The forms at dawn ran differently from the day before.
Not dramatically — the sequence was the same, the output the same, the six forms moving through the clearing in the same order they always moved. What was different was underneath them. The base layer had been finding its accommodation across two days of uncultivated ground and the finding had compounded overnight the way physical learning compounded when the body had time to absorb it without interference. The Falling Star landed with the hinge quality Nyx had described — the Silver Fang and the Warlord not running in tolerance of each other but something closer to a single thing with two expressions, the severance principle and the territorial assertion sharing the same moment of contact rather than arriving sequentially.
He ran it twice more to confirm it wasn't a fortunate repetition.
It wasn't.
