The arena looked different in the morning.
Not physically—the stone was the same stone, the tiers were the same tiers, the screens above the floor displaying the same bracket they had displayed when the crowd filed out the night before. But the quality of the light was different. Morning light came from above rather than from the side, falling straight down through the open roof and hitting the arena floor directly, making the broken section of stone from last night's fight visible in a way the evening screens hadn't fully shown. The cracks were real. The gaps were real. The section of floor that Cintra's maximum pulse had separated from the surface sat slightly lower than the surrounding stone—permanent, unrestorable, the evidence of what the fight had already done sitting in the middle of the arena waiting for both fighters to return to it.
The crowd had come back earlier than they had left.
