Morning comes with a crick in my neck, the expected result of sleeping on the couch with my head in Amber’s lap. Someone’s wrapped me in a blanket, and Amber is half-curled around me in a position that can’t possibly be comfortable, the heat radiating off of her body keeping me comfortably warm.
She’s awake, blissfully content with sparkling eyes and a wide smile. I tell her I can’t deal with her face until I’ve had a shower and drag her with me, and about fifteen minutes later I’m recovered enough to express in unambiguous physicality how good I’m feeling.
It rather helps that her touch soothes every ache and twinge away. Convenient, that.
Breakfast is some sort of porridge, rich and spiced and burning all the way down. It’s sweeter, too, with a sugar that’s got a higher concentration of molasses than what I’m used to, and it’s served with a thick and tangy yogurt that wipes the fire away. We eat it with three kinds of fruit in a companionable silence, and we’re ready to go before my brain has caught up from when it got put on pause during the shower.
“Hey.”
The word is a ripple of stillness and silence, with the five of us in the foyer. The pressure of everyone’s attention somehow doesn’t make me feel anxious; the four of them turn to face me, and I look at them with a smile that feels more silly than anything else.
There’s no actual need to say anything.
“Thank you,” I say anyway, and for some reason that sets Zidanya to laughing. I look on in bafflement as she progresses from an incredulous chuckle to howling mirth, leaning against the wall. Nobody says anything, but Sara’s snickering quietly and Amber is grinning at me like I just made the greatest joke of all time, and I lean my head against her and wait.
The laughter slows, then stops, after what’s probably only a few moments, well after the awkwardness would have kicked in, a world ago or a week ago; well before it kicks in, today, and then Zidanya just walks out the door, shaking her head, and everyone else follows.
Amber does too, after kissing my forehead, and I wander on after them in a bemusement that lasts most of the way to the stadium.
For whatever reason, we manage to avoid most of the crowds that we’d previously had to deal with, even though about a quarter of everyone instantiated into the scenario—which I guess, and Vonne confirms, is the vast majority of the Temple’s sapient imprints—is heading to the place to see the upcoming battles in person. There’s a real sense that the morning’s fights, Ghosts Numbering Five against Sages and Flight against Order, are going to be the most interesting, the most real fights remaining of the tournament; people are already chattering about how obviously the Lady won’t allow either my team or Rei’s to fall in the semifinals, and the showmatch won’t be worth watching because we’ll all be fighting to not die, not to win.
It’s pretty obvious to me, at least, that Lily Sheid is perfectly capable of letting me die, even if it means Zidanya dying with me, even if it means losing her shot at… something. I don’t know what that something is, maybe it’s just Zidanya getting out, but it’s pretty obvious that the exchange of stories was something unusual and that her story is a boon, and I just don’t know what the intended boon is and what her broader goals, goals that are furthered by giving me that boon, are.
Well, it’s more accurate to say that I’m deliberately not thinking about whether she knows what my plans are and how empowering those plans might further her goals. What I wound up learning from that exchange is so incredibly, immediately useful to those plans that I have to assume she knows, if I stop to think about it, and that’s terrifying.
Instead, I think about the upcoming violence. I haven’t, weirdly enough, been asked to justify my prediction from two evenings ago about who’s going to win out of Ghosts and Sages. Instead, the other four are having a rapid back-and-forth about why; words like tempo and spike are flying around along with at least three different adverbs being attached to the word advantage. Nobody’s actually naming any of the Skills I threw up onto the display briefly that evening, but everyone’s clearly bearing them in mind as they argue, which seamlessly expands to include Khalal as ze joins us at the point where the seamless corridors covered in never-repeating geometric designs of light brown and dark green end and Khetzi goes visibly tenser as we enter the more public spaces.
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Whatever they’re expecting to go wrong, it doesn’t. We move smoothly through sparse, orderly crowds, getting a recognition I’m familiar with; everyone’s aware of who we are, but nobody wants to be the one to make a big deal of it, to make things awkward. Khetzi doesn’t relax until we’ve moved through a door that is absolutely stuffed with glyphs, four spatial dimensions of runework so dense I’m not even sure my Visor can figure out where one starts and the next ends, and we feel a shift of displacement and we’re in a private space on one of the spike-points. The hells, I remember Zidanya calling them, ten-meter-square boxes with a balcony that extends out over the field of battle. I hadn’t thought to look at them through the Visor, to try to get a sense of the magic at play, and now that I’m inside them it’s… well, it would be blinding, if I were using my eyes as the primary sensory hardware, but I’m not, I’m just using my eyes to interpret a graphical display that munges esoteric sensoria into readable data.
I’m almost too distracted by the opportunity to study the magic here to notice when Amber steers me carefully to sit on the floor in front of her, legs pressing against my sides in something like a hug and fingernails toying with my freshly-braided hair. I make some frankly embarrassing noises, but also I pick apart spell after spell, committing them to my Visor’s memory. I don’t understand enough about how any of them work to use them yet, but I’ve picked up enough glyphwork from Zidanya’s tutoring to start figuring out the vague domain of a lot of these. Firmament targeted externally might be a bulwark of some sort, and there are literally hundreds of those, which actually reinforces my guess as to what it’s doing, since they’re all just different enough that they could be defending against different things with a lot of overlap. There are void runes with glyphs that I’ve seen before in sound-related and sight-related runes, and at least some of those are soundproofing and one-way-vision effects, and I know there’s got to be a few things preventing teleportation, tele-presence, and a host of related effects. I can’t find them, or more accurately can’t figure out which of the vast number of active runes is handling that task, but I lose myself in the joy of trying to figure it out, rambling out loud to myself in the process.
I don’t pull out all the stops, though. Useful as it would be to have an enormous library of runes and glyphs, I have no time to practice with integrating anything new into my Motes, much less my orbs, and it’s not like I’m going to have the time or the wherewithal to do actual runework in the heat of battle. So while I’m not exactly spinning my wheels, and I do carefully record as much as I possibly can, I’m careful not to do anything particularly novel in terms of clever abuses of the Visor’s computational capacities.
I might need to pull off some bullshit soon, and I don’t want to have my exploits taken away for something that isn’t absolutely critical.
Amber pulls me out of my reverie by pulling me up and into the seat next to her. My attention comes back to my body in time to intercept the handkerchief; I’m relaxed, I feel like I’m glowing, and that notwithstanding I am, by the Void that sees every embarrassment and cares nothing for them, an adult and I can wipe my own drool off my face. Her smirk and the way her hand traces slow circles along the base of my neck both do a lot of work in helping me not care about the indignity, and I just nuzzle into her hand for a moment before the presence sweeps over me and I straighten.
Lily—no, Lady Sheid, Architect of this tournament—is standing in the center of the field, turning to pass her eye over the stands.
“Today’s the final day-in-full of this tournament.” Her words are even, her tone casual. She commands everyone’s attention regardless, and even though she’s not even looking at me it feels like her words are directed at me, personally. As commanding and compelling as her words are, there’s no room for thought, no room for analysis. Just her words, and the sense that every phoneme that comes out of her mouth is fit to shift orbits. “Two matches in the morning, three in the afternoon, and you’ll have a night to celebrate and a morning to settle your shit.
“The days we have labored, fought, thought, loved, and lived, inasmuch as life is permitted us, come to a close.” Her voice becomes more formal, more serious. “Perhaps they will come again. Perhaps the Temple will fall before they do, or that which we all serve will reshape its glyphwork and erase us all. Perhaps.” She lets that rest, and then releases the tension with a shrug and a small smile. “What will be, we will leave to the future. The fight that comes, we will leave to those who still stand. But they do not stand alone; behind the thirty whose fury will shift these sands there are the serried ranks of all those whom I see before me, and many more besides.
“We all strive. That was the commandment; that is our lot. But for our striving, we all rise.” The word is like a string, tugging at us, and I let it pull me onto my feet. “Champions, architects, sages, and cooks. Workers of wood and stone and gems, educators and those who bring new life into the world and a thousand people more. We are the engine by which this Temple has grown rich enough to grant us the life we live.
“There are no gods here, nor Gods, nor Goddess. We all strive, and we all rise. All of us! Look to your left, and to your right; look above and below you, before and behind you. Look to those who serve beyond this stadium, and look to those who watch from afar.” Her voice rises, fierce and proud, in triumph and celebration and challenge. It boils in my blood, the glory of everything they’ve built. “Look to those who have fallen, and look to those who will enter these blood-drenched sands to consecrate them further!
“Remember what we had, in the darkness, and what we have built in this light. Remember that we are each other’s and our own salvation.”
Lady Sheid raises two fists to the false sky of the stadium ceiling, and the roar of the crowd shakes the world as she strides off the pitch and the first two teams begin to file in.