VIVIAN

The Guardian came in fast.

Vivian didn’t think. She acted. The construct slammed into the frost wall she raised at the last instant, striking with a crack like lightning through glass. The backlash rattled her bones, but she held the casting. She dismissed the wall as quickly as she’d raised it and pivoted, sword flashing in a disciplined arc that drove the Guardian sideways.

It looked like one of the old warriors from across the sea—those armored champions spoken of in half-forgotten ballads—only this one was carved from magic instead of flesh. Frost-plate wrapped its towering frame, each segment edged in glacial light. Beneath the armor there was no body, only a storm of pale mana swirling in the shape of a man. The runes along its chest burned faintly blue, marks of an enchantment older than the language that birthed it.

So much for facing a Guardian with a flame aspect. If she survived this she was going to have a talk with Princess about her intellgence network.

When it moved, the air shivered. The weight of its stride cracked the ice beneath its boots, and a low resonance rolled through the chamber like a drumbeat under water. The weapon it carried was not steel but condensed ice and power—sharp, translucent, alive. Every motion echoed the discipline of a true soldier: deliberate and terrifyingly efficient.

Vivian understood then why the stories spoke of the warriors across the sea with awe. Whoever had crafted this Guardian had given it more than shape. They had given it memory.

What was the word they used? Knight...that was it...a knight.

She did not flinch. Step, parry, cut. Each motion was Form Seven, stripped to its brutal core.

The Guardian thrummed—a vibration that hummed through her ribs. It turned, blade sweeping in a wide, perfect arc. Vivian twisted, intercepting with a shriek of mana-charged steel. The shock rippled up her arm, numbing her fingers. Shards of frost hissed through the air where the edges met.

She ignored the pain. She answered with ice. Mana surged down her blade, frost coiling along the steel until it gleamed white-hot with cold. She sharpened the flow, controlling it so precisely that the mana itself could have been mistaken for razor-edged steel.

This was why the Li sword style was so difficult—the directional control of mana needed for this kind of real-time adjustment was impossible for most. But not for the Li family. Never the Li family.

She struck, carving across the Guardian’s forearm. The blow sheared through a layer of enchanted plating; cracks spidered through the construct’s limb, blue light spilling from the fractures like blood that wasn’t blood.

The sound that followed was a scream—a cross between a dying banshee and a wounded animal. The pitch made her teeth ache and her ears throb. She was fairly sure they had started bleeding.

The Guardian’s power flared, and then it came again with faster blows, heavier movements—something relentless.

Vivian dropped low, grounding herself, letting the strike pass just wide. She rode its momentum, pivoted, and snapped her sword upward. Silver arc. Cold light. The blade cut deep through the Guardian’s chest, splitting the runes that bound its core.

The frost in her weapon screamed as the two magics collided. Light burst in shards of ice and shattered mana. The Guardian convulsed once, the glow inside it strobing wildly—and then its form fractured, collapsing into a thousand glittering fragments that fell like snow and melted into silence.

The silence was deafening.

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Vivian staggered, sword slipping from her hand to ring against the stone. Her chest heaved, her forearm throbbed, and her fingers were numb through the leather. She knew bruises would bloom by nightfall—if there was a night left to have.

The chamber’s silence echoed. Her own quiet pressed back, too loud to be empty.

She breathed the way Master Shen had taught: spine stacked, belly low, each inhale leaving room for the next. She cycled her mana calmly; rushing was where mistakes were made. You are only as strong as the space you leave for your breath, Master Shen had said. The lesson worked for more than stances.

The frost stirred. At first smooth, then scarred—etched with blade marks and burns of cold. It folded into petals until a bloom rose where the Guardian had fallen. Her reflection appeared in its surface: disciplined, gray around the mouth, braid fraying, hands trembling.

Then the ice shifted. Other faces pressed forward—layering, crowding—until the mirror became a gallery.

Jun, fifteen and shivering, wrapping her in a coat. Jun again, storming a banquet with fists and noise, grief turned to spectacle. The shame of it hit sharp as a bruise.

Then Ethan. Not the distant boy who sketched theories in notebooks no one read, but a man whose quiet attention worked like hands that never stopped. Ink, burnt tea, and calluses earned by thought as much as by steel. His presence steadied something inside her that had ached since she left the estate so many months ago.

A voice came—not Serenya’s playful lilt, but older, drier, patient as stone.

You fought well. That was your body. Now fight with the part you’ve kept sheathed.

Vivian tightened her grip until the leather creaked. “This is a test,” she said aloud, brittle in the frost.

Will you carry steel alone, or will you carry the weight of your heart?

She wanted to spit back—poetry and riddles were luxuries for other people—but habit made her snap instead. “I don’t have time for riddles. Enemies don’t care if I recite verses afterward.”

The bloom fractured into facets. Faces multiplied: her mother’s calm mask, her father’s hand on a scabbard, Nathan’s reckless grin, Gavin’s approving nod, Lucas sliding her a ledger and trusting her to cut the line. Duty stacked behind her face until it was armor she could wear.

You can build a wall tall enough to touch the moon, the voice said, and still bleed to death behind it if you never let anyone else carry a stone.

The words landed low, under her ribs—truth with teeth.

“I have carried more than stones,” she snapped. “Men who mistook my presence for courage. A house that preferred perfect death to living imperfection. I have carried—”

Jun’s face broke like ice. Shame cut deep. Ethan’s steadiness did not. It held like ballast.

The voice thinned to something like care. I want you to mean it. There is a difference between choosing and merely saying.

The blow was cleaner than any strike. Vivian closed her eyes. She remembered every ordered step, every withheld word, every shield she had refused to lower. Muscles she had never used strained inside her—the ones that reached for softness: to ask, to rest, to admit she could not carry everything alone.

Her throat scraped raw as she forced the words out. “I do not want a court. I do not want to be a perfect symbol rotting at the edge of a field. I am not seamless steel. I am tired. I am angry. I am—” She swallowed the name like fruit too large for her throat. “—I am married to a man I did not choose.”

Silence widened, and relief cut through her chest like warmth.

The frost smoothed flat. Only her face remained—not PathIcon heroine, not duelist of reels, but the woman who took blows for others and dared to name who she loved.

Better, the voice approved. Again.

Vivian laughed, cracked and surprised—the sound of release. “What do you want from me?”

Sometimes poetry is only accuracy arranged efficiently.

Her sword shifted in her hand. Frost crawled along the steel, then sank into it, leaving a hair-thin vein of silver-white down the blade. The hilt warmed as though the weapon itself had chosen to remember heat.

A fissure split the far wall. Air flowed in—warm, cedar-scented, carrying ripe fruit and women’s voices. She was met with silence.

Vivian bent and picked up the last shard of the Guardian’s form: a sword which was niether ice or steel but maybe something elese entirely. She wasn't sure. The sword lay in her palm like a question not yet answered.

The wall will break. Many times. Do not mistake that for the end.

When she stepped from the chamber, Serenya waited, pleased like someone who had bet the odds and won. “You took longer than I wagered,” she said with mock severity. “I owe myself a cup of tea.”

Heat flushed Vivian’s neck. Serenya pressed a cup into Vivian’s hand. “Drink. The heart is heavier to lift than a sword.”

Vivian looked down at the silver vein gleaming in her blade and felt, for the first time in months, a dangerous kind of peace: that naming a thing could change its weight.