[Pinnacle Academy — Second Year Dormitories, Evening]
The academy at night was the same as it had always been.
Lamps along the walkways, the low sound of students still awake somewhere in the upper floors, the training fields empty and dark past the treeline. Two days back and the whole place still hadn't noticed that eleven of its students had died and come back in a world that didn't exist.
I was halfway across the courtyard when I saw Jan.
He was sitting on the steps outside the dorm entrance with his elbows on his knees, and in his hands he was turning something over slowly, the way you handle a thing you don't fully understand yet.
A hilt.
Just a hilt.
Wrapped grip, a plain crossguard, and above it, nothing at all. No blade, no stub of metal, not even a break where a blade should have snapped off.
It simply ended, finished and complete, like the sword it belonged to had never been made in the first place.
_So he did get it._
_The reward for putting Richard down._
