Fá tilts his head, amused by my strange form. He comes for me again with confidence and supreme competence. Just like before, he baits me to take to the air. He uses his warsaw to batter at my guard and his body as a ram. I am nimbler, but that advantage in counterattack is mitigated by the weight of his armor. This is what the heavy gear was made for. Closer-quarters meatstraws in ship halls. So this time, instead of bending back and countering with the Way or trying to match his strength as my armor tempts and my ego demands, I simply receive what he gives.
No teeth-chattering blocks. No counterattacks. No lusting for the air.
I deflect and move, always sideways. Never backward. Always at an angle so that I begin to make a wide circle around him, forcing him to constantly turn his hips to face me, upsetting his charges by switching my rotation. Time and again Fá tries to close. It worked against the Willow Way, which depends on maintaining a central axis for movement, like a tree trunk. But in this new form of mine, the center moves along with my target. I exhale and try to find the moving air once again. Thepath spreads itself out before me; all I need to do is feel the wind and follow it.
For two minutes, I decline any invitation to attack or close. I maneuver. I study. I learn. Fá is the best armored Obsidian fighter I have ever faced. Full stop. He relies on his strength and mass in the attack. An attack so overwhelming he’s never needed to develop his defense. Not with his seemingly invulnerable armor that can soak up slashes and trap thrusts long enough for him to cleave his enemies in half.
I doubt he’s ever had a fight last this long. In fact, I doubt anyone has ever survived more than a minute with him. I barely did. But past our second minute, I see the way to win.
His relentless assault is unsustainable. Even in the armor, his pace has begun to slow, his decisions become more judicious. He’s saving energy. Waiting for me to make a mistake. Preying on that, I set a lure and let him break my circle and push me back toward the dome wall. When he rushes forward to crush me against it, I swim right and hack not at his body or his head but at the spike on his left shoulder. The spike shears off. I slash with my other blade and I take a spike off the elbow. I don’t get greedy. He clears me off with a backswing and I dance away.
Clang. Clang. Clang.“Confess.”
I lure him back to the center, retreating until he tries to charge me again. I take another spike off, and feel myself sinking into the shallows of a flow. He expects me to back off again. I don’t. I accept the flow and strike off another spike. I begin to move around him faster and faster like a vortex of wind, my current shifting directions whenever his balance is uneven. Spike by spike I denude his monstrous armor. When spikes litter the ground, I shout again: “Confess!”
He roars in frustration. To me the sound is ambrosia. I am beyond him now, beyond this plane, submerged in the depths of a battle-flow unlike any I’ve ever felt. My body is not flesh and bone, not a clawDrill, but the wind I sought to emulate. My will is pure current. Pyrphoros and Bad Lass become a rain, state-changing between whip and blade with musical fluidity. The blades whittle the armor, the whips tease the wrists and ankles, forcing Fá to dedicate all his focus to preventing his limbs from being snared lest I sever them.
He starts to curl inward, no longer daring to attack.
I retract my helmet, realizing it’s in my way from feeling themovement of air around me. I laugh like a boy, but not at Fá. It’s because I feel the ascendent rushing through me. It’s swelling inside me. He cannot stop it. For years I’ve used Lorn’s art to make my name. Somewhere along the way, I began to think of him as a god, the custodian of some unimpeachable magic. I thought there was no potential beyond mastery of the Willow Way. Even training with Cassius in the pinched confines of his dueling room I felt as though we were only refining that craft.
No. We were sharpening my fundamentals—so I could then findmyart form.
And this is where that art is found: where my breath meets the wind my blades make, the wind up from the stone, the wind of Fá as he flees my attacks.
My worries come and go, easy as an exhalation.
It is beautiful, natural, this movement I’ve stumbled upon. I feel part of nature and part of my past, full and empty, unable to falter or make a mistake because even when I misplace my blade—which I do—or my foot, or my weight, or my intentions, I can flow it into a new movement as if it was the original design. My mistakes become new opportunities, each flowing together like a drunken dance with Eo on the dirt-packed Laureltide floor.
It is that same joy as in a dance. That same reckless fun.
No longer concerned with overanalyzing my opponent or my own movement, my mind is free to wander and stumble upon a realization. All my life I’ve had the Helldiver’s mentality: smashing through obstacles fast enough will gain the laurel for my clan. But now, after breaking a million drills and myself, I can see the flaws in that mentality. I’m done forcing my way through rock like a hungry claw until I break. Now I know to shift around obstacles, flow through gaps, like those same deepmine winds that the path referenced, the same winds that filled the old tunnels around Lykos.
I feel transported to a memory from my past. As children in the mine we played a game called Tempt the Dark. We’d gather and shout down into the abyss of an old tunnel to wake what slumbered therein. Then we’d turn our backs to see who could stand there the longest. Who could conquer the fear growing in their own chests.
Eo won that game, every time.
Some called her daft or dumb in the head. Others snickered and saidshe was mad standing there with her weird little smile. I thought her brave and beautiful, darkness all about her, red hair whipping my heart into tangles. It’s taken me all this time to understand that smile.
She was not afraid because she was not thinking of the dark. She was enjoying her moment alone with the deepmine wind.
That wind becomes sacred to me with that realization. It finds its way through the smallest cracks and the biggest gaps. Darkness cannot stop it nor alter its journey. It cannot be chained nor held in the palm. It is movement unending. It is the sound of my childhood and Mars’s song to my people. It is my path to the Vale, back to Eo one day, back to Da, and Fitchner, Dancer, and Ragnar, Theodora, and Orion, Alexandar, Ulysses, and Uncle Narrol too. When I die, whenever that day comes, I will hear the wind that howls like a wolf and know I am home.
No magical force overtakes my body, but the memories, my lessons learned through Aurae’s little book, and my training with Cassius coalesce together. I can’t be a Helldiver gnawing my way forward. I must flow like the breath of Mars’s stone.
My eyes find a vulnerability in Fá’s armor. One of his pauldrons is a little bit looser than the other from the force of his charges.
Gently, like wind guiding a kite, I guide his warsaw down and to his left. Still busying the warsaw with Pyrphoros in my right hand, I reverse directions with Bad Lass in my left and deliver three neat strikes to dislodge his right pauldron. His shoulder lies exposed. I cross my arms, pinning his warsaw down with Bad Lass, and hack off a chunk of meat from the top of his shoulder with Pyrphoros.
Fá grunts in pain, and I spin around to his right and deliver a double-slash to the back of his right knee that sends him stumbling away. The mood changes. He recovers from his stumble and stares at the blood pouring from his shoulder, then the chunk of metal missing behind his right knee. The Ascomanni and Obsidians no longer chant. They must never have seen their king bleed like this in single combat.
There’s a blur to my right as the shield flickers off and a figure enters the fighting circle. I don’t let it draw all of my attention, and catch Fá nodding at someone behind me. Two people have entered the sacred fight, it seems. Two interlopers. I don’t bother with the one on the right. Instead, I flash Pyrphoros back in whip form underhanded as I turn, and throw Bad Lass like a spear.
Behind me is one of the Obsidians I suspected of being a Gorgon. Hehas a rifle pointed at my back and is about to fire just as Pyrphoros lashes across his eyes. He screams and Bad Lass takes him in the chest with athunk.Without thinking, I form Pyrphoros into a blade and fling it sideways at the other Gorgon, the one I first saw entering the circle on my right. I turn to watch the blade pinwheel toward him and cut him in half just above his hips.
Seeing me without a weapon, Fá charges with a roar. I don’t rush for my blades. That gap isn’t open yet. Instead, I wait for him to swing, and bend away from the warsaw. I wanted to retrieve Pyrphoros first, but his attacks guide me away, and I find my path back to Bad Lass instead.I pull it from the downed man almost casually as I pass. With it in hand, I slowly turn Fá around and work toward Pyrphoros.Soon both blades are back in my hands, and only then do I resume my attack.
I guide Fá’s blade when I can, and get out of the way when I can’t. My breath is rhythmic, and the clarity I’ve found feels semi-divine. Fá almost seems to move in slow motion. No longer a machine I cannot oppose, he is a puzzle I’m excited to deconstruct. I do it piece by piece, guiding his blade, weakening his armor in multiple places, only to return when the opportunity arises.
