Meanwhile, the other students had also thrown themselves fully into the task, and the stadium filled with a deafening cacophony of sounds and smells. Magic crackled in the air in dozens of different forms.
Kryštof of Valdštejn, breathing heavily, was weaving thick oak branches and roots in front of him. The wood groaned and cracked loudly beneath his hands as his will bent it into unnatural angles, until a robust, menacing-looking warhorse reared up before him. A little further away, Matyáš and Ondřej, fueled by their gaming fantasies, were kneading a massive heap of wet, black earth. They quickly shaped it into something resembling a nightmare from a dark fantasy—a muscular, hunched monstrosity with elongated claws and a maw full of earthen fangs, still dripping with mud. Albrecht of Šternberk, with cold concentration, crushed and reassembled chunks of coarse granite. With the grinding screech of stone against stone, he erected a massive granite warrior. And Beata? She stood amidst a whirlwind of colorful petals, supple vines, and leaves, weaving them with absolute ease into a statue of a giant, unearthly beautiful fairy with sharply cut wings. It was a multicolored, fragrant vessel that stood in absurd contrast to the heavy-duty monsters of the boys.
The hall gradually quieted down as the students completed their forms one by one. Ema looked around. She was one of the last ones left with only a empty, gray floor in front of her.
Ema closed her eyes. It was her turn. What should I start with? Yesterday's anger and defiance terrified her. She would try sorrow. She reached inside herself, into that strange emptiness. She remembered the ritual at the spring yesterday, when she felt her emotions pouring into that shared, massive current. But there was no current here now. There was only her. She tried to grasp that sorrow and push it out, but absolutely nothing happened. The air remained still, the floor didn't even tremble.
"Stay calm, Volná," Šimr's steady voice came from nearby. "Don't force it. It might not happen immediately. Give it time."
Ema exhaled deeply and tried a different approach. She stopped trying to rape the power. Instead, she simply surrendered completely to that consuming feeling of disappointment and loss. And then it came. It was a strange, purely physical sensation. Like holding your breath for a long time and then finally relaxing your muscles. The pressure that had been building inside her suddenly found a way out. It wasn't a complex equation like the one Tomáš used; it was a newly discovered, entirely natural instinct, a biological reflex she hadn't even known she possessed until now. It was absurdly easy.
She reached out her hands. With a massive rumble, water erupted from the concrete floor in front of her. It wasn't an orderly stream; it was a chaotic, wild mass that surged over itself, turbulent and formless. "Water is a good foundation," Šimr noted, watching the geyser closely. "But it won't hold a shape on its own. Now you need to give it structure. Solidify it."
Ema fixed her gaze on the mass of water. Solidify. She could transform the matter, reach for heavy clay, or let it boil away in heat. But the cold came on its own. As a completely random, intuitive response to her internal state. The sorrow inside her was cold. With every breath she took, the air in the hall cooled sharply, aggressively, until vapor began to form at Ema's lips. She traced a wide arc with her hands and slowly began to freeze the surging mass.
With a drawn-out crackling, the water gradually began to harden. Ema pictured the outlines in her mind, and the ice obediently followed her thoughts. A statue began to grow beneath her hands. Only when the crackling ceased did Ema drop her arms to her sides. She hadn't just created a rough block of ice. Standing before her was a life-sized statue of a woman. She was made of transparent, bluish ice, dangerously sharp and exceedingly beautiful. It was the face of an unknown, gorgeous woman, but her features were twisted in endless grief, her hands clasped tightly to her chest in a gesture of utter ruin and surrender.
"That is so cool, Ema!" Beata's excited shout echoed from afar.
Šimr walked over to her slowly and gave the ice woman an appraising look. He inspected the perfect, razor-sharp details on her face and hands. "An unusually dense and precise structure for a first attempt, Volná," he finally evaluated matter-of-factly. "Your resonance is strong. The shape holds firmly." He took a step back and swept his gaze over the entire group. "Excellent," he raised his voice. "Your vessels are ready. Now we move on to the animation. Inserting the source. Vectors can do this from a distance; I recommend Scalars physically touch their golem. Tomáš, you start. Show them."
Tomáš approached his steel knight. He placed his hand on the cold breastplate. Ema felt a slight tremor of power in the space around them. Tomáš pushed into it his love for his family, mixed with the carefully measured anger of a protector and a drop of sorrow from the weight of the responsibility he carried as a Přemyslid. There was a quiet, metallic click. The steel knight raised its head. The eyes in the slits of its helmet glowed blue. Slowly, with perfect grace despite the weight of the heavy metal, it took a step back and bowed deeply to Tomáš. A stunned Wow rippled through the hall.
Šimr moved from student to student. But not everyone was succeeding. Albrecht of Šternberk, creating nearby, had overcomplicated it. His granite warrior suddenly let out a raspy groan. It grabbed its stone head with both hands, and a confused flash of red light erupted from its chest. The golem had gone mad. With a roar, it swung a massive fist at Albrecht. "Get down!" Šimr yelled, swiping his hand, and an invisible shockwave tore through the air, blasting the granite golem to dust before it could attack. "Too much fear mixed with aggression, Albrecht!" the teacher shook his head. "Start over!"
Finally, Šimr reached Ema. He stopped in front of her ice statue and looked intently at the girl. "To love, Ema, is the most fundamental reason our world was ever created and why we all, despite all the pain, keep going every morning. It is the principle of life. Love will give the golem the basic purpose of protecting you. Always start with that."
The teacher clasped his hands behind his back and examined the sharp features of the icy face. "Only then can you add other layers. If you want it to defend you actively and return blows, you mix anger and sorrow with the love. If you require more autonomy and the ability to think analytically in combat, you add defiance. But be careful. Every additional emotion introduces a risk, and you must weigh the ratios meticulously."
Šimr lowered his head slightly toward her, and his voice lost its stern, commanding tone. "But this is your first golem. If you're not ready for that mix yet, it doesn't matter at all. Just stick to pure love. It will only make it a passive shield, but in a moment of danger, it will embrace you like a mother and step into the path of any blow aimed at you without hesitation. And trust me, Volná... sometimes that is absolutely enough. Focus."
Ema approached her ice statue. She raised her hand, her fingers stopping a millimeter from its cold chest, and closed her eyes. Love. She tried to feel for the emotion, but she hit a void. Her past life had been largely erased, covered over by a year spent in a fog numbed by strong antidepressants. When the drugs finally stopped holding her, she woke up to the horrors of her hometown. Viktor, who had then saved her twice and given her a fragile sense of safety, ultimately left her standing alone on the street. And the von Riese family had just played a monstrous game with her.
She tried desperately to skip to the nice fragments she had left. She remembered the quiet certainty of her parents, the warmth of dog fur under her palm, the wind in her hair while riding her skateboard, the laughter with her friends. But every single memory fractured a second after she called it up. As if it were infected. The love immediately collapsed into a deep, constricting sorrow that all of this was irretrievably gone. Dead or lost.
And then the darkest, most consuming memory of all struck her. The woman. She saw the face of that unknown rebel a second before she decided on that irreversible act. The passing of the splinter of power, which was paid for by the absolute end of her existence. The woman had died in front of her so that Ema could live. From this realization arose a raw, searing hatred. Hatred and defiance toward a world that demanded such sacrifices. Toward everything that had allowed this to happen.
She became overwhelmed with emotions. The ratio was absolutely devastating. There was desperately little love, hopelessly drowned in a toxic ocean of grief and untamed resentment. The air around her grew heavy. Most of the advanced students, and especially Šimr, felt the pressure immediately. It was the suffocating, freezing aura of an impending explosion. "Volná! Pull back immediately!" Šimr yelled, lunging toward her.
It was too late. Ema pressed her palm against the ice. There was a horrifying crack that sounded like a gunshot. The transparent statue came to life. Slowly, with terrifying fluidity, it opened its eyes and stared with a deep, empty gaze straight at Ema. Loyalty did not shine in them. A raw, savage frost burned there, and the mask of its face twisted into pure agony. Ema tried to step back, but the surge of that massive, uncontrollable power made her head spin. Her legs gave out beneath her, and with a soft exhale, she crumpled to the concrete, swallowed by the merciful emptiness of unconsciousness before she even hit the ground.
The ice woman stood motionless over her limp body. "Volná! Get up!" Šimr shouted. He knew what an unstable source could do. He stopped mid-stride and, with a lightning-fast gesture of both hands, sent a crushing shockwave toward the ice woman. It was a massive force that would have easily blasted a standard granite golem to dust.
But the ice statue didn't even raise an arm to defend itself. It just slowly turned its head toward the incoming wave. Its cold, tortured gaze met the kinetic energy. With a hollow thud, the wave simply dissipated into the air a meter in front of it, erased from existence by the mere intervention of a foreign will. The hall froze in pure shock. Nobody breathed.
The first to break that paralyzing terror was one of the students from the next row. Driven by reflex and pure courage, he stepped forward. Beside him stumped his own golem—a stocky, intricately detailed dwarf in plate armor. The student, with the dwarf at his side, slowly began to walk toward the fallen Ema, ready to pick her up and get her out of the reach of that abnormal icy horror.
The ice woman reacted with terrifying, unnatural dynamism. She raised her transparent arm high above her head and brought it down in a vicious, sweeping arc. A massive, pressurized wave of water erupted from her open palm. It looked as if a piece of the ocean had risen right in the middle of the Department and crashed down upon the student with a roaring bellow. In the moment of maximum pressure, right before impact, the statue imprinted absolute frost into the mass. The flash-freezing transformed the falling wave into a gigantic wall of ice spears, as hard and heavy as steel.
The dwarf reacted first. Without hesitation, it jumped in front of its creator, setting its robust body directly against the deadly barricade. The impact was crushing. With a grating screech, the steel golem shattered to pieces, taking a portion of the flying spikes with it, but the rest of the ice wall passed right through.