Aldric recited it first, slow and careful, the words carrying the rough edges of a language Corren recognized instantly as a corrupted descendant of Old Germanic, the kind of drift he'd once mapped across three centuries of manuscript variants back when he still had a body that could hold a pen. Fiery breath, unleash your fiery passion, with an unyielding flame. The words themselves were sound enough. The grammar underneath them had gone soft, imprecise, a command with the edges worn off.
Corren tried it exactly as given. Flame burst from his mouth in an uncontrolled gout that singed his own eyebrows and sent him stumbling backward, coughing smoke.
"Are you hurt?" His father was at his side in an instant, hands hovering, already reaching to pull him back toward the villa. "Perhaps you're too young for destruction magic this advanced."
Corren waved him off, brushing ash from his sleeves, his mind already three steps ahead of his father's concern. The chant wasn't wrong so much as it was vague, a request without a target, the linguistic equivalent of asking for "some water" when what you actually needed was a specific, aimed stream. He turned the words over once more, testing the grammar the way he might test a load-bearing beam, and adjusted.
"Fiery breath," he said, steadier this time, "unleash an orb of blazing fire, and scorch all within your sight."
The flame that answered came out of him in a controlled, coherent ball, spinning and compact, nothing like the wild burst from a moment before. His father's mouth fell open. Pride and astonishment chased each other across his face in quick succession before settling somewhere in the middle, on something that looked very much like a plan already forming.
The day of Tempest arrived a week later: the traditional coming-of-age ceremony for the young sons of Clan Ashvale, held in the same grand hall his mother's marriage into the family had never quite been allowed to belong to. Aldric walked in with his shoulders back for the first time in longer than Corren could remember, and Corren walked beside him with the calm, watchful patience of someone who already knew how this would end and was simply waiting to let everyone else catch up.
The other adults did not extend him the same courtesy of patience. Whispers followed them the moment they crossed the threshold, low and pointed: why bring the failure's son here at all, why let him think he had a place among real Ashvale blood. The words found their target easily enough. Corren felt the old, familiar heat of humiliation rise in his chest, the same heat he'd felt once, in another body, standing in a ballroom while a billionaire compared him to a parking attendant. He breathed through it. He had learned, in one life or another, that rage answered too fast was rage wasted.
His father stood taller against the murmuring than Corren had ever seen him stand. "My son is a genius," Aldric announced to the room, chin lifted, and the laughter that answered him was thick with condescension, the kind reserved for men everyone had already decided were beneath correcting.
The organizers, perhaps out of spite, perhaps simple procedure, put Corren dead last. One by one, the older boys stepped forward and recited the same tired chant, achieving results that ranged from a few respectable meters of flame to embarrassing, sputtering puffs that drew polite applause anyway, because even a puff of fire from an untrained boy counted as something worth clapping for. Corren watched each attempt with the professional detachment of a man grading undergraduate essays, cataloguing exactly where each speaker's pronunciation had drifted from the source and by how much.
When his turn finally came, he stepped forward into a silence heavy with expectation of failure. He brought two fingers to his lips, forming a rough funnel the way his father had shown him, and let the corrected words leave his mouth with total confidence.
"Fiery breath, unleash a majestic ball of blazing fire, and scorch all within your sight. Engulf the world in your inferno's searing art, reducing all to ash, a testament to your fiery heart."
Someone in the crowd started laughing before he'd even finished, certain this over-elaborate phrasing was a boy fumbling his lines out of nerves. The laughter did not survive contact with what happened next.
Flame erupted from him in a column thick enough to blot out the far end of the pond, rolling across the water's surface in a wave of steam and heat that drove the nearest onlookers stumbling backward. It was not a puff. It was not even the tidy orb he'd managed on the pier with his father. It was, Corren understood even as he poured himself into it, considerably more than he had ever produced before, and considerably more than his small, ten-year-old body had any right to sustain.
He felt it the moment the fire left him: a hollowing in his chest, like something vital being siphoned out through a straw too wide for the vessel holding it. The world tilted at the edges. His vision narrowed to a tunnel, then to a pinprick, and the last thing Corren registered before his knees buckled was his father's face, lit gold by dying flame, torn between pride and sudden, sharp fear.
He woke up minutes later on the cool grass, his mother's hand pressed to his forehead, the murmuring crowd gone eerily quiet around him.
"He drew too deep," someone was saying, low and clinical, the voice of a man who had clearly seen this happen before. "Every working draws on the same well, boy. Correct the grammar, sharpen the intent, and you get more power, yes, but power has a price whether the words are pretty or not. Push past what your well can give and your body pays the difference. Sometimes it only tires you. Sometimes it puts you flat on your back in front of the whole clan. Learn your own depth before you learn to be clever, or one day you will draw past empty, and there will be nothing left to spend."