The weeks that followed were the hardest of my life.
Caelan had not been exaggerating when he said that learning to choose between combustion and disintegration would be difficult. The two forms of my gift felt nearly identical when I reached for them, like trying to distinguish between two shades of the same color in dim light. My early attempts produced results that were neither one thing nor the other. Stones would begin to crumble and then explode halfway through the process, scattering ash and shrapnel in equal measure. Wood would catch fire when I wanted it to disintegrate, or smolder uselessly when I reached for combustion. The meadow became a graveyard of my failures, littered with half-burned logs and piles of powder that had once been boulders.
"You're still thinking about it wrong," Caelan said after watching me produce yet another hybrid disaster, a stone that had cracked and smoked and done nothing useful at all. "You're trying to choose the outcome before you shape the fire. That's backwards."
I wiped sweat from my forehead and tried not to let my frustration show. "Then how should I be thinking about it?"
"Stop thinking entirely. Feel instead." He walked to where I stood and placed a hand on my chest, just over my heart. "Close your eyes. Find your spark. But don't reach for it yet, just observe it."
I closed my eyes and turned my attention inward. The spark was there as always, a warmth pulsing beneath my sternum, familiar now after weeks of daily practice. I let myself be aware of it without trying to draw on it, simply watching the way it moved and shifted inside me.
"What does it feel like right now?" Caelan asked.
"Warm. Steady. Like a heartbeat, but not quite in time with my actual heart."
"Good. Now pay closer attention. The spark isn't uniform, it has texture, variation. Can you feel the difference between one part of it and another?"
I focused harder, pushing past my surface awareness into something deeper. At first the spark seemed homogeneous, a single mass of warmth without distinguishing features. But as I held my attention on it, I began to notice what Caelan was describing. There were currents within the warmth, subtle movements that shifted in different directions. Some parts of the spark felt denser than others, more concentrated, while other parts seemed to want to expand outward.
"I think so," I said slowly. "There's... it's like there are two different movements happening at once. One pushing out and one pulling in."
"That's it." Caelan's voice carried a note of approval I hadn't heard before. "Those two movements are combustion and disintegration. They're not separate powers, they're different expressions of the same fire. Combustion is the spark expanding, releasing its energy outward all at once. Disintegration is the spark contracting, focusing its energy inward until matter can't hold itself together."
I held onto the awareness, trying to distinguish more clearly between the two currents. The outward movement was easier to feel, more obvious, like the difference between a clenched fist and an open hand. The inward movement was subtler, a slow pull toward the center that I might have missed entirely if I hadn't been looking for it.
"When you want combustion, you encourage the outward current and suppress the inward one. When you want disintegration, you do the opposite." Caelan removed his hand from my chest. "Try it now. Don't think about anger or sorrow or any emotional state. Just feel the currents and choose which one to follow."
I opened my eyes and looked at the stone he had placed on the ground in front of me. It was about the size of my fist, grey and unremarkable, one of dozens he had gathered for my training. I reached for my spark and tried to do what he had described, focusing on the inward current while letting the outward one fade.
The sensation was strange, like flexing a muscle I hadn't known I possessed. The spark responded to my attention, and I felt the inward pull strengthen while the outward push diminished. The warmth in my chest changed quality, becoming denser and more focused, and when I directed it toward the stone I could feel the difference immediately.
The stone didn't explode. It didn't crack or smoke or do any of the half-formed things my previous attempts had produced. Instead, it began to grey and crumble exactly as the first stone had when Thessa was watching, the bonds that held it together failing piece by piece until nothing remained but ash.
"Better," Caelan said. "Now do it again, but faster."
I did it again. And again. Each time, I focused on feeling the currents within my spark rather than trying to think my way to the right outcome. The process became easier with repetition, the distinction between the two movements growing clearer as I practiced identifying them. By the end of the session, I could switch between combustion and disintegration almost as quickly as I could recognize which one I wanted.
"This is the foundation," Caelan said as we walked back to the house. "Everything else builds on this awareness. Once you can reliably feel the shape of your power, you can start learning to refine it, to control the intensity and the focus and the duration. But none of that matters if you can't tell the difference between what you're holding."
"Why did you have me use emotions at the beginning, then?"
"Because you didn't know how to feel your spark at all. Emotions were a shortcut, a way to push you toward one current or the other without requiring you to perceive the difference directly." He glanced at me, something like respect in his golden eyes. "Most students take months to move past that stage. You've done it in weeks. Either you have unusual sensitivity to your own magic, or you're more stubborn than I gave you credit for."
I wasn't sure which option I preferred, but I accepted the compliment for what it was.
The days that followed were still exhausting, but the exhaustion had a different quality now. Instead of cycling through emotions that left me raw and unstable, I was learning to perceive and manipulate something that existed entirely within my own body. It was difficult in the way that learning any new skill was difficult, requiring concentration and repetition and a willingness to fail, but it didn't tear me apart the way the emotional approach had.
Caelan introduced new exercises designed to refine my awareness. He had me hold both currents in balance, feeling the tension between them without letting either one dominate. He had me shift from one to the other as quickly as possible, then as slowly as possible, learning to control the transition. He had me extend my perception beyond the spark itself, feeling the way my power interacted with the objects I was trying to affect.
"Matter has its own resistance," he explained during one of these sessions. "Even dead matter wants to remain what it is, and your fire has to overcome that resistance to produce any effect. Living matter resists more strongly because it has will behind it, the drive to survive that exists in every creature. But the principle is the same. You're not just projecting power outward, you're engaging in a contest between your fire and the target's integrity."
I practiced on stones and wood and metal, learning to feel the different textures of their resistance. Stone was solid and unyielding, requiring sustained pressure to overcome. Wood was fibrous and complex, with grain patterns that channeled my fire in unexpected directions. Metal was dense and conductive, sometimes carrying my power further than I intended and other times reflecting it back at me.
"You're developing what we call magical proprioception," Caelan told me after a particularly successful session in which I had disintegrated a iron bar with precise control, leaving behind only a thin layer of rust-colored powder. "The ability to sense where your power is and what it's doing without having to think about it consciously. It's like learning to walk: at first you have to concentrate on every movement, but eventually your body knows what to do and your mind can focus on other things."
"How long until I reach that point?"
"For basic control? A few more months, probably. For true mastery?" He shrugged. "Years. Maybe decades. I've been practicing for longer than you've been alive, and I'm still learning new things about my gift."
The timeline should have been discouraging, but I found it oddly comforting. If mastery took decades, then I didn't need to be perfect now. I just needed to be good enough to survive whatever came next.
By the end of my fourth week of training, Caelan declared that I was ready to move on to living targets.
I had known this was coming. He had mentioned it before, and the logic was obvious: if I couldn't use my gift on something alive, I would never be able to use it when it truly mattered. But knowing something intellectually and facing it in reality were different things, and I spent the night before that session staring at the ceiling and wondering if I would be able to go through with it.
The morning was cold and clear, the kind of crisp autumn day that would have been beautiful under other circumstances. Caelan led me to the meadow as usual and set a small wooden cage on the flat stone at its center. Inside the cage was a mouse, grey-furred and bright-eyed, its whiskers twitching as it explored its confined space.
"Living things resist differently than dead matter," Caelan said, standing beside me as I stared at the mouse. "It's not just a matter of intensity. There's a quality to the resistance, a sense of something pushing back against you that has intention behind it. The creature doesn't understand what you're doing, but some part of it recognizes the threat and fights against it."
I reached for my spark and found the inward current, the disintegration form that had become familiar over weeks of practice. Then I extended my awareness toward the mouse, trying to feel the connection between my fire and its small living body.
The resistance was immediate and unmistakable. Where stone had been solid and wood had been complex and metal had been dense, the mouse was something else entirely. There was a vitality to it, a sense of presence that I hadn't encountered in any dead material. My fire touched that presence and was pushed back, not strongly, but persistently, like water flowing around a stone in a stream.
"Don't force it," Caelan said. "Feel the resistance first. Understand what you're working against before you try to overcome it."
I held the connection without pushing, simply observing the way the mouse's life force interacted with my power. It wasn't consciousness exactly, the mouse certainly wasn't aware of what I was doing on any level it could understand, but there was something there that responded to my fire as a threat. A survival instinct, perhaps, or simply the basic drive of living matter to continue living.
"Now push," Caelan said. "Gently at first. See how much pressure you need to overcome the resistance."
I pushed. The mouse's vitality bent under my fire like grass in a wind, yielding slightly but not breaking. I pushed harder, and felt the resistance increase to match, the creature's life force somehow strengthening in response to the greater threat. It was like trying to compress a spring, the harder I pressed, the harder it pressed back.
"Living things adapt," Caelan observed. "They respond to pressure by becoming more resistant. You can overcome that by pushing harder, but it's inefficient and exhausting. Better to find the frequency of resistance and work around it rather than through it."
"How do I do that?"
"Feel for the gaps. The resistance isn't uniform, it has rhythms and patterns, moments when it's stronger and moments when it's weaker. Time your pressure to the weak moments, and the whole thing becomes much easier."
I focused on the connection, trying to perceive what he was describing. At first the resistance felt constant, but as I held my attention on it, I began to notice variations. The mouse's heartbeat created tiny fluctuations, moments when its life force pulsed stronger and moments when it ebbed. Its breathing created larger waves, inhales that concentrated its vitality and exhales that dispersed it.
I waited for an exhale, felt the resistance weaken slightly, and pushed.
The mouse went grey. Its fur lost its luster and its eyes went dull, and the vibrant presence I had been feeling collapsed inward on itself. The resistance vanished so suddenly that I almost lost my balance, my fire rushing into the void where life had been and finding nothing to push against. The mouse crumbled, its body falling apart into ash and fine powder, and within seconds there was nothing left in the cage but a small grey pile.
I released the connection and stood in silence, staring at what remained.
"Good," Caelan said quietly. "How do you feel?"
I considered the question carefully. The mouse was dead, unmade by my power, reduced to nothing but ash. I should feel something about that. Horror, perhaps, or guilt, or at least discomfort. And there was discomfort, a low awareness that I had ended a life, but it was muted, manageable, nowhere near as overwhelming as I had feared.
"Tired," I said finally. "And... I don't know. It's strange. I thought it would be harder."
"It will be harder with larger creatures. Mice don't have much resistance to overcome, and their lives are small enough that ending them doesn't require much from you." Caelan removed the cage from the stone and set down another one, this one containing a second mouse. "But you've taken the first step. The rest is refinement."
We spent the remainder of the morning on mice. Some I destroyed with disintegration, reducing them to ash in seconds. Others I destroyed with combustion, learning to feel the outward current of my spark and direct it at living flesh. The combustion was messier, the mice bursting rather than crumbling, leaving behind scorched remains that smelled of burned meat. Both methods became easier with practice, the resistance less daunting as I learned to feel for its rhythms and work around them.
By the end of the session, I had killed perhaps two dozen mice, and the act had become almost routine.
"Tomorrow we move to larger animals," Caelan said as we walked back to the house. "Rabbits, probably, then birds. The resistance scales with the complexity of the creature, so you'll need to adjust your approach as we progress."
I nodded, too tired to speak. The work had drained me in ways that went beyond physical exhaustion, but it wasn't the emotional devastation I had expected. The deaths were real, and I carried them, but they didn't crush me. Perhaps that was the distance Caelan had warned me about, the necessary separation that allowed someone to do terrible things without being destroyed by them. Or perhaps it was simply that mice were small, their lives brief and unremarkable, and ending them felt less like murder than like extinguishing candles.
I wondered how I would feel when the targets were larger, more complex, more obviously alive. I wondered how I would feel when the targets were human.
But those questions were for another day. For now, I had learned to kill with my gift, and that was enough.
The progression was faster than I expected.
Rabbits took three days to master, their resistance stronger than the mice but still manageable once I learned to feel the rhythms of their larger hearts. Birds were harder, their vitality quick and fluttering, difficult to pin down long enough to overcome. Caelan brought me a hawk on the fifth day, a fierce-eyed predator that fought my fire with a ferocity none of the smaller creatures had possessed, and reducing it to ash took everything I had.
"Predators resist more strongly than prey," he explained afterward. "Their will to survive is sharper, more focused. The same will be true of humans, when you reach that point. Soldiers and warriors will fight your fire harder than farmers and merchants, and someone trained in magic will resist harder still."
"How do you overcome that?"
"Power, mostly. Enough fire can overcome any resistance, if you're willing to pay the cost." He paused, considering. "But there are other methods. Surprise helps, the resistance takes a moment to engage, so if you can catch your target unaware, you can be halfway through the process before they start fighting back. Distraction helps too, splitting their attention weakens their ability to resist. And there are certain vulnerabilities that all living things share, points where the resistance is naturally weaker."
"What kind of vulnerabilities?"
"The connection between mind and body is the most common. If you can target that connection specifically, rather than the whole organism, you can kill much more efficiently." He demonstrated on a rat he had brought for the purpose, his power sliding past the creature's resistance like water finding the path of least resistance through rock. The rat simply stopped, its life ending so cleanly that it didn't even twitch. "That's what I do on battlefields. I don't destroy bodies, I sever the threads that hold them together. It's faster, cleaner, and costs far less than trying to unmake flesh directly."
I spent the next several days learning to perceive those threads, the invisible connections that made a living thing more than the sum of its parts. It was delicate work, requiring a precision I hadn't developed yet, and my early attempts were clumsy at best. But slowly I began to feel what Caelan was describing, the subtle architecture that held life in place and the weak points where that architecture could be compromised.
"You're progressing faster than anyone I've trained before," Caelan told me at the end of my second month. "Another few weeks and you'll have the basics down well enough to function in the field."
"The field?"
"There's a war council scheduled for the end of next month. The Council is calling all available Sovereigns to the capital to discuss the situation on the eastern border." He glanced at me, gauging my reaction. "The conflict that took your friend's life hasn't ended. If anything, it's escalated. The enemy has brought new forces to bear, and our conventional armies are struggling to hold the line."
I thought about the battlefield where Tam had died, about the chaos and blood and terror of that morning. I thought about the soldiers who had cut him down, about the army that Caelan had destroyed with a gesture. I thought about other battlefields, other soldiers, other boys like Tam who were dying even now while I stood safely in a mountain meadow learning to kill rabbits.
"They want to send me to fight," I said. It wasn't a question.
"They want to evaluate you. See how your training is progressing, assess your potential, determine how soon you might be ready for active service." Caelan stopped walking and turned to face me, his expression grave. "I've bought you as much time as I can, Edrin. I told the Council that your gift requires careful cultivation, and that rushing your training could produce dangerous results. But they're impatient, and they're frightened, and frightened councils make poor decisions."
"What happens if they decide I'm ready before I actually am?"
"Then I'll argue against them. I have enough standing to delay their plans, at least for a while." He reached out and gripped my shoulder. "But you need to understand what's coming. This war isn't going to wait for you to be comfortable with your power. Sooner or later, you'll be asked to use your gift on something more than animals. You need to be prepared for that."
I thought about the mice and the rabbits and the hawk, about the feeling of their resistance collapsing under my fire. I thought about what it would mean to do the same to a human being, to feel a person's life force bend and break and crumble into nothing. The idea should have horrified me. Part of me wanted it to horrify me, wanted to feel the revulsion that would prove I was still human despite everything I was learning.
But another part of me, a part that was growing stronger with each passing day, simply noted the challenge and began planning how to overcome it.
"I'll be ready," I said.
Caelan studied my face for a long moment. Then he nodded.
"We'll see," he said. "In the meantime, we have work to do."