Chapter 16 The Trial #2
"I understand," Sera said, and her voice was steady because Malakor's hand had found hers at her side, unseen by the Council, his fingers interlacing with hers in a grip that was not reassuring but reinforcing, a physical anchor for the steadiness she needed to project.
"But I would ask the Council to consider something.
You are testing whether I am a threat. You should also be testing whether I am an asset.
The trial should not merely determine whether I can perform shadow magic.
It should determine whether I can do what no one else in this realm can do—bridge the gap between what you are and what I am, and use that bridge to heal what is broken.
" Nysara's smile was thin and did not reach her eyes.
"An ambitious addendum. Agreed, Shadow-Touched One.
Let the trial determine what you truly are.
" *** Three days was not enough time to master five disciplines of magic that Sera had been practicing for mere weeks, but it was the time she had, and Sera Voss had never been the kind of woman who wasted time lamenting insufficient resources.
She met Malakor in the training clearing before the silver light had fully brightened, the Garden's luminescence cycle still in its earliest waking phase, and the air was cool and damp and carried the mineral scent of the root systems that ran beneath the clearing's floor like veins beneath skin.
Malakor was already there, standing at the clearing's center with his arms crossed and his amber eyes carrying the particular intensity that Sera had come to recognize as his teaching mode: focused, demanding, and utterly without patience for self-pity.
Kaelen lay at the clearing's edge, the hound's massive head resting on his paws, his amber eyes tracking Sera's approach with the steady attentiveness of a creature who understood that something important was about to happen.
"Three days," Malakor said, and the words were not a complaint but a declaration of parameters, the way a commander might state the available forces before a battle.
"We will cover all five disciplines, but we will prioritize the ones that come most naturally to you and build from those strengths.
Your analytical mind is both your greatest asset and your greatest obstacle.
Shadow magic is not a system to be understood.
It is a language to be felt." "I know," Sera said.
"I've been trying to understand it for weeks, and the moments when it works best are the moments when I stop trying to understand and just—" She hesitated, searching for the right word, and the word that came was not the word her analytical mind would have chosen.
"—feel." "Good. Then you already know more than most practitioners learn in a century.
" He uncrossed his arms and stepped toward her, and the training began.
They started with Weaving, and it was here that Sera discovered that the Bond had changed everything.
Before the Bonding Ritual, her attempts at Weaving had been tentative, laborious constructions built from pure will and the raw shadow-touched sensitivity of her blood.
Now, with Malakor's shadow-resonance flowing through their connection like a second circulatory system, she could feel the shadow substance around her with a depth and precision that was almost overwhelming.
She reached for the ambient shadow, and it responded, not with the sluggish reluctance of a substance being coerced but with the eager fluidity of water finding its natural course.
She shaped a sphere first, then a cube, then a lattice of interlocking shadow-strands so fine that they were nearly invisible, each form materializing from the darkness with a speed and precision that made Malakor's eyebrows rise.
The shadow responded to her emotional intention the way a plant responds to sunlight, naturally, organically, and she understood, with a flash of insight that was as pleasurable as it was unexpected, that her Sunlit-trained analytical mind was not the obstacle she had feared.
It was a tool. She could use it to visualize the form she wanted, to hold its structure in her mind with geometric precision, and then release that structure to the shadow substance with the emotional command that brought it into being.
Analysis for the blueprint. Emotion for the construction.
"Your Weaving has improved by an order of magnitude since the Bond," Malakor said, and there was wonder in his voice, a raw, unguarded quality that the old Malakor would never have allowed to surface.
"The Bond is amplifying your abilities through my resonance.
This is—" He stopped, and she felt through the Bond the collision of excitement and fear that the observation produced in him, the scientist recognizing a phenomenon and the lover recognizing a danger.
"This is more than I expected." "Is that good or bad?
" Sera asked, forming a shadow-bloom between her palms, its petals as delicate and detailed as the nightbloom that sat in its pot on the windowsill of her quarters.
"I don't know yet," Malakor said honestly. "We keep going."
Reading came next, and here Sera found a different kind of power.
She had always possessed Emotional Sensitivity, the raw ability to perceive the emotional states of those around her, but the Bond had transformed that sensitivity into something far more refined.
She placed her hand against the trunk of an amethyst tree and closed her eyes, and the tree's emotional history poured into her like water into a dry channel: centuries of growth and response, the slow accumulation of joy and sorrow and desire that the tree had absorbed from the shadow beings who had passed beneath its branches, the particular, specific resonance of the Warden who had touched this trunk four thousand years ago, his grief as sharp and fresh as the day it was deposited, and beneath that, deeper, the resonance of a woman whose emotional signature carried a quality that Sera recognized from the locket, from the nightbloom, from the blood in her own veins.
She pulled her hand away, gasping. "You felt her," Malakor said quietly.
"Seraphine," Sera breathed. "The one who came before.
She touched this tree. I felt—I felt my own blood in her resonance.
" "The Voss bloodline carries emotional memory across generations," Malakor said.
"Oren has theorized about it for centuries.
Your Reading ability, amplified by the Bond, may be sensitive enough to perceive those inherited memories directly.
" Reading, like Weaving, came to her with a relative ease that was almost suspicious, as though the shadow substance recognized her as someone who belonged to it and opened accordingly.
But Veiling was a different matter entirely.
Veiling required a kind of surrender that Sera's mind actively resisted.
The discipline demanded that she dissolve her emotional signature into the ambient shadow, becoming indistinguishable from the background resonance of the Garden, and the act of dissolution felt wrong at the most fundamental level of her being.
She was a woman who had spent her entire adult life building her identity with deliberate, conscious effort, carving out a self from the raw material of grief and loneliness and fierce independence, and the idea of taking that carefully constructed self and fragmenting it, scattering it into the surrounding darkness, triggered a response in her that was not intellectual but visceral: a clenching in her chest, a tightening in her throat, a full-body recoil from the very concept of self-erasure.
She tried. She stood in the center of the clearing and reached for the Veiling state, and the shadow around her shimmered and shifted, and for a moment she felt herself beginning to thin, her edges blurring, her presence becoming less distinct, and the sensation was so profoundly wrong that her emotions rebelled, flooding her consciousness with a wave of fierce, territorial insistence that crashed through the Veiling like a stone through glass.
The shadow snapped back into solidity around her, and she was visible, present, unmistakably herself, and shaking.
"Again," Malakor said, and his voice was gentle but firm, and she could feel through the Bond that he understood exactly what she was experiencing, not because he had felt it himself but because he could feel her feeling it, the intimate transmission of her struggle traveling through their connection in real time.