The days that followed blurred together into an exhausting rhythm of training, rest, and more training. Caelan had not exaggerated when he warned me that I would be too tired for excessive thought. By the end of each session in the meadow, I could barely walk back to the house, and I often fell asleep at the dinner table with food still on my plate.
But I was learning.
The spark that had seemed so fragile on that first morning grew stronger with each passing day, responding more readily to my attempts to call it forth. I learned to find it without closing my eyes, to reach for it while moving or speaking or doing any of the ordinary things that life required. I learned that it had moods and preferences, that it came more easily when I was calm and fought against me when I was frustrated, that it seemed to enjoy being used even when I was terrified of what it might do.
I also learned that my power was not like Caelan's.
He had explained this during our third session, after I had managed to shatter another shell of ice and accidentally set fire to a nearby tree in the process. The magic that lived inside each Sovereign took a unique shape, he told me, reflecting something essential about the person who carried it. His own gift was manipulation of fundamental forces, the ability to bend reality itself to his will in ways that defied easy categorization. Mine was something different, something that Caelan was still trying to understand.
"Heat is the obvious manifestation," he said, examining the scorched grass where I had been standing. "But heat can express itself in many ways. Your spark may be more versatile than it first appears."
I didn't know what that meant, not really, but I filed the information away and tried not to think too hard about the implications. It was easier to focus on the immediate challenges of training than to contemplate what kind of Sovereign I might eventually become.
The hardest part wasn't the physical exhaustion or the constant fear of losing control. The hardest part was the grief.
Caelan had told me to hold onto it, to use it as an anchor, and I was beginning to understand what he meant. The spark responded to strong emotion, and no emotion I possessed was stronger than the love I had carried for Tam and the loss I felt in his absence. When I reached for my power, I reached through the grief to find it, and the grief reached back, pulling me down into memories I wasn't ready to face.
I saw Tam's face every time I closed my eyes. I heard his voice in the silence between Caelan's instructions. I felt his hand reaching for mine in the moment before he died, and I felt myself failing to catch it, failing to save him, failing in the one thing that had ever truly mattered.
The magic grew stronger. So did the pain.
On the seventh day of my training, Caelan announced that we would be having a visitor.
"Thessa will be arriving this afternoon," he said over breakfast, the words casual in a way that suggested he was watching carefully for my reaction. "She's the healer I mentioned. She wants to examine you, to make sure your awakening didn't cause any damage I might have missed."
I set down my spoon and tried to keep my voice steady. "Is that common? For awakenings to cause damage?"
"Common enough that we check for it." He took a sip of his bitter morning drink, his golden eyes never leaving my face. "The spark doesn't always integrate smoothly with the body that carries it. Sometimes there are complications, internal injuries that don't become apparent until weeks or months after the initial manifestation. Thessa can see things I cannot, and her assessment will give us a better understanding of what your training should look like going forward."
I nodded and returned to my porridge, though my appetite had vanished. The idea of being examined by another Sovereign, of being seen and judged by someone whose power I couldn't begin to comprehend, made my stomach twist with anxiety. I had grown almost comfortable with Caelan over the past week, as comfortable as anyone could be with a man who could unmake armies with a thought. The prospect of adding another godlike presence to my life felt overwhelming.
Thessa arrived shortly after midday, appearing on the terrace without warning or announcement.
One moment I was alone, sitting on the low stone wall and watching clouds gather over the distant peaks, and the next moment a woman was standing beside me as though she had always been there. She was older than Caelan, her hair gone fully white and her face lined with the kind of deep wrinkles that spoke of decades rather than years. But her eyes were young, bright and curious and filled with a warmth that seemed entirely at odds with the terrible power I knew she must possess.
"You must be Edrin," she said, and her voice was soft and musical, the kind of voice that belonged in lullabies or bedtime stories. "Caelan has told me about you. May I sit?"
I nodded, too startled to speak, and she settled onto the wall beside me with a grace that belied her apparent age. Up close, I could see that her robes were a deep green rather than the blue I had expected, embroidered with patterns that seemed to shift and change when I tried to focus on them directly.
"I'm going to touch your hand," she said. "Is that all right?"
I nodded again, and she reached out and took my hand in both of hers. Her skin was cool and dry, her grip gentle but firm, and as her fingers closed around mine I felt something pass between us, a sensation like being seen from the inside out.
"Breathe normally," she said. "This won't hurt."
It didn't hurt, but it was strange in ways I couldn't articulate. I felt her presence moving through me, exploring the pathways that my spark had carved through my body, examining the places where magic and flesh had learned to coexist. She lingered in my chest, where the warmth of my power lived, and she spent a long time studying something near my heart that I couldn't identify or understand.
When she finally released my hand, her expression was thoughtful.
"Well," she said. "That's interesting."
"Is something wrong?"
"No, nothing wrong. Just unexpected." She turned to look at the mountains, her eyes distant in a way that suggested she was seeing something beyond the physical landscape. "Your spark is healthy and well-integrated. The awakening was violent, as battlefield awakenings tend to be, but your body has adapted remarkably well. You should have no complications from the initial manifestation."
Relief flooded through me, though I hadn't realized until that moment how much I had been fearing the alternative. "Then what's unexpected?"
Thessa was quiet for a long moment, choosing her words with the same care I had seen in Caelan.
"The nature of your gift," she said finally. "Caelan told me you manifested as heat, as fire, and that's certainly part of what I see in you. But there's more to it than simple burning." She turned back to face me, her bright eyes holding mine with an intensity that made me want to look away. "Your power isn't just heat, Edrin. It's heat in two very different forms, and the difference between them matters more than you might think."
I stared at her, not understanding. "What do you mean, two forms?"
"Think of it this way." She held up her hands, palms facing each other about a foot apart. "Imagine a fire. Now imagine two ways that fire could destroy something. The first way is obvious: an explosion, rapid and violent, heat expanding outward all at once." She clapped her hands together suddenly, and I flinched at the sound. "That's one form of your gift. Combustion, Caelan called it in his letter. Things burst from within, burn outward, leave scorched remains and shrapnel. It's loud and messy and difficult to control precisely."
She lowered her hands and her voice grew quieter.
"But the second form is different. Instead of exploding outward, the heat turns inward. It focuses, concentrates, burns at the smallest level of matter itself. The bonds that hold things together weaken and break, not all at once but piece by piece, until there's nothing left but ash and powder." She picked up a dried leaf that had blown onto the terrace wall and held it between her fingers. "Imagine this leaf aging a thousand years in a single breath. Imagine watching it crumble and drift apart, reduced to what fire would leave behind if given infinite time to do its work. That's the other form of your gift. Disintegration."
I watched the leaf in her hand, imagining it turning grey and brittle, imagining it falling to dust at her touch. The image was disturbing in ways I couldn't fully articulate, less violent than the explosion she had described but somehow more final.
"Both forms are destruction," Thessa continued. "Neither can protect or heal or create. Your gift is fire, Edrin, but it's fire that only knows how to consume." She set the leaf down carefully, as though it were something precious rather than debris. "The Sovereign I mentioned to Caelan in my correspondence, the one I examined years ago with a similar gift, he struggled terribly with what he was. The power wanted to be used, wanted to burn and unmake everything it touched, and he had to fight against that impulse every moment of every day."
"What happened to him?"
"He made a choice." Her voice carried a weight of old grief that made my chest ache in sympathy. "He turned the power inward, focused it on himself, and let it do what it was designed to do. By the time anyone found him, there was nothing left but a scorch mark on the floor of his chambers."
I thought about the warmth in my chest, about the spark that pulsed with its own rhythm separate from my heartbeat. I thought about the grass dying beneath my feet when I shattered Caelan's ice, about the tree bursting into flames when I pushed too hard. I had known from the beginning that my power was dangerous, but I had imagined that danger as something external, a threat to others that I would learn to control. The idea that it might turn against me, that it might one day consume me from the inside out, was something I hadn't considered.
"I'm telling you this because you need to understand what you're carrying," Thessa said, reading the fear on my face with uncomfortable accuracy. "Not to frighten you, but to prepare you. Caelan knows about fire. He's lived with terrible power for longer than you've been alive, and he's found ways to bear it without letting it destroy him. Let him help you find the same."
"How?" The word came out cracked and thin. "How do you bear something that only knows how to destroy?"
Thessa smiled, and there was something sad and knowing in the expression.
"By choosing what to burn," she said. "And what to spare. The power doesn't care, but you do. That's the difference between a wildfire and a hearth, Edrin. Both are fire. Only one is under control."
Thessa stayed for dinner, and the meal was unlike any I had shared with Caelan during my week of training.
She filled the silence that had characterized our previous evenings, telling stories about the other Sovereigns she had healed over the years, about the injuries she had mended and the complications she had navigated and the strange manifestations of power she had witnessed in her decades of service. She spoke of Seraph, whose lightning had once struck her by accident during a training session and left her deaf in one ear for three months. She spoke of Corvin, whose visions sometimes showed him things so terrible that he had to be sedated for days afterward. She spoke of Yara, who claimed to carry on conversations with people who had been dead for centuries and who sometimes forgot which world she was supposed to be living in.
She did not speak of Brennan, the young Sovereign whose gift was the manipulation of emotions, and I noticed that Caelan changed the subject whenever the conversation drifted in that direction.
"You'll meet the others eventually," Thessa said, pushing back from the table with a satisfied sigh. "Once your training progresses far enough that Caelan is willing to let you out of his sight. The Council likes to gather us together occasionally, to remind us that we're part of something larger than ourselves and to make sure none of us are going mad with power in our isolated corners of the kingdom."
"Does that happen often?" I asked. "Sovereigns going mad?"
"More often than any of us would like to admit." She exchanged a look with Caelan that carried weight I couldn't interpret. "Power changes people, Edrin. It's the nature of what we are. The question is whether the change leads us toward wisdom or toward destruction."
"Thessa," Caelan said, and his voice carried a warning that I didn't understand.
"He needs to know." She turned back to me, her bright eyes suddenly serious. "The Culling didn't happen because magic was too dangerous to exist. It happened because Sovereigns were too dangerous to exist without oversight. Before the kingdoms imposed their restrictions, before children with sparks were taken and trained and bound to oaths of service, we were gods walking among mortals. Some of us were kind gods. Many were not."
"The history lessons can wait," Caelan said firmly. "He has enough to process without adding the weight of centuries he wasn't alive to witness."
Thessa studied him for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "You're right. I apologize, Edrin. It's easy to forget how new all of this must be to you."
"It's all right." I wasn't sure whether I meant it, but the words seemed expected. "I'd rather know the truth than be protected from it."
"A noble sentiment." She rose from her chair and brushed invisible crumbs from her green robes. "Hold onto that impulse. It will serve you well in the years to come."
She said her goodbyes and walked out onto the terrace, and I watched through the window as she stood for a moment looking at the stars. Then she simply wasn't there anymore, vanished as completely as she had arrived, leaving no trace that she had ever been present except the lingering warmth of her company.
"She likes you," Caelan said from behind me.
I turned to find him clearing the table, stacking dishes with the same efficient movements he brought to everything. "How can you tell?"
"She told you about Aldric. The Sovereign who turned his fire on himself." He paused with a plate in his hand, looking at me with an expression I was beginning to recognize as the prelude to something important. "She doesn't tell that story to people she doesn't like.
"She knew him?"
"She trained him. Spent five years teaching him to control what he was, believing she had found a way to help him bear the weight of his gift." Caelan set down the plate and crossed his arms, leaning against the doorframe. "When he made his choice, she blamed herself. Still does, I think, though she'd never admit it."
I thought about the compassion in Thessa's voice when she told me about Aldric's fate, the pain that had flickered across her features before she smoothed it away. I thought about the warning implicit in the story, the acknowledgment that my power could consume me if I let it, that the fire I carried might one day turn inward.
"Is that why you're training me?" I asked. "To make sure I don't end up like him?"
"Partly." Caelan pushed off from the doorframe and walked toward me, stopping close enough that I had to tilt my head back to meet his golden eyes. "But partly because I see something in you that I haven't seen in a very long time. A chance for the power to be wielded by someone who might actually deserve it."
"I don't feel like I deserve anything."
"No. You wouldn't." He reached out and placed a hand on my shoulder, the contact brief but solid, grounding me in a way I hadn't realized I needed. "That's precisely why you might. Get some sleep, Edrin. Tomorrow we start working on the difference between combustion and disintegration, and I suspect you're going to find it more difficult than anything we've done so far."
He walked away before I could respond, disappearing into the depths of the house with the candle that had been lighting the dining room. I stood alone in the darkness for a long time, thinking about fire and control and the strange path my life had taken since Tam died on that battlefield.
Then I went to bed and dreamed of heat consuming everything I had ever loved, sometimes in violent explosions and sometimes in slow grey crumbling, and I couldn't tell which was worse.
The next morning dawned grey and cold, with low clouds obscuring the mountain peaks and a fine mist hanging in the air that soaked through my clothes within minutes of stepping outside. Caelan led me down to the meadow as usual, but instead of taking his position at the edge of the clearing, he walked with me to the center and stood close enough that I could see the individual threads of gold woven through his irises.
"Today we try something different," he said. "Yesterday Thessa told you what your power truly is. Today we see if you can access both forms deliberately, without fear or crisis driving you."
I swallowed hard, remembering the way the grass had died beneath my feet, the way the tree had burst into flames. "And if I can't control it?"
"Then we'll deal with the consequences and try again." He stepped back, giving me space but not leaving entirely. "Close your eyes. Find your spark. And then I want you to think about what Thessa told you. Not just heat, but heat in two different shapes. Explosion and consumption. Violence and patience."
I closed my eyes and reached for the warmth in my chest. It came more easily now than it had a week ago, responding to my attention like a familiar presence rather than a stranger. I let it fill me, let it spread through my limbs and settle into my bones, and then I tried to see it the way Thessa had described.
Two forms of the same fire. One that burst outward, loud and fast and uncontrollable. One that burned inward, quiet and slow and precise. Both destruction, but destruction with different textures, different purposes, different costs.
I thought about combustion first, because that was what I knew. The explosive heat that had shattered Caelan's ice, the fire that had consumed the tree, the warmth that poured off my body when I pushed too hard. It was violent and immediate, a release of energy that wanted to happen all at once. I could feel it waiting inside me, eager to be unleashed, straining against the boundaries I had learned to impose.
Then I thought about disintegration, and the spark shifted.
It was subtle at first, a change in quality rather than quantity. The fire that had been pressing outward began to turn inward instead, folding in on itself, concentrating into something denser and more focused. The heat was still there, but it felt different now, less like an explosion waiting to happen and more like a slow burn that could continue indefinitely. Patient rather than urgent. Consuming rather than destroying.
"Good," Caelan said, his voice reaching me as though from a great distance. "You've found the difference. Now hold onto that second form. Don't let it slip back into combustion."
Holding was harder than finding. The concentrated fire wanted to expand, wanted to release itself in the familiar burst of heat and light, and keeping it focused required constant attention. I thought about what Thessa had said, about matter breaking down at the molecular level, about bonds weakening and failing piece by piece until nothing remained but ash. I thought about the leaf she had held between her fingers, about watching it age a thousand years in a single breath.
The spark settled into its new shape, and I felt something click into place inside me.
"Open your eyes," Caelan said. "And look at your hands."
I opened my eyes and looked down. My hands were glowing, but the light was different from what I had seen before. Instead of the bright amber of combustion, this was a deeper color, almost red, pulsing slowly rather than flickering rapidly. The air around my fingers shimmered with heat, but it was a contained heat, concentrated rather than radiating outward.
Caelan held out a small stone, about the size of my fist.
"Touch it," he said. "And let the fire do what it wants to do."
I reached out and pressed my fingertips against the stone's surface. For a moment nothing happened, and I felt the familiar fear of failure rising in my chest. Then the stone began to change.
It didn't explode or shatter or burst into flames. Instead, it seemed to age before my eyes, its surface turning grey and porous as the heat consumed it from within. Cracks appeared, spreading across the stone like the lines on an old man's face, and fine powder began to drift away from its edges. Within seconds the stone had crumbled completely, leaving nothing in my palm but a small pile of ash and a scorch mark on my skin.
I stared at the remains, my heart pounding in my chest.
"That's disintegration," Caelan said quietly. "The slow fire. The patient burn. It's harder to control than combustion because it requires sustained focus rather than a single release, but it's more precise, and it leaves less collateral damage." He took my hand and brushed the ash away, examining the scorch mark with clinical interest. "You'll need to learn to protect yourself from your own heat eventually, but for now the mark will serve as a reminder of what you're capable of."
I looked at the blackened skin on my palm, at the outline of the stone I had just unmade. It didn't hurt, exactly, but it felt strange, as though the flesh there had been transformed into something other than what it had been before.
"The Sovereign Thessa told me about," I said slowly. "Aldric. This is how he killed himself, isn't it? He turned this on his own body and let it consume him."
"Yes." Caelan's voice was flat, stripped of emotion in a way that told me the topic was painful even for him. "Disintegration turned inward is nearly impossible to stop once it begins. The fire feeds on itself, consuming faster as it goes, until there's nothing left to burn." He released my hand and stepped back, his golden eyes meeting mine with an intensity that made it difficult to breathe. "That's why control matters so much, Edrin. Not just to protect others from what you can do, but to protect yourself from the temptation to let the fire have its way."
"Temptation?"
"The power wants to be used. You've felt it already, the way it strains against your control, the way it reaches toward anything it might consume." He turned and walked toward the edge of the meadow, gesturing for me to follow. "For most Sovereigns, that pressure is manageable. Annoying, perhaps, but not overwhelming. But for those whose gifts are purely destructive, whose fire can only burn and never build, the pressure becomes something else. It becomes a voice whispering that everything would be easier if you just let go. If you just stopped fighting. If you just let the fire have what it wants."
I thought about the spark in my chest, about the way it had responded so eagerly when I found the disintegration form. It hadn't felt like pressure, exactly, but there had been something seductive about the focused burn, something that made me want to keep going even after the stone had crumbled to ash.
"Is that what happened to Aldric?" I asked. "He stopped fighting?"
"Aldric fought for five years." Caelan stopped at the meadow's edge and turned to face me, his expression unreadable. "He fought harder than anyone Thessa had ever trained, and for a while it seemed like he might win. But the voice never stopped. It never even quieted. And eventually, on a night when everything else in his life had gone wrong, he decided that the voice was right. That everything would be easier if he just let go."
The morning mist had begun to lift, revealing glimpses of blue sky between the clouds. I stood in the meadow where I had learned to find my spark, where I had shattered ice and killed grass and discovered the shape of my terrible gift, and I thought about what it would mean to carry this fire for the rest of my life.
"How do I make sure that doesn't happen to me?"
Caelan was quiet for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was softer than I had ever heard it.
"You find something worth not burning," he said. "Something that matters more to you than the fire's voice, more than the exhaustion of constant control, more than the seductive promise of letting go. For Aldric, there was nothing. He had lost everyone he loved before his spark even woke, and the training took the rest. By the time Thessa realized how alone he was, it was too late to give him anything worth holding onto."
I thought about Tam, about the grief I carried every moment of every day. I thought about my parents, distant and disappointing but still alive somewhere in a village I might never see again. I thought about Caelan himself, this strange and terrible man who had pulled me from a battlefield and promised to teach me how to survive what I had become.
"And you?" I asked. "What do you hold onto?"
The ghost of a smile crossed his features, there and gone so quickly I might have imagined it.
"That's a conversation for another day," he said. "For now, we have work to do. You've found disintegration, but finding isn't the same as controlling. By the end of this week, I want you to be able to choose between combustion and disintegration deliberately, to switch between them at will, to use each one precisely and intentionally." He walked back toward me, his boots leaving prints in the dew-soaked grass. "We'll start with more stones. Then wood. Then metal. And eventually, when you're ready, we'll talk about what it means to use this gift on something that's alive."
The thought made my stomach clench, but I nodded anyway. This was what I had agreed to when I took his hand on the battlefield. This was the path I had chosen, or the path that had chosen me, and there was no turning back now.
"All right," I said. "Show me what to do."
And Caelan smiled, and the training began in earnest.