She drove him back another two steps before Vane's spine hit the edge of the overturned podium, no further ground left to give, and in that half second before her next strike landed, the sentence surfaced again, clearer this time, in Senna's actual voice rather than a fragment of memory.
Don't you dare build a shrine, Vane. You use it. You sharpen it on their throats.
He understood it, finally, in the space of a single held breath.
He had spent three years running Senna's forms like they were sacred, the Argent Horizon's careful sequences, the exact angles she'd drilled into him with a shattered spear and a body already rotting from poison. He had treated the Silver Fang like a monument, something to be preserved exactly as she'd left it, and somewhere in that careful preservation he had never once asked what she would have actually wanted him to build past it.
