---
On the first day Markus handed him a wooden sword.
Aren looked at it. Looked at Markus.
"I thought you said you couldn't teach me magic."
"I can't." Markus nodded toward the training yard where a row of guards stood waiting, wooden blades in hand, expressions carefully neutral. "I can teach you everything else."
Aren picked up the sword.
What followed was not a lesson. It was an examination — Markus standing at the yard's edge, arms crossed, pipe unlit, watching with the focused stillness of a man cataloguing information. Aren moved through the guards one after another, losing early, adapting fast, losing differently each time until he stopped losing. By midday the guards were rotating in shifts. By evening three of them had asked quietly if they could be reassigned.
Markus said nothing throughout. He simply watched.
---
The second examination was quieter.
He had Aren sit cross-legged in the courtyard at dawn, back straight, eyes closed. Then Markus stood behind him, placed one hand very carefully between his shoulder blades, closed his own eyes, and looked inward with the trained perception of a Sword Saint who had spent twenty years learning to read the energy inside living things.
He expected a mana core. The boy was clearly a mage — three elements on the night they met, a fourth possibly developing.
He found the mana core.
And behind it, sitting in the same body like a second sun sharing the same sky, an aura core.
Markus opened his eyes.
He stood very still for a long moment.
In the whole of the continent — not the empire, the continent — there was no recorded case of a person carrying both. A mana core made a mage. An aura core made a warrior.Without mana core one cannot cast spell or do magic regardless how genius they are so a genius without a mana core become alchemist and if a person dont have aura core he could still wield sword but growth-limited without it but capable of the blade path. Together they were considered a physical impossibility, two systems of power that the human body simply could not contain simultaneously without destroying itself.
Aren was sitting in the morning light looking faintly bored.
Markus stepped back. Said nothing. Made a note in the part of his mind where he kept things that needed careful thought before being spoken aloud.
---
The weeks passed and the world kept showing him things he had not asked to see.
One day aren was standing near the fountain in the east courtyard, distracted, irritated about something — Markus had made him practice bowing for three hours and the boy's opinion of bowing was well established. He flung one hand out in a vague gesture of frustration and slowy the water in the fountain rose.Not all of it. A small column hanging in the air for two full seconds before he noticed and he gestured back but water froze into ice then crashed.
He stared at it.
Markus, watching from the upper window, wrote something down.
---
A thunderstorm was blwoing three weeks in. Aren was standing at the window watching it with the flat, patient attention he gave everything. A single bolt hit the iron weather vane on the stable roof and he turned his head toward it instinctively and lightning answered — a small thing, a thread of it, curling around his fingertip like it had come home.
He looked at his hand for a long time.
---
Durinv a training duel in the lower yard. One of the senior guards was pressing him hard, Aren was being pushed back, back foot losing ground on the dirt — and then the ground stopped cooperating with the guard. Not dramatically. Just a slight resistance underfoot, a small rise at exactly the wrong moment. Aren didn't notice he'd done it. The guard noticed. He said nothing because he was not entirely sure what had happened and was not sure he wanted to know.
Markus wrote something else down.
---
Anger was the most obvious trigger.
Aren angry — which was not rare, he was fourteen and had watched his village burn and was currently being taught which fork to use at formal dinners — meant heat. Not fire, not yet, but warmth radiating outward from him in slow waves. Candles in the room burned higher. The temperature climbed several degrees. Once, during a particularly grim etiquette lesson, a curtain near him began to smoke gently at the hem.
Markus poured himself a drink and moved the curtain.
---
Two things came without triggers at all.
One afternoon his shadow disappeared entirely for six minutes. Not his body — he was standing in full sunlight, present and solid. Just the shadow. Gone. Aren did not notice until a maid walked past, looked down, made a small sound, and left very quickly.
One night Markus passed his room and saw light under the door — not candlelight, not the warm orange of flame, but cool silver, steady and sourceless. He opened the door quietly. Aren was asleep. His silver hair was glowing.
Markus stood in the doorway for a long time.
Then he closed the door and went to his study and sat alone for the better part of an hour with an unlit pipe and a very full glass and the specific expression of a man doing difficult arithmetic in his head.
He had read the old texts. Everyone in his position had read the old texts, the ones kept in locked libraries and referenced in hushed academic voices. The Prophecy of the Unbound. Written before the empire. Before the kingdoms. Before most of the gods had chosen their thrones.
One will come carrying all fires. No single path will hold them. To gods an error. To empires a reckoning. When sighted, execute without pause.
Seven elements in three months. Accidental. Untrained. At fourteen.
Both cores. Unheard of.
Markus drank his drink.
---
On the last morning before Selvinina he called Aren into the study.
Aren stood across the desk — taller than three months ago, shoulders broader, posture carrying something new that was not arrogance but was not far from it. The noble manners sat on him strangely, like a fine coat on someone who had been built for armour.
"You're ready enough," Markus said. "For the performance. For the role."
Aren waited.
"What I am about to tell you is not a suggestion." Markus's voice was quiet and absolutely serious — none of the morning warmth, none of the comfortable humour. This was the other Markus. The Sword Saint. "At Selvinina they will test you. They will measure you. They will watch you in every class, every duel, every meal." He leaned forward. "Do not reveal the mana core."
Aren frowned slightly. "I'm a mage. They'll see—"
"They will see an aura knight in training. Nothing more." Markus held his gaze. "You have more raw talent in the blade path than anyone I have tested in twenty years. Use that. Let them believe that is all you are. If you use magic — and you may, Selvinina trains both — use it to strengthen your sword. Quietly. Internally. Never openly. Never in a way that makes them ask questions about what you are."
"Why?"
The single word. Flat. Direct.
Markus was quiet for a moment.
"Because there are people in that empire — in that academy — who know what to look for. And if they find it in you, they will not send a report. They will not hold a trial." He picked up his pipe. Did not light it. "They will simply ensure you do not leave the building."
The room was very still.
Aren looked at him with those cold blue eyes for a long moment.
"Both cores," he said quietly. "You found both."
Markus said nothing. Which was itself an answer.
Aren nodded once. Slowly. As if filing the information somewhere it would not be forgotten.
"Hidden," he said. "Understood."
He turned to leave.
"Aren Vex."
He stopped.
"You are not ready for what you are yet," Markus said. "And that is not an insult. No one would be ready for what you are yet." He finally lit the pipe. "But you will be. Go learn everything they know."he paused then a small grin in his face" and use it to to cut there own throat."
Aren walked out.
Outside the window the road to Selvinina stretched south, pale and long in the early morning light.
---
— End of Chapter 4 —
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What comes next?