Prince Ciro leaned against the cold stone wall of the private hall, each breath a sharp reminder of the limits of his battered body. A swollen, purple eye prevented him from opening it fully; his lower lip, split and still bleeding, drew a hiss from him every time he tried to speak clearly. The bandages covering his torso and arms were stained with dark red that was already drying, and he could barely straighten his back without a whip of pain shooting down his spine—but he smiled, even if the pain was gratifying in its own way, like knowing he had truly pushed himself.

  The training had escalated to something inhuman since the party a few days ago. Direct orders from the queen mother: “Make him suffer until he forgets what comfort is.” The instructors had spared no blows, no blunted weapons that left deep bruises, no exercises that turned muscles into knots of fire. Today, they had finally given him a respite… or what passed for respite in those trainings: letting the body recover at its natural pace. Because healing magic, that treacherous blessing, came with a price.

  When used, the body returned to a pre-injury state. The wounds vanished, yes, but so did the accumulated effort: the gained endurance, the technique honed with sweat and blood—everything faded as if it had never existed. It was like erasing an entire day of progress for the whim of quick healing. That was why the instructors had ordered the royal physicians to stay away and had forbidden the harem enchantresses from approaching during recovery. “Let him feel every bruise,” one had said. “Let his body regain its vitality on its own.”

  Ciro lifted his gaze toward the figure who had just entered—it was Ariadna. She walked strangely; it was clear her training sessions were even more deranged. The last time he had seen her, she was tied with ropes that hoisted her up while her master ordered her to do a split before he watched her dislocate a leg. The master had then gone over and—with a single movement—reset the leg before continuing.

  Ciro tried to flash a sardonic smile, but the expression twisted into a grimace of pain. He didn’t know who had it worse.

  “Can you tell me what you’ve found out about the dungeon?” he asked, his voice hoarse and halting from the split lip. Each word cost him, but the tone remained firm, almost defiant. There was no room for weakness—not when his mother watched every step, every failure. “If we can turn you into a boy, we can save you a lot of trouble,” he added, vaguely gesturing toward his wounds with a trembling hand. “This is only the beginning.”

  “I finally managed a perfect split,” Ariadna murmured, voice broken by exhaustion and an involuntary bitter laugh. “My master is a lunatic… a perfect ninety-degree split. My legs… touched my head.”

  He went still for a second, breathing heavily, as the image assaulted him again: his body forced to the limit, the training horse straps yanking at ankles and wrists in opposite directions, weights hanging like lead, stretching every tendon until the world narrowed to a silent scream in his nerves. He had thought that was the method: tie you like a criminal on the torture wheel, but instead of breaking bones, break limits. Expand the body until it gave… or became stronger. His master called it “controlled expansion.” He called it hell with ropes.

  Ciro snapped his legs shut instinctively—though they ached, the motion was more protective than anything—imagining himself forced into that same predicament.

  “I don’t know whether to thank her or curse her,” Ariadna said quietly, more to himself than to anyone listening. “But at least now I know my body… can bend without breaking. For now.”

  His eyes drifted to the opposite wall, where the shadows of dusk stretched like accusing fingers. The master would keep pushing. More weights. More impossible angles. More “expansion.” And he would keep bending.

  Ciro leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees with a wince as pain lanced through his back—he remembered being hoisted up and then slammed spine-first onto a knee, to teach him never to surrender. The black eye throbbed in time with his pulse, but he ignored it. The dungeon mattered more than any bruise.

  “It’s a wandering dungeon,” Ariadna explained, voice rough but steady, as if reciting a war report—he was used to reporting everything to the prince even when the other was half-asleep and clearly uninterested. “It appears in one place for a few months, then moves to another. Usually, nobles send their most troublesome daughters there so they come out… submissive and obedient. The common belief is that if a man enters, he dies. But if what Rustamzadeh told us is true… it’s because the men who enter are turned into women.”

  He paused, letting the words settle in the heavy air of the room. He remembered Rustamzadeh’s calm, resigned voice at the party, explaining the dungeon’s origin in the days of the great golden age, a flawed creation meant for some god, the twisted fate of the men who entered. It all fit too perfectly with the obsidian collar they had used on Marcus… and on others.

  “And what he told us… is about one person in particular.” Ciro raised his eyes, narrowed by the bruise. “You already found her, didn’t you?”

  The other nodded once.

  “Yes, I already found her…” Ciro confirmed, though the statement sounded more like a verdict than a question. “A noblewoman from the city of Damascus. Nayal the Indomitable.”

  The name fell like a stone into still water. Both Ciro and Ariadna felt a knot in their stomachs—not fear, but something worse: recognition. Nayal had been one of the greatest warriors the empire had seen in generations. She gathered hundreds of thousands of men on the eastern coasts and, for two full days, prevented Linch’s ships from landing. She fought with a spear that seemed an extension of her arm, shouting orders that made even the undead rising from the sea like a black plague fall back. Capable. Too capable. Too good.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  And dead when Linch decided to mount its true assault. Or so the official reports claimed.

  Ciro let out a short, bitter laugh that stung his split lip.

  “Too good to let live, I suppose,” he murmured. “So she was a man… we need to talk to her—”

  He straightened with effort, ignoring the stab in his ribs.

  “Maybe if we speak with her, she’ll tell us what secret the dungeon holds to turn me back into a man.”

  .

  .

  Mariane reclined in the ebony-carved chair, the parchment rustling softly between her fingers as she turned page after page of the progress reports. The flickering light of the oil lamps danced across the columns of the private hall, casting long shadows that stretched like accusing fingers. Each report was a map of bodies in transformation: bruises fading, muscles sharpening, wills bending... or honing themselves to razor edges—among the concubines, lovers, and female guards within the harem.

  Her gaze lingered longest on Ariadne's. Always Ariadne. The girl had advanced at a speed that bordered on the exceptional. Elasticity. That was the key Mariane had chosen for her from the beginning. Not the brute force demanded by Prince Cyrus in his inhuman drills; no. Ariadne needed to bend without breaking. And for that, the elasticity horse—or, as some of the students whispered in trembling voices when no one else could hear, the torture horse—was the perfect instrument.

  It depended on who wielded it. For a harem girl, it was the means to achieve poses that would bring any man to his knees: impossible arches of the back, legs spreading until they kissed the ground at angles that defied anatomy, shoulders dislocating and snapping back into place with a controlled click. For an enemy... it was a method of destruction. Slowly. Joint by joint. Until pride shattered before bone.

  Mariane closed her eyes for a moment, allowing the foundations of the ancient Persian martial arts—Varzesh-e Pahlavani, the sport of heroes, and its subtler variant, Koshti-e Rahmat—to unfurl in her mind like an ancient scroll.

  The masters of the zurkhaneh had always taught that the true warrior mastered five pillars: strength to crush, reflexes to evade, speed to strike first, endurance to outlast the battle... and magic to transcend the merely human. But for women—the guardians, the concubines, those who had to survive in palaces where chains were made of silk rather than iron—a sixth was added: elasticity. The ability to slip free of restraints, to dislocate a shoulder to escape a lethal grip, to contort until the captor believed the body was no longer human. It was survival disguised as submission. Power wrapped in grace.

  She thought of Ariadne on the horse that very morning: sweat beading on her brow, tendons taut as bowstrings, the stifled groan when the mechanism pulled just a fraction more. Progress. Painful, but progress. The girl could now hold a 180-degree split without trembling. Soon she would dislocate and relocate a shoulder in seconds. Soon she would be untouchable... or at least flexible enough that the prince—or whoever claimed her—would see her as either a weapon or a remarkably pliant woman.

  Mariane folded the report with care and placed it atop the stack. A subtle, almost imperceptible smile curved her lips.

  She understood, with the unshakable certainty granted by Koshti-e Rahmat itself, that no true power arose from nothing. The path of warrior mastery first demanded conquest of the body's temple before the disciple could command the techniques of magic.

  Every style of learning in this millennia-old tradition rested upon the same primordial truth: mastery of the physical was the indispensable foundation for the magical. Mariane knew this with the clarity of one who had witnessed kingdoms crumble from haste. The sacred mission of the masters was unrelenting: by the age of ten, when the inner power—the ruh-e bāteni—began to awaken and train in its purest forms, the disciple must already know the limits and hidden potentials of their own flesh. It was not mere brute force, but absolute harmony between flesh and will.

  The warriors who could split a battlefield in two with a mere flick of the fingers had not been born that way. They had forged their fate step by step, beginning with the unbreakable foundations: quwwat (pure strength, the power that crushes mountains) and taqat (inexhaustible endurance, the capacity to weather storms that would break others). These two virtues formed the first pillar of the sacred quartet, known as Quwwat-o Taqat, the duo that turned man into living rock.

  Yet the path did not end there. Now, in this stage of training that Mariane oversaw with stern gaze and expectant heart, the turn had come for elasticity. It was not mere muscular flexibility, but something deeper: the ability to bend without breaking, to flow like water around the enemy's blade, to absorb blows and return them multiplied. This quality joined with technique—the surgical precision, the art of placing every strike exactly where the moment demanded—to form the second pillar: Maruna-o Maharat.

  Maruna, drawn from the ancient tongues of desert and high plateau, evoked elastic resilience—the quality of always returning to original form after deformation, like the bow stretched to its limit before unleashing its arrow with divine fury. Maharat, in turn, was absolute mastery of movement, the skill that transformed every gesture into lethal poetry, every sequence into embodied spell.

  Thus the quartet reached perfect epic symmetry:

  Quwwat-o Taqat: indomitable strength wedded to eternal endurance, the foundation that allowed one to bear the weight of the world. Mastering only these bases was the norm among mercenaries—lethal, yet capable of no more.

  Maruna-o Maharat: resilient elasticity combined with impeccable technique, the art that turned defense into mortal offense, the body into a fluid and precise weapon—trained more intensely among female warriors and bed guardians.

  Mariane stepped out to observe the afternoon trainings, watching the girls under the merciless sun: young bodies bending into impossible arches, enduring loads that would have shattered grown men. In their still-forming minds, understanding began to sprout: true mana was no gift fallen from the heavens. There were several ancient, differentiated types, flowing according to the warrior's nature—some hard as rock, others swift as lightning, others fierce as lions. Each style held a thousand forms, shaped by the warrior themselves.

  She spotted Ariadne walking with legs that seemed fragile as a newborn foal's. The girl caught sight of her and tried to slip away, but Mariane's hands were already gentle yet firm. She lifted the small one with ease, carrying her toward another session of elasticity—smiling softly, a subtle kindness before the necessary ordeal.