[b]Injimo![/b]

In her capacity as sparring instructor, one of Injimo's tasks is to go out into the world, learn new combat skills, and then teach them to Princess Heron. This means, as most everything she does usually means, losing. She enters new dojos or martial traditions as a novice and then fails as a novice until she's distilled the heart of something useful enough for Heron to pick up.

From Aadya it was wrestling. It was a good memory. On one side she had the feeling of being tangled up and helpless in the arms of a muscular woman, and then on the other she'd gotten to put Heron into some nasty pins and hold her there until she perfected the breakout technique. It was a shame she didn't have a chance to see how that fight would have gone on her own time (REMATCH REMATCH REMATCH), but she was on the clock now more than she usually was.

"Hear you fought the assassin," said Injimo as Heron. "What should I know?"

[b]Kalentia![/b]

In the past, Heron experimented with flame magic rather than her familiar lightning. Her completed battledress, the Invincible Flame Armour, was the culmination of that quest. It was forged from a dragon's fever dream, a volcano's indigestion, and a night of passion with Summer amongst other lesser catalysts. She walked the world for a while as a firestorm, fields of rolling flames as tame as grass. 

The histories didn't say what went wrong with it. Cair didn't know or wasn't telling. All Kalentia knew is that it shined, radiant in orange and yellow, in its containment sphere of molten glass at the bottom of a jagged lake. The light from below filtered through the water's reflection of the strange half-void sky, staining the water an admixture green. A little wooden bath shrine had been constructed or collected and placed outside the narrow band of coastal water where the water was warm and not scalding. Rurik's fishing rods were stored neatly outside the front door, next to Injimo's kayak.

Despite the sky being visible, the shrine existed on a 'floor' of its own - walk five minutes away from the lake in any direction and you risked falling to another part of the Nexus, or even directly into the Outside. A rope ladder passed through a hole in the sky down into what seemed like a bottomless pit; the only entrance and egress.

"Don't go out too far," Cair said. "It's dangerous to get too close to most things down here."