Chapter Eight: The Language of Bruises
He trained with the void the way a man handles a venomous snake. Carefully. In private. With one eye on the exit.
The first night after the clearing, he crouched behind the barn and reached for a cluster of weeds growing through a crack in the foundation. The cold place stirred. One thought. One pull. Three weeds crumbled to grey powder in under a second.
The warmth that flowed into him lasted moments, a brief flush of stolen vitality that the knot behind his sternum swallowed without gratitude.
Three weeds. Congratulations. The garden is terrified.
The second night, he found a dead rabbit on the forest floor. Something had killed it hours ago. He reached for it with the void on instinct. Nothing happened. The pull found no purchase. No warmth to draw. No life to steal.
Good. It only works on living things. That's horrifying, but at least it has rules. Rules I can learn.
The third night, he stood beside the old willow at the creek bend. Its massive trunk pulsed with dense green Aether in his new sight. Nox threaded through its roots in thin violet veins, and the two energies moved in parallel, never mixing. The tree was ancient. Fat with stored power.
He reached.
One thread of green separated from the trunk and drifted toward his open palm. Sweet warmth filled his hand. The pull deepened, and a second thread began to peel away.
He shut it down. Clamped the void closed with a mental grip that made his teeth ache.
The willow swayed. Two leaves on its lowest branch had gone yellow at the edges.
Two leaves. From a tree this size, that's nothing. A scratch. But I felt the pull accelerate. It wanted more. And the wanting was not mine.
He sat with that truth until the cold made him shiver.
The void has appetite. My job is to hold the leash. If I let go, it feeds until there's nothing left. Including, presumably, me.
Training with Burrel shifted in texture after the clearing. The void did not make Zack stronger. His muscles carried the same limited force. His bones held no Aether reinforcement. But his perception had sharpened beyond anything Burrel's teaching could explain.
He saw the heat patterns in the Chief's body change before a strike. Blood moved to the shoulder, the hip, the planted foot. A fraction of a second before the blow launched, Zack's new sight read the intention.
He dodged three consecutive strikes on the fourth morning. Clean dodges. No stumbling.
Burrel stopped. His practice knife lowered an inch. His dark eyes narrowed.
"Something changed."
"I've been practicing."
"Practice makes you better. This is different. You're reading me before I commit."
Because I can see your blood move. Because the void gave me predator's eyes in exchange for the ability to accidentally kill houseplants. Fair trade.
"You said to see the shape of mistakes."
"I said that. This is not what I meant." Burrel circled him. Slow. Assessing. "Your eyes track differently now. You see things that aren't in the movement."
Careful. He's sharp. Sharper than anyone in this village. If he figures out what happened in the clearing, the sixty-day clock becomes a zero-day clock.
"I'm motivated."
Burrel held his stare for four full seconds. Then he attacked.
The next session was brutal. Burrel abandoned his teaching patterns and fought to hurt. Strikes came from angles that defied his body's natural mechanics. Combinations that broke every rule he'd taught over the past weeks. He was testing. Probing the edges of Zack's new ability.
Zack took hits. Plenty of them. His forearms bloomed purple. His left ear rang from a palm strike he didn't see coming. But he caught eleven out of twenty attacks that should have landed clean, and the look on Burrel's face confirmed what both of them knew.
Something had changed. Burrel chose not to ask again.
He knows I'm hiding something. He's decided to let me keep the secret. For now. That "for now" sits between us like a loaded crossbow on a shelf.
Mira was less diplomatic.
She cornered him at the water pump three days before the trial. Her sleeves were rolled past her wrapped wrists, and her face carried the specific expression of a younger sister who had discovered a locked door and intended to kick it open.
"You're sleeping less."
"I sleep fine."
"You left the house at midnight four nights in a row. The floor creaks. I'm not deaf."
The floor. The stupid, ancient, gossiping floor.
"Walks help me think."
"Walks." She pumped the handle. Water splashed into the bucket. "You come back from your walks with dirt on your knees and leaves in your hair and you smell like copper and wet stone. That's not walking. That's crawling through the woods on your hands and knees doing something you don't want anyone to see."
She's too smart. She's always been too smart. If she weren't my sister, I'd be terrified of her. I am terrified of her.
"Mira."
"What?"
He looked at her. The void pulsed cold in his chest. Through his new sight, the Aether ran through her body in thin streams, feeding her muscles, reinforcing her joints. Her wrapped wrists glowed with strained, overworked channels. She'd been pushing herself again. Hauling double loads. Working for two because one of them couldn't contribute.
I could drain her. Right now. One careless thought and that thin stream of Aether flowing through her bones would come to me instead. She wouldn't even understand what was happening until her knees buckled.
The thought made his stomach clench.
"Trust me. Please."
Her jaw worked. She wanted to push. He could see the argument building behind her eyes, the logical assault forming in perfect order. Then something in his face stopped her.
"Fine." She grabbed the bucket. "But if you die doing whatever this is, I'll find a Soul Path necromancer and bring you back so I can kill you myself."
That is the most loving threat anyone has ever made.
The days thinned. Two before the trial. Then one. The village sharpened around the approaching date. Conversations at the well carried a new undercurrent. Zack caught fragments. "Kael will end it fast." "The Husk boy has been training with the Chief." "Waste of time. Body Path medium-high against nothing."
Nobody spoke to him about it directly. They spoke around him, the same way Aether flowed around him. A space in the current where a person should be.
Let them talk. Let them calculate the odds. None of them know what I found in the clearing, and if I do this right, none of them ever will.
That evening, his mother caught him at the door.
She'd been mending by the hearth. The needle rested in her lap. The thread hung slack. She'd been waiting, not sewing. The mending was a prop.
Her hands rose. Rough from decades of garden soil and needlework. Calloused at the fingertips. Strong in the way that had nothing to do with Aether and everything to do with the kind of woman who raised two children on a blighted farm and refused to let either of them see her flinch.
She took his face in her palms. Held it. Her eyes searched his the way they had when he was small and came home with skinned knees, looking for the wound beneath the wound.
"You walk out there as yourself. Not as the crystal's verdict." Her voice was steady. Her hands were not. "As my son. The one who keeps hitting the tree until the tree remembers him."
Don't. Don't do this to me. I have spent three weeks building walls inside my chest, and you are dismantling them with your hands on my face and your voice in my ears, and if you keep going I will crack apart right here in this kitchen.
His throat closed. He swallowed against it.
"I'll come back."
"You will." Not a question. An instruction. The same tone she used when telling Mira to wrap her wrists or his father to eat before fieldwork. A fact delivered to the universe with the expectation that the universe would comply.
She released his face. Patted his cheek once. Turned back to the hearth.
The woman who can't reinforce a blade or throw a ward or read an Aether current just armed me better than Burrel and the void combined.
He climbed the ladder to the loft. Lay down. Stared at the ceiling beams he'd memorized over fourteen years.
Her hands were still warm on his face. The void was still cold behind his sternum.
Between those two truths, he carried everything he needed for tomorrow.