The mountain did not bleed white; it bled grey.
The open clearing was abandoned. Instead, Mordren led Ronan up the treacherous, frost-shattered spine behind the cabin, climbing higher into the jagged teeth of the ridge where the stunted pines withered into naked, black-veined rock. They stopped before a deep, jagged fissure, a natural mountain scar where the limestone walls pinched inward like a rotting throat, leaving a claustrophobic corridor scarcely three paces wide and ten feet deep. The stone faces were glazed with black ice, suffocated by stagnant damp and the dead, lingering chill of ancient shadow.
Mordren tapped the rough, freezing wall with the pommel of his saber, the sound flat and dead in the narrow space.
"The Underdark does not give you logs planed by a carpenter's hand," Mordren rasped, his breath curling in the air like a foul, spectral shroud against the whistling mountain draft. "It gives you stone that shreds your knuckles and swallows your echoes. You want to test the dual guard? Let us see how well it holds when the walls themselves are trying to crush the breath from your ribs."
Ronan felt a sick, cold knot twist in his gut, but his boots did not hesitate. He stepped into the trench, his shoulders instantly scraping the freezing, jagged limestone on both sides. With familiar, desperate muscle memory, he unlatched Cormac’s side-sword, Fang, into his right hand, and settled his father’s ash-hammered dagger, Sting, low in his left, dropping his weight into a low, coiled Faelun crouch.
At the opposite end of the natural cleft, Mordren slipped into the shadows. He drew not just his curved saber, but a second, shorter dirk in his off-hand, a dual-wielding predator waiting in a tomb.
"Defend yourself," Mordren whispered.
There was no count, no warning. Mordren closed the distance instantly, a blurred flash of grey leather and dead bone within the tight stone chute.
His primary saber struck high in a crushing, bone-shattering overhead arc designed to force a shattered block, while his secondary dagger lunged low toward Ronan's groin. The impact detonated like a thunderclap inside the narrow stone walls, the metallic shriek rattling straight up Ronan’s spine and vibrating painfully into his teeth.
Instinct, forged through weeks of bruises, torn calluses, and the silent dread of failure, took over.
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Ronan caught the heavy overhead strike on the flat of Fang, using the sharp, jagged angle of the limestone wall to deflect Mordren’s murderous momentum outward. But the low dagger was already driving inward. Without conscious thought, Ronan snapped his left hand up, Sting intercepting Mordren’s wrist with a sharp, metallic clack, pinning the dark elf’s arm hard against his own torso in a textbook Pin-and-Slip.
For a single heartbeat, they were locked together in the suffocating gap, breath hot and fogging in the freezing air, steel crossed against unyielding rock and bone.
Mordren’s lips parted in a chilling, yellow-toothed grin.
"Good," the dark elf hissed, before twisting his weight and turning the stone corridor into a brutal, screaming whirlwind of flashing iron.
Adapt or rot.
Ronan did not retreat an inch. When the dark elf's secondary blade swept low to test his balance, Sting met it with a violent, jarring deflection, while Fang rose to parry the screaming descent of the saber. The narrow stone walls muffled the clash into a brutal, intimate roar, the sharp limestone biting raw holes into his shoulders as he held his ground against the onslaught.
The corridor felt like a narrowing vice. Mordren’s twin blades blurred in the dim, bruised light, a relentless, deafening clatter of steel against limestone that threatened to jar the very teeth from Ronan’s jaw. Every muscle in the boy's frame burned with coppery agony, fueled entirely by raw grit and the unyielding cadence of his Faelun breathing.
Mordren lunged, his primary saber driving a massive, crushing arc aimed squarely at Ronan’s collarbone.
Instead of resisting the crushing weight head-on, Ronan dropped his center of gravity into a low, sliding crouch through the freezing muck. With a vicious twist of his wrist, he used Fang to sweep wide, catching Mordren’s blade and slamming it hard against the rough limestone wall. The dark elf’s primary weapon was instantly pinned, locked dead out of alignment by the unyielding stone and the side-sword's heavy steel spine.
Mordren’s obsidian eyes flared with sudden, sharp realization, too late.
With his primary arm neutralized, the dark elf’s inner guard vanished entirely into the shadows. Ronan did not hesitate. Snapping his left hand upward through the narrow gap between their bodies, he drove Sting forward in a vicious, snapping arc, The Undercut.
The dark, pitted point of the dagger halted dead against the soft hollow beneath Mordren’s ribs, exactly a breath away from tearing skin. At the exact same instant, Ronan brought the heavy pommel of Fang up in a tight, controlled Blind Cross near Mordren’s jaw, boxing the dark elf completely in against the freezing rock face.
A heavy, absolute silence settled over the mountain cleft, broken only by the dripping of black, foul water from the ice-crusted overhang and the ragged, rattling wheeze of Ronan’s lungs.
Mordren stared down at the dark, ash-hammered steel resting against his diaphragm. For a long, motionless heartbeat, the dark elf did not move a muscle. Then, slowly, a cold, fierce grin split his scarred features.
"You trap them in the stone," Mordren rasped softly, his voice like dry leaves scraping over a tombstone as he lowered his weapons and stepped back from the blade. "And then you break the door."