Inside the deepest part of the Black Tower one could hear the faint echoes of explosive magic and the hum of mana whirling underneath it.
"Again!" Van Dijk said as he stood over Ludwig's fallen form.
The command rang off the warded walls and came back thinner, like sound pressed through glass. The training chamber under the tower smelled of hot metal and old spell-smoke; the lamps along the ceiling burned without flame, casting a pale, artificial daylight that never shifted. Ludwig lay on his back for half a breath, chest dragging at the air that he didn't need, the stone under him leeching heat as if the floor itself disapproved. Van Dijk's shadow fell across his ribs, precise, patient, unpitying, until Ludwig blinked and the shape resolved into the man himself, coat unrumpled, eyes keen with the miser's focus of a collector examining a rare fault.
