Nephis agreed to both requests without ceremony.
She agreed to Sunny's the way she agreed to most things — with a nod that communicated the decision had been made and the conversation about it was now concluded. She agreed to Quinn's with a slightly longer pause, the specific length of someone filing an obligation they intended to honor, and then moved on.
That evening, the four of them sat on the stone platform in the dark while Nephis talked about the sword.
She was not a natural teacher in the way that some people are natural teachers — the kind who find the analogy that makes the concept click, who read the student and adjust accordingly, who make the difficult feel approachable. What she was instead was precise. She described mechanics with the clarity of someone who had internalized them so completely that explaining them was simply a matter of finding the words, which she did slowly and without embellishment. How to hold the blade. How weight transfers through a committed strike. How to read the geometry of an opponent's stance before they've decided to move. How to fight something larger than yourself without fighting its strength directly.
Quinn listened and took notes in the part of his mind that stored things he might need later. Sunny listened with the focused intensity of someone who had decided this was an investment and intended to see a return on it.
At some point Nephis asked the question. Not as a teaching exercise, Quinn thought — more as genuine curiosity, the kind that surfaces when someone has been thinking about something long enough that it becomes a question they actually want answered.
"What is your essence of combat?"
Cassie answered first, quietly, without hesitation. "Victory."
Sunny took a moment. "Survival."
Quinn didn't have to think about it. "To escape."
Nephis looked at each of them in turn. Then she said, with the same flat certainty she brought to most statements: "Murder."
Nobody argued with this.
They slept.
The scream came before the light did.
Sunny was upright with the Azure Blade in his hand before he had finished waking, his body making the decision independently of whatever his mind was still doing. Nephis was already standing, sword drawn, her eyes moving across the platform in the rapid sweep of someone checking angles.
Quinn was beside them, axe in hand, which he noted with the distant part of his brain that was still cataloging things even when the rest of him was operating on adrenaline.
Cassie was not where she had been.
The blind girl was at the edge of the platform, her blonde hair disordered, her hands stretched out in front of her searching for something to hold onto. Her expression was the specific horror of someone who was not quite here — present in the body and somewhere else entirely in the mind. The platform offered nothing to grab. Beyond the edge, the dark water churned in the distance, patient and cold.
Sunny moved before anyone else did, crossing the platform and catching her by the shoulders, pulling her back from the edge and holding her steady. He spoke to her in the low, even tone of someone who understood that the words mattered less than the presence.
Nephis checked the water. Quinn watched the perimeter. Nothing was coming. The shore was quiet in the way it was quiet at this hour — not safe, just temporarily uninterested.
When Cassie's breathing had steadied and her hands had stopped reaching for walls that weren't there, they sat with her for a while. She was still pale, still fractionally somewhere else, the vision not fully released. They didn't push. They moved a short distance away, to a section of the platform that gave them a clear sightline to where Cassie sat, and gave her the space to find her way back.
Nephis produced two practice weapons from somewhere — Quinn didn't ask where, he had learned that Nephis's preparedness existed at a level that didn't require explanation — and set Sunny to work. A thousand sword swings, which was not a metaphor but an actual count, delivered with the patient expectation of a teacher who had decided that the foundation mattered more than the flourish.
Sunny began.
Nephis turned to Quinn. Her sword arm was at rest but her posture wasn't, and Quinn recognized the particular quality of someone who was assessing whether a sparring partner would be useful or a liability.
"Axe," she said.
Quinn raised it.
She didn't know the axe, she said plainly — her training was with the blade, and the mechanics were different enough that she couldn't teach what she hadn't built. What she could do was give him something to respond to. Real resistance. Real timing. She would adjust her approach to account for the weapon's weight and reach and he would learn by doing what he couldn't learn by listening.
It was, Quinn thought as the first exchange began, an extremely efficient way to get hit repeatedly in a controlled environment.
He was hit repeatedly in a controlled environment.
He also learned things, which was the point.
They worked in intervals, pausing when Nephis needed to correct Sunny's form, resuming when he returned to his count. The platform was small enough that they could do both simultaneously without losing track of Cassie, who sat at the far edge with her knees drawn up and her face turned toward a horizon she couldn't see.
By the time Sunny's count reached a thousand, the light had shifted. The grey had warmed fractionally, which on the Forgotten Shore passed for morning.
Cassie looked up.
The color had returned to her face. The somewhere-else quality in her eyes had resolved back into the particular calm of someone who had processed what they needed to process and was ready to speak.
She looked at the three of them.
"I'm ready," she said. "To tell you what I saw."