Chapter 40
Some fusions steady the heart. Some break it. Pay attention to which is which, lest you find yourself without one entirely.
—The Codex of Convergence, Auren Emberlain
Noa chooses a secluded bay on the far side of Lake Caldrith for our training grounds. Tucked behind a screen of red maples—each branch tipped with tiny pink buds—the bay feels untouched. Private. A secret hidden in plain sight.
The trail in is more mud than path, the thawing earth soft and slick under our boots. The lake lies before us like a pewter mirror, broken only by the occasional ripple of a cold March breeze. Along the shore, stubborn patches of snow give way to damp, sandy stones.
Spring whispers its arrival everywhere: crocuses’ bright-green tips thrusting through dark soil, the air filled with the scent of wet bark and moss.
The buzzing of insects that now stir beneath fallen leaves.
Still, the air has a bite to it when the wind cuts through, the edge of winter’s last grip on the land.
The bay is perfect, its uneven terrain lending a wild, natural edge to every drill. Noa clearly knew this when he brought us here, and Gavrail, after a moment’s calculation, agrees.
It’s uncomfortable at first, the two of them working together. Disagreements over theory and training methods. Glares cutting sharper than any weapon between them. Occasionally fists will clench, a fight only seconds away from erupting.
And yet—
They hold it together.
Again and again, they put their differences aside.
For me. The shared thread connecting them.
Noa begins with the fundamentals: elemental manipulation, then state manipulation. Shaping water as liquid, solid, and vapor—freezing the shore’s edges into glass, turning ice to mist, condensing steam back into droplets, and back to ice—in ever-faster succession. Precision. Control. Speed.
Then Gavrail takes over.
He doesn’t teach, not in the way Noa does. He tests. Pushes. Dares.
Gavrail teaches me to draw moisture from the air, from the damp grass underfoot, then from the birch trunks behind the boulders at the bay’s edge.
“Draw it from the trees,” he says, voice low and cool as the water I summon. “If you want to control the water, then control all of it. Even what wants to stay hidden.”
It breaks me to see the fragile shoots wilt or fresh spring blossoms shrivel and fall, and even more so to watch the once-majestic tree trunks turn gray, bark cracking. My stomach twists every time.
“Undo it,” he says, unmoved. “If you break it, fix it. That’s how you learn.”
So I do. I learn to reverse it—pouring life back into the plants until buds pinken, leaves unfurl, trunks gleam with restored sap.
Each time, watching life return, I feel a deep sense of satisfaction.
Some small piece of me heals at being able to fix what was once broken. Even if I was the one to break it.
On Tuesdays, Gavrail and I meet alone. We start refining shadowmire, changing its consistency, shaping it in ways we haven’t tried before.
We discover ways to stabilize it beyond its initial formation, suspending it in specially runed vials Gavrail stole from the Potions lab.
He begins to collect the variations: thick, thin, slow-moving, fast-acting—bottles of liquid shadow stored like forbidden secrets, locked behind a hidden panel in his bedroom at the Ivy House.
He watches me closely when we work. Not just my magick—me.
The way I breathe. The way I move. How fast I react.
Sometimes there is a flicker in his gaze—curiosity and calculation and something more.
He makes sure he never pushes me beyond what could break me, but also takes me right to the edge. Just like he did when we were children.
Thursdays are for maelflare—the name I give to Noa’s and my shared magick.
Noa and I practice at the bay, chasing the storm we first summoned together.
At first, our attempts sputter—clouds forming without thunder, mist without lightning.
Maelflare depends entirely on our emotions, on being in sync.
It is volatile, elusive. Unlike shadowmire, which pulses just beneath the surface—always ready, always waiting—maelflare has to be coaxed, sparked, trusted. But when it comes… it is devastating.
Fridays, we train together. The focus shifts to dueling techniques, battle stances, and field strategy. Noa and Gavrail spar with each other as often as they train me.
Noa’s fire evolves. He learns to channel it into plasma—a writhing serpent of molten energy that devours everything in its path.
But his most remarkable feat comes after watching me refine my freezing techniques: learning to forge freeze-fire, a pale-blue flame that forms unbreakable chains.
They don’t burn in the way his normal fire does, but they hold.
And once they lock around you—there is no escape.
Gavrail, meanwhile, has mastered shadowbinding: the ability to anchor someone’s shadow to them and use it to restrict or control their movement.
He begins shadowstepping too—vanishing and reappearing between slants of light like a phantom.
Noa hates it. It makes Gavrail nearly impossible to pin down in combat, Noa’s fire striking nothing but empty air again and again.
By month’s end, the bay is both practice and proving ground, where I’ve discovered just how deeply my power and I are intertwined.
In trying to uncover more about how I can fuse my magick into my own body—not just wield it, but become it—we’ve stumbled onto something no known text has named. Noa calls it elemental embodiment, though no such term exists in the current canon of magicks.
As far as we know, Magicks have fused their elements to tools or artifacts—flaming swords, cloaks of smoke, obsidian armor made from the earth’s own bones. Even elemental fusion, like maelflare or shadowmire, is rare but recorded. But this… this is different.
This is me.
Me, transforming into an element and being rebuilt by it again and again.
We test its boundaries, its limitations. I can shift any object I’m touching as long as it isn’t alive—clothing, weapons, paper, even food. It all disappears with me in my elemental form before being pulled molecule by molecule back to solid matter.
But every time I return to flesh, I feel… less.
At first, it’s just fatigue. A headache. A pull behind the eyes. Then it starts to change—bone-deep exhaustion, memories that shimmer at the edges like ripples, small pieces of thought I have to chase down to hold on to.
But I keep going. I don’t tell them. I can’t. Not when we are so close to breaking through, to understanding, to becoming something more than the world of magick allows.
Elemental embodiment, elemental fusion—each exacting a different toll. Some worse than others… until even I can’t ignore the difference.
When Gavrail and I fuse, shadowmire feels energizing. Steady. Dense. Like something ancient and quietly alive. It tethers us, leaving us humming, synchronized.
But with Noa… maelflare is chaos. It’s beautiful. Uncontrollable. Igniting and consuming everything around it—and sometimes, it feels like it consumes me too.
Shadowmire is a drumbeat, steady and low.
Maelflare is a strike of lightning.
Shadowmire tethers me.
Maelflare tears me loose.
And in the quiet moments after the storm fades and the mist burns off the water’s surface, I often catch Noa watching me.
He doesn’t ask. Not yet. But his fingers linger longer on my wrist, checking my pulse. His gaze drifts to my temples when I rub them. He’s noticing.
I just don’t want him to know what he’s noticing.
But when his eyes follow me… When he pulls me close…
It’s like he’s trying to see what’s left. Like he’s worried I’m already slipping through his fingers, one drop at a time.