~ The Yard — Night
The sound the collision made was wrong.
Not wrong in the way that sounds are wrong when something breaks or fails — wrong in the way that sounds are wrong when the physics producing them are not the physics that should be producing them. Metal on metal.
The clean, honest 'CLANK' of two blades meeting. Except that one of the blades was not there.
Not visibly.
Santora's sword — drawn in the half-second between his sentence and its consequence, the draw of a man whose hand had lived on a pommel for thirty years and knew the distance from there to ready without thinking about it — had stopped.
Mid-swing.
In the air.
Hovering.
Not held. Not blocked by another blade in a hand. Simply 'stopped', the momentum of the swing removed from it as cleanly as you remove a word from a sentence, the sword hanging in the yard air at the angle it had been traveling and then not traveling at, the edge catching the inn-window light on one side and the night on the other.
