Typhoen didn't remember deciding to walk.
One moment he was standing over Harris's collapsed body, musket hanging forgotten at his side, and the next his boots were carrying him off the ruined arena floor entirely on their own, the crowd's noise folding into a single dull roar that seemed to come from very far away, muffled, wrong, like he was hearing it through water.
'Winner by default,' he thought, turning the phrase over and over without managing to make it mean anything. 'Winner by default. Winner by—'
The arena looked wrong around him, scorched black in long claw-marks where the bronze spear had torn free of the stone, the small white-and-blue flower still hanging patient and untouched behind him as though none of the last ten minutes had actually happened, and Typhoen found he couldn't hold on to any single piece of it long enough to make sense of the whole.
"Typhoen, your legs aren't there!!!"
The scream cut through the noise sharp and high, some first-year near the front railing, voice cracking on the last word, and Typhoen kept walking. His ears were still ringing from the muskets. His hands were still shaking. People screamed all kinds of things when a match ended ugly, and this one had ended ugly enough that he wasn't inclined to stop for a single voice in a thousand.
Then the pain arrived.
It came all at once, no warning and no build, a white-hot line drawn clean across his abdomen that dropped him to one knee before his mind had even finished registering it as pain and not something else entirely, and the musket clattered out of his hand and struck the stone with a sound that seemed to happen very far below him.
'That's new,' he thought, distantly, stupidly. 'That wasn't there a second ago.'
He looked down.
For one long, suspended moment, Typhoen's mind simply refused the information his eyes were sending it, turning it over the way a person turns over a word in a language they don't speak, waiting for it to resolve into something that made sense. It did not resolve. His waist ended in a wet, glistening ruin, cut clean and bloodless-white at the edges the way only something inhumanly sharp could cut, and below that ending there was nothing that belonged to a battlefield at all — only the pale, obscene coil of his own intestines, spilled loose and slick across the scorched stone, and his upper body balanced on top of them like a man standing on a rope bridge he hadn't noticed was already burning.
He didn't scream.
He looked up instead, blinking, almost apologetic, as though he owed someone an explanation for a mess he hadn't meant to make, and said, in a small and genuinely bewildered voice, "When did that happen?"
The crowd answered for him.
It happened all at once, thousands of people finding their voice in the same half-second, gasps and shrieks and someone actually being sick over the railing, first-years scrambling backward from a sight they'd never signed up to see, and somewhere in that rising wall of horror Typhoen registered, almost as an afterthought, that the growing red pool beneath him had reached his hand.
'Huh,' he thought. 'That's a lot of blood.'
He didn't feel afraid yet. That was the strangest part, the part he'd never be able to properly explain to anyone afterward — that the fear hadn't arrived with the wound, only the confusion had, a vast, empty and childlike confusion, as though his body had quietly decided to fall apart before bothering to inform him it was allowed to be scared about it.
Hersneva was already moving.
He came down the arena steps faster than he had all match, faster than his tired, aging frame had any business moving, robes snapping behind him, and dropped to his knees beside Typhoen without a flicker of hesitation, both hands already outstretched and glowing faint gold at the fingertips before he'd even finished kneeling.
"Hold still," he said, low and urgent, none of his usual dry exhaustion left in it. "Hold still, boy."
His eyes moved fast over the wound even as his hands worked: clean edges, no torn muscle fraying loose, no fragments, no sign the boy had been struck by anything that behaved like an ordinary weapon at all. Whatever had done this hadn't cut him. It had simply decided, somewhere between one heartbeat and the next, that his waist would no longer be attached to the rest of him, and the wrongness of that — the sheer, surgical impossibility of it — was almost worse than the wound itself.
'Later,' Hersneva thought grimly, already reaching past the horror of it toward the only thing that mattered right now. 'Whatever did this, I'll understand it later. Right now I only need to keep him breathing.'
Typhoen tried to answer him. What came out instead was a wet, confused sound that wasn't quite a word.
Hersneva spoke.
The sound that left him wasn't language, not any language Typhoen had ever heard spoken by human mouths, syllables that folded and doubled back on themselves, low and resonant, felt more than heard, vibrating up through the stone and into Typhoen's spine like a second pulse laid over his own failing one. Where the words touched the wound, the bleeding simply stopped, the ragged, glistening edges of him sealing shut all at once with no scar, no seam, no mark to say a wound had ever been there at all.
It should have felt like relief.
It didn't. It felt like something reaching inside him and turning a key, and Typhoen's last coherent thought, right before the world tilted sideways and went dark, was that he still didn't understand what had happened to him, and somehow that was worse than the pain had ever been.
He went under with his mouth still open, confusion and fear tangled together on his slack face in an expression none of them would forget for a long time.
Up in the stands, nobody was cheering anymore.
Osmandas had both hands pressed to his mouth, all the color gone out of his face, the easy grin that had carried him through the entire match wiped away like it had never existed. "That's not—" he started, and couldn't finish it, couldn't find a joke anywhere in himself for the first time all day.
Sashah hadn't moved. Her crimson eyes were fixed on the pool of blood spreading slow and dark across the arena floor, and for once the sharp, assessing calculation she carried into everything had simply gone quiet, replaced by something closer to nausea.
Even Alderen, who had watched a hundred blades fail to touch Harris without so much as blinking, stood very still now, his amethyst eyes wide, his jaw tight, one hand gripping the railing hard enough to whiten his knuckles.
None of them said anything else.
Below, the crowd had begun to move at last, ushers and upperclassmen shouting for everyone to sit back down, to stay calm, to give the medics room, and none of it worked, the whole auditorium shifting and surging like something with a single frightened body, students climbing over benches just to see and other students dragging them back down again, and through all of it the small white-and-blue flower kept hanging exactly where Harris had left it, untouched, indifferent, as though it belonged to some other, gentler afternoon entirely.
Down on the ruined arena floor, Hersneva gathered Typhoen up in both arms, blood soaking dark into his robes, and shouted for a medic in a voice that cracked with something none of his students had ever heard from him before.
Fear.