If fire remade him from the outside in with heat and force, water found him where fire could not: the deep, repeating rhythms in the center of his being. Where flame was dramatic and thunder impulsive, water was patience incarnate.
At first the flow was merely a cooling—a relief from the inferno's residue—but soon it proved more. It threaded through his rebuilt tissues, filling microfractures the flame had left and lubricating joints that had stiffened through age and battle. The water element's gift was a kind of mercy: flexibility in a universe that often demanded rigidity.
RC recorded the changes with a new reverence. "Hydrodynamic integration detected. Neural conductivity stabilized. Emotional regulation signals improving."
Krish snorted at being measured like an instrument, but the numbers did not lie. The water carried more than physiology; it carried clarity. Old resentments that had been fossilized in him loosened. Memory lost their jagged edges. It was as if river stones had smoothed the rough corners of his mind.
He experimented with the flow—shaping a small current through his fingertips, then letting the same current slide along a filament of thunder to cool its tip. Water did not oppose fire; it moderated it. It could corral flame into precise lines. It could temper the heat enough that thunder struck without shredding the rope of his psyche.
Plant life that later would emerge in him had its seed in water's embrace. Water fed a tremor of green within his marrow, and the sense that life could renew itself repeatedly no longer felt like a fanciful myth. It was procedural and tactile: water healed, and the promise of regeneration came with it.
In the void, Krish made exercises that would seem absurd to those who had never felt elemental resonance. He traced currents around imaginary stones, made micro whirlpools that braided with miniature blazes, practiced the odd harmony of steam and frost. Still, each experiment knit his elements together more tightly.
Silvia observed with her ancient calm. "Water grants not only survival, but continuity," she said. "Where fire reshapes a life, water preserves the new form."
Krish closed his eyes and listened to the flow. The rhythm soothed something ancient in him that had never had time to mourn. He allowed himself to sink into the tide and be carried, even for a moment. The void's silence folded into the sound of distant oceans, and he let that sound remind him that he could endure long journeys without losing himself.
His training with water, more than any previous element, taught him patience. If the path to mastery was a river, then impatience was simply a shallow current that offered no depth. He welcomed depth.
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