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I don’t hold it easily. It’s fast in a way that has no business belonging to a thing built of dead metal and older grief, reading my strikes before I’ve finished them and answering blow for blow like it already knows where the next one’s going. I give ground twice before I find the rhythm underneath its discipline — not speed, not strength, just the same patience it’s using against me, waiting for the half-beat where its formation-trained reflex expects a partner that isn’t there anymore. I take that half-beat. Nightfall goes through the gap in its plating where a man’s ribs would be, and the thing folds, slow, almost gentle, like it’s finally being allowed to stop.

I don’t feel like I won anything.

The second Guardian’s blade comes down at an angle meant for Lyessa’s exposed side, and she’s already answering it before I’ve closed half the distance toward her — dropping under the strike, driving the pike’s butt into the back of its knee hard enough to buckle the joint, back on her feet with the same economy she brought to reading a damaged parchment two nights ago. I don’t reach her in time to matter. She never needed me to.

“Nice work.” I mean it, closing the last of the distance anyway, Nightfall already swinging for the opening her strike just bought us both.

“You’ll have it faster if we both work it.” She’s already pivoting to put a knife into the Guardian’s shoulder joint while I finish locking its blade against mine.

Across the plaza, she’s found her pillar — a column carved floor to ceiling with the same six-pointed script from the pass, glowing faint gold where her fingers move across it, reading faster than I’ve ever seen anyone read anything. One Guardian’s arm locks at an unnatural angle mid-strike, its momentum carrying it into the fountain instead of into Lyessa or me. She’s disabling them. Not killing. Pulling the command thread instead of cutting the puppet.

Her rune and my blade finish the last one in the same breath—the Guardian dropping to one knee, its sword arm gone dark and unresponsive at its side. It doesn’t fall the rest of the way. It kneels there in the wreckage of a fountain that hasn’t held water in a thousand years, and for one terrible moment its visor tilts up like it’s finally remembering what a face is for.

Neither of us moves to finish it.

Up close, the plating over its chest is scored with old symbols half worn away — a name, maybe, or a rank, or a house it swore itself to before isolation and whatever’s wrong with this mountain ate through a millennium of discipline and left only the discipline standing. Whoever it was, something in it still remembers how to kneel instead of fall.

“It’s not attacking.” Lyessa’s quiet, breathing hard, the pike still gripped white-knuckled in both hands.

“No.” I don’t lower Nightfall. I don’t raise it either. “I don’t think it ever wanted to. I don’t think any of them did.”

The gash across my shoulder doesn’t announce itself until the fighting’s done — the way wounds do, patient, waiting for a man to stop needing his body for the fight before they demand attention. Lyessa finds it before I do, her hand at the torn seam of my armor while I’m still insisting I’m fine.

“You’re not fine. You’re bleeding through blackened steel, which means it’s worse than you’re describing.” She’s got a strip of cloth out of some hidden pocket already, and doesn’t ask permission before she’s working the buckles at my shoulder loose, her hands quick and sure and unbothered by blood, the same brisk focus she’d bring to disarming anything that could still hurt her.

I let her. I could stop her — I outweigh her by more than double, and every trained instinct in me says a Warden doesn’t sit still and let someone else handle him — but I don’t move, and I don’t examine too closely why I don’t.

Her hands are steadier than my breathing is right now.

She works in silence, cloth pressed firm against the cut, her concentration total enough that I catch myself watching the exact place where her brow draws down instead of watching the empty plaza around us the way I should be. Ink stains her nails permanently. A thin white scar crosses two knuckles on her left hand, old, the kind that comes from a blade lesson learned the hard way. I’ve spent years mapping threats in every room I walk into. I’ve never once cared to notice a woman’s hands before hers.

“You held that pillar under pressure I’ve never seen a scholar hold under.” It’s true, and it’s easier to say than the other things sitting in my chest right now.

“You held five of those things off me with a sword arm that should be useless right now.” She doesn’t look up from the wound. “We’re both apparently better under pressure than we let on.”

“You noticed the strength.”

That gets her eyes up, just for a second, before she goes back to the bandage with a focus that’s trying too hard to be only about the bandage. “Hard not to. You’re not exactly subtle, Captain.”

“When it matters, no.” I let that sit a beat before I add the rest, low, because it’s true and I’ve stopped seeing the point in not saying true things to her. “I’m not about to start being subtle about you either.”

Her hands stay on my shoulder for a moment. Her breath catches — small, involuntary, gone before she can stop it — and her eyes flick up to mine and hold there a beat too long to be about the wound anymore. Then she finishes the wrap tighter than the work strictly requires and steps back a half-inch farther than it strictly requires either — which tells me everything the silence didn’t.

“That’s not a Captain talking.” Quieter now, not quite meeting my eyes. “Careful, Vorren. I don’t take back things I let myself hear twice.”

“I don’t often say things I haven’t already decided to mean.” I hold her gaze until she’s the one who looks away first, which she hasn’t done with me once since a burning street in Asterhold.

A sound behind us, small and wet and deliberate, turns us both around at once.

The kneeling Guardian hasn’t moved from where it fell still — sword arm dark, visor tilted, the rest of it gone motionless in a way that should mean finished. But something behind that visor slit is still working, still fighting for the shape of words through metal and a thousand years of silence, and when it finally finds enough of a voice to use, what comes out is barely more than a vibration in the stone beneath our boots.

“The Hall.” Broken. Ancient. Aimed at us like its last duty on earth is making sure we hear it. “The Hall of Oaths still remembers. Find it — before he does.”

“Before who does?” I’m moving toward it before the thought finishes, Nightfall forgotten at my side, because whatever’s dying in front of me right now isn’t an enemy anymore and hasn’t been for several minutes.

The visor tilts, one final degree, toward the mountain looming dark beyond the district’s furthest rooftops — toward whatever waits deeper in this city than we’ve gone yet.

Then the light behind the visor slit goes out, all at once, like a door closing on a room nobody’s coming back to.