The hidden courtyard became my entire world. Time lost meaning, measured only by the slow arc of sunlight across the patch of sky visible above the high walls and the increasingly precise exercises Lyra set for me.
Sleep was a luxury afforded to me on a thin pallet in a small, sparse room off the courtyard. The food was simple, bland, but nourishing, left for me by a silent, hooded figure I never saw clearly. Lyra was my only constant, a demanding and impassive tutor.
The second lesson was harder than the first.
"It is not enough to direct the power outward," Lyra stated the next morning, placing a smooth, river stone on the bench between us. "You must learn to contain it. To hold it within yourself, perfectly still, until you require it. Your very presence in the square caused unintended decay. That is a beacon. It is a lack of control that will get you killed."
She called it "The Stillness." It was a form of meditation, but far more terrifying. I had to sit, eyes closed, and focus on the void within me. Not to suppress it, but to calm it. To make its surface as smooth as glass, with no ripples, no leaks.
It was agony.
The void wasn't a passive thing. It was a hungry, cold presence that constantly sought to spill out, to touch the world and unravel it. Holding it back was like trying to contain a ocean with my bare hands. I would sit for hours, my body tense, sweat beading on my forehead, while Lyra watched with those unblinking silver eyes.
"You are fighting it," she said, her voice cutting through my strain. "You see it as an enemy inside you. It is not. It is a part of you. Your will is not a dam holding back a flood. Your will is the riverbank, guiding its flow. Relax. Command it."
I failed. Repeatedly. A nearby potted plant would wilt. The wood of the bench beneath me would grow dry and splinter. Each failure was a reminder of the destructive thing I housed.
But slowly, incrementally, I began to find a sliver of control. I stopped thinking of it as a monster to be caged and started thinking of it as a limb that had been asleep and was now waking up—tingling, unfamiliar, but mine.
Weeks bled together. My hands, which had been instruments of accidental ruin, became tools of precise dissection under Lyra's relentless instruction. I could wither a single petal on a flower. I could age a specific link in a chain until it became brittle enough to snap, leaving the others strong. I learned to feel the inherent entropy in every object, the tiny points of failure waiting to be encouraged.
One afternoon, Lyra brought a new test. A small, captured songbird in a wicker cage. It chirped, fluttering against the bars, its heart a frantic drumbeat of life.
"This creature's life force is strong, vibrant," Lyra said. "Its entropy is a distant, faint whisper. I want you to find that whisper. Silence it."
I froze, my blood turning to ice. "No." The word was out of my mouth before I could stop it. "I won't kill it."
Lyra's expression didn't change. "This is not a request. It is the next step. Your power is not merely for objects. It is for life. To understand it, you must understand its ultimate expression. To control death, you must not fear it."
"I'm not a murderer," I said, my voice shaking. The memory of the guard's withered arm flashed in my mind.
"You are a vessel of Entropy," she corrected, her voice cold. "This is not about morality. It is about nature. The bird will die. Tomorrow, a year from now, a hawk will take it, or it will simply fall from the sky when its time comes. You are not creating its end. You are merely… hastening a meeting that is already destined to happen. You are aligning its timeline with your will."
Her words were a twisted, logical poison. They made a horrible kind of sense. But my human soul, Leo's soul, rebelled against it.
"I can't," I whispered, backing away from the cage.
Lyra watched me for a long, silent moment. The bird continued its frantic chirping.
"Your sentimentality is a weakness your enemies will not share," she said finally. She didn't sound angry, just… disappointed. As if I'd failed a simple arithmetic problem. "The Church's Inquisitors will not hesitate to use their Light to scour you from existence. The Malkuth Earth-shapers will bury you alive without a second thought. They see you as a thing. To survive, you must be harder than they are."
She picked up the cage. "Until you can master this, your control is an illusion. You are still a danger to everything you care about, because you cannot command the fullest extent of your own power."
She took the bird away. I didn't ask what she did with it. I didn't want to know.
That night, for the first time, I truly contemplated leaving. Lyra's world of cold logic and necessary evils was its own kind of prison. Was this survival? Becoming a monster to avoid being killed as one?
I lay on my pallet, staring at the ceiling, the cold void within me feeling more like a separate, malevolent entity than ever. I was trapped between two worlds: one that wanted me dead for what I was, and one that wanted to remake me into something I feared.
A soft sound snapped me from my thoughts. A faint scrape at the courtyard door. Not Lyra's confident step.
I was on my feet instantly, pressing myself against the wall beside my doorway. The Stillness came easier now, a reflex. I held the void inside me, making my presence as small and inert as the stones around me.
The door opened silently. A figure slipped in, cloaked and hooded like Lyra, but shorter, slighter. They moved with a nervous energy, glancing over their shoulder before closing the door.
This was the one who left the food. I'd never seen them up close.
They set a small parcel on the bench and turned to leave, but then they paused. Their head tilted, and they looked directly at my doorway, as if they could feel me watching despite my control.
A hand came up and pushed back the hood.
It was a girl. Probably my age, maybe a year younger. Her hair was a messy shock of white, and her eyes were wide and a startling violet. But it was her expression that held me—not fear, but a fierce, burning curiosity.
"I know you're there," she whispered, her voice like the rustle of leaves. "The silence around you is… really loud."
I stayed frozen. A trick? A test from Lyra?
She took a hesitant step forward. "My name is Elara." She saw my flinch. "Not… not the one from your square. A different one. Lyra is my aunt."
She gestured to the parcel. "I bring your food. I've been… listening."
"Listening?" I finally spoke, my voice rough from disuse.
She nodded, a quick, bird-like motion. "My element. It's… Sound. Vibration." She said it with a mix of pride and shame. A Divine Element, but one she clearly had to hide here. "I can hear the world. The hum of the stones, the pulse of the plants… and you. You don't have a hum. You have a… a drain. A quiet spot that swallows all the sound around it. It's fascinating."
She was talking a mile a minute, her words tumbling out in an eager rush. She was nothing like the severe, calculating Lyra.
"You shouldn't be here," I said. "Lyra said—"
"Lyra says a lot of things," Elara interrupted, rolling her violet eyes. "She thinks the only way to be strong is to be cold. Like her." She hugged herself, looking suddenly young and vulnerable. "I heard what she asked you to do with the bird. It was cruel."
The simple empathy in her words was a balm on a wound I didn't know was still bleeding. I found myself stepping out of the shadows.
She didn't recoil. She just looked at me, her head cocked. "You don't feel like a heretic. You just feel… sad. And really, really tired."
A choked, half-sob, half-laugh escaped me. It was the most accurate description of my existence anyone had ever uttered.
"She's trying to help you," Elara said, her voice softening. "In her way. But her way isn't the only way. You don't have to become like her to survive."
She looked towards the door, nervous again. "I have to go. She mustn't know I talked to you." She pulled her hood back up, but her violet eyes lingered on me. "Don't give up. Not on yourself."
And then she was gone, slipping back into the night as quietly as she came.
I stood alone in the moonlit courtyard, the taste of the bland food forgotten. For the first time since my Awakening, I had made a connection that wasn't based on fear, power, or manipulation. It was based on a shared sense of being an outsider.
Her words echoed in the silence she left behind. You don't have to become like her.
I had a choice. It was a terrifyingly small one, buried under layers of threat and survival. But it was there. The choice of what kind of monster, what kind of man, I would become in this world that had given me a second life, only to try and tear it away.