The courtyard stank of sweat and smoke.
Morning heat pressed down until the air itself seemed tired of watching boys fail.
Ren stood in line, head low, chalk dust from other people's defeats clinging to his boots. Two red slashes marked his name on the board. One more, and he was finished.
Across the yard, instructors watched from the shade—stone-faced, unmoving. Each candidate fought until the marshal's flag dropped or until they couldn't stand. Ren hadn't lasted long in either of his matches.
Wind.
Invisible, cruel. He opened light, feinted low, swung where the body had been—met only air and the sting that arrived a breath later. He chased movement; wind punished the chase. By the bell he was still turning, striking at ghosts, learning that speed without touch is just noise.
Earth.
The ground decided. A step to set his hips and the floor itself shifted—buckled under his weight, stole his balance, popped his teeth together hard. He recovered once, braced wrong, and the next swell threw him clean. Lesson learned, too late: against stone you move early or you don't move at all. Dust still clung to his ribs.
Now he had one chance left.
Marek waited three names ahead—uniform crisp, crest bright, House Varnen stitched where once there had been nothing. They'd shared a leaking roof once, back when fever chose without asking. Now Marek's smile looked borrowed from someone wealthier.
"Didn't think you'd still be here," he said, loud enough for the crowd. "Didn't think you'd crawl this far without someone holding your hand."
Ren rolled his shoulders. The marshal's call cut the noise.
"Candidate Ren versus Marek of House Varnen."
The crowd leaned forward, hungry for a clean finish.
The sand still steamed from the last fire user. Ren flexed his hands, reopening thin cuts.
Marek grinned. "Let's end this quickly."
The bell rang.
Ren moved first—a faint shuffle, drop of weight, feint. Orphanage habits: strike first, stay low, never wait. He slipped beneath the first wave of flame, rolled through ash, and came up fast. His fist grazed Marek's shoulder—light, but it earned a gasp.
He pressed on. Another swing, another dodge. Marek's grin began to crack.
"Still think this is a game?"
The heat flared. Fire burst wide, forcing Ren back. He circled, boots scraping near the chalk edge, lungs dragging furnace air. Another surge swept in low. He leapt, landed wrong, and almost fell. The sand burned through his soles. He couldn't last long.
"You should've stayed where you belonged," Marek shouted through the glare.
Ren's breath rasped, each inhaling a scrape of glass. The air warped, bending with the flames; the ring became a cage.
A murmur rippled through the onlookers. One instructor's hand twitched toward his whistle—then stilled.
Ren's vision darkened at the edges. The roar closed around him.
Marek raised both hands. Fire gathered above him, swirling into a single molten sphere. It pulsed, waiting.
Ren's knees hit the dirt. His body screamed to move—but it was done listening.
He thought of the orphanage: the cold nights, the roof that leaked more than it kept. He thought of the hill, and the storm that once leaned close, curious. He thought of being told, again and again, to accept what he was.
"Not again…"
A heartbeat. Then another. Time stretched, and even the flames seemed to wait, patient.
"This will not be my fate."
His throat tore. "I REFUSE!"
Muscles locked. Teeth ground. Every nerve screamed; the air itself felt like static against his tongue.
He gathered everything left—fear, pain, fury—and hurled it into one word.
"SHIELD!"
The world split open.
A crack like sky-metal. Blue-white light exploded outward—lightning unchained. The fireball disintegrated mid-air, scattering sparks. The shockwave ripped through the ring; glassed sand shattered outward. Instructors dove. Spectators froze—hands half-raised, mouths open.
A dropped sword hissed against molten grit. A child cried out.
Thunder rolled overhead, so loud it felt alive.
Ren stood trembling, eyes blank, arcs crawling over his skin—flickering light dancing across his veins. Then the glow collapsed, and he fell. He lay there, lungs shaking, heart hammering—alive, but unrecognizable even to himself.
Marek lay sprawled at the boundary, armor blackened, eyes wide. He tried to rise, failed, and stared at Ren as if the world's order had just rewritten itself.
Silence. Even the fire dared not move.
The ring was gone, replaced by scorched earth and an ozone sting that burned the nose. Smoke climbed in thin silver threads. An instructor brushed at a smoldering sleeve; another boot stuck to melted sand.
Dren stepped forward, stopping at the rim of the blast-glass. Blue light still throbbed faintly beneath Ren's skin—a second heartbeat. His lips parted, shut, parted again.
"He… wasn't supposed to have a nature."
No one answered. Only the faint crackle of fading thunder and the wind whispering through ruin.
The pulse didn't die there. It raced outward—through stone, through the city, through the sky—until even the clouds trembled.
Far away, a man in black robes stood before a window, watching the horizon flare. The reflection burned in his eyes.
"Finally," he murmured. "I found you."
In another quarter, books rattled on their shelves; ink rippled in its glass. Varin stopped mid-sentence, turning toward the light that washed his chamber. For an instant, composure fractured—recognition, old and sharp.
"That… feels familiar."
Across campus, where the afternoon sun struck the upper courtyards, another bout raged—blades clashing, sparks scattering—yet one fighter's eyes kept drifting to the distant smoke where lightning had split the sky. Wind and stone collided; his opponent stumbled.
The young man's smile curved—interest, not arrogance now.
"Interesting."
Then he pivoted, finishing his bout with a single, effortless strike. The crowd erupted, but his gaze stayed fixed on the horizon where lightning had fallen.
Sound narrowed to a single tone—the echo of thunder lodged behind Ren's ribs. The hot light faded. Sand, smoke, voices, all pulled away like a tide.
Then even the echo let go.
He woke to light hung in gauze and the smell of crushed mint.
Wooden beams drifted in and out of focus above him, and when he tried to sit the room slid sideways and came back with a click. His mouth tasted of old breath and metal—like he'd slept through a storm.
"Easy." A cool hand steadied his shoulder. "You've been stubborn about waking."
The woman wore grey with green thread at the cuffs. White hair caught in a coil at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were the color of tea left to sit.
"Where—" His voice rasped. "Where am I?"
"The infirmary," she said. "You're safe." She hesitated, then added, "I'm Healer Marwen."
"How long?"
"Longer than made us comfortable." Something like dry humor touched her mouth. "Nearly three weeks."
His chest hollowed. The words slipped out before he could stop them. "Then I failed."
Marwen tipped her head, as if measuring the weight of the thought. "You're in the Academy, boy." She angled his gaze toward the window: slate roofs, the line of the eastern tower, banners moving with the morning. "Hard place to fail when half the courtyard is still telling stories about you."
He looked at his hands. No burns. No scars he didn't recognize. But when he flexed, a tremor ran along his fingers like the memory of cold water.
"What… happened?"
"You were in an accident." She said it gently, like a bandage pressed to a bruise. "There was a lot of light."
He searched the blank between then and now and found only sound: a crack like the sky breaking its teeth. Then nothing.
"Rest," Marwen said. "Your head will argue with you if you try to do anything clever. There's broth if you can keep it, and quiet if you can't."
He slept, woke, and drifted. Thunder lingered somewhere behind the bones of his ears. When he finally kept the broth down, the door offered a soft knock and swung open.
Two figures entered. The first carried the room with him; calm, certain, the kind of presence that made everyone else straighten without knowing why. He was tall, white-haired, dressed in simple black the way some men wear armor. The second was a boy near Ren's age, a little younger maybe—same pale hair, same restraint, a patience that looked learned rather than born.
"Ren, is it?" the man asked.
Ren nodded.
"I'm Varin," he said. "Head of Valenreach." The title came without ceremony, like a fact of weather. "This is my son, Lior."
"Good morning," Lior said. Polite, even. His eyes took in everything and offered nothing back.
Varin pulled a chair nearer, careful not to crowd the bed. "You frightened a lot of people," he said, and there was warmth in it, not accusation. "You also impressed more than a few."
Ren wet his lips. "I… don't remember."
"That's common," Varin said. "Shock has its own way of protecting fools and prodigies alike." A brief line at the corner of his mouth suggested he'd seen both. "There was a duel. You were cornered by flame. You tried to cast a shield you'd never managed before." He held Ren's gaze. "It wasn't a shield."
"What was it?"
"Lightning," Lior said quietly.
Marwen made a small sound at the window, like a kettle deciding whether to boil.
Varin went on, voice steady. "You were admitted to the Academy under my word. Special circumstances, as our scribes will call it. You missed the final trial—teams in the south field, a little game of protecting an egg that everyone swears is indestructible until it isn't. Doesn't matter. The Trials measure many things. What you showed us is… not usual." His eyes softened, then sharpened again. "Raw power is not a virtue by itself. We'll teach you the rest, if you'll let us."
Ren tried to sit straighter and thought better of it. "I didn't mean to—" The ring. The screaming heat. The word he'd thrown like a stone at a wall bigger than himself. "I could have hurt someone."
"You could have," Varin said. "You didn't. And we put sturdier walls around dangerous things than a courtyard ring." A pause. "Still—learn quickly."
Lior's attention flicked to Ren's hands, then away. "Welcome," he said, and made it sound like both a greeting and a warning he hoped Ren would never need.
Varin rose. "Uniforms have been set aside for you. A room, as well. Healer Marwen will tell you when you're cleared to walk without falling over your own feet. Classes begin at the first bell tomorrow." He inclined his head, not quite a bow. "We'll speak again."
They turned to go. In the doorway, Varin's voice lowered. "Lior."
His son leaned close.
"Keep an eye on him," Varin murmured. "Not because I think he'll break something." A small, wry breath. "Because he feels like something we've seen before."
Lior nodded once. "Yes, Father."
When they were gone, Marwen checked Ren's pulse, her touch quick and competent. "You'll be sore in ways you don't have names for," she said. "But you'll live. Try to avoid exploding again for a day or two. It makes the linens smell like storms."
By dusk he was steady enough to try the corridor. The uniform folded on the chair fit like it didn't believe in him yet: clean lines, dark cloth, boots that didn't leak. The room Marwen pointed him to had a door that latched and a window that caught late light—both luxuries. He stood inside it and felt like he'd wandered into someone else's life by accident.
When the bell complained its way toward evening, he went outside. No one stopped him. His feet found the northern path out of the courtyard and the little ridge beyond the eastern wall. The hill held its old shape, as if waiting. Wind pushed at the grass and carried up the smell of kitchens and river mud and oil from the practice yards.
He sank down with his knees drawn up and watched Valenreach become lanterns. Somewhere below, a bell argued with itself and lost. He tried to picture the way the light had left him—the crack, the surge, the afterward—and found only the feeling of a door he hadn't known was there, swinging open into a room too bright to look at for long.
He should have felt triumphant. All those mornings on the orphanage steps, telling himself he would find a way to belong someplace like this. Now that he'd arrived, belonging felt like a shirt he hadn't grown into yet.
The wind lifted. For an instant, the tiny hairs on his arms rose, and the world leaned a fraction closer, curious again. It passed, leaving his skin empty and his mouth tasting faintly of rain.
"All right," he told the dark, or himself. "All right."