The world slows down, or speeds up, or both, once Amber’s hand touches my shoulder. It doesn’t come into any better focus, though, and what comes out of my mouth isn’t any language that Omniglot will translate.

Standing up proves to be just as impossible as speaking comprehensible words. I drop back to my knees, dry-heaving; there isn’t even acid left, just emptiness and raw, scoured pain.

The pain drops away as Amber engulfs me with her healing, and then the ground drops away as she lifts me carefully into her arms. There’s a roaring in my ears, the world is far too bright, and I’m suffering from a tremendous, awful dizziness, but I can relax into her strength and trust her. I can hear her, and Omniglot can translate her, as she tells me to stay awake, to stay with her, and I don’t understand why. I’ve had concussions before, once or twice, and obviously I’m trained in first aid and emergency response, and there’s no particular reason I’m aware of that I shouldn’t take a nap in Amber’s arms.

It would be so very nice to take a nap in Amber’s arms.

I stay awake anyway. I’m sure she has a good reason.

She puts me down eventually, probably after only a minute or so. I make a small displeased murmuring noise, but it’s only a small one, because she’s not gone anywhere. She’s stroking my hair and saying something I can’t make out, and then there’s a pair of cool, gentle-but-firm hands on my forehead, and something goes snap.

It’s not an audible snap, it’s not a snap made out of sound. It’s, if anything, most similar to the feeling of stretching out your back and feeling the synovial fluid cavitate, with the popping sounds it makes. It’s somehow definitely a snap, though, a series of snaps, and awareness floods back into me like I’m waking up from a dream-haze.

“Done.” The voice is gravelly, low and grinding. “Cleaned, cleansed, healed, rehydrated, and restored. Nef’s grace on you, Architect.”

“Ro, fain do I remind you that I bear no such title in this time; with your debt discharged, might you not know me by name?”

“Zidanya. Magelord. Good fortune.”

My vision’s working again. The room’s dim, but not so dim that I can’t see who’s around, and there’s only one person other than my party.

Other than the remaining members of my party.

“Hey, uh. Thanks?”

The rue stops in its motion away from us, towards a door. It… not exact turns, more like rotates, spiky bits of ice bobbing up and down in their orbits of its main crystal as it does. “A debt was owed. The debt was paid. I am not to be thanked.”

My mouth opens and closes, and I take in a breath. The rue is sticking around, so I let half of that breath out and try again, feeling like I’m grabbing some random phrases in hopes of successful communication. “Your craft was efficacious. May your future efforts prosper; I am glad you were here today.”

“It brings me pleasure,” the rue rumbles, “to have been the one to restore you to function. See that my work is not wasted.”

And then the rue is gone, and it’s just me and my companions, at least for a moment.

“Void.” I stagger over to the nearest wall, not entirely for effect, and slump down to the floor, leaning against it. “Fuck.”

“Welcome back. Sir.” Sara tacks the honorific on at the end as though it’s an afterthought. She leans against the wall, eyes half-closed. “Outcomes are now in line with expectations.”

“In line with…” I breathe in, let it out. Again. “Yeah,” I finally say. “You’re not wrong. How long do we have?”

“Two and a half hours.” I quirk an eyebrow at Amber, and she shrugs. “There is a performance before Flight and the Lord Mayor’s team have their battle, followed by a… competition of costuming?”

“Music unpleasant to your ears, Magelord. Tastes in a realm as closed as ours grow strange, when unfettered.”

About ten kiloseconds. That’s… a substantial amount of time, actually. It’ll be enough. It’ll have to be enough. “Do we…” I hesitate, but I know what their answer is going to be, and that means I should ask the question. “Do we want to do a review of what happened?”

“A review.” Amber glances at Sara, then Zidanya; there’s a lot more communication going on with those glances than I can pick up on, I’m pretty sure, but I can follow a fair amount of what Amber’s giving off. A balance of concern and interest, mostly. “Are you… well enough, Adam?”

“I’m healed.” Thoroughly healed, physically; my throat doesn’t so much as tickle, much less burn. I still don’t meet her eyes. My ear itches, and I probe it idly with a fingernail; I pull out an earplug, and then the matching one, momentarily nonplussed. I’d somehow forgotten about them. “Getting the review over with will be good. If we’re gonna do a review. Should I start?”

Amber shakes her head. “I fought, unsupported, a Blademaster whose strikes I could not simply avoid, as he ensured my doing so would put another at risk. I could have chosen to safeguard Khalal instead, leaving Miss Evetheri to safeguard herself and you, my lord, and I did not so choose. In this, I have no regrets.”

There’s a short round of nods, and nobody speaks up for a moment.

“I could have—”

“My prioritization—”

Sara and I look at each other, or rather, she stares at me with a flatness in her eyes that has me raising my hands in surrender.

“My prioritization,” she says, restarting, “was intended to be on the offensive side of flexibility. I made use of the opportunity to eliminate the enemy’s Ranger, after which I killed their… nightmare spirit. It is possible that, had I focused on their mages from the beginning, they would not have been in a position to misdirect my defensive measures. However, Khalal’s choice to focus entirely on ensuring that Raoul had no opportunity to avoid or survive Taveda Medah’s charge was zir own and was an uncommunicated departure from our plans.

“It is considered impolite to demean the decisions of the dead. Khalal’s actions may have ensured our victory, but equally, they ensured zir own death. For my own part, I had no reason to expect the decisions I made to be anything other than optimal, and as Dame Ashborn says, I have no regrets.”

I suspect that might be the longest chain of words I’ve ever heard Sara string together, and I have to resist the urge to applaud. “You used a small shield spell to block Easy’s arrows,” I say instead. “You had seven shots, which should have been enough, since she had a five-shot Volley and then two more arrows in the air, and you knew it. Were there better anti-projectile spells or effects? An angled plane of force, a sustained wind, a destructive screen?”

“Not everyone has your degree of flexibility, sir.” Her voice isn’t cold or bitten-off, and I think maybe it’s thoughtful, so I’m pretty sure I didn’t just misstep. “The spell in question is Mage’s Aegis, more colloquially known as a buckler. It is curved and layered, among other qualities. It deflects a great deal of force to the sides, as an angled plane might; and each layer will destructively interfere with both the physical and metaphysical components of a projectile.”

I whistle quietly. “Take that into the deep dark.” Amber quirks an eyebrow, and I cough in embarrassment, reddening a little. “It’s… a saying. It’s a spell that would be worth taking on a long, perilous journey. I retract my comment. Um.” I glance at Zidanya. “Are you going to insist that you’re junior to me?”

“Magelord, I am, and until we should step out under the true sky shall I remain, your subordinate.” Zidanya’s mouth twists upwards. “But we might bend the rules only in the least to say that the conversation might flow otherwise from its most formal forms.”

“Miss Evetheri, what means did you—”

“Sara.” Amber raises an eyebrow fractionally at her. “Call me Sara,” she says levelly.

Amber practically glows in happiness for a moment, though I’m not sure anyone else can tell. “Sara. How did you kill Peacebringer?”

“A mixture of Arcane Reversal and a technique I learned as Backfire, though I am informed there are other names for it. With the natural mana circulation—”

I don’t particularly intend to tune her out, but I do, slumping down at the wall. My attention doesn’t so much wander as become absent; it’s not until Amber kneels down to touch my shoulder that I realize I’ve been asked for my own… report, I suppose.

I give it, as best I can. My decisions on balancing spell disruption with offense, my decision to prioritize taking down Easy. The disorientation of the fight, the way everything had moved so quickly and I hadn’t had time to stop and consider and make decisions, the way I’d felt like I needed to act immediately, do something even if it wasn’t the best thing.

Sara’s unsympathetic, and Amber tries to be understanding, but it’s Zidanya who just shrugs and says that this is the right intuition, and the rest can only be gotten by training; that bias for action is the most important thing, and that it’s just good that I didn’t freeze up. The other two more or less agree with her, and for some reason that’s that, and we move on to Zidanya.

“Glorious was I,” she says, and looks at the three of us. “Well? Is it not so? Did not the world shake beneath my hooves? Did my foe not shatter before my charge?”

“Glorious,” I agree with the closest I can manage to a smile, and Amber concurs way more convincingly. “Honestly,” I say after a moment, “there isn’t much to say other than that. You were terrifying.”

“Adam speaks true.” Amber’s been leaning against the wall next to me, but now she slides down to the ground, pulling me into her side with one arm. There’s a welling of quietness, and she stretches, back popping audibly. “What now? We’ve still some time before we march onto the field of battle, to my lord’s clever plan.”

Something about what she said pulls at my attention, and I turn my head to see her smirking at me. “You’ve figured it out, then?”

“The Magelord should not presume his companions to be fools.” Zidanya doesn’t so much slide down the wall as use the wall to catch herself as she sits heavily on my other side, sprawling across my lap and Amber’s. “In truth, it came to me days ago, but some measure of caution even in the privacy of our residence seemed appropriate.”

I bring my head up from where it’s resting on Amber to look at Sara, who’s pulled a chair out of… somewhere? I’m fairly confident that the room didn’t have a chair beforehand, so where did she—no, focus. “You’re up for it, too?”

“It is the obvious strategy, and has been since our first meeting with Lady Sheid.” Sara sits, smiling slightly. “She will not approve. Neither will the audience.”

“I…” My face feels warm, all the way down my neck and to the tips of my ears. “I didn’t think any of you would approve.” Amber’s hand pauses where it was stroking the back of my head, and I flush harder, looking up at her hurt face. “You like to fight.”

“We can speak of this under the sun. We’ve still an hour, and you should rest, and consider how you might handle the response of the crowd.”

“And of Lily.” I sigh, closing my eyes. It’s a quiet moment, and I should probably take advantage of it to work through my feelings about the fight and the brutality of the violence we all, I and my companions and our foes, dealt out to one another. I should plan for what’s going to happen next, and what happens after. I should integrate everything I’ve learned into my model and understanding of magic, and I should figure out how to make sure things stay okay between us.

Instead, I rest, trying to get my body to relax. My muscles fight me, twitching back to full tension repeatedly, but slowly, slowly, they unknot and loosen.

Too soon, we’re walking on the pitch again. Too soon, we’re listening to the announcer hyping up the battle to come, promising wrath and ruin and possibly the deaths of the living, not just of imprints, as our two teams clash.

The horn blows, and less than a second later, the match ends.