Chapter 34: The Great Reveal.
When it finally spoke, Elian genuinely felt like an eternity had passed.
"For now, I’m going to have to teach you some things. Pointers mostly, you’re going to have to do research on it yourself."
Elian looked up.
"Like what?"
"Like mana circles." It said, drifting back and settling into a new stance, the restless energy dimming somehow.
"Have you ever heard about mana circles before? I can tell that you haven’t from what I see, but i can’t be too sure."
Elian shook his head, "No."
"Okay,"
A pause.
"Think about mana circles as each new step in attaining a certain amount of complexity with your spells. Most full fledged mages rank themselves by the highest complexity of spells they can do, the maximum that’s ever been attained being nine. The ice spell you did in class today would be considered a no circle spell, the first circle equivalent of it being something like turning it into a form you can control."
Elian nodded, doing his best to not get lost on the flow of new information.
"Your teacher, Rowan Vale is the highest circle mage in recent history as far as I know."
Another shift in stance, like it was choosing the next words carefully, which for a two-hundred-year-old staff apparently didn’t come naturally.
"She can push an eighth-circle spell before it starts fighting her back, and even then it’s more sheer force of will than anything resembling comfort. No one else alive can claim past a fifth, sixth if they do it in exchange for their lives, as far as any recorded testing I’m aware of shows."
"That’s..."
Elian tried to find the right word for it, and settled on the plainest one available.
"A lot."
"It’s absurd, is what it is. Most kingdoms build their entire military doctrine around the assumption that no single caster will ever exceed a fourth circle in the field, because past that point the mana starts demanding things back from you that most bodies simply can’t afford to give."
The Everbloom drifted a fraction closer, the restless energy in it settling into something more focused, more instructional.
"Which is relevant to you specifically, because Resonance casting doesn’t follow the same curve. A resonance artifact acts like a conduit to help you shape your spells on larger scales. Conventional mages spend decades clawing up each circle. You’re going to find some of them arrive faster than they should, and some of them refuse to arrive at all no matter how hard you push, because the bond decides readiness, not effort or talent."
"So I can’t just study my way up?"
"You can study your way to understanding what you’re looking at once it happens. That’s not nothing—plenty of bonded casters have died because they don’t recognize a circle shift happening in the middle of a fight and panic instead of adjusting."
It paused bobbing towards the left, something almost approving in the gesture.
"But no. You don’t get to grind this the way your classmates grind theirs. It comes when the bond, namely me, decides you’re honest enough to hold it, same as everything else with me."
Elian turned that over, already feeling the shape of tomorrow’s exhaustion settling in before he’d even had it yet.
"That’s going to make studying for exams difficult."
"Welcome to being interestng,"
It said dryly, staying silent for a long moment before it spoke again.
"That’ll be enough of information you need to survive for now, and that leaves..."
"Leaves what?" Elian asked, only to be met by silence.
Elian sat with the silence for a long moment, the abyss patient around him, before something in the staff’s silence shifted—not quite hesitation, more like a decision being made.
"There’s something else," it finally said, startling Elian back into awareness. "Since apparently tonight’s the night for uncomfortable truths."
"That doesn’t sound reassuring."
"It isn’t, particularly. But you’ve earned it, well you technically earned it for me, and I’m tired of being a voice in the dark with no face attached to it."
A pause, and for the first time since he’d met it, the staff’s tone carried something like nerves.
"I haven’t shown anyone this in a very long time, Elian. Longer than your family’s been failing to open me. So be nice."
Before he could ask what ’this’ meant, the abyss around them began to change.
The scattered motes of light didn’t fade so much as gather—drawing inward, converging on a single point a few feet from him, spinning faster and faster until the darkness around them seemed to hold its breath.
Then, all at once, the light took shape.
She was tall.
That registered first, somehow, before anything else.
She stood at a height that had nothing to do with the abyss’s lack of scale and everything to do with presence, the way a mountain didn’t need context to look enormous.
She had dark skin, warm and deep as old teakwood, marked in places with faint patterns that shimmered gold when the light caught them right, like scales remembering they used to be scales.
Her hair fell loose and black past her shoulders to her waist, streaked through with threads of pale, ashen white and brilliant gold that didn’t look like age so much as scar tissue—the kind of white that came from surviving something rather than outliving it.
Her eyes, when they opened, were the exact color of the single lit petal on his staff. So brilliantly white it stopped looking like white somehow.
She didn’t look kind.
That was the thing Elian understood about her before anything else.
Before the horns curling back from her temples like something that had once been much larger and had been cut down to fit into a shape that could speak to him, before the faint claw-tips replacing what should have been human nails.
She did not look as kind as she sounded.
She looked like someone who had been kind, once, a long time ago, and had that kindness worn down to something harder and more useful by whatever came after.
"Kaveri," she said, and her voice was the same voice he’d been hearing in the dark for weeks now, just given weight and breath for the first time.
"That’s my name. My actual one. The staff was an alias, it was just the only shape I had left to wear."
Elian couldn’t speak for a long moment, staring at her—at the scars visible along every inch of her skin, old and pale and clearly not decorative, at the way she held herself like someone still braced for a blow that hadn’t landed yet.
Almost exactly like Elian held himself.
"You’re..." he managed finally. "What are you?"
"Human once, then i was a dragon. High-blooded, if the old titles still mean anything to anyone these days. Nowadays, I’m just a staff."
She said it plainly, no grandeur attached, the way she seemed to say most things.
"I was one of the older ones actually. Older than your kingdom, older than most of the things that you got to know about as you grew up."
"And now?"
Something crossed her face—not quite pain, something that had been sanded down past the point of showing as pain anymore.
"Now I’m whatever’s left after something takes everything you are and leaves you just enough to remember what was taken."
She crouched slightly, bringing herself more level with him, the motion oddly careful for someone who looked like she could tear the abyss itself open if she wanted to. Elian believed that too, the sheer suffocation of her presence made him think that it was something she could do, if not something she had done before.
"I didn’t choose this shape, Elian. It’s just something that happened when I chose to become... this. Sealed, bound, folded down into something small enough to be handed between generations of a family too frightened to ever find out why."
Elian’s chest went tight.
"Why?"
Kaveri’s expression didn’t change, but the light around them dimmed slightly, like even the abyss was bracing.
"That," she said, "is a conversation for when you’ve got more than two petals open. I’ve told you enough truths tonight to be getting on with."
She studied him a moment longer, something almost gentle creeping into the hard lines of her face.
"You wanted to know why it’s five petals, and the details of why your family only ever managed one. Now you’ve got a face to put to the question, at least. All thanks to you opening the second petal. That’s more than I’ve given anyone in longer than you’d believe."
Then the motes of lights started leaking out her, her form growing dimmer and smaller until all that was left behind was the familiar staff.
The Everbloom... Kaveri, looked at him for a long moment, taking in his stunned silence.
"You should get some rest. I’ve given you enough for one night, and you’re going to need the sleep more than you need my voice droning on about circle theory until sunrise."
The abyss had already begun to thin by the time Elian thought to argue, his surroundings dissolving back into morning light, and the last thing he caught—faint, almost fond—was her voice trailing after him into the waking world.
"This will be the last time we see eachother for a long while, since I used up too much energy conjuring my true form, so..."
A small moment of hesitation.
"...Make sure you don’t get too overwhelmed because of today okay? Remember that no matter what happens, I’ll always be with you even if I’m silent. Until you take the step after you open the whole of five petals, you’ll always have me with you."