They walked until the hum disappeared.
Then Mara made them walk another quarter hour.
"The edge of a thing and the middle of being safe from it are not the same distance," she said.
No one argued with the woman who had just understood the danger better than the other five of them combined.
For most of those fifteen minutes, Vane turned the last hour over in his mind the way he might turn a blade in his hands, checking every angle for damage.
He had failed.
That was the plain accounting of it. The conclusion he owed himself, even if no one else intended to make him speak it aloud.
Ryuken had given him a lesson and a spear in the same morning.
Bend around what you did not expect. Do not waste time resenting the fact that you failed to expect it.
Then this place had handed Vane something he did not understand, and he had answered exactly as he always had.
With the largest weapon available to him.
No pause.
No measurement.
Not even half a second spent asking whether the scale of the threat matched the scale of his answer.
He had seen something rush Ashe and struck with enough force to end almost anything he understood. The attack had succeeded perfectly.
That had been the problem.
The only reason Vane was still walking beside the others instead of vanished through a boundary none of them knew how to reopen was that Mara had paid a cost he had never earned the right to demand from her.
He did not yet know whether that meant Ryuken’s lesson had failed to take root.
Or whether lessons simply needed more than one bad afternoon before they stopped living only in thought and began to inhabit reflex.
He suspected the second answer was true.
He did not entirely trust himself to accept it yet.
The spear rested across his back as it had throughout the walk.
Once, Vane reached up and closed his hand around the haft.
Only briefly.
The way someone might touch a familiar wall in darkness to confirm that both it and they remained real.
Ryuken had not given him the spear because it would win fights.
Vane understood that now in a way he had not fully understood it in the sparring yard. Its weight was not a promise. It was a question.
Every time he reached for it, he was meant to remember why.
Knowing the right question did not mean the answer would ever come easily.
"You’re doing the thing," Ashe said.
She walked close beside him, one arm still held carefully against her ribs.
Vane glanced at her. "What thing?"
"The thing where you try a mistake alone, convict yourself alone, and never permit anyone else to testify about how bad it actually was."
There was no sharpness in her voice.
That made it worse.
"For what it’s worth," she continued, "from where I was standing, there wasn’t a version of that moment where you had time to ask your instincts for permission."
"That isn’t the part I’m stuck on."
"I know."
Her free hand found his.
She held it for only a moment before letting go, needing the arm again to steady her side.
"Ask Isole to look at me instead of yourself for a minute," Ashe said. "I’d rather you worry about something you can actually fix."
Isole had apparently been waiting for exactly that invitation.
She came alongside Ashe and carefully loosened the binding at her ribs. Gold gathered faintly around her fingers as she examined the wound, gentler than before, controlled enough not to announce itself to anything that might still be listening.
No fresh damage appeared beneath the cloth.
The injury had not spread.
It had not receded either.
"It isn’t worse," Isole said. "It isn’t better, but whatever the crossing did to the rest of us, it seems to have left this alone."
She retied the binding.
"A small mercy. I’ll take it."
"That makes one thing out here that didn’t need fixing," Ashe said.
They finally stopped when the ground no longer felt as though it were listening.
The rise was low, but it offered clear sightlines in every direction. For the first time since their arrival, the crooked trees kept enough distance to feel almost respectful.
Nyx sat with her back against a boulder that at least appeared to be an honest boulder.
She closed her eyes.
For a while, she said nothing.
No one pushed her.
"You still owe us the rest," Vane said eventually.
He kept the words gentle. A reminder, not a demand.
"I know what I owe you."
Nyx did not open her eyes.
"I’m not finishing it here. Not today."
Vane waited.
"You’re all still shaking," she continued, "whether any of you intend to admit it or not. And I’m not going to hand you a piece of Lancelot’s entire life while half of us are still waiting to hear that hum again."
Her mouth tightened.
"It deserves better than becoming an afterthought to nearly losing you."
"That’s a delay," Isole said.
It was not quite an accusation.
Nyx opened one eye.
"It’s a choice."
She closed it again.
"There’s a difference, and I’d appreciate some credit for knowing which one I’m making."
No one argued with that either.
In the end, Mara was the one who properly broke the stillness.
She did not mention the attack.
She did not mention the lattice, or the six years she had spent refusing to use it, or the private decision necessity had forced into the open.
Instead, she lifted her gaze beyond them.
Toward the land they had been too occupied surviving to actually see.
"We should look at where we are," she said.
The others followed her attention.
"Properly," Mara added. "Not as a threat assessment. Just... look."
So they did.
The light still fell incorrectly.
It argued with itself across the landscape, casting overlapping shadows as though direction were a matter of opinion. The spiral trees stood dark and silent, their leaves swallowing more light than they returned.
Beyond the rise, the terrain climbed into shapes that might once have been mountains, before whatever had formed this place decided mountains ought to lean.
Farther still, a pale haze rested over the lowlands.
It might have concealed a valley.
A river.
Nothing at all.
They had not learned enough of this world to know which guesses deserved trust.
"There’s a pattern to the lean," Valerica said.
Her attention moved slowly across the distant ridgeline, as methodical as Mara’s over an account book.
"Everything tilts in roughly the same direction."
Mara studied it.
"Yes."
"That isn’t weather," Valerica said. "Weather doesn’t agree with itself over miles."
"No," Mara replied. "It doesn’t."
Neither offered a theory.
For now, it was enough to notice something true and speak it aloud without demanding that it immediately become useful.
It was the first time since the ring that any of them had looked at the land with curiosity instead of fear.
Valerica remained quiet for another moment.
Then she said, "It’s strange how much easier that is to see when nothing is actively trying to kill us while we look."
No one quite laughed.
But something in all six of them loosened.
Only slightly.
Enough.
There was comfort in the plainness of it. In the ordinary truth of six exhausted people standing beneath impossible light and discovering that, for the moment, the world had stopped trying to take one of them away.
For the moment, they were safe enough to look.
And that was not the same thing as safety.
But it was closer.
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