Chapter 14 Declarations of War
DECLARATIONS OF WAR
The weeks following the disastrous first lesson with Instructor Ky settled into a new, strange, and exhausting rhythm, a dual existence that split Gessa in two.
Part of her day was spent on the drill yards with the rest of Wyvern Cohort; the other part was spent in the tense, isolated bubble of her private training, now conducted with a man she was beginning to realize she understood less and less.
She had braced herself for fury. After the catastrophe of the void-stalker and her humiliating breakdown in the circle, she had expected his cold disdain to harden into open hostility.
She had expected punishment. But Ky hadn’t been angry.
He was exacting, yes. Grim, certainly. But the explosion of rage she had been expecting never came.
It was a confusing, off-balance reprieve that left her unsure of where she stood.
The decision to seek out Master Elms had been born of a quiet, creeping panic.
For the last two nights, the hematite in Gessa’s pocket had ceased to matter.
It sat in her pocket, a cold, heavy lump of rock, utterly indifferent to the storm raging inside her.
It was supposed to be her anchor, but now, clutching it felt like holding a dead twig while being swept away by a river.
She found the Talent-Sensor in his circular tower room. Elms looked up from a magnifying lens as she hesitated in the doorway.
“Mistress Gessa? You are not on the roster for assessment today.”
“I need... advice,” she said, clutching her tunic. “It’s not working anymore.”
Elms softened. “Come in. Sit.”
Gessa sat and pulled out the chunk of raw hematite, placing it on the table. It rested there, dark, grey, and completely still.
“It stopped working,” she whispered. “It used to make the world quiet. When the magic got too loud, I’d hold it, and the iron would dampen the noise. But now... it’s like it’s not even there.”
Elms frowned. He reached out and picked up the stone, weighing it in his hand. He tossed it lightly into the air and caught it. He looked unimpressed.
“Hematite,” he murmured. “Iron oxide. A naturally occurring dampener.”
“I need a bigger piece,” Gessa said, desperation leaking into her voice. “I’ve outgrown it. The magic is too strong for it to absorb.”
Elms looked at her over the rims of his spectacles, his expression unreadable.
“Gessa,” he said slowly. “This stone is barely three ounces. It has a mild dampening field, yes. Enough to obscure the sense of a very young child. But against a mage of your caliber?”
He set the stone down with a sharp clack.
“This is a pebble trying to stop a tidal wave. It should have stopped working for you years ago.”
Gessa blinked, confused. “But... it did work. Until two days ago, it worked perfectly. I held it, and the magic stopped.”
“No,” Elms corrected gently. “You held it, and you stopped the magic.”
He leaned forward, his eyes intense. “You told me of your past. You were kept on an estate built on iron, were you not? The very ground was saturated with it. You were taught, day after day, that the air you breathed meant silence. That the heavy earth meant you were powerless.”
Gessa flinched, the memory of that oppressive, dead air rising in her throat. “Yes. No magic could breathe there.”
“Your magic responds to your will, Gessa. Even your subconscious will. You believed, with every fiber of your trauma, that iron had the power to bind you. So, your magic obeyed. You didn’t dampen your power with the rock. You dampened it with your belief.”
“So it was a lie?” Gessa stared at the grey lump, feeling a wave of vertigo. “It never helped me?”
“It was a crutch,” Elms said. “A trick of the mind to grant yourself permission to quiet the storm.”
He picked up a clear quartz crystal from his desk and held it up to the window.
“You are trying to block the sun with a coin, Gessa. You hold it up to your eye and tell yourself it is night. And because your will is terrifyingly strong, you actually made it night for yourself. But you cannot lie to yourself anymore.”
“Why?” she whispered. “Why did it stop?”
“Because you are healing,” Elms said simply. “A part of you—the part that is growing, the part that stood in the circle and made a creature of void—no longer believes you are a prisoner. Your power knows it is free, Gessa. It refuses to pretend that a three-ounce rock can hold it back.”
“But without it...” Gessa’s voice hitched. “If I can’t use the stone to stop the noise, how do I stop it?”
“You don’t stop it. You endure it until you command it.”
He pushed the stone back toward her. It looked smaller now. Pathetic, even.
“Iron creates a false sense of safety. That estate taught you that control comes from suppression. That you are only safe when the magic is suffocated. That is the lesson of a victim, Gessa, not a Wayfinder.”
He offered her a small, encouraging smile. “The coin doesn’t block the sun anymore. You have to learn to look at the light without flinching.”
She left the tower with the stone back in her pocket, but the weight of it had changed. It wasn’t an anchor anymore. It was just a rock. And she was the one who had to hold back the storm.
Her mornings on Master Jaedon’s anvil were still grueling.
But Gessa’s body, to her own astonishment, was adapting.
The constant, aching soreness was now a familiar hum beneath a new, unfamiliar layer of hard-won muscle.
She was leaner, tougher, her movements surer.
She could hold her own now in the exhausting staff drills, and while she was still far from the effortless grace of Roric, she was no longer always the last to finish the punishing ridge runs.
This new competence earned her little warmth from most of the cohort, but it changed the nature of their attention. The whispers about her age and gender were now tinged with a grudging curiosity. In a combat drill where Jaedon paired them off, Finn approached her, his face flushing slightly.
“Recruit Gessa? Would you be my partner?”
Gessa, surprised, had nodded. He was a focused partner, never using his greater strength against her, but pushing her to improve her form.
“That was a good block!” he’d said, breathless, after she’d successfully deflected one of his lunges. “You’re getting much faster.”
The simple, genuine praise was so unexpected it almost made her falter. Before she could respond, Roric’s sneering voice cut across the yard.
“Don’t waste your breath, Finn! She’s getting special attention. Learning all sorts of advanced techniques in her private lessons with Instructor Ky. Aren’t you, grandmother?”
Gessa’s face, thanks to Polan’s brutal lessons, remained a cold, impassive mask. But inwardly, the taunt landed like a lit torch on dry tinder, forcing the memory of the bathhouse to the surface, the illicit, shocking image of Ky’s body, his undeniable magnetism.
Roric’s words were meant as a vile insult, but a confusing, unwelcome part of her couldn’t entirely deny their premise.
She was intensely aware of Ky. It was a bewildering feeling, not the self-disgust she would have expected weeks ago, but a frustrating confusion.
To feel even a flicker of this for him, her harsh instructor, a man who held her fate in his hands, was impossible, illogical, a complication she could not afford.
She shoved the bewildering thought down, her knuckles white on her practice stave.
“Your footwork is sloppy, Roric,” Jaedon’s voice suddenly sliced through the air. “And your mouth is running faster than your feet. Since you have so much excess energy for social commentary, you can demonstrate the next drill for us. Against me.”
The smirk vanished from Roric’s face.
The afternoon session brought a shift in focus.
Master Orlan stood before a fresh chart the recruits had not seen before—a high-detail topography of the southern territories.
He used a pointer to trace the flow of the currents, skipping the general overviews they had memorized in previous weeks to focus on specific anomalies.
Gessa squinted. The specific curve of the mountain range, the way the coastline hooked inward, it plucked at a chord in her memory.
She felt a sudden, inexplicable sense of familiarity, as if she had seen this terrain before, perhaps traced in heavier, darker ink, though the specific context remained tantalizingly out of reach.
Orlan tapped the pointer against a stark, grey void in the center of the colorful web, a large area where the Lines conspicuously bent and flowed around, avoiding it like water flowing around a stone.
“Recruit Bram,” Orlan said, his voice precise. “You have a practical eye. The Great South Line, as you can see, diverts sharply here, leaving this entire domain in shadow. Why?”
Bram considered the map for a moment before answering, his voice a low rumble. “It’s the Ironwood, Master. Lord Polan’s domain. The land is rich in deep cold iron deposits. The Lines can’t cross it; the cold iron repels them.”
The name “Polan” sucked the air out of the room. Gessa’s hand flew to the hematite in her pocket, but she recoiled instantly, as if the stone had suddenly turned white-hot.
The confinement. The refusal to let her travel, even to the village. It wasn’t just jealousy; it was concealment.
She looked around the room at the young faces of Wyvern Cohort—boys on the cusp of manhood, brought here because the blood had finally woken in their veins.
That was the natural order: the spark ignited as childhood faded.
Had she stepped foot off Polan’s dead land after her own eighteenth naming day, her power would have flared just like theirs.
But the iron had suffocated it. He had drowned her magic in silence during the very years it was meant to rise, twisting it into the starved, wild thing she now carried. He hadn’t just trapped her; he had buried her alive to keep her a secret.