After the midday meal of hot barley broth, Chief Examiner Vaska Ren mounted his quartz-and-bronze pressure lens on the high northern tripod of the seal court and adjusted its coal-stone shutter to pulse on the exact three-wave, half-beat proof rhythm Halin and Pera had mapped. Around the base of the tripod, three painted stone blocks marked the positions of the lower shrine’s leftover test sockets.
Soran, Daro Kesh, Ilyra, Nara Soth, and Seyun stepped into the twenty-four-pillar ring to run their first full-speed rehearsal of the hub assault. Meanwhile, Kes and Pera carried wooden evacuee markers along the western outer edge to simulate townspeople crossing the hillside junctions.
Vaska rapped his chalk stick against the tripod leg to start the count. Then, the first three breaths moved with promising crispness. Soran deflected the high lens angle with her plain iron spear, Daro stepped in with his twenty-two-inch short sword to take the lower returning plane. Ilyra opened a responsive hall for Kes’s marker past Pillar Four.
Then, on the fifth and sixth breaths—as the simulated hub completed its first proof pause and shifted its targeting vector laterally across the court—the coordination began to snarl. Seeing the quartz gimbal swing toward the flat stone slab by Pillar Four where Ilyra had stood two breaths earlier, Daro Kesh instinctively abandoned his own lower returning plane and lunged sideways to throw his dark sword plane over Pillar Four.
