Tristan Aelindor blazed. Lucian Moon waited. The difference between them was the difference between a bonfire and a fault line: one of them was impressive and the other one was about to rearrange the landscape.
The instructors adjusted approaches. Modified exercises. Consulted texts. Lucian's power acknowledged every attempt and declined every one with the polite, absolute refusal of a thing that had its own timeline and was on it.
The frustration was silent. Lucian didn't complain. Complaining was a luxury he'd never permitted himself, because complaining required admitting that the failing bothered him and admitting the failing bothered him required vulnerability and vulnerability was something he rationed with the care of a man managing a finite resource in hostile territory.
But it bothered him.
