Daryn's muscles tensed. The old, hot surge of anger—of ledger and loss and the tablet under Lyra's cloak—rose like a tide. He felt the urge to strike, to answer the perceived betrayal with steel. For a breath, the world narrowed to the flash of metal and the imagined sting.
Suddenly, the heel-stomp variant they had practiced landed in his body: two quick, deliberate stomps that meant "wait." Immediately, Daryn felt it; he planted his foot and held. Like hummed magic in his ears, Lyra's real voice cut through the mirrored shout, calm and clipped: "Hold. It's a trick."
She canceled the illusion with a small, bright sigil that shattered the mirror's lie, and the perceived reflected blade dissolved into harmless glass, then Daryn's hands unclenched from his blade. This arena had wanted spectacle, but they had given it restraint.
Then Lyra's eyes met his for a heartbeat—no triumph, only the steadying of two people who had learned to keep one another from being baited by grief. "You almost answered," she said, not reproachful but as a matter of fact.
"You almost let them make me answer," he replied. The words were softer than the moment had been, but they carried the weight of something like gratitude, something Lyra had noticed.
The last stretch of tiles pulsed faster, the runes' cadence quickening as if the bridge itself were impatient. A tile flashed red beneath Lyra's foot; another promised safety and then flickered. This time, the arena's designers had stacked the odds to force a single mistake into a catastrophe.
Lyra tapped his wrist once—warm, then cool—the signal to commit. Daryn matched his breath to the pulse and moved. When a tile threatened to flip mid-step, Lyra's lattice caught it, and when a mirrored panel angled to show a phantom ally behind them, Daryn's heel-stomp would hold him steady until Lyra's cancel cleared the image.
Before long, they reached the far side with scraped knuckles and a bruise blooming on Daryn's calf. The shallow pit had claimed a few others—fallen champions who had misread a color or answered a phantom. Trainers scribbled notes; the priests watched with the cool interest of those who cataloged behavior. The crowd cheered, hungry for drama, but Daryn and Lyra felt only the quiet that follows a narrowly kept promise.
Outside the arena, the two teammates sat at their usual spot, a low wall outside the arena. Silently reminiscing on their recent challenge, the test that had almost broken a kept promise. Lyra sighed as she wiped sweat from her brow and offered Daryn a small, wry smile. "Hey, you held when it mattered."
He returned the smile. "You steadied the floor," he breathed, evening out as the weight of recent events cleared his mind. " and we made the rounds into a clock."
Daryn pressed his thumb to the bruise on his calf and felt the pulse of the tablet's name under his ribs—Seris—like a small, steady ember. Lyra's hand found his forearm and read the faint marks where her pulses had run. They were not lovers, not yet; they were something more practical and rarer in that place: a covenant of timing and restraint.
They walked away with the bridge behind them like a lesson in their wake. The arena had tried to make them betray one another; instead, it had taught them how to translate sight into touch, panic into signal, and illusion into a test of will. The Bridge of Allegiance had been designed to split teams; it had done the opposite for them. It had braided their timing into something harder to break.
The bridge receded behind them like a lesson in their wake. Ahead, the Trial's next doors waited—wider, meaner, and hungrier.