To bar the hub’s imposed answer from entering his chest, Seyun had to perform an act that reversed every instinct of an ambitious fighter. He had to voluntarily narrow his own spirit vein flow in the middle of a battle for his life. He couldn’t sever the sworn vows in Place I and Place II—his disagreements with Ilyra and Daro had not ended by witnessed contest or honest reconciliation, and tearing a living mark apart by force would petrify his chest. Instead, he reached back to the eleven slow, unglamorous years he had spent on the outer practice flat stone slabs of the Ash Reed Sect before he ever knew Master Uren’s name, when his naturally inward-closing return pathways had forced him to learn the exact muscular and breath gates behind his collarbones just to keep ordinary Coal heat from choking his lungs. What the sect elders had dismissed as a crippling defect of birth was also an intimate familiarity with how his own internal doors closed.
Seyun set the butt of his ash staff firmly against the dark rock floor between his boots. He squared his shoulders and tucked his chin an inch toward his breastbone. Beside the southern lip, Ilyra felt a sudden, dull tug beneath her own collarbone. Not the sharp warning ache of a new wound, but the clear sensation of a door being bolted from the inside against a storm. At the eastern corner, Daro Kesh’s eyes narrowed as he registered the same quiet dampening…
