On the far side of the vast training grounds, far removed from the raging clamour, the crimson fire that Dex was scattering in every direction, and the sharp crack of burning arrows striking wooden targets, a different kind of training was taking place in absolute silence. It was accompanied by no furious shouting, no military commands; yet for anyone possessing the insight to understand its true nature, it was more terrifying and awe-inspiring than the phoenix fire itself, by a very wide margin.
In an isolated patch draped in thick, cool shadows, Lumia stood face to face with one of the oldest trunks in the forest. It was the trunk of a colossal ironwood oak, fully three metres in diameter, its bark thick and fossilised as the armour of ancient dragons, its roots driving into the depths of the earth like the fingers of a sleeping giant. Lumia carried no weapon. She had assumed no combat stance. She stood perfectly upright, her hands resting loosely at her sides, her eyes shut tight.
The scene around her defied every law of familiar nature. Her long silver hair, which ordinarily cascaded over her shoulders, was floating around her face and head with a slow, breathtaking fluidity, as though she were submerged in the depths of an invisible lake. It was not the wind moving those silver strands; it was a gravity entirely her own, a field of cosmic energy forming slowly around her slender frame, rippling with each beat of her heart.
"Focus, Lumia…" she whispered to herself in a voice barely audible, as though speaking to an entity far older than herself that dwelt in the deepest reaches of her soul. "Remember the ancient laws. Distance is not an absolute truth, it is merely an illusion believed by lesser minds. Space is not a wall; it is a fabric… a sheet laid flat. The tree and I do not stand in two different places. In the cosmic canvas, we occupy the very same point. It is only that the sheet… has not yet been folded."
This philosophy transcended everything taught in the magic academies of humans or Elf. She was trying to summon a forgotten instinct, a power never designed for mortal bodies.
Lumia opened her eyes with agonising slowness. They were no longer as they had been: the irises flared abruptly with a pale, dreadful silver light, a luminance resembling the gleam of dead stars at the farthest edges of ancient galaxies. In that instant, the movement of every air particle around her ceased entirely.
Zzzzt!
There was no thunderous magical detonation, no blinding flash of light, no billowing clouds of thick smoke of the kind that accompany human teleportation spells. Instead, there was a strange sound, soft, yet one that tore the eardrum from within, a sound like a vast piece of thick celestial silk being slowly, deliberately torn. The air around Lumia's body bent; colours distorted; the threads of light surrounding her appeared to fracture as though passing through a flawed glass prism.
And in a fraction of a thousandth of a second, Lumia vanished entirely from before the great tree. She did not move at a speed too swift for the eye to follow. She did not leap high to clear the trunk. She was simply erased from that spatial coordinate. In that same terrifying fraction of a second, with no measurable interval, her silver form materialised directly behind the massive trunk. She had passed through three solid metres without ever passing through them.
But the price exacted from a body not yet prepared to contain this divine power was severe. The moment her existence settled into the new coordinate, Lumia lurched violently, as though struck from behind by an invisible hammer. She lost her balance and fell hard onto her knees in the damp earth. Her breathing became frantic, hysterical, her chest rising and falling forcefully as if she had sprinted a full mile without pause. A thin thread of blood ran from her left nostril, followed by droplets that fell from the corner of her mouth, staining her deathly pale skin. She felt as though thousands of scalding needles had been driven into her brain all at once.
From a distance, watching the scene in its entirety from an elevated position overlooking the whole training ground, stood Okonnor, the dark Elves military commander. He was standing on a wooden hanging balcony carved into the trunk of a neighbouring tree. When he saw what had happened, his face drained of colour until it resembled ash, and his fist seized the balcony's wooden railing with such crushing force that the sturdy timber began to crack and groan beneath his fingers, on the verge of shattering entirely.
"She… she folded the distance," Okonnor whispered, his voice trembling, the words nearly strangling in his throat. His green eyes were wide with a terror mingled with sacred reverence as he stared down at the girl kneeling below.
His adjutant, a young officer who had not yet fully grasped the magnitude of what he had just witnessed, turned to him with a note of mild dismissal in his tone. "Is this simply Instant Teleportation, sir? I mean, high-tier mages from the Empire's Tower do it all the time. Granted, it consumes tremendous mana, but it is hardly impossible."
"No, you blind fool!" Okonnor replied, his voice cutting and sharp, his face wheeling toward his adjutant with a fury that silenced him utterly. "What you just witnessed bears no resemblance whatsoever to the conjuring tricks human mages perform, nor even to the sorcery of the great Elf mages. The Instant Teleportation you speak of is a complex, crude physical process. A human mage deconstructs his material body into mana-particles, then drives those particles through the current of space at tremendous speed, before reassembling and reconstructing his body elsewhere. It is a process that requires time, an open pathway, and can be intercepted or disrupted by countermeasure arrays."
Okonnor turned his gaze back to Lumia and wiped the cold sweat gathering on his brow with the back of his trembling hand. "What this girl did… she did not move at all. She did not deconstruct her body. She literally bent the world itself. Picture the world as a sheet of paper, and she is standing at one end, her destination at the other. She did not walk across the paper, she folded it until both ends touched, making her point of departure and her point of arrival one single coordinate, then released the paper to return as it was. She is manipulating the very fabric of reality itself."
Okonnor fell silent for a moment, swallowing with difficulty as he struggled to process the new strategic situation. "This is a divine ability, a vanished legend mentioned only in the texts of the First War of the Gods. It is the power of Space Folding. Do you understand what this means? If this girl manages to reclaim her full strength and master this ability without it destroying her body in the process… then Dex will have no need for an army of Elf archers to face the Empire. She alone… is an entire army. She could appear inside General Vargas's tent, take his head, and be gone before he could even draw a breath."
Down below, Lumia was paying no attention to watchful eyes or strategic assessments. She raised her trembling hand and wiped the thick blood from her face with the back of her sleeve. Leaning against the rough bark, she rose slowly to her feet, her muscles screaming with exhaustion. A violent dizziness washed over her, nearly stripping her of consciousness; yet beneath that pain, she felt something else, a sweeping exhilaration, a spark of that ancient, formidable power returning to flow once more through her stiffened veins.
Lumia looked down at her small, reddened hands, and saw space itself trembling and rippling visibly around her fingers, like a heat mirage above a scorched desert. Nature itself was afraid of her.
"I am remembering…" Lumia whispered, and a small smile, cold and terrifying, formed on her blood-stained lips. She dismissed the dizziness and the cerebral agony, drew a deep breath, planted her feet firmly in the earth once more, and readied herself to try again. The miracle had only just begun, and she refused to stop until she had reclaimed her stolen throne.