Hine returned to breath like a diver breaking the surface. Air rushed in with a thin wheeze, then steadied under a warm hand at her sternum. Naberius knelt beside her in the pale, quiet plane between torments, a place of soft light and black glass where nothing hurt for a few heartbeats.
"You are whole," Naberius said. "Hold that knowledge a moment before you go back."
Hine nodded. Her lips were cracked, her palms raw where she had clawed ice, stone, and the smooth face of the abyss. The shard at her collarbone glowed a steady ember. It had no pulse of its own, only a reply to hers.
"I cannot change Ronova's terms," Naberius said, eyes bright with the gentlest sadness. "But you can change how you meet them. Life is technique as much as force. Will you let me show you how to listen for openings?"
Hine's throat worked. "I will."
Naberius shaped her hand over Hine's as if they were holding a cup of river water. "Everything begins with breath. Four counts to root, two counts to kindle, four counts to release. Rooting slows panic. Kindling feeds quick decisions. Releasing keeps you from shattering under fear." She guided Hine through it until the rhythm settled like a small drum behind her ribs.
"Good. When you return, do not rush to strike. Find three things that do not move. Fix them in mind. Then move between them."
"Three things," Hine whispered. "Breath. Landmarks. Openings."
Naberius smiled. "You remember your road lessons."
Hine thought of Kaien's rope and Lurya's bitter leaves, of the Silent Soul's quiet corrections on footwork in a narrow gorge. Knees bent, shoulders loose, eyes forward. She had fallen so many ways since then. She had learned something from each fall, even if all she could name was the shape of pain.
"Again," Naberius said, and Hine breathed.
Light folded her away.
The arena returned as a slab of obsidian cut by cracks of red fire. Heat climbed off the floor in waves that made the air shimmer. Ronova's presence pressed down from above, patient and merciless. The first beast formed out of shadow at the edge of vision, its body all angles and teeth, its eyes like chips of old ice.
Hine did not sprint. She looked for what did not move. A jag in the floor, a broken spire, a pale thread of smoke that rose straight in a driftless pocket. She marked them, then slid her feet until her weight sat over the balls, knees soft. The beast's shoulder hitched a heartbeat before it lunged. There was the telegraph. She had seen it in another death and not understood.
This time she let the first lunge pass, slipping inside its reach the way the Silent Soul once taught her to slip past thorned branches. She put the heel of her hand under its jaw and drove with her legs, a small, precise burst. Bone gave. Her palm burned, but the stagger gave her two breaths. She used them to move, to keep the beast between herself and two of the fixed points she had chosen. A second lunge. The shoulder hitched again. Telegraphed. Pattern.
"Count," she told herself. "One to root, two to kindle, three to act."
When she moved, she moved like flint striking iron. A short step, a twist, a rip with the shard's heat gathered to her fingertips. The beast howled and collapsed. She did not wait for it to dissolve. She scanned the edges. More shapes. Always more shapes.
She lasted seven breaths longer than the last time this loop had burned her clean.
Death came anyway. Fire gathered under the floor, needles of heat that lanced through her calves and thighs. She bit back a cry, took one step, miscounted, and the world flared white.
Pale light. Warm hand.
"Seven breaths longer," Naberius said. "Name three things you did right."
Hine swallowed. "I waited. I watched the shoulder. I used the floor."
"And one thing you would do differently."
"Do not overreach after the first cut," Hine said. "Greed invites a second blade."
Naberius's smile was brief and proud. "Again."
Hine woke falling into wind so loud it shook her teeth. The abyss opened everywhere. The air here felt thinner than in the mountains, as if someone had scooped the sky and left only the idea of it behind. Years ago, the fall would have made her flail until she forgot to breathe. Now she tucked, chin to chest, arms tight, knees bent. She counted. Four to root. Two to kindle. Four to release. With each release she pushed a small swell of heat into the air below her, a quick bloom from the shard that made the space around her body expand. Once, in the high passes, she had cupped fire for light. Now she cupped it for lift.
It did not save her. Not entirely. But it slowed the fall enough that she saw a ledge as thin as a knife edge, saw the way the wind curled over it in a faint ripple. Timing, not force. She reached with her rope, looped a spur, swung, missed, fell, and then found the stone with the side of her boot. The impact tore skin and pulsed pain up to her hip, but she stuck there for a breath and a half, long enough to feel alive with choice. She bared her teeth into the wind, laughed once, then lost the hold and went tumbling.
Pale light. Warm hand.
"Name your opening," Naberius said.
"The curl of wind over the ledge."
"And the tool you used."
"Heat to swell the air. Rope to reach the spur."
Naberius tipped her head. "Not all tools are iron. Not all edges cut outward. You learned both."
Hine learned to read the ice loops next. She had always hated the cold, the way it slid under skin and stole strength. Now she treated it like a map. She watched for the white glaze that meant brittle footing and the dull gray that meant a thin film of melt on stone. She learned how her breath fogged and where it did not, the still pockets that meant shelter, the whirl that meant a hidden drop. When shards of frozen crystal grew out of the ground, barbed and bright, she did not try to break them. She threaded them, leaving a palm-width of space between points, the way she once threaded bramble. She wrapped her rope with its iron hooks around a knee of rock, tested twice, then committed to the jump.
Sometimes she landed and slid into a fall with her heart slamming the world into a narrowed tunnel. Sometimes she landed clean, knees bent, breath steady, the shard humming at her sternum like a small, pleased animal. In both cases she named what she had done right and what she would change, and Naberius listened.
On a day that may have been the hundredth or the thousandth, something new happened in the fire loops. Hine reached for the shard to build a sheath against the heat, expecting only an inch of mercy. Instead a thin veil of warmth slid across her skin and hung there like a second cloak. She could feel it, not quite solid, but present, like the boundary between flame and air that dances above a candle.
She named it Ash Veil. It did not make her invulnerable. Flames still found her eyes and the tender skin at her wrists. But with the Veil she could run three strides farther before her muscles betrayed her. Three strides sometimes meant the next pillar of stone, and the next had a shadow pool, and in that pool she could draw a long breath without her lungs feeling like lit cloth.
The shadowed beasts learned her as she learned them. They came in pairs more often, then in threes. Their shoulder hitches shifted to a twitch at the hip. Ronova watched and changed the terms without speaking. Hine did not curse her for it. She filed it under the same truth as falling: the ground is not kind. That does not make it your enemy. It is a teacher without a face.
She borrowed again from the Silent Soul. He had taught her to break momentum in two steps rather than four, to square her hips before a turn, to let the eyes arrive before the body. She practiced until the small corrections lived in her bones. When a beast lunged, she pivoted with her eyes already set on the path beyond it. When a blade of dark rose out of the floor, she broke momentum in two quick footfalls and let the strike miss by the thickness of a breath. When the arena turned to glass and the glass to knives, she folded at the waist and head, not the back and neck, and the cut took hair rather than scalp.
Between loops, Naberius began to add to the lessons. She showed Hine how life sits in joints and tendons, how to send warmth to the small muscles that decide balance. Hine learned to keep heat coiled at her ankles so the first step after a dodge always had strength. She learned that lungs should not be filled to the top in panic, that half-full lungs hold better rhythm. She learned to release her jaw so pain had one less lock to enter.
"Technique is a kindness you grant your future self," Naberius said. "You do not always get to choose the weapon. You may always choose the stance."
Hine named what she discovered. Ash Veil for the skin of heat. Ember Step for the quick burst that made her feet lift when the floor grabbed at them. Spark Feint for the flicker of her hand that drew a beast's eyes half a degree off before she cut. Coil for the breath she held at the bottom of her ribs that let her turn faster around her center.
Once, inside the crushing void that pressed from all directions, she found a way to live longer than she ever had. It happened by accident. She exhaled on the fifth count instead of the fourth, and the pressure slipped by her chest as if it had missed its mark. She tried it again, carefully, and saw the same fraction of relief. From then on she treated the void like a stubborn door and her breath like the turning key. She could not escape the room, but she could stay in it.
The first kill came on an ice floor. It was not graceful. She lured a beast into a narrow corridor between crystal teeth, baited with a stutter in her step, then brought the rope across its neck and planted her feet the way Kaien had taught her for the passes. The iron hooks bit. The beast thrashed and slashed. She went to her knees, felt her shoulder tear, and held anyway. It dissolved into smoke and left a smear of cold on the rope.
Ronova's voice slid into the air above with no body behind it. "You enjoyed that."
"No," Hine said, and tasted her own blood where she had bitten her lip. "I enjoyed choosing."
The arena answered next time with three beasts and a floor that turned to sleet underfoot. She did not last, but she named what had gone wrong. Not the numbers, not the odds. The choice to stay in the narrow rather than run to wider ground. Narrow had saved her once. It would not always.
Between deaths, Naberius kept the lessons simple. She refused to turn pain into story. She refused to let it become the only language Hine knew.
"Drink," she would say, and a cup would appear in Hine's hand, warm and sweet. "Flex the fingers. Name each knuckle. Roll the ankles. Sight the horizon."
"What horizon?" Hine asked once, laughing a little because the plane had none.
"The one inside," Naberius said, and her smile made the dark feel farther away.
Hine began to set small goals inside the loops. Reach the second spire before dying in fire. Reach the third ledge before the wind took her. Touch the base of Ronova's high dais, the one that looked like a cut mountain, before the shadows gathered. The first time she touched the dais, the obsidian was colder than anything she had felt. It made her bones ache. She flattened her palm there anyway and left a round smudge of heat that faded as she watched.
Ronova was waiting at the top. Not her whole presence, only a silhouette like a cutout in the world. Hine did not lift her eyes. She was learning to choose her gaze the way she chose her steps. She turned and ran. She died with the dais behind her and her hand still tingling where the cold had seeped in.
Another time, in the fire arena, she tried something foolish and it worked. She jammed a broken shard of obsidian into a crack and flared heat through it like breath through a reed. The stone sang, a high tremor that made the nearest beast flinch with its ears pressed flat. Animals hate certain sounds. She filed it away. The next time she needed a length of space, she made the stone sing and bought herself three heartbeats.
Hine began to recognize Ronova's adjustments the way a sailor reads wind. When she delayed her first move, Ronova sent a fast enemy. When she opened with Ash Veil, Ronova filled the air with knives rather than flame. When she looked up to the dais too often, Ronova kept it shrouded until Hine forgot it existed. There was a lesson in that, too. Do not let one goal blind you to the room.
In a loop that smelled like summer rain on hot stone, Hine found herself on a plain of shallow water. The beasts moved in sets of four, reflections doubling their number. She lowered into the Silent Soul's low guard and slid forward with her feet whispering under the surface. Ember Step warmed her calves. Ash Veil flickered. Spark Feint tugged a beast's focus, and she cut low at the knee where shadow meets water. For the first time she did not die on that plain. The loop rewrote itself in surprise and ended with a sky that cracked like glass.
Pale light again. Naberius again. Warm hand. Steady eyes.
"You are learning," Naberius said.
"I am listening," Hine answered. "To breath. To floor. To what moves and what does not."
"Good." Naberius touched Hine's wrist where a faint burn ring had settled like a bracelet. "One more thing. Your fire comes from two places. The shard lends what it can. Your life lends the rest. Never spend both at once unless the path is worth the cost."
"How will I know the cost?"
"You will not, not always. That is why you must choose with a clear head."
Hine let that sit inside her lungs the way breath had. She thought of the small mark she had left on the dais. She thought of Ronova's silhouette and the way it had not moved. She thought of the Silent Soul barred from this place and the mountain rope that had saved her life once on a real cliff with a real sky.
"Again," she said.
The next loop opened as a storm. The sky veined with red. The floor a grid of slick black plates separated by seams that spat steam. Beasts climbed over each other to reach her. Hine chose three fixed points. A cracked plate. A tall spike. A motionless thread of falling rain that slipped through still air. She rooted, kindled, released. Ash Veil. Ember Step. Spark Feint. Rope to spur. Stone to song. She moved without waiting for her courage to arrive. Courage could meet her on the second breath. It did.
She killed twice. She reached the spike. She marked the plate. She sang the stone. She slipped. She fell. She died looking up.
Pale light. Warm hand. A small smile that was not pity.
"What did you learn?" Naberius asked.
"That I can meet the storm with a plan," Hine said. Her voice was level. "And change it when the storm changes."
She flexed her fingers. Named each knuckle, each tendon. The shard hummed back at her touch. Somewhere far above, beyond the quiet plane, she felt a listening she could not name. Ronova had not grown kinder. The other Rulers had not come to lift her. The loop still waited with new teeth.
Hine felt ready anyway.
"Again," she said, and when the world took her, she went with her knees bent, breath counted, eyes already searching for what would not move.