The seventh circle collapsed for the third time that night.
It went the way it always went. The first six held—clean, bright, turning in the air around me in neat nested order—and then the seventh started to close, and the moment it tried to decide anything, it came apart. Not violently. It simply unravelled, thread by thread, like a sentence that forgot what it was trying to say, and drifted to the floor of the training hall as a fine silver ash.
I let the other six go before they could follow it down.
'That's three,' Luna said in my head.
'I can count.'
'I know you can count. That's the problem.'
I didn't answer. I sat on the cold stone with Evolvis across my knees and breathed, and waited for the ache behind my eyes to fade.
