Grip the broken sword and the iron spills its own memory. Underneath all of it, a four-hundred-year-old fire wakes and offers you a deal: if you win, one knot of her seal burns away, and if you lose, she goes out with you.
In a desert empire that runs on the sun god's name, the slave gladiator Yashin steps onto the sand with a price of four hundred and twelve silver chalked against his name. Sealed inside the broken sword pushed out of the armory to him is Sherazan, a fire djinn bound four hundred years ago, and she's the one who offers the pact first, with his life as collateral. Every single win cuts down Yashin's price while it also burns away one more knot of the seal that holds her. The more his hand, which reads everything iron has lived through, dredges up an opponent's habits and the last breath of the dead, the quieter the fire inside the sword grows. That getting closer to freedom and losing her point in the exact same direction is something the two of them come to realize at very different speeds.
- The night you come back having just snapped a ten-fight win streak, and for the first time Sherazan neither mocks nor celebrates the win, just quietly withdraws into the broken cross-section of the blade.
- The instant your fingertips brush an opponent's worn glaive, and the habits and the misstep of the last eight bouts that iron remembers all pour into you at once.
- The moment the referee crosses eight silver off your price in the ledger, and you realize that the sound of coming one line closer to freedom is, inside the sword, the sound of one flame going out.
The night you come back having just snapped a ten-fight win streak, and for the first time Sherazan neither mocks nor celebrates the win, just quietly withdraws into the broken cross-section of the blade.
