A clear, ringing note—crisp as a marsh-iron spearhead striking cold river stone—rang beneath Seyun’s left collarbone the instant Ilyra stepped into the seal court. It was the oldest of his three marks, sworn at sunrise before Mother Renn at the burial-road funerary shrine. Just then, he was still a newly expelled Coal student and she was a Late Flame prodigy who barely knew his name.
Twice before in their journey, that left collarbone mark had carried her growth to him after seven dawns. First in the limewashed storeroom of the burial house when her reed-marsh breakthrough lifted him into Flame, and second at the mountain hospice after her snow-bridge stand against Arel Fen lifted him into Early Bronze.
Now, as Kes eased Ilyra down onto the broad stone steps of the seal court and Mina hurried over with a wool blanket and a steaming wooden cup of sweet barley-and-glucose broth, Place I hummed with the clear signed name of Early Jade.
With that single ringing note, both of Seyun’s leftover active rivals—Ilyra on the left collarbone and Daro Kesh on the right—now stood in the Jade realm. Under the rules of the Answering Spirit vein, his theoretical ceiling remained firmly open to Jade despite the closure of Nara’s Crown mark yesterday morning, and in exactly seven dawns (on the seventy-fifth day of their record), the challenge-shape of Ilyra’s responsive protection would arrive in his channels.
