The reliquary sat at the hex's heart like a held breath—glass faceted and rimed with runes that pulsed in a slow, musical cadence. Around it, the arena's floor was a ring of polished stone, scarred by the feet of those who had tried and failed. Torches around the ring threw steady light; the crowd's noise thinned to a distant wash. Up close, the reliquary's hum was not a sound so much as a pressure. It pressed against bone and tendon, a vibration that demanded an answer in the body rather than from the ear.
When they were called to the arena, Lyra and Daryn approached with the careful slowness of people who had learned the cost of haste. The sigils carved into the reliquary's base were paired—two linked glyphs that glowed faintly where a palm might rest. The rule was absolute: both hands on the sigils at once; match the reliquary's tone; unlock the rune pattern, but the simplicity made the test cruel. It demanded that two voices become one, and it demanded that both be willing to be exposed.
Lyra set her palm first, fingers splayed over the cool glass. Her touch was practiced and light; she closed her eyes for a fraction of a breath and let the reliquary's vibration find the hollow of her wrist. Daryn placed his hand opposite hers, the contrast of his callused grip against her slender fingers like two different instruments poised to play the same note.
"This one listens for truth," Lyra warned, voice low enough that only he could hear. "Not for volume. Not for bravado."
Daryn swallowed. The tablet under his cloak felt like a second heartbeat. "Then we don't shout," he answered. "We answer." Fear was noticeable in his eyes, but he was clearly fighting it.
They began together. Lyra's tone was clear and steady, a single note that threaded through the reliquary's hum. Daryn matched it with breath—four beats in, one release—his voice rough at the edges but steady. For a moment the glass accepted them and the runes shimmered, pleased.
But the reliquary did not remain passive. It bent its note, a jagged interval that scraped at their pitch. The sound was small but precise. The sound was engineered to unsettle: a dissonance that made the throat tighten and the voice wobble. Daryn felt his tone tremble; the note he had held like a plank began to tilt.
Lyra's hand tightened on the glass. She felt the change as a cold thread along her palm and, without breaking the note, she threaded a counter-harmonic charm beneath her voice—an almost invisible weave of sound that steadied the air around them. The charm did not sing for them; it steadied the space so their voices could find each other again.
The reliquary answered with a harsher test - a divine touch. Suddenly, the arena replied with a dampening pulse—thin and deliberate—rolling through the hex like a hand closing over a bell. Stifling their rhythm, slowly, Lyra's tone hiccupped and then vanished into static. For a heartbeat, Daryn heard only the reliquary's mocking echo and the hollow of his own breath.
They had seen the possibility of a divine interruption and rehearsed for it. Lyra had taught him a nonverbal fallback: two short presses of the heel of the hand into the partner's forearm—a private drum that meant hold the rhythm, do not break. She pressed twice against Daryn's forearm. That contact cut through the static and removed any doubt Daryn could have at the moment, and he calmed himself.
He closed his eyes and counted inward: four beats in, one release. He hummed on the exhale, not trying to chase the reliquary's shifting pitch but to be a steady anchor. He was not perfect; his voice was thin and raw, but it was constant and consistent, and Lyra's charm, where it could, threaded back into the air and smoothed the edges of the sound. Together, they eventually rebuilt the braid: his breath as a metronome, her magic as the tuning fork.
When the reliquary tried another trick, it threw a sequence of notes that leapt like stones across a river—too quick to follow, too precise to mimic. Daryn's throat burned with the effort of keeping pace; Lyra's fingers ached where they rested on the sigil. The arena's designers wanted them to chase, to lunge for perfection and fall into discord. Instead, they did something quieter: they refused to be baited —they did not chase. Lyra lowered her voice and hummed a simple counter line beneath the reliquary's leaps, not to match every jag but to hold a steady harmonic center. Daryn matched his breath to that center. When the reliquary demanded a sudden, high note that would have left one of them exposed, Lyra's charm softened the edge; Daryn's steady exhale filled the gap, then the glass warmed under their palms as if approving the compromise.
At one point, the reliquary punished imbalance with a backlash—a sharp, cold shock that ran up Daryn's arm when his pitch wavered and left his chest hollow. He gasped and nearly broke the rhythm. Lyra's heel-press came again, two beats into his forearm, and the contact was a tether. He breathed into the count and let the pain pass like a tide, and the reliquary's hum shifted from accusation to curiosity as it prepared a calculated attack for the pair.
This time, they were prepared; they had rehearsed a second fallback for when either of their voices failed: a tactile rhythm. So when the planned divine attack began on their set rhythm, Lyra tapped the heel of her hand twice against his forearm, then once on the glass; and Daryn answered with a heel-stomp against the stone—two beats, one release. The pattern was small and human; a drumbeat that required no pitch and no magic. When the gods' dampening pulse returned and swallowed Lyra's voice again, they completed the harmony by combining Daryn's breath-count with the tactile cue, and the reliquary's runes brightened and aligned, then the runes unlocked.
The unlocking was not a dramatic shattering. It was a slow, deliberate unthreading: the runes rearranged themselves into a pattern that hummed in a single, resonant chord, and the sigils beneath their palms warmed, then the glass sighed open like a mouth releasing a held secret.
Inside lay a small cluster of palm-sized rune-slates, each etched with a pattern that promised a key—an instruction, a map, a phrase that would help them read the next layer of the Trial. The prize was practical and precise, not sentimental: a rune pattern that, when traced, would reveal the sequence to bypass a later trap. It was the kind of thing Lyra's temple valued—useful knowledge wrapped in ritual.
After studying the rune-slates, Lyra withdrew her hand slowly, her voice hoarse but steady; She laughed once, a short sound that was more relief than mirth. "The test wanted perfection," she said, meeting Daryn's eyes. "But we gave it steadiness."
Daryn withdrew his hand slowly, the ache in his chest still raw from the backlash. He looked at her, at the smear of sweat on her temple, at the faint marks where the reliquary's runes had kissed their skin. He wiped the sweat on her temple with his thumb, which caused her to blink for a moment.
"We gave it trust," he corrected. "We gave it that instead."
After the announcement that proved they had passed the test trial, they retrieved their items and sat on the low rim of the plinth facing the stage and let the arena's noise surround them. Trainers scribbled notes; priests watched with the cool interest of those cataloguing behaviour, and the reliquary's runes dimmed to a soft afterglow, content for the moment.
Lyra unwrapped one of the rune-slates and traced the pattern with a fingertip. "This will help with the archive locks," she said. "A sequence of sigils that bypasses a common ward. It's not everything, but it's a start."
Daryn folded his hands over his knees and let the steadiness of his breath return to normal. The Trial had not asked them to be flawless; it had asked them to be willing to be vulnerable in front of each other and in front of the gods. They had answered with a rhythm that belonged to both of them. They stayed for a while in the hex arena, steadying their breaths and watching the team pairs that climbed the stage to take the trial after them. They watched the champions that failed and those that succeeded. In a way, it helped them perceive the strength and coordination of the other champions until the trial ended for the day.
Before they left the hex, Lyra pressed her palm to his forearm once more—two quick beats, the private cadence that had steadied them. "We keep that," she said. "When the gods try to mute us, we keep the rhythm."
Daryn nodded in understanding. The tablet under his cloak felt heavier and lighter at once—heavier because the path forward was now more visible, lighter because he had learned how to carry another person's steadiness without losing his own. They rose together and walked from the arena, the rune-slates tucked into Lyra's robe like small, dangerous promises.
Outside the hex, the night air tasted of dust and torch smoke. The Trial had given them a lesson in harmony: not the kind that erased difference, but the kind that let two imperfect voices hold a single, unbreakable note.