The four-breath window opened around the exposed rear of the lower returning hub. Then, the silence inside the eye of the roar was unlike any stillness Seyun had ever experienced on the mountain. There was no golden light dropping from a kind sky, no sudden miraculous healing of the stitched gash in his left calf or the braced burn on his right forearm. No mystical voice promising that the universe had tilted in his favor. The mountain air was still bitter cold, his lungs still burned like raw iron from four watches of high-sky hard effort. The yard-wide bronze drum before him was still a lethal, three-ton mass of spinning metal capable of tearing off an arm on a single misjudged beat.
What made the four breaths real—more solid than any sect blessing or heaven-sent omen—was that Seyun could trace every single half-second of the opening to a specific, named friend working with an ordinary or damaged tool on the stone around him.
To his right at the eastern crater wall, he could hear the harsh, rhythmic rasp of Daro Kesh’s chipped fire-rib sword holding the rear plane high on its three-breath count. Beyond Daro in the eastern trench, he could see the square handle knob of Keth Or’s recovery blade jutting out of the smoking gap of Socket #2. Meanwhile, Keth crouched safe behind the southern boulder.
