The girl in the mirror was a stranger. She had bags under her eyes the whites of which were so bloodied it would be wrong to call them whites anymore. Her sunken cheeks and cracked lips reminded Dahlia of the dead bodies in her father’s mausoleum. Her nose was worn out from scratching after ten days of getting doused in freezing water.

On her best day Dahlia wasn’t the prettiest. Her eyes were too far apart, her jaw was blocky, her hair was weirdly colored and unruly. Her eyes used to be dark brown but since the choosing ceremony they had been subtly changing too, decaying into a bottomless black. Sitting in her room on the highest floor of the tower the recruits shared, waiting the last minutes to sunrise, Dahlia found herself cursing the very gods that cursed her.

She grabbed the wooden box from her table and took out a handful of poison leaves. She dumped them directly in her mouth, the bitter taste shocking her senses awake as she chewed on them. Her lungs shrunk and her longing for the blood magic lessened a little bit. She leaned back in her chair as waves of pain rolled through her body.

She glared at her trembling hand, grinding her teeth. She willed it to stop again and again until the frustration became unbearable, and she watched her hand curl up in a fist and crash into the mirror in front of her. Bright red beads of blood splashed on the table, tempting her to call upon them.

She joined the others around the pond a little after the sun started painting the sky, a makeshift bandage out of a torn shirt around her hand. She gave no acknowledgement to the trio of Helio, Kuro and Helen who were already next to the pond, the older two listening about a dream or something Helio had last night.

When Ashe joined them after a few minutes, they took a step and jump, all five in perfect synch as they had done dozens of times before. All five landed near perfectly.

Dahlia took a well-practiced pose with knees bent and elbows out. Her spine was perfectly upright. She used her hands to make micro-adjustments to her center of balance. When she felt comfortable in her stance, her eyes darted around the pond.

Helen looked effortless as usual, prowling on her platform like a feline predator. While Dahlia’s and Ashe’s wiggled like crazy, the boys and Helen looked still as winter on their planks.

That’s how their days usually started, a blind try to give the water a chance to wake them properly. None were particularly confident in the day’s first attempt, it was more of a warmup than having a real go at it. Through process of trial and error, they had figured out each one’s strengths and weaknesses at least.

Helen was near flawless as long as she was left to her own devices, but her balance crumbled the moment there was the slightest wave in the pond. She also got frustrated easily and her anger often clouded her judgement.

Helio was the lightest one of the bunch. That, coupled with his low center of gravity due to his height, granted him a clear advantage. But the boy also excelled at observing and emulating movements of others. He had no trouble learning the movements crucial to keeping balance, which took Dahlia hours to understand and implement.

Kuro was the one with the most knowledge on balance and such as he spent most of his childhood climbing vines in Eighth Spire. However, he was tall and had a climber’s body, meaning he had the most trouble making use of the very ideas he himself had cooked up.

Ashe was still a mystery even after ten days spent glued together. The broad girl spoke little, her speech was often limited to three-word rude sentences to either agree or disagree with someone else. She never spoke unless spoken to. Once, Kuro had tried to ask her about the Fourth Spire while they all were sitting around the dinner table. According to what Helio read in one of his books, Ashe was the first recruit from the agriculture focused spire in the last fifty something years. When asked about it, the girl’s expression darkened, and she answered with a simple grunt. Nobody pushed her after that.

Helio whispered a short melody signaling the thirty second mark. Dahlia felt a little flutter of hope appear in her chest. That flutter immediately disappeared when with a splash of freezing crystal, the pond swallowed Ashe.

Waves of water came crashing into the closest planks, Dahlia and Kuro aboard them wiggling hopelessly to try and keep their stance. Dahlia first lost her drive to try, then her footing. Air exploded out of her lungs, her spine shivered with the sudden shock as small chunks of ice danced on her skin.

She opened her eyes to a scene almost as shocking as the cold when she reached back to the surface. Across the pond’s chaotic waves, Helen was still on her platform. She wasn’t in any of the stances they had practiced. Instead of a lowered stance with her legs spread wide, it almost looked like a combat pose. She jumped around on the plank with small steps, a well-practiced footwork making it seem like she was almost floating above the wood. This was the first time any of the recruits kept their feet on the platform after someone else had fallen.

Dahlia cursed herself under her breath, anger rising inside that she didn’t even have the resolve to try. While she despaired in excuses and gave up before even trying, Helen was on her platform fighting with a crooked snarl on her face. The blue haired girl looked almost like a statue of some old war goddess.

One, two, three, four seconds later Helen’s feet slipped on the wet wood and she joined her peers in the hellish cold.

“That was amazing!” Helio said through chattering teeth as the recruits pushed themselves out of the pond.

“How did you figure that out?” Kuro asked Helen, handing out towels from his backpack to the others.

“I didn’t figure out shit,” Helen let out a frustrated grunt. “I simply didn’t want to fall, and my instincts kicked in. I’m not even sure why it worked.”

Dahlia eyed her cousin, trying to keep herself from getting too jealous of the girl. On top of having everything Dahlia lacked in her life, she was also stupidly good at everything too.

“Well, when you figure out, share with the rest of the class please,” Kuro said. “We are counting on you.”

Dahlia rolled her eyes and picked her sword up from where she had left it when she arrived. She slowly fell into the familiar comfort of the sword forms that Syllan taught them. The others joined her one by one in the usual routine.

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Since the boys and Ashe arrived on the spire much earlier than her and Helen, they had learned the forms from Arachne themselves. It was pretty much similar to what Syllan demonstrated on the cloudship. The only difference was that the others had learned it with an increased focus on footwork whereas Syllan mostly focused on upper body movements and arm motion.

Her body flowed like a sky serpent in flight, slow and methodical yet sharp and deadly. Her sword responded beautifully to her slightest adjustments now that she had gotten used to its near weightless blade. Steel was impressive yet flimsy, its instability, when compared to stone weapons Dahlia was used to, still somewhat scared her.

The ten moves that made up the dragon’s dance, the forms that Syllan taught them as the fundamental building blocks, mirrored the way a dragon fights in flight. Of course, this information was omitted by Syllan in his “required information only” approach. Thankfully, Helio didn’t have such reservations.

The boy liked to yap about anything and everything he learned from the books he found in Arachne’s library, which he apparently had special permission from the lieutenant to visit. Dahlia assumed Arachne simply gave the boy permission so he would stop bothering them. He had read extensively about fighting styles. “He had to, so as to become the best swordsman to bless the spires,” he said. It was a childish dream. Infuriatingly naïve and maddeningly selfish.

Dahlia felt her muscles get taught as she tried to keep her movements smooth, struggling to keep her anger in check as it rose in her belly. The smell of wine that plagued her blood reared its head through the cold and the poison, intense emotions dulling the effects of those bitter leaves. Summoned by her rage, Cartha’s face was burned on top of her vision like a phantom that haunted her entire being. She kept herself moving, tried to drown herself in the burning sensation of her muscles and the cold one on her skin.

She focused on the forms, on the philosophy behind them. According to the red eyed brat; many of the fighting styles, most of which were developed during the Pre-Spire Era, mimicked some sort of natural phenomena. Forms that mirrored the movements of animals were not uncommon. “Flowing Skies” was some sort of contemporary fighting style created by the first dragon riders. It consisted of two parts; dragon’s dance which utilized the straight sword, and rider’s dance that focused on the spear. What Syllan taught the recruits on the cloudship and made them practice to no end, the one they still practiced in their soaked clothes was but a miniscule part of the former. A mere ten forms out of a supposed total around twenty-five basic sword forms was the only thing they had learned, still trying desperately to drill them into their muscle memory in between jumping on the planks.

The others were already so much better than her, to the point that she even questioned why she was grouped with those four. All of them had near-perfect form while Dahlia struggled with the extreme departure from the solid stances and strikes she learned from her sister. Cartha had learned to fight in the slums of the Lower City, where nothing but overpowering your opponent mattered. Everything Dahlia learned about fighting from her sister revolved around the assumption that she was fighting an opponent weaker than she was.

Cartha always lived her life around one principle; “only pick fights you can win, little flower,” she used to say, “this graveyard is filled with overconfident idiots who thought honor could save them.”

So the moves she taught Dahlia, the moves she developed herself by watching street brawls and gladiator fights, focused on swift offense. Straight, powerful killing blows had been ingrained in Dahlia ever since she was a child of five. So, while her body and her muscles were ready for the movements required for this new way of moving, her mind still had trouble keeping up.

Dragon’s dance was the complete antithesis of everything she was taught. A high guard flowing into a swift stab, an overhead swing coming down into a lower counter, shifting into a horizontal slash, everything about this new way of fighting screamed inefficiency. And a voice in the back of Dahlia’s anger-meddled mind, that suspiciously sounded like Cartha, screamed at her for being stupid and trying to unlearn years of forced muscle memory.

Both the logical and emotional parts of Dahlia, which had more and more trouble agreeing on the simplest things lately, knew that Cartha’s way of fighting wouldn’t work for her now. The image of her sister nonchalantly dodging her attack in their garden on the day of the choosing ceremony often flashed in Dahlia’s mind. She knew that she needed techniques that would help her fight against a stronger Cartha; and no matter how much she hated everything about this fucking spire, the riders corps gave her a rare opportunity to get strong enough to force answers from her sister.

So, she threw herself into the forms. She focused on her balance. She watched the others intently, soaking everything they did better than her. On the next try, she tried to mimic what Helen did.

The moment water beneath started to ripple, she let her instincts take over. Her peripheral vision spotted Ashe as the source of the ruffle, lacking grace as the boorish girl did. She wobbled on her platform, failing to keep a simple stance of balance the way Dahlia figured out how to do on the second day.

Her instincts took over, subconsciously shifting her axis to keep her core directly above the center of her platform. Her weight shifted slightly from one leg to the other. In a moment, endless possibilities flashed in front of her. Forms, stances and movements that would shift the placement of her center of gravity into various positions. It felt like an explosion of ideas, a blinding dawn in her mind.

For a second, she found herself in awe of her own subconscious understanding of her body’s movements. A self-satisfied smile slowly creeped on her face. Blood rushed in her body, fueled by the improvements that ten days of torturous training inflicted on herself. Sparks of inspiration flew in her brain, buzzing like bees in a hive. She watched her body from above, moving like a ribbon in wind.

Helio’s low, melodic whistle jerked Dahlia back into her body. She froze for a fleeting second, trying to figure out the correct shift to her stance.

On the second try of the tenth day of training, for the first time since the day they started, Dahlia was the first to find herself in the water. She rushed to the surface; her mind blank with bees frozen in place in her skull, and glanced around at the others still trying to keep their balance.

It was painfully evident that she wasn’t the only one to draw conclusions from Helen’s performance in the last try and built on it during the half hour session going through the forms of the dragon’s dance.

Each moved in their own unique ways, a bizarre circus of four completely different animals. Claws and fangs bared against the overwhelming enemy that is shallow waves in a small pond. The one similarity they shared was the expression on their faces; an intense focus bordering on anger that sent shivers through Dahlia’s spine.

All four made it through a solid ten seconds before the pressure got too intense for Kuro, and the others one by one found themselves in the water after him.

“Maybe we should give going one by one a try,” Dahlia said when they were all out of the water.

The others looked at her in surprise, trading curious glancing around in the process.

“But we are getting close, no?” Ashe asked, addressing the group more than Dahlia herself, her gaze finally settling on Helen.

“You are the one that said we needed to do it together anyways, Dahlia,” Kuro said, his irritatingly calm eyes not wavering for a second.

Helen picked up her sword as if she had lost all interest in this conversation. Dahlia could almost feel the blue haired girl’s eyes rolling through the back of her head.

“Surprise surprise,” she said, swinging her sword in a wide arc. “The cursed one doesn’t like to be the one to fail the class. You guys do whatever you want, I will keep to the usual schedule that you all set for us.”

She fell into the dragon’s dance without wasting much time. The others joined her after sneaking a couple more glances Dahlia’s way.

Dahlia gritted her teeth, sudden anger simmering in her belly. New bees started buzzing, not the bright sparkling ones from before but blood red ones. Bees that screamed rage and vomited fire, that felt like they would pour out of her eyes. Her eyes jumped between the pond and the recruits.

She forced herself to move before she was stopped by a pride that swelled in her throat. Instead, she let out a low growl and stalked to where her sword stood leaning against the wall to practice the boring sword forms for the millionth time.