Min felt it before she understood it.
It started as a warmth in her chest. Soft and slow, like sinking into a hot bath at the end of a long day. Her shoulders loosened. Her jaw unclenched. The pain in her broken arm faded to a dull, distant throb, the kind of pain that belonged to someone else.
She realized she'd stopped moving.
She was standing in the middle of the wrecked hall with her threads still hanging from her fingers, and she couldn't remember why she'd been holding them up. Everything felt very quiet. Very calm. The fight, the blood, the ice melting across the floor, none of it seemed to matter very much anymore.
Across the hall, Yoon stood with his arms loose at his sides and a gentle smile on his face. The air around him rippled, not like heat, not like wind, but like the surface of a pond on a still morning. And that stillness was spreading. Rolling outward from him across the whole hall in slow, quiet waves.
