The camp was silent save for the harsh scraping of steel against blackened leather in the chill of early winter.
Mia sat on a frost-rimed stone, forcing her jaw to work through a meager strip of salted gray-meat. The travel ration tasted of ash and stale salt, possessing all the culinary warmth of a boot sole, but she swallowed it down out of necessity to keep her strength up.
Across the smoldering remains of their small fire, Ny'all sat rigidly. The Oath-Blade rested her leather cuirass in her lap, using the sharp point of a dagger to meticulously pry coagulated blood and frost from the intricate metal joints. In the high palace of Beh-REET, a dozen squires would have treated the leather and oiled the steel before dawn. Here in the dirt, Ny'all's movements were tight and frustrated, her martial pride warring with the gritty reality of the wilderness.
Mia finished the flavorless ration and stood, wiping her hands on her trousers. She walked over to her mare, running a soothing hand down the beast's flank before lifting its hind leg. Drawing her own knife, Mia quietly picked a wedge of sharp stone from the horse's hoof. It was a purely mundane routine, but the physical labor kept her mind from drifting back to the violence of the cave and the Tap. Tap. Tap. that followed.
Ny'all watched her for a fleeting second, the dagger stilling in her hand, before returning to the stubborn gore on her armor.
They packed the camp without a word.
The dawn offered light but little warmth, the mountain pass locked in early winter's grip. The sun bleached the peaks of the mountain pass with light that stretched across the trail as the two women rode west.
The silence between them had changed. It was no longer the standoffish, hostile quiet of the previous day. It was weighted with the unspoken aftermath of the blood spilled in the cave.
Mia rode with her shoulders hunched against the wind, her eyes fixed on the gray mane of her mare. Her mind was leagues away, trapped in the agonizingly long second when she had opened the door to the Void.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The phantom rhythm echoed in her skull, perfectly syncing with the crunch of her horse's hooves in the snow.
Mia's hand drifted to the dagger sheathed in her boot. The memory of the man's breath vibrating in her teeth made her stomach twist. Was the Void broken? she wondered, a knot tightening in her chest. Or am I? If the First Dragon had turned his soul into a cage for the Shadows, and the royal bloodline was the key to that cage... what exactly was she reaching into when she drew on the power?
Beside her, Ny'all was fighting a very different battle.
The Oath-Blade rode with her spine rigid, her eyes scanning the tree line with hyper-vigilant intensity. Every few minutes, her gaze would dart to Mia, lingering on her Sister-Wife's distant expression before quickly snapping back to the road.
To Ny'all, Mia's lack of confrontation was a clear and damning indictment. The 'Perfect Weapon' assumed the Sand-girl was inwardly judging her for the catastrophic lapse in focus that had nearly gotten a spear driven through her back. Ny'all possessed no road map for navigating emotional fallout. She knew how to parry a blade, but she had no idea how to parry the guilt of failing her sister, and by proxy, her husband.
Finally, the tension became too much even for the future Queen to bear.
"You have been staring at the same patch of leather on your reins for three miles," Ny'all said, her voice cutting sharply through the mountain wind.
Mia blinked, startled out of her dark reverie. She looked up, realizing her hands were gripping the leather tightly. "I was just... thinking."
"If you are waiting for me to justify my failure last night, I cannot," Ny'all said stiffly, staring straight ahead. Her jaw was clamped tight. The tension in it made her face look like steel. "It was a failure of the blade, and a failure of the mind."
Mia frowned, thoroughly confused. "Ny'all, I wasn't—"
"I let my father's ghost dictate my temper," Ny'all interrupted, forcing the words out as if she were pulling her own teeth. "I allowed a philosophical argument to compromise our perimeter, and it nearly cost me my life. I... I apologize. For my rage. I won't let it happen again."
Mia stared at her. The future Dual Queen of the Dragon Line, the most lethal woman on the continent, was sitting rigidly in her saddle, apologizing for having feelings.
The absurdity of its contrast hit Mia like a training blade to the back of a careless novice. Here she was, spiraling into an existential panic about the possible horror living inside the Void, and Ny'all was agonizing over a breach in tactical etiquette.
A sudden sound escaped Mia's lips. It started as a scoff, but quickly bubbled up into her chest, breaking through the dread. Mia threw her head back and laughed.
It wasn't a mocking laugh. It was genuine, a sound of pure relief that echoed off the limestone cliffs.
Ny'all's gelding sidestepped and stopped nervously. She turned in her saddle, her eyes narrowing in profound confusion and mild offense. "I fail to see the humor in my near-death, or my apology."
Mia shook her head, a joyful smile finally breaking across her face. She pulled back on her reins, bringing her horse to a halt. As Ny'all looked deeply uncomfortable, Mia leaned across the gap between the two animals.
Before Ny'all could react, Mia threw her arms awkwardly over her Sister-Wife's shoulders, pulling her into a clumsy and heavy hug.
Ny'all froze completely. Her entire body went rigid. Her hands hovered uselessly in the air for a second before she cautiously and stiffly patted Mia once on the back, treating the embrace like a highly volatile explosive.
"I'm just really glad we didn't kill each other in the Kal-kal'nor," Mia whispered fiercely, ignoring the awkwardness and squeezing Ny'all tightly for a second before pulling back.
Ny'all quickly adjusted her leather bracer, the sharp snap of the buckle cutting aggressively through the cold air. She refused to look at Mia's smiling face.
"Yes. Well," Ny'all said briskly, her voice an octave higher than usual as she scrambled for her pragmatic armor. "Sentiments will not break the guard of the Anai. If we are to survive the western valleys, we must move as a single front. Your footwork is fast, but your strikes lack the structural discipline of the mountain."
Ny'all spurred her horse forward a few paces, putting a safe distance between herself and any further physical affection. She drew her sword, the metal ringing clearly in the cold morning air, and pointed it toward a clearing just off the trail.
"Dismount," Ny'all commanded, swinging her leg over the saddle with fluid grace. "The Anai fight as two halves of the same storm. If one strikes high, the other sweeps low. If one defends, the other eviscerates. Right now, we fight like two strangers caught in the same room. Draw your blade."
Mia slid from her gelding, her boots crunching softly in the snow. She didn't draw a longsword. She pulled the Red Dunes dagger from her boot, settling instinctively into the loose, crouched stance Kael had beaten into her muscles. Mountain Guards the Heart. Ny'all looked at the dagger, then at Mia's stance, and sighed.
"That is exactly what I mean," Ny'all said, bringing her own sword up into the rigid, flawless guard of the Dragon Line. "My father taught you how to survive an assassin in an alley. He taught you to evade, to slip, and to counter. But an army cannot hold a line if its soldiers are constantly slipping away. You are fluid like the sand, Mia. But today, you must learn to be the stone. You reach for your dagger first rather than the longsword of the Line."
Without warning, Ny'all lunged.
She didn't swing with lethal intent, but the strike was fast—a heavy, downward cleave meant to test Mia's reaction.
Instinct took over. Mia didn't block; she flowed. She pivoted sharply on her heel, allowing Ny'all's blade to slice harmlessly through the empty air where her shoulder had just been. It was a ghostly evasion.
"Stop," Ny'all snapped, freezing mid-swing.
Mia paused, her dagger raised to counter. "I cleared the strike."
"You cleared yourself," Ny'all corrected, tapping the flat of her blade against the space Mia had just vacated. "If we were fighting side-by-side, and you stepped off the line to evade that blow, where does the enemy's sword go next?"
Mia looked past Ny'all's blade, realizing with a jolt of clarity what the Oath-Blade meant. By dodging perfectly out of the way, the momentum of the attacker's weapon would have carried straight through the empty space... and directly into the person standing next to her.
"It hits you," Mia breathed.
"It takes my head off," Ny'all confirmed grimly, lowering her sword. "Your evasion is flawless for a lone fighter in the desert. But in a paired formation, every time you retreat from an attack, you leave my flank exposed. To fight the Anai, you cannot just move out of the way of the storm. You have to stand your ground and break it."
Mia lowered her dagger, though she didn't break her stance. She looked at the rigid posture of Ny'all, seeing not just a warrior, but the product of a brutal machine.
"I understand the geometry of your shield wall, Ny'all," Mia said, her breath pluming in the freezing air. "But I am not made of stone. My combat style is paired with who I am. I had to flow like the sand because if I stood still, the desert would have killed me. And I assume the exact same is true for you."
Mia's gaze dropped to the heavy, Dragon-Etched hilt of Ny'all's sword. "You were forged to be a pillar of an empire. You fight like you are defending a throne because you were never allowed to be anything else."
Ny'all's jaw tightened. A faint, angry flush crept up her neck, blooming against the cold. The Sand-girl had just summarized twenty years of the King's emotionless conditioning in a single breath. It was an uncomfortable truth.
"We might be the two greatest fighters on this side of the mountain," Ny'all admitted, her voice tight as she slowly lowered the tip of her blade to the snow. "But put us together, and we are a disaster waiting for a spear. We have no symmetry."
Ny'all began to pace, her boots crunching rhythmically in the fresh powder. Her mind, perfectly trained to dismantle battlefield disadvantages, whirred as she searched for a solution.
"The Anai rely on a lifetime of shared rhythm," Ny'all muttered, thinking aloud. "We do not have a lifetime. But... we share a master. We share the same root discipline."
Ny'all stopped pacing. She turned to Mia, a sudden gleam of inspiration in her eyes.
"The Void," Ny'all said, her voice dropping into the hushed tone of a commander unveiling a secret weapon. "If we drop our mental guards and open the door to the Stillness simultaneously... we could use the Void as a tether. A shared mind-space. We wouldn't have to learn each other's physical footwork if we could anticipate each other's intent through the dark."
The suggestion hit Mia, bringing her mind violently back to the memory.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The rhythmic knocking against the veil of reality, and the horrific, rattling breath of the man trapped in the dark surged to the front of her mind. If they opened the door together—if they linked their minds to the Void—what if the man, or the creature, was still there?
"NO!" Mia shouted, the word tearing from her throat with raw panic.
She took a stumbling step backward in the snow, her dagger twitching upward defensively as if the very idea was a threat.
Ny'all flinched. Her sword snapped back up into a guard entirely on instinct, her eyes wide as she tried to assess a threat that wasn't there. When she realized Mia was simply backing away in terror, the Oath-Blade's confusion instantly hardened into sharp, offended anger.
"What is wrong with you?" Ny'all demanded, her voice echoing harshly off the frosted trees. She stared at the trembling Sand-girl, utterly bewildered. "I offer a tactical bridge to save both our lives, and you scream at me like I just asked you to cut out your heart?"
Mia stood frozen, the handle of her dagger slipping slightly in her sweaty palm despite the cool temperature of the morning. She couldn't tell her. If she told her that there was a monster breathing inside the Void of the Dragon Line, Ny'all wouldn't believe her. If anything, she would think Mia was exactly like Kael—the father who had abandoned her while screaming about ghosts in the dark.
"We... can't," the words staggered out as she struggled to force her racing heart back into a normal rhythm. "We can't use the Void to connect."
Ny'all's eyes narrowed into judgmental slits. "The Void is never safe, Mia. It is a weapon. It requires absolute control. Are you telling me that after all of my father's lessons, after matching me in the arena... you are suddenly afraid of the dark?"
Mia didn't know what to say. The excuse died in her throat, choked out by the shift in the atmosphere.
Before Mia could even formulate a lie, the air around them physically sank. The mountain wind faded, swallowed by a force outside of the physical world. The biting cold turned stagnant. Mia stared in awe as the thick powder of snow around Ny'all's boots began to melt, a perfect circle of exposed, steaming rock expanding outward from the Oath-Blade as she drew the surrounding heat directly into the emptiness of her mind.
"Enter the Void," Ny'all commanded. Her voice no longer sounded like it was coming from her throat; it vibrated with a strange, hollow resonance that seemed to echo inside Mia's own chest.
Mia swallowed hard. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, but the weight of Ny'all's presence left her no room to retreat. Taking a shuddering breath, Mia hesitantly conceded. She stopped fighting her fear, let go of her physical anchor, and let herself fall backward into her own mind.
The freezing mountain air, the smell of ponderosa pine, the solid crunch of snow beneath her boots—it all vanished, replaced by the sensation of sinking into an ocean of stillness. Her skin tingle sharply, as if bitten by a thousand tiny insects, her bones going numb as her consciousness separated from her flesh. She opened herself and was standing in an infinite, pitch-black expanse. The space was perfectly empty, the floor beneath her invisible but reacting like a thin sheet of glass over dark water, rippling outward into the endless black with every phantom step she took.
Mia braced herself, her metaphysical muscles tensing. She waited for the pressure to return. She waited for the rhythmic tap, tap, tap against the veil.
She strained her ears for the exhale of the trapped man.
But there was nothing.
No ghosts. No tapping. No breathing. Just an endless darkness and profound calm.
The terror that had gripped her only moments ago was rapidly siphoned away, absorbed by the dark. In its place came the clinical detachment of the Void. Her emotions were aggressively dampened, turned from a burning flame into a dull, distant murmur. The realization that the 'anomaly' from the cave was gone should have flooded her with relief. But here, in the infinite expanse of the Stillness, she was simply empty.
Slowly, Mia opened her physical eyes.
The world had changed. The blinding white snow, the yellow ponderosa pines, the vibrant leather of their saddles—everything had been hollowed out. The world was drained of almost all color, reduced to a landscape of gray ink. Time itself had stretched, turning the falling flakes of snow into suspended, floating ash.
Standing ten paces away, Ny'all looked like a statue carved from shadow. Her face was perfectly smooth, stripped of all the anger, frustration, and awkwardness she had displayed moments ago. But it was her eyes that were truly terrifying. The whites had been entirely consumed, leaving nothing but a bottomless obsidian black.
Ny'all slowly raised her sword, the steel leaving a faint, delayed gray tracer in the air as it moved through the syrup of frozen time.
"Find me in the dark," Ny'all said, her voice echoing.
Ny'all was a blur. Within the expanse of the Void, the Oath-Blade was merely a force of physics moving in Mia's direction. She closed the distance in a single step, bringing the Dragon-Etched blade down in a perfect arc.
Mia reacted. But the moment she moved, the dissonance between them was clear.
They were tethered to the same Void, pulling from the same well of frozen time and darkness, but their minds were completely walled off. They were two masterwork gears forged with differently sized teeth, grinding against each other.
Mia read the drop of Ny'all's shoulder and anticipated a sweeping strike. She ducked low, preparing to slip inside the guard—only to realize Ny'all hadn't swept. The Oath-Blade had pivoted her wrist mid-strike, turning the cleave into a mathematical thrust aimed exactly where Mia was moving.
Mia had to throw herself backward, her boots sliding uselessly on the gray snow. The razor edge of Ny'all's sword missed Mia's throat by mere inches, the wind of its passing tugging at her hair.
Before Mia could regain her balance, she instinctively slashed her dagger upward to create space. Ny'all, expecting a partner to hold the line, had stepped forward to press the attack. Mia's blade screeched against Ny'all's steel bracer, a shower of gray, soundless sparks erupting between them.
They broke apart. The emotionless calm of the Void was beginning to fracture under the frustration of their incompatibility.
"You are reading the steel!" Ny'all's voice echoed. "You are guessing my intent after I have already committed to it! The Anai will butcher us if we fight like strangers!"
"I am flowing to the empty space!" Mia shouted back. "But you keep filling it with your blade!"
Ny'all lowered her sword, her obsidian eyes locking onto Mia. The Oath-Blade realized the physical duel was useless.
"Stop reading my steel," Ny'all commanded, her voice vibrating with a new frequency. " Read my intent."
Ny'all reached into the tether connecting them and pulled.
Mia followed.
The gray world seemed to slowly collapse into black.
She felt the sensation of plunging beneath the surface of a lightless ocean. The separation between her physical body and her consciousness dissolved entirely. The Void became profoundly intimate and terrifying.
Mia stopped feeling the handle of her own dagger. Instead, she felt the cold leather wrap of a longsword in her grip. She felt the phantom weight of steel plate on her shoulders.
But there was something more.
It crashed over Mia like a wave. She suddenly felt the crushing weight of Ny'all's royal conditioning. She felt the freezing gaze of King Va'lerius—the absolute, paralyzing demand for perfection where a single misstep meant worthlessness. She felt the profound loneliness of being forged into a weapon instead of raised as a daughter. The Oath-Blade wasn't a title of glory. It was an inescapable chain.
Simultaneously, a sharp gasp echoed from Ny'all as her being also bled and mingled into Mia's.
The future Queen was drowning in the scorching heat of the Red Dunes. Ny'all felt the agonizing grit of sand in her throat, the hollow ache of true starvation, and the desperate terror that kept Mia moving as she felt the life of an unborn child leaking into the white sands, just as so many others from the Red Dunes had fed the thirst of the desert.
They were two blended warriors standing in the dark, sharing the same invisible cages that had shaped them.
It was breathtaking. Ny'all stepped forward, driving a phantom strike high, knowing with absolute certainty that Mia was already sweeping low to hamstring the invisible enemy. When Mia spun out of a parry, Ny'all was already there, her Dragon-Etched blade perfectly filling the space Mia had vacated, protecting her sister's exposed flank.
They were the storm in the desert. Perfect, symmetrical destruction.
Mia's dagger flowed into Scorpion Beneath the Stone, merging seamlessly with Ny'all's The Dragon Pierces the Veil at a singular point.
But as they reached the apex of their synchronization, moving in flawless, beautiful harmony...
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The knocking was light, rhythmic, a knocking on reality. But this time, it didn't just echo in Mia's skull.
Ny'all froze.
Mia felt Ny'all's terror spike—a spike so sharp it nearly shattered the tether. The Sister-Wives perfect control dissolved into primal panic. They both felt the crushing presence shifting in the deepest trenches of the Void, drawn to their shared light.
Then came the breath.
Haaaaahhhh.
The heavy, rattling exhale washed over them both. It carried the weight of a millennium of suffering, a suffocating, ancient agony that violently rejected the warmth of their connection.
The tether snapped.
The violent severing threw them out of the Void like ragdolls. The gray world shattered, instantly replaced by the blinding glare of the morning sun and the howl of the mountain wind.
Mia fell hard to the snow on her hands and knees, heaving as the freezing air seized her lungs.
Ten feet away, Ny'all had dropped her sword. The legendary weapon of the Dragon Line lay discarded in the snow. The Oath-Blade was on her knees, her hands clutched at her own chest as she gasped for air, her eyes wide with complete horror.
Ny'all looked up, locking eyes with Mia across the clearing. The aristocratic mask was gone.
"Mia," Ny'all whispered, her voice trembling against the wind. "What... what was that?"