The sand shifted beneath her feet as she pivoted left, narrowly avoiding the blade aimed for her ribs.
Caelvir's footwork was better now. He didn't overextend like he used to. He didn't lunge with desperation. No, this one was measured—cold in his own way. The sword he held gleamed under the harsh sun, a slit of memory forged in steel.
The Sword of Seren.
They called it that now.
It whistled as it swung. Lysara ducked under it with unnatural speed, the wind whispering past her as her boots kicked up dust.
Not like her. Not anymore.
"Don't pivot with both feet flat, Seren," Lysara said, voice even, eyes distant. "You're digging your grave before you even move."
Seren blinked at her, sweat clinging to her temple, lips parted in breathless effort. "It's hard to balance like you," she murmured.
"Then fall less," Lysara replied, stepping behind her, adjusting her grip. "Move like the wind, not like a tree."
The girl tried again, spinning to face the imaginary enemy. Her steps were better. Still sloppy, but better.
And the same sword gripped in her fist.
Lysara parried another strike, the clang of steel against steel slicing through the silence in her mind. Caelvir was using his weight now, trying to push her off rhythm. His swings had meat, effort behind them.
Was he the one teaching the blade? Or was the blade the one teaching him?
She slid under his guard, pivoting with a burst of air-infused speed, and slashed at his leg. He twisted, narrowly avoiding the edge—a smart move. The same move had caught others.
But not him.
Seren held the sword in both hands, arms trembling.
"She's too delicate for this," Valkira had said once, but Lysara disagreed.
"She's weak," Lysara had said, "but not delicate."
She had watched the girl's fingers tighten around the grip, and it wasn't strength; it was need. To prove something. To become something. Lysara had known that need.
"Hold it tighter near the guard," she instructed then. "You're swinging it like a dancer. This isn't a stage."
Seren had laughed, quietly. "But I like dancing."
Now it was a dance.
Steel rang out, the tempo fast, almost elegant. Lysara struck twice in succession—left, then low—both parried. Caelvir stepped back, gauging distance. His breathing wasn't yet labored nor was hers.
Her large pauldron slid slightly again. She ignored it. Her other shoulder bare, gleamed with sweat. Still, her face remained unreadable. The arena roared beyond the veil of silence inside her.
She looked into Caelvir's eyes.
She saw something reflected on the edges of the blade for a moment.
Not Seren. Not exactly.
But Seren's sword. Seren's death. Seren's mistakes.
In his hands, that steel had purpose.
In hers, it had been weight.
"Again," Lysara had said, watching Seren fall.
The girl groaned, brushing sand from her cheek. "You're like a statue. Do you even feel anything when we train?"
Lysara turned away. "No."
It wasn't unkind. It was just true from heart.
But sometimes… sometimes when Seren spoke, her words left ripples in Lysara's chest. A warmth? A thing Lysara didn't know what to do with.
Caelvir faked left. Lysara followed, but caught the shift in his shoulder too late.
The sand.
He kicked it up, a harsh arc flung toward her eyes.
For a heartbeat, the light vanished, vision gone.
Her arm came up, instinct honed sharper than steel, blocking most of the grains. A flicker of wind danced across her skin as she twisted, dodging the follow-up strike by inches.
His blade whistled past.
You should have been more careful, Seren.
That same trick had killed her.
But against Lysara? Too predictable.
Lysara twisted low, air folding beneath her heels as she spun in a tight arc, and struck.
Her blade sang past his guard.
A crimson line bloomed across Caelvir's right arm.
He backed away, face tightening.
She didn't follow up.
She didn't smile.
"Why do you always look like that?" Seren had asked once, rubbing a bruise from her thigh. "Like the world already ended, and you're just waiting for it to catch up."
Lysara didn't answer. She just looked at her.
And Seren's smile faded.
"You're not dead, Lys," she said softly. "Not to us."
She'd said it without malice. Just... sadness. The kind only someone who had lived among ghosts could recognize in another.
Lysara hadn't looked away, but she hadn't answered either.
Caelvir's blood dripped in slow arcs. It darkened the sand.
The wind shifted slightly, brushing against Lysara's cheek. A cold breeze came. The kind that used to whisper through the back corridors of the barracks when she and Seren and Valkira lay sleepless beneath the weight of bruises and exhaustion.
She remembered.
Seren had once flinched from shadows.
Now Caelvir held her sword like it had always been his.
No. It's not his
It wasn't the sword that changed. It was the soul behind it.
One belonged to a girl with milk-white hair, lips pale and often bitten raw in sleep, body marked by past buyers, a girl who had just learned to laugh again.
"She's hot," Seren whispered one night, watching Valkira spar through the slats in the practice-yard fence. "Like, really hot. Fire!"
Lysara had nodded, sharpening her blade.
"You're hot too, you know," Seren said.
"No," Lysara replied. "You are."
Seren laughed. "Aah... you're joking, right? Don't you know? I'm Elarian! Look at all this snow on my head!"
Lysara had turned to her, looked at her and seen the change.
Eyes no longer numb. Cheeks no longer pale. Breath no longer shallow like someone afraid to take up space.
She had wanted to say something.
But she hadn't.
And now here she was.
Facing the man who ended that flame.
Caelvir didn't gloat. He didn't speak.
That almost made it worse.
He treated the death of Seren like he treated the death of every other; he treated it as an inevitable necessity.
The same hands that pulled sand to blind her, pulled the blade through her.
She hadn't screamed.
Lysara remembered that too.
Seren had died quiet.
She had died as if she knew it was coming because she hadn't listened.
Because Lysara hadn't made her listen.
"You always say things once, Lys," Seren said, after a poor block left her ribs bruised. "Like that's enough."
"If you want to live, once is enough."
"But sometimes it isn't."
That had struck something strange in Lysara.
Seren wasn't questioning the advice. She was asking to be reminded like she wanted to live, not just survive.
That had confused Lysara.
Still did.
Because what kind of warrior wanted to hear the warning twice?
What kind of warrior wasn't already listening?
Now, Lysara's blade hovered once again.
Caelvir's grip had shifted subtly but she noticed it. He favored the wounded arm.
He knew how to hide pain, not from her though.
She wasn't Seren.
She wondered, as she stepped forward, her boots barely whispering across the sand, what he remembers of that fight.
Did he think of it at all?
Of the white-haired girl who held her blade a second too slow?
Of the way he blinded her first?
Of the way he grappled with her?
Did he recall how he twisted after the sand? How he stabbed her with her own sword?
Or had he done it so many times it blurred?
Seren had sat with her knees drawn up, the day before her final match.
"I think I'd like to win," she said. "For her."
"Valkira?"
Seren nodded. "I think it'd make her proud."
Lysara looked away.
Seren noticed.
"It's strange, Lys. I thought I was you. At first. But I think... I think I want to be something else."
Lysara didn't respond.
But later that night, when Seren slept beside Valkira in the dim hall, hand curled into hers like a tether, Lysara sat awake.
She stared at the sword.
At the reflection of herself in the steel.
And for a heartbeat, it didn't look like her at all.
Caelvir moved.
Lysara answered.
Steel rang out like bells in mourning.
And this time, when he stepped wrong just an inch, Lysara twisted inside his guard.
Her blade kissed his side cleanly yet barely deep.
Like the kind of cut that tells you: I know where to bleed you next.
Caelvir stepped back.
The sand trembled faintly with his motion, but Lysara stilled.
Her sword lingered in the air lightly on the end of her wrist, just a whisper away from another strike.
Then her eyes shifted to the blade in his hands.
The flat of the steel caught her reflection. A warped, silver smear of her face unmoving, lips dry, eyes like frost beneath a skyless winter.
Something in the mirror of that weapon felt wrong.
Her? I'm frowning?
She was... angry.
The realization hit her like cold water.
For once, her face did not look like the measured, lethal calm she'd been known for so long.
No, this was heat. A quiet rage beneath the silence.
Her fingers tightened on the hilt.
Was it vengeance?
The thought struck.
Had she come here with vengeance in her lungs?
That wasn't like her. She didn't feel things like that.
Her kills had never held purpose beyond command. Her path was paved with silence, a line of corpses she neither mourned nor remembered.
Yet now... now her chest burned.
She wasn't angry at death. She had kissed it too many times for that.
But at him.
At Caelvir.
And that made no sense.
She had stood before his cell once, quiet and shadowed. He had expected venom. She'd given him back the Sword of Seren instead.
She had said, simply: "You carried it well."
He had given the sword a legacy, the one Seren never got to carve herself. And the world had raised him up for it, naming him the Blade King.
He had turned Seren's name, one attracting the licentious eyes, into respect and fear.
She should not be angry.
She should be grateful.
So why now did her heart wage war against her discipline?
Why did this fight feel so different?
None of the others had meant anything. They were just contests. One would die, one would live. Sand soaked in blood.
But this one... this one had...
meaning.
It held weight in her chest.
A name.
A memory.
A fire.
A fire?
Her mouth parted slightly.
Her eyes widened in her mind.
But the blade in her hand showed her something stranger.
Her face... in the reflection...
It didn't look like Lysara.
Not the Lysara who had been sold at seven.
Not the Lysara who had cut her master's throat.
Not the one who stood unmoved through Seren's blood cooling by her feet.
No.
The eyes in the steel had changed.
There was cold in them still, but no emptiness dared step inside the eternal darkness of her pupils.
This cold was cracked as if something beneath had warmed it and warped it and wrecked it.
For a breath, she looked like Valkira, the same fire-born, battle-true warrior who stood with her chin high even when surrounded by loss.
And then...
For a breath longer...
She looked like Seren, the same girl with white-blonde hair who was frozen by ice and melted by fire.
That unsettled her.
More than the sword.
More than Caelvir's strikes.
More than death.
Who is she?
The question came unbidden.
And the reflection held no answer.
Only a glimmer of something in-between ice and fire?
She tore her gaze from the blade.
Caelvir stood across from her again, steady despite the wound.
A breeze came, felt on the skin and moving through the arena.
Warm.