AELIA REVA
One day later
The morning air is colder than it should be for the season. It lies against my skin like an unspoken warning, thin and biting, carrying the faint scent of wet earth from the night's rain.
The grass under my boots is slick, bending easily beneath my weight. Beyond the stretch of lawn, the forest keeps its silent watch, a dark ring around the castle grounds.
He stands a little ahead of me, hands clasped behind his back, his long coat unmoving despite the wind that keeps tugging at my skirts. The sunlight slides across him, unbroken by shadow, as if it has been told not to dare.
"You do not yet comprehend what you carry," he says, not turning to look at me. His voice is low enough that I have to listen, but clear enough to leave no room for drifting thoughts. "Power, in its truest form, is not measured by how much flame you can call or how loud the world cries when you release it. It is measured by what you choose to hold when the urge to let go becomes unbearable."
I keep my arms folded, both for warmth and because it feels safer that way. "I'm sure you've got an entire library of speeches like this memorized."
His gaze moves to me at last, slow, deliberate. "Libraries remember what their shelves can hold. I have more."
I glance away, toward the long sweep of green that runs down to the treeline. "You said you'd tell me about fairies."
"I said I would speak of power," he corrects, "and your kind is not the only one to wield it. Fairies… are a peculiar folk. Their gifts run deep, yet they are fragile things, bound to places the way shadows are bound to light. Without their ground, they wither. Without their bonds, they lose themselves."
I frown, the wind lifting strands of my hair into my eyes.
He turns fully toward me now. "Rare, and therefore the most vulnerable. You carry fire, yet it is not only fire. Yours is the kind that moves when you feel, that answers not your commands, but your nature. It is the same gift the fairies once feared most and prized above all else."
My curiosity gets ahead of me before I can stop it. "How do you know all of that?"
His eyes narrow slightly, not in suspicion, but as though he's sifting through what to offer me. "Because I lived among them once. Many centuries ago, before kingdoms like this one thought themselves old. I taught them. I kept their young from burning themselves apart before they'd seen their first hundred years."
The image that rises in my head, him among winged, delicate creatures with bright eyes and sharper tongues....feels impossible. "You? Teaching fairies? You don't exactly… seem like the type."
"I was younger then," he says, though I cannot imagine what 'younger' means to him. "Less… precise. My patience came later."
"What happened?" I ask before I can think better of it.
He studies me for a long moment, and I think he might answer. But then he turns away, his gaze sweeping across the field as if the grass itself had asked the question. "What happened is of no use to you. What matters is this, your gift is like theirs, but without the safeguards they were born into. That makes you… unfinished."
I almost point out that I'm standing here, breathing just fine, but he keeps speaking.
"Today you will learn the first thing they ever learn: the separation of the heart from the spark. Your magic listens to your emotions. When they rise, it rises. When they break, it lashes out. If you do not command the emotion, you do not command the fire."
I let out a slow breath. "So… you're saying I have to stop feeling?"
"No," he says, and there's a faint curl of something in his tone, amusement maybe. "You must learn to feel without letting the feeling rule. Containment. It is not absence. It is a mastery."
He steps closer, and the shadow he casts swallows the tips of my boots. "Close your eyes."
I give him a flat look. "Why?"
"Because you are not going to watch the wind, or the ground, or me. You are going to listen to yourself, and you are very bad at that."
I hold his gaze a moment longer, then shut my eyes with more force than necessary.
"Good," he says, ignoring my tone. "Now call the spark."
It's easier than it should be. The moment I reach for it, the warmth stirs in my palms, slow and eager, curling toward the surface. The air around my hands changes, the faintest crackle moving over my skin.
"What do you feel?" he asks.
"Heat. The air shifting."
"Beneath that."
I frown. "I don't–"
"Yes, you do."
The heat builds. My chest tightens with it. "I feel… restless. Like I need to move or it'll just–"
"Stop there," he says sharply. "Hold that, but do not move."
I grit my teeth. The urge to open my hands, to let the flame escape, crawls over my skin.
"Now," he says, "put it away."
The spark bucks against me when I try. It doesn't want to go. The more I push, the more it pushes back, until it's all I can feel, pounding in my fingertips.
I let it go.
The fire spills out between my fingers, leaping into the air in a bright, quick burst before it vanishes. My eyes snap open.
He's watching me with the kind of look that isn't quite disapproval, but isn't praise either. "Again."
The second time is no easier. The third, the heat lingers even after I've managed to swallow it back, leaving my hands tingling. By the fifth, my breathing is ragged, my shoulders aching from the effort of holding still.
It's only after what feels like hours that the spark begins to obey without fighting me. The warmth pools where I want it to, stays when I hold it, and slips away when I tell it to.
When I open my eyes again, the lawn is brighter, the sun higher, and my legs are stiff from standing so long.
"Better," he says finally.
"That's it?"
His mouth curves in that not-quite-a-smile I've seen before. "You want my applause? Learn to control it without my voice holding your focus."
I roll my eyes and murmur, "And here I thought centuries of teaching fairies might've made you nicer."
He inclines his head as if considering it. "It made me honest."
"Honest is just your word for irritating," I mutter.
"And irritating," he says, turning back toward the castle, "is just your word for correct."
❦︎ To Be Continued ❦︎