By the time I pushed through the library doors and stepped unto it's second floor balcony, the air slapped me with its usual damp chill, laced with that mountain-mist bite that somehow manages to make every breath taste like disappointment.
I had expected quiet—stillness, perhaps broken only by the occasional cough or whispered conversation. Instead, the courtyard was alive with shouts, grunts, and the metallic scrape of steel. Training. Or at least the clumsy approximation of it that most exhausted competitors managed when they realized the next war might only be yet but a sunrise away.
And then there was Salem.
If the rest of the yard looked like a gaggle of nervous schoolchildren attempting to mimic warriors, Salem looked like a man intent on cutting through the very concept of mortality with sheer willpower.
He moved with a kind of ferocity that didn't belong in a courtyard of cracked stone and wooden dummies.
