Vane stopped trying to follow the fight within the first ten seconds.
It wasn't a decision. His eyes simply couldn't keep pace with what was happening in front of him, the four Transcendents and the Emperor moving through exchanges that arrived and resolved faster than his mind could assemble into anything resembling a sequence. He caught fragments instead. A flash of gold. A wall of frost climbing the hall's far side and shattering an instant later into powder fine as mist. A sound like the world's largest bell struck once, deep in his chest rather than his ears.
Isadora's domain arrived first, spreading outward from where she'd landed in a slow, creeping frontier of absolute cold, the air itself losing its capacity to hold warmth wherever the frost touched it. Vane felt it reach the edge of where he lay and stop there, deliberate, sparing him and the others without her seeming to spend any conscious attention on the choice at all.
