Martins was in their small garden one evening behind the house, practicing and mastering his usual magical powers. He would draw a circle on the floor and make a deep hole in it, commanding it with just his little finger, and then command it to close back. He even commanded the rain to fall on one side of his father's house, and when the rain poured out from the sky, he let out a loud laughter like someone who just accomplished a mission.
He continued with his practice. He made a leaf dance in a complex pattern of air currents, then incinerated it to ash, then pulled the ash back together and reformed the leaf, perfect and whole. Creation and destruction, held in a delicate balance.
A startled gasp made him lose his concentration. The leaf, half-reformed, fluttered to the ground.
He spun around. There, at the rusted iron gate that led to the alleyway, stood a little girl of about thirteen years old.
She was dressed not in royal silks but in a simple, practical linen dress.
Martin's eyes and mouth were wide open in awe at who he saw. It was Princess Lyra. "How did she find her way here?" He quickly turned around in fear to see if the palace guard was standing and staring.
"How did you do that?" she whispered, her voice full of awe, not fear.
Panic, cold, and tremors ran through him a second time, knowing that Princess Lyra has been there and saw everything he was doing.
"She's seen you. She knows. This is how it begins again: secrecy, betrayal, death." The old instincts, forged in a marble chamber, roared to life. "He should silence her. A simple push of power against her mind to make her forget. It would be so easy."
"It's… a trick," he stammered, his heart pounding; anyone standing by could hear the sound of his troubled heart. He was too scared to even utter more words.
"It's not a trick," she said, pushing the gate open and stepping into the garden. She pointed at the perfectly reformed leaf on the ground. "Tricks are with strings and mirrors. That was real." She looked at him, a sudden, shocking empathy in her young face. "You have the Glow, too."
The Glow. He remembered it was the old, childish term for magic, the one the royal archivists had tried to beat out of him—the term his nursemaid had used.
She nodded, suddenly looking shy. She held out her hand, about to perform magic too. Concentrating, her little face scrunched up adorably as she summoned a light. Not a raging, uncontrollable emerald inferno like his had been. This was a soft, silver-white luminescence, like a captured moonbeam, that danced just above her palm. It was gentle. It was beautiful.
"I'm not supposed to show anyone," she said, whispering it into the ear of Martins. "Father says it's not seemly, and Mother says it's weak. But… it doesn't feel weak. It feels like… like singing on the inside."
At this moment, Martins was even more confused; he couldn't understand why Princess Lyra also possessed magical powers just like him. She had just performed some magic too, so he needed even more explanation.
Martins' world moved on its axis. The walls of hatred he had built so carefully, brick by brick, over two lifetimes began to crumble. She was like him. She was a secret, just like him—hidden away, told to be ashamed of the most beautiful part of herself.
The ghost of Rayon screamed that this was a trick, a deception bred from the same cold bloodline. But Martins, the boy who had been loved by weavers, saw only a lonely, magical little girl who had probably been told the same lies by his deceitful father.
"It's not weak," Martins said, his voice hoarse. "It's… it's the strongest thing in the world."
Her smile then was even brighter than the one she'd given him years ago. It was a smile of shared understanding, of conspiracy.
"I'm Lyra," she said, as if he might not know.
"I'm Martins," he replied.
And so, an impossible friendship was born.
How happy and fulfilled she felt discovering someone who shared the same unique nature as her! A magical power that could not be revealed to anyone or even used by them.
She would sneak away from her minders, using her small size and a few cleverly placed diversions with her "Glow" to frequently visit Martins in the garden. He became her secret, her confidant, the only person in the world with whom she could be her true self.
For Martins, the world gained color again. He stopped staring up at the palace with hatred and started waiting for the moments when a golden head would appear at the gate.
He taught her control, showing her how to make her light dance in patterns and how to use tiny breaths of air to carry seeds on the wind. She, in turn, taught him about the palace, about her boring lessons, about her stern father, her cold mother, and her cruel brother.
She spoke without malice, simply stating facts, and in doing so, she showed him the true prison she lived in—a gilded cage of expectation and disapproval.
The burning coal of his vengeance, once the center of his being, grew cold and gray. How could he destroy the palace when it contained her? How could he unleash his power when she would be caught in the blast?
The love he felt for her was not a sudden bolt of lightning, but a slow, inevitable sunrise, burning away the night of his hatred. He was trapped. Not by the walls of his simple life, but by his own heart. His magnificent plan for revenge was in ruins, demolished by a thirteen-year-old girl with a moonbeam in her hand.
They kept seeing each other in secret and had come to an agreement never to disclose this new love they had found among themselves to anyone. This continued for about seven years, and this was the first time Marti
ns had smiled genuinely since his rebirth into the world.