Vane was standing in the center of the practice ring long before the light even thought about breaking.
The northern territory at pre-dawn was a specific, crushing kind of dark—one entirely devoid of the soft, artificial bleed of imperial mana-lamps. There was only the biting cold, the jagged silhouette of the pines, and the deep, circular track worn into the freezing earth by eleven years of a ghost's mornings.
He ran the six forms.
Quicksilver Thrust. Lunar Deflection. Falling Star. Then the eastern sequence: first, second, third. Six forms, two distinct grammars, one ruthless foundation. He ran them exactly the way Ryuken had built them into his muscles, the way they had settled into his bone marrow across twelve agonizing weeks at the Zenith compound and every bloody fight since.
The forms ran perfectly clean.
