feat that granted hundreds of years of life so long as those joined intentions remained stable.
Yet across all her hundreds of years since the fall of the early Counterpoise Sect, Nara had kept that balance through a single, exhausting structure. She had made her own overarching protective will the container that held every smaller intention in place. A battle grew wider than her single arm could encompass. Each time, the container strained at its seams, tearing her dorsal channels and convincing her that only greater solitary breadth could save the day.
Just now, under the live, lethal descent of the second pale blade, she had deliberately left two-thirds of the field outside her container. She had trusted Daro Kesh’s twenty-two-inch blade to hold the falling mass. She had trusted Ilyra’s shortened spear and Seyun’s braced staff to keep the fourteen townspeople safe in the under-road drain.
