He went out onto the black ground the next morning the way he had a thousand mornings before it, and inside the first minute he knew something was wrong.
It wasn't his body. His body answered him fine. He'd come out of the pool whole, the bruising gone, the ribs solid, nothing anywhere in him that hurt worse than usual. The trouble sat somewhere behind his eyes, in the place where all of this actually happened.
Dravok opened with a low feint into a high cut, and Trafalgar raised [Origin Guard] in a rush to meet it, hauling the mana up out of the blade the way he had done in his first weeks here, the exact habit the old man had drilled out of him with a fortnight of bruises. He caught the mistake as he made it. That was worse than not catching it, because by the time he knew what he'd done there was nothing behind Maledicta to answer with, and Dravok's sword took him across the hip and put him on the ground.
'What the hell was that? I fixed that. I fixed that weeks ago.'
