*Weekly updates* "There are no leashes now, no bindings," she says, her voice a dark lullaby in the flickering candlelight, "and it is their sacrifice that gave us this. Nothing can ever repay it. No one can ever take it from us. So now, in this hal...
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It's that midnight light, a sprinkle of starlight and the flickering glow of fireflies, that illuminates the empty practice room. Tara tried to sleep, she really did, but after three hours of tossing and turning she knew it was a moot point.
Moot point, her thoughts echo, as dry as the chalk caked to the sore pads of her hands, the creases of her aching fingers. Moot, moot, moot, moot, moot—
The dummy in front of her is putting up an abysmal fight, though in no universe is this surprising as it has neither the arms nor the brain to fight back.
Not like the real opponents I will have soon, her brain whispers again. Not like the foes I will face in three days. Three days...
No, sleep isn't coming tonight.
This shouldn't bother her—shouldn't gnaw at her as it does. She knows this. She's fought worse—faced worse. A sea of faceless machines, garbed in black metal under a blazing sun; a wasteland of dust and carnage, littered with broken bodies and limbs missing from their owners.
A brawl in a ring—what is that but a speck in the face of all of that came before?
A moment passes over her, and its as if dust stuffs itself down her throat once more, as if she can still smell the raw heat and burning singe of boiling metal and melting bones; the dummy in front of her glints a cold steel now, its face masked, its armor a cruel black and blue—
Something snaps—a door closing somewhere else, amplified in the nighttime silence, or maybe a crack, the sound of a cold sword splintering vertebrae, emanating only from the depths of her memory. She doesn't have enough lucidity to distinguish between the two, and maybe, right now, alone in the quiet, the difference doesn't matter.
She stops swinging and passes a shaky hand over her face.
I'm back home, she thinks, as if this matters. I'm back home and all of that lies behind, beneath, beyond here. It shouldn't have followed me home.
But it did, and this thought, terrible as it is, brings another: a reminder of what came back with her. For one, bizarre moment it seems to her that not just the memory of Vatra has risen up from the dust and cracked earth; but that, should she turn now, she might see Aren Dost standing in the door too, a blocky silhouette that is a head shorter in death.
You can't crack up, she tells herself. You don't have the luxury of going around the bend like that. Engle and the other officers are counting on you. Allayria is counting on you.
"It's over," she whispers to herself. "She's dead. Isati too. They're just ghosts now."
" 'Do not,' " a voice calls, startling her out of her thoughts, " 'enter that ring unless you intend to do what you must to make the ascension.' "
It's not the dead, but Hiran, walking through the empty practice room behind her. His hands are tucked in the pants pockets of his night clothes, his posture at odds with the expression on his face.
