The awakening happened three days after the cave.
Sirath had said it would take time. He had said the spatial formation he'd embedded in the scroll would work gradually, finding what was already there and drawing it out — that forcibly awakening an element in a child's body was a delicate process and he would rather do it properly than quickly. He had also said it would not be pleasant.
He had not said it would feel like being turned inside out.
Aaron woke at the second hour of the night with the feeling that his chest had been replaced with an open window. Cold air moved through him — not through his lungs but through whatever was underneath them, the deep part of a person that most people never had cause to think about. He lay on his sleeping mat and breathed carefully and watched silver light bleed from his own skin into the dark of his room.
It lasted about an hour.
When it was over, he sat up and took stock of himself. He was drenched in sweat and his hands were shaking faintly. But overlaid on all of that was a sensation so new he didn't yet have words for it: a kind of extra sense, faint as a whisper, that told him the space between the wall and his bed was not just emptiness. It had a texture. A weight. It pushed back, softly, against the boundaries of objects.
He held up his hand and looked at his palm. He could see — barely, at the very edge of perception — the faintest traces of silver in the air around his fingers. Like dust motes in a sunbeam, except these moved with intent, drifting toward him and away in gentle currents.
The space element.
"Congratulations," said Sirath's voice in his head — dry, precise, the same voice from the cave except closer now, as though originating from somewhere just behind Aaron's thoughts. "You've survived the awakening. The formation went smoothly, all things considered."
"All things considered," Aaron repeated. "What are the 'things' being considered?"
"You had a second resonance. Near the end of the process." A brief pause. "I don't know what it was. I've never seen it before. I would prefer not to speculate until I understand it better."
Aaron sat with that for a moment. He had learned in his past life that 'I don't know' from someone who knew a great deal was more alarming than confident wrongness.
"Is it dangerous?"
"I don't know," Sirath said again. "But it was not the space element. The space element is silver. What I saw was... closer to white. Absolute white, the way light is white before it splits." Another pause. "We'll watch it."
Aaron filed this under 'questions without answers yet' — a mental folder he kept well-organised — and lay back down.
"Get some sleep," Sirath said. "Training starts tomorrow."
"You sound like a drill sergeant."
"I have no idea what that is, but yes, probably."
— — —
Sleep came easier than he expected, which said something about how thoroughly the awakening had exhausted him.
He dreamed of the cave — except in the dream, the cave had no walls. It extended in every direction into a darkness that was not hostile, just vast. And in the centre of the darkness was a tower.
Small. Perhaps the height of a two-story building, narrow, built from some dark material that wasn't quite stone. Its windows were lit from inside by that same silver light. It looked like the kind of building that had been standing for a very long time and intended to keep standing.
He understood, in the way you understand things in dreams without being told, that this was the Void Catalog. That everything Sirath had ever learned or built or thought was in there, organised in ways that would take Aaron years to fully explore.
He also understood that most of the windows were dark. Locked. Available only when he'd grown enough to use them.
He stood outside the tower for a long time. Then he looked up, past the tower's peak, into the vast dark above.
Far away — further than any distance he had reference for — there was something else. Not darkness. Not light. Just the suggestion of space on a scale that made his mind slide away from it the way water slides off oil.
He woke up.
Sirath said nothing. But Aaron had the impression that the old mage had been watching the dream alongside him, and had gone very quiet at the same moment Aaron had.
— — —
Training began the following morning with a conversation.
"Tell me what you think a mage is," Sirath said.
Aaron was sitting at the mountain summit, the wind cutting sharp across the ridge. He considered the question the way he always considered questions — not hurrying to the first answer, checking it from multiple angles first.
"A person who can gather elemental energy," he said finally. "And direct it. Use it to do things that would otherwise be impossible."
"Correct. Basic and correct. Now tell me what separates a mediocre mage from a great one."
"Control," Aaron said. "And understanding. Not just knowing what the element does, but knowing why it does it."
Sirath was quiet for a moment, and Aaron had the impression of something being measured.
"Most students in this empire's academies would answer: talent, resources, and power. You said control and understanding." A pause. "Why?"
"Because control and understanding are things I can improve regardless of where I start. Talent is fixed. Resources depend on other people." Aaron looked out at the distant brown smudge of Eskra on the horizon. "I'm starting at the bottom. I need advantages that aren't determined by what I was born with."
"You were born with exceptional spatial resonance. Because I gave it to you."
"I know. Which means I'm already using up my one inherited advantage. Everything else has to come from me."
Sirath said nothing for a long time.
Then: "The first exercise is this. Gather space particles into your dantian — not to store them, but to let them flow. Up through your body, through every limb and organ, and dissipate in your mind. Over and over. It is tedious. It is painful at first. And it will raise your elemental compatibility, slowly, over the next four years, until your aptitude test reads as exceptional."
"Not exceptional from birth," Aaron said. "Exceptional earned."
"Yes." Something in Sirath's voice, barely audible. "That, I think, is worth more."
— — —
Aaron sat in the meditative stance and began.
The space particles were everywhere, he realised — thin in the lower village, denser up here on the mountain, concentrated in certain spots he was only beginning to learn to find. He gathered them slowly, the way you'd gather fog. Breathed them in. Let them move through him.
The first cycle took twenty minutes and left him gasping, his clothes damp with sweat, his mind ringing like a struck bell.
He rested for five minutes.
Then he started the second cycle.
This was going to be a very long four years.