Adyr, the Practitioners, and the spectators fixed their attention on the scales, eager to see whether the arms would sink farther than they had for Brakhtar before he revealed his bloodline talent, imaginations pulled taut as bowstrings while the arena’s heat gathered under the high vault and the carved stone planet on the far pan glimred with a faint, mineral sheen.
Monts passed, and faces changed, interest turning to unease as the stillness refused to break and the breath that people held without noticing began to burn in their chests.
"What’s going on?"
The arms did not shift a finger’s width, steel pivots untroubled, and murmurs rose about a fault in the device, the sound like cloth rubbed together in a thousand restless hands.
The conclusion ca quickly for many, an easy answer the mind accepts when it wants to be spared the work of doubt.
"As expected, bloodline still matters. We can’t expect much from a Velari." The thought settled them with the dull comfort of prejudice, as if the result were only natural, as if they had known it all along.
Only Adyr remained unconvinced. He knew he was not Velari but Human, and in his understanding, Humans counted among the Elder Races, a lineage the Tower should recognize the instant its will brushed against him, a category engraved into the world long before any of these people had learned to speak.
By that logic, the scales should already have sensed that bloodline and judged his worth accordingly, yet nothing moved, and in that stubborn quiet, a colder question took root in him.
Is there another reason it isn’t moving, or is it truly judging weak?
When Brakhtar first stepped onto the scales, the arms had twitched, however slightly, as if acknowledging a sliver of worth against the carved stone planet, a breath of motion that told every watcher that the Tower knew what it was looking at, yet for Adyr there was nothing, no dip, no tremor, not even the ghost of a shiver through the long steel bones, and the stillness told him there was sothing he was missing.
At last, a thought surfaced in his mind, rising clean from the noise.
Maybe it is simply clueless about ?
If there were truly no Humans in this world, then the scales’ stillness made sense; with no record to draw on, the chanism had nothing by which to compare him, no sigil in its mory to overlay upon his presence, no na to fold him under, and therefore no verdict to render.
With that thought, a solution surfaced. At last, he decided to show his worth by offering sothing the scales could work on and judge. In the end, the reward was too good to miss the chance.
—
"This tower must be blind, not recognizing his worth," Loudbark muttered with an irritation that made his voice burr against the quiet as he watched the arm remain stubbornly level. "He is worthy enough to take my sister’s hand. What more judgnt does he need? Peh."
"Well, looks like it doesn’t work like that," Maruun sighed. He had expected to see sothing special outside the worth of a bloodline, but alas, discrimination existed everywhere, even when the judge was a stone statue.
On the Lunari side, Thalira Luna seed almost relaxed when she saw the motionless pans, shoulders lowering by a fraction as if a private fear had let go of her spine. "For a mont, I thought he was planning sothing, but it looks like he really was just trying his luck. But..."
The thought caught and turned, her brows knitting as a line she could not reconcile appeared in her mind. "Why isn’t the scale moving even a little? I thought he was at least as strong as Brakhtar, if not stronger."
She was not alone in that fracture between sight and expectation.
Brakhtar watched the beam with an unmoving face and a focus so tight it called silence around him, impossible to know how many thoughts were knotted in his skull or how quickly his mind was untying them.
Restlessness began to spread, a ripple that wanted to beco a wave, and in that rising unease, sothing happened.
"Wait. He’s doing sothing." The Practitioners turned back to Adyr as a pale glow began to gather around him, so faint at first that it seed like an illusion laid over the air by exhaustion and wish, a hush of light like far fireflies closing ranks.
In a handful of heartbeats, it thickened and drew itself upward, a patient column that rose as if it had learned from trees, straight and unhurried, pale as the inside of a shell, steady as a prayer lifted without a voice, a vertical line that seed to ask the sky a question and wait without pride for an answer.
"What kind of skill is that?" The question surfaced everywhere at once. To them, it looked like he was using a Spark skill, and they were simply curious why Adyr would bother, as if it could change anything.
"This is the first ti I have seen anything like it." Thalira narrowed her eyes and weighed the glow against every Spark she knew, moving through her catalog with the asured care of a scribe who does not want to smudge a line.
Most watched, believing it was a skill. Only one saw the truth.
"So this is what you were hiding, Adyr of Velari," Brakhtar Gorat murmured, voice low, eyes hard, the words spoken not for effect but to keep his throat from closing around them.
Because Adyr kept Grace’s reach tight and the field small, no one in the arena felt a thing; to almost everyone, it registered as just a visual show. The light rose, calm and contained, touching nothing beyond him, and the arena waited without a single ripple of pressure to mark it as real.
Yet as Brakhtar watched, sothing in his blood answered that hidden current, and a second head began to flicker beside his own, a phantom twin that appeared and faded and appeared again, not a vision but a resonance, a quiet reply only he seed able to hear.
But this feeling... he thought, and the grimness that nad it was not fear but certainty.
He knew what he was witnessing, knew it with the confidence that cos when the mind recognizes its own kind.
His bloodline talent was bound to sense, and it sharpened his perceptions to heights that most would only ever approach in pain, and that was why he recognized the surge rising around Adyr, a quality that did not belong to any Spark, a signature that did not fit the simple fras by which people sort the strange.
It was also the first ti he had ever encountered another bearer of a bloodline talent, and that made the sensation hard to define, a chord he had heard in dreams finally played in the waking world without a na to set beside it.
He looked at the divine light wrapping Adyr’s body, and every sense in him insisted that he was facing sothing beyond his own bloodline, sothing further up the ladder, perhaps even supre.
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