Chapter 84: A Desert for Two
Walking with an almost dancing step through the volcanic desert, Lysara was whistling. A soft, almost irreverent whistle, slicing through the burning silence like an insolent note hurled at the face of the world. The wind, heavy with ash and distant echoes, didn’t dare contradict her. It merely brushed past, grazing her face with a resigned warmth, as if even it had learned not to try silencing her anymore.
Surprising, isn’t it? Especially when you know what had happened just a few hours earlier.
After her latest defeat — and not a small one — logic would have dictated that she sulk, brood, grit her teeth and clench her fists in that stormy silence she mastered so well. But no. She was whistling. Cheerfully. Almost proudly.
Why? you may ask.
Well... for several reasons.
But first — primo, as an overly talkative old professor might say — she had managed to hit me. And not just once. Several times. Enough to leave marks. Light ones, yes, but real. And coming from her, that was anything but trivial. Not because I’m unbeatable — far from it — but because helping her progress had so far been a kind of patient alchemy, an underground effort, as if every improvement had to be wrested from arid soil with brute force and gentleness intertwined.
So yes, she had struck me. And had I let her? No. Not this time. She had found the opening. She had earned it. And her gaze, after the final blow, held no arrogance. It gleamed with a naked pride, a rare, almost childlike satisfaction — the kind of glow only conquerors discover within themselves in the moment of their first triumph.
That’s why she was whistling. Not to mock. Not to boast.
She whistled because, finally, for once, she felt up to the promise she had made to herself.
Secondly, I had literally shattered her old hammer. Broken clean, exploded under the furious impact of a too-unbalanced clash. That weapon, though sturdy, forged from hardened cendrite and braided shadowsteel, simply hadn’t held. Not against me. Not against the burning power of my animated blood, not against my twin swords, living, legendary, honed to the edge of reality.
Under the violence of the battle, the weapon shattered like an empty shell, its fragments flung into the black sand like shards of a bygone past. A moment of silence followed, almost solemn. She watched it collapse, her fingers still stretched toward a handle that no longer existed. A trace of surprise, briefly betrayed by a twitch of her lips. Then nothing. She swallowed the emotion. As always.