Sera Ardiente

They left Sera at the gates of the Sanctuary of Mourning when she was three, with one fist clenched. When the sisters opened it, there was nothing inside. Only the habit of squeezing.

The sister who tended the vegetable garden taught her to fight so she would stop breaking things. It made it worse. Now she broke them better.

She has done nothing else since. No sewing, no singing, no praying like the others. Sera prays her own way: a thousand blows to the sandbag every morning, before the sun comes up.

She carries no weapons. She says a sword can slip out of your hand. Your hands cannot.

At the Sanctuary they call her Ardiente, "the Burning One", because she never stops. She chains one blow to the next, and that one to the one after, and each comes out harder than the last. As if she were storing them inside.

And she does. When she cannot hold any more, she lets them all out at once.

Whoever has taken that blow rarely tells the tale. Whoever has seen it, does.

She is thirty-eight years old, and her hands are covered in scars. She does not know how to do anything else.

Nor does she need to.