The ground beneath my boots still smelled of iron, smoke, and blood. No matter how the wind moved through the scarred fields, no matter how much the banners burned to black husks or the earth swallowed its own ash, the air clung to me as if it remembered. My chest rose and fell with each slow breath, but the rhythm was ragged, off-beat, as if my own heart had begun to resist the burden of being alive when so many others no longer were.
I carried the weight of their silence with me. Every corpse that lay unburied behind me seemed to press into my spine, a hand clawing down my back, reminding me I had not merely survived the duel—I had made survival costlier than death. It would be easier if my memories blurred, if the circle of the duel dissolved into smoke and became nothing more than shadowed impressions. But I could still hear every clang of steel, every howl of defiance, every desperate cry as blades carved through the barrier and blood poured out.
