Alatar returned to the chamber the following dawn. The doors closed behind him with their familiar, grinding weight, sealing the silence once more. For a long while, he simply sat in the center of the cold stone floor, hands folded on his knees, the hush of the sanctum pressing into his ears.
The ash rose at his call. They swirled slowly around him, drifting like fine dust, quiet as falling snow. He watched them with steady eyes.
The first attempt came that day.
Alatar extended his will, not in command, but in offering. He tried to impress something of himself upon the ash—an intent, a sliver of identity, a quiet suggestion that they were not simply ash, but his ash, bound to him in more than shape.
They resisted. Not violently, not rebelliously, but with a kind of indifference. They remained ash, floating, neither more nor less than before. The attempt ended in failure.
Alatar's jaw tightened, but no frustration spilled out. He sat with the ash drifting, turning the moment over in his thoughts. Perhaps too forceful. Perhaps too shallow. Or perhaps it is not that they reject me, but that I have not yet given them reason to become more than they are.
He released them back into silence.
---
The First Decade: Force Meets Emptiness
The years that followed blurred into cycles of effort and stillness. Alatar tried to press harder, to bind the ash with his intent. He shaped them into forms—blades, walls, threads so fine they could cut stone—but whenever he sought to lace them with meaning beyond shape, they dissolved, falling back into formless drift.
At times, the chamber filled with ashstorms, spirals of dust and smoke as he poured raw force into them. But always, when his focus faltered, the storm settled into silence, leaving him alone with failure.
By the tenth year, he understood: force could not root will. The ash would obey, yes. But obedience was not the same as expression.
Sitting in the silence, he whispered into the dark: "They are not hollow. It is I who am shallow."
---
The Second Decade: Listening
So he changed.
For twenty years, Alatar no longer imposed. He watched. He summoned the ash, but gave them no form. He let them drift, tracing their natural flow. He studied the way they thickened in corners of the room, how they seemed to hum faintly in clusters when his mind calmed, how they reacted subtly to his breath, his heartbeat, the cadence of his thought.
And slowly, he began to hear them. Not in words, not in voices, but in currents. He discovered that they responded not to command, but to resonance—when his thought was still, their drift became smoother; when his emotions stirred, their movement grew restless.
By the twentieth year, Alatar realized something that startled him: the ash were already reflecting him. Always had been. He had simply never cared to notice.
---
The Third Decade: First Sparks of Will
With this realization, he began again.
Instead of pressing his will like a weight, he tried to offer it like a breath. He pictured calm, and the ash slowed. He envisioned sharpness, and they narrowed into fine threads. The changes were subtle, fragile—at the slightest distraction, they unraveled—but they were real.
The failures came daily. The ash would fall apart, refusing coherence, drifting into nothingness. But now each failure left a trace of progress. Each attempt lasted a little longer, held a little firmer.
At the thirtieth year, he achieved his first true success: a single wisp of ash that carried more than shape. It held focus—not because he commanded it to remain, but because it chose to reflect his clarity. It drifted in the air for minutes before dissolving.
Alatar wept when it fell apart. Not from sorrow, but from the weight of proof.
---
The Fourth and Fifth Decades: Collapse and Renewal
With success came ambition.
Alatar sought to extend the will into many wisps at once, to have them move as an orchestra rather than a lone voice. He pressed too fast, too soon. For decades he battled with collapsing forms, each attempt unraveling into formless ash.
At times, the failures stung. He would sit in silence, the chamber littered with settling dust, wondering if he was merely chasing illusions.
But Barachas's voice, memory of their last meeting, echoed in him: Temper. Let your idea rest until it no longer trembles.
So he slowed again. One wisp, then two. Then three. By the fiftieth year, he could hold dozens—fragile, yes, but carrying echoes of his will.
---
The Sixth and Seventh Decades: Toward Shape
Alatar deepened the bond.
Now he began shaping the will-imbued ash into forms—not blades or walls, but subtler constructs. Loops that held together without breaking. Threads that wove themselves into braids. Small, imperfect spheres that drifted like stars in orbit.
Failures were countless. Sometimes the forms collapsed immediately, sometimes they unraveled after days. Each time, Alatar traced back the reason—was his focus fractured? Was his intent unclear? Did he force rather than offer?
By the seventieth year, the chamber was alive with fleeting forms. They would not yet endure, but they existed. Alatar felt himself drawing closer, step by deliberate step.
---
The Eighth and Ninth Decades: Refinement
Patience was no longer foreign to him. Where once failure brought tension, now it was simply part of rhythm.
For twenty years, Alatar refined his control. He experimented with pacing—slowly layering will into the ash like dye into water, instead of pouring it in all at once. He tested the balance of silence and expression, learning when to let them drift and when to draw them close.
He began to feel the ash as part of his body, not just a tool. His thoughts flowed into them as naturally as breath into lungs.
By the ninetieth year, he had achieved stability. Small constructs could hold for weeks before dissolving. The chamber was no longer bare—it shimmered with drifting shapes, constellations of ash born of his will.
---
The Tenth Decade: Grasping the Concept
The final decade was less about expansion and more about understanding.
Alatar no longer chased new shapes. He watched the existing ones. He studied how they held together, how they shifted with the rhythm of his thoughts. He learned that each form carried not just his will but his state of being. Calm produced clarity; turmoil produced collapse.
And then—one hundred years after his first attempt—Alatar sat in the center of the chamber, ash drifting around him like a galaxy, and realized:
I have done it. Not mastery. Not perfection. But grasp. I understand the principle. The ash are not commanded, they are joined. They are not tools, they are extensions. They do not obey, they resonate.
He opened his eyes, and for the first time in a century, he smiled.
---
The chamber was filled with quiet, drifting shapes—spirals, threads, spheres—none of them perfect, but all of them alive with a faint pulse of his will. They were his failures, his patience, his persistence, his century of silence and struggle.
A hundred years had gone by, and Alatar had not wasted them.
He stood slowly, the ash following in quiet orbit. His body was older now, his face marked by years, but his presence had deepened into something vast, steady, unshaken.
He placed a hand on the chamber wall.
It is time to show Barachas.
And with that, he walked once more toward the doors.