With Nara Soth pulled inside the granite recess and the Listening Crown lattice rejected overhead, the lower returning hub altered its search pattern across the scarred dark rock slope. Even with a narrow section of the outer sky-slit rim cut by Nara’s expensive Crown stroke moments earlier, the yard-wide bronze drum still held enough gathered pressure to sustain the descent if it could seat its return inside a living fighter’s inward channels. Seyun knelt at the mouth of the cleft with his plain ash staff braced across his knee, watching cold white light ripple down the thirty paces of frost-cracked rock between the hub and their shelter. Every stone along the northern ridge carried the bitter chill of the fourth watch, where ice had crusted over the grooves cut by earlier exchanges. Then it turned the shale underfoot into a dangerous sheet of grey grit. Set thirty paces below the spinning bronze drum where Hall Mistress Soran had just hauled Nara out of the eastern chute, Seyun kept his shoulders low and measured the physical distance across the court in actual strides that his stitched left calf would have to pay for.
Behind him in the shallow dark of the recess, Hall Mistress Soran pressed folded linen against the deep blade cut across Nara’s scarred back. Meanwhile, Chief Examiner Vaska Ren leaned his shoulder against the stone beside Commander Keth Or, his left hand wrapped in blood-soaked cloth where two fingers had been cut free of the iron wedge. At…
