Crow awoke to morning, drawn from his sleep by a gentle rocking. He was surprised to find his sister looking down on him, face still and cold, betraying none of whatever was happening behind her eyes.

“Amelia’s task is in a few hours.” She said, voice coiled.

Crow remembered, through his sleep addled mind, what had passed between them the night before. Understood her instantly.

“Thank you for waking me.” He answered, rolling from the bed and placing cautious feet beneath him. Crow could scarcely even recall how he’d gotten into his room, all memories of the night before a blur. Eclipsed in their entirety by Amelia’s kiss.

“It’s fine.” Replied his sister, still frosty, eyes far from his own. She turned to leave, apparently satisfied she’d said her peace already. Crow barely stopped her with a coarse, ragged word.

“About our argument yesterday,” He began, “You were right.”

Astra didn’t turn, but he saw her stiffen slightly. With apprehension or satisfaction, he wasn’t sure.

“I was.” She answered. Anger still thick in her tone. Crow wasn’t surprised, he’d known an apology alone would do little to mend the bridge between them.

Astra continued before Crow could add anything more, silencing him with a single question striking deep for the jugular.

“Have you reconsidered and decided to drop out of the Sieve?”

He couldn’t bring himself to lie outright, instead answering with an unseen shrug and a breaking voice.

“There’s something I should tell you about, but I don’t think now is the time. Can you wait a while for me to gather my thoughts?”

Don’t have the time. He thought, chastising himself in silence. I’m just trying to put it off, delay the conversation because I know I’ll not enjoy it.

“Fine.” Came Astra’s response, no more emotional than any other. Crow realised then just how much his sister must have worried for him already, how long her concern had been left to reach breaking point. He couldn’t imagine she’d tolerate much more.

It was a sobering enough thought to pull him from his bed, body working hastily to spite the injuries slowing it.

He dressed with difficulty, left in misery. Joined with the rest of his team wearing a forced smile to hide the extent of his weakness. Few seemed to buy the facade.

Conversation came tight and strained as they all waited to leave, pity marring every stare Crow received. Save Astra, who dismayed him by not looking at all.

The sympathy was a poison to his mind, no matter how much Crow tried to ignore it. Even Gem fled from his eye. It was that that made Crow realise how the girl must have felt after the second stage began, when it had been her own body made into a wreck. Her own teammates walking on tiptoes around her.

When it was finally time to leave, Crow found the journey a relief. His legs still shook beneath him, body still screamed with every step, but the walls of his quarters had become a fiercer torment by far. Seeming to close in with each breath, stealing the very air from his lungs.

Pity and stagnancy were a greater torture than anything his crying flesh could produce.

The walk was one Crow had made many times before. Perhaps two thousand steps through the crux, then a few hundred more once they’d taken their carriage. Still, he found it longer than usual.

Coals burned beneath his skin, the single night’s recovery doing little to cool them. The restorative magics let him walk, but it had been a foolish hope to think they might make it painless.

That no more relics were available to heal him further left a stone in the pit of Crow’s gut.

Conversation was dense all the way to the carriage, not stopping even there. Gem and Astra bickered, even through the latter’s foul mood, while Unity prodded Deka with testing jibes to draw out her wit. It all seemed entirely ordinary, and he realised only then how accustomed his team had grown to one another’s company.

Weeks had passed slowly indeed. He could only hope the days remaining before his last task proved just as glacial, his wounds would surely need every moment fortune gave to heal.

The carriage was more cramped than Crow remembered. Rocking and clattering, shivering and groaning, cutting a swift pace through the city. Its reprieve ended too fast by far for Crow’s liking, and soon he was out of again. Walking once more with the stadium in sight ahead.

Perhaps I should have settled for watching through a scrying slate. He mused, already tiring of his feeble strides.

His thoughts were scattered as he neared the entrance, eyes soon coming to drink in an entirely unexpected sight. Stone blackened as if from the breath of fire, cratered and split, cobbles lying strewn about and smouldered debris scattered in all directions. It looked to him like a warzone, and every step he took through the destruction only reinforced the feeling.

“Looks like the Sieve’s been facing a bit more trouble than its organisers have been letting on.” Unity muttered into his ear, scrutinising the area just as Crow did. “Big shock, there. Explains why we weren’t allowed to wander out of the Crux.”

Crow wasn’t sure how he ought to respond, or even what to make of the damage. Choosing to remain silent instead.

If nothing else it gave him something to think on besides the stadium’s roars. He sat with some semblance of peace, high in the structure. Peering down from above and covered from the elements by the cresting roofs built over his seats.

Smelling the air, Crow recognised the heavy, sterile scent of imminent stormclouds. Found himself thankful for the cover.

More people funnelled in, though Crow had long since grown tired of the sight. He barely paid any heed to it at all as the stadium filled. Mind elsewhere, ears filled instead with his teammates’ chatter.

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It took the arrival of Lavastro Kaiosyni herself to truly grab his focus.

Her voice was unchanged, booming and sharp as ever, and to his joy the Taik spoke just as quickly as he could have hoped. Calling on Rajah and Amelia in no time at all.

The darkening, clouded skies made Rajah’s bronze skin seem desaturated as he entered first. Still as tall as Crow remembered, yet seeming somehow broader. It took him a moment to recognise the sight of plated metal encasing him, crustacious in form and thick enough to fight musketry.

Crow recognised the armour from the reliquary, imagined it was purchased with Amelia’s monstrous strength in mind. He found himself wondering how effective a barrier it would make.

He studied the boy while Kaiosyni spoke, scrutinising him for any hint of weakness or strength. Distance and fatigue left both beyond his senses, and before Crow could look further, Amelia’s name had been called.

The girl emerged from her own tunnel with none of Rajah’s severity, yet so too did she lack her usual levity.

She had a certain caution to her. A muscular tremble hidden beneath her movement, fidgeting fingers and twitching lips the only clues to betray its presence, barely visible even with the magnification Crow’s seat afforded.

She’s nervous. He realised, almost laughing outloud at the realisation. Of course she was nervous, it would take an idiot not to be with Rajah for an opponent. Crow almost kicked himself for doubting the fact.

The two contestants stopped ten paces apart, gazes locked solidly on one another alone. All else in the world dead to them.

Nods answered Kaiosyn as she confirmed the task’s conditions. Then, moments later, the fizzling distortions of arcane transportation seized boy and girl alike.

Both fighters grew translucent in moments, transparent in seconds more. Disappearing just as the arena seemed to change.

The ground grew hard and jagged, stone leached of colour and greying even as its smoothed face shifted like dunes beneath a gale. Crow saw great stretches reach upwards, curving and conjoining into walls and ceilings, their interiors somehow unobscured to his vision through the Sieve’s ocular trickery.

He studied the stage as it coiled and melted, stone growing like mould into a mountain in the stadium’s midst. Walls thick and foreboding, interior more hollow with labrynthine caverns than not.

It took barely half a minute of searching the cave’s bowels before Crow found Amelia, ten seconds more before his eyes fell upon Rajah.

Both contestants were moving, cutting swift paths through the stage. Already adjusted to its peculiar genometry, weaving around stalegmites and powering forth with a haste and surety that could only have stemmed from magic.

They were within a hundred paces of one another, and by the way both moved Crow could only assume sound had given each the other’s location.

Sand coiled around Rajah, his defence like an ornament. Amelia’s own seemed absent, her hands low and face split by a grin. Somehow Crow found it impossible to imagine any gaps in her armour all the same. It sent a chill down his spine to see the excitement in her eyes, to know how wrong he’d been about the girl’s nerves.

He realised, surely before they did, that their paths intersected in a great opening in the rock. Arterial in shape, rounded and wide, measuring a score of yards in all directions, Crow could only imagine its inclusion was deliberate on the Sieve’s part.

“They added in an arena.” Unity breathed, amusement clear in his tone. “A fucking arena. In the arena. How obvious could they be?”

Crow didn’t turn to his teammate, didn’t dare take his eyes from the stage. Amelia and Rajah burst into the central chamber at once, barely laying eyes on one another for an instant before the battle began.

Its tone was set by the first move. Rajah took a backstep, his hands raised and sand contorting before him like music given form. He moved swiftly, fluidly, body barely shifting.

He hardly finished before Amelia was upon him, charging with all the unrelenting surety of a wolf and crushing mass of an ox. She pounced at the boy from fathoms away, clearing the space between them in an eye’s blink and crashing into a hasty wall of sand with thunder at her back.

Amelia barely stopped against the obstacle, silicates buckling beneath her momentum. The sight was almost wrong in Crow’s eyes, a violation. Like seeing an anvil split beneath hammerblows.

Rajah stumbled back as the girl fell, spluttering and spitting grains. Barely kept from the enemy’s throat.

The moment of blindness was only half-dead when he struck, conducting his sand to lash at Amelia like whips. Somehow she saw them coming without eyes, for they passed overhead as she flattened herself against the stone. Rising once more in a leap.

A second shield formed to block her, this time coupled with a sidestep. Amelia burst from it in a stumble, whirling to continue her attack but flailing blindly through watering eyes.

Rajah had already retreated far from arm’s reach, and another gesture whipped more sand to lurch from his feet in a pillar just as conical and sharp as any of the stalectites above.

Crow’s breath left him as the spear struck Amelia, throwing her back before a trail of blood. She landed hard, rolling to stand in a moment and charging once more without pause.

It took another moment of studying the ichor leaking from her belly for Crow to realise how shallow the wound was, and how poor a penetrator Rajah’s sand must have made.

The contestants were like warring beasts. Amelia threw herself at Rajah time and time again, moving with a speed that shamed even Crow. Striking with the very strength that had given the last stage’s alphoe pause.

Rajah answered her prowess in kind. Maintaining the distance between them, striking with sand rather than flesh. Not letting the girl fight on her own terms.

His ally was range, if not sheer power. Bolstered by the dexterity with which his sand answered him, and Amelia was hard pressed to reduce it.

She was raked by grains whipping by as if on hurricane winds, her blows caught and parried by walls emerging in heartbeats. Cudgels staggering her, thrusting pillars tossing her back.

Before Crow knew it, close to a minute had passed. Dozens of blows and counters already exchanged, even slowed for the mundane perceptions of their spectators. Neither held a conclusive advantage, yet he was certain which would claim victory.

“Amelia can’t win this.” Gem noted.

Crow concurred. He knew full well how powerful the Jyptian’s magic was. Even Amelia’s body of steel would break down before it, sooner or later. It was inevitable.

“Amelia will win.” Astra said, staring almost unblinking at the conflict. The black eyed girl below had already begun twisting space with her second ability, adding an impossible variety to each attack, defying geometry as she snatched for Rajah.

It was like watching a pool’s face ripple, distortions making Crow’s head throb as he beheld the battle. He could just barely see enough to realise Amelia’s blows still remained far from her foe.

Suddenly Gem’s certainty seemed more concrete in his mind.

He’d assumed any battle between ones as powerful as the Jyptian and black eyed phenoms could only be a struggle. That one might so thoroughly eclipse the other hadn’t crossed his mind.

It made a monstrous visage of Rajah even as the boy repelled Amelia’s frenzied assault for the fiftieth time.

The battle continued almost monotonously for seconds more before the currents changed. Rajah’s sand coiled up in a roaring pillar for Amelia’s gut, yet the girl twisted aside with an impossible trajectory. More granules scraped into position around her, forming the jaws of a vicious trap as they closed in. Amelia cleared them with a simple hop, rising and falling unnaturally swift as space shrank before her.

Rajah had no time for anything else before she moved, uncoiling like a striking snake. Her fist buried itself deep in the boy’s gut with a speed that left it blurred in Crow’s eyes.

Gravity and friction made a poor anchor for the Jyptian as he left the ground, soaring backwards like a shotput. Armour dented under the blow, flight halted only as sand pooled to make a cushion behind him.

He was on his feet in time to meet Amelia’s next strike, his gestures placing another wall between them.