Chapter 5: Practice Sessions.
"Stop trying to force it!"
Roderic’s voice carried across the practice yard, equal parts amused and exasperated as he watched his younger brother wrestle with what should have been the easiest magical exercise in the world, a simple elemental discharge.
Elian released the stance, breathing hard, one hand still wrapped white-knuckled around the Everbloom. Nothing. The staff sat dark and inert against his palm, same as it had for the better part of an hour.
"I’m not forcing anything," he said, which was, strictly speaking, a lie he’d told so many times over the past week it had started to feel true.
"I’m doing it exactly the way you showed me."
"That’s the problem." Roderic crossed the yard, plucked a fallen leaf off his shoulder with the idle precision of someone who’d never had to think twice about his own magic.
"You’re doing it exactly the way I showed you. Which works, for me, because I’m not carrying an artifact that apparently finds ’exactly the way you were taught’ personally insulting."
"Helpful."
"I’m trying." Roderic sighed, dropping onto the low stone wall bordering the yard, and then tipping his head back to consider his brother with something that had gotten steadily less like pity and steadily more like genuine curiosity over the past few days.
"You lit up like a bonfire the one time you actually let yourself get annoyed at me for teasing you about the hairpin. Have you tried just—being annoyed? On purpose?"
Elian felt his ears go warm.
"That was an accident."
"Was it, though?"
Roderic wasn’t smiling exactly, but there was something knowing in the set of his mouth.
"Because from where I’m sitting, every single time this thing’s done anything at all, it’s been the one moment where you got angry at us."
Elian didn’t have a good answer for that, mostly because it was true and he resented how easily his brother had noticed it.
"So what," He said instead, "you want me to just... walk around irritated all day? hoping for another accident?"
"I want you to stop white-knuckling every casting like you’re bracing for someone to grade you on it." Roderic stood, dusting off his trousers, nodding toward the staff still clutched tight in Elian’s fist.
"Try again, and loosen your grip. Not on the staff. On yourself."
Easy for him to say, Elian thought. Roderic had never once had to think about what version of his face he was allowed to show at breakfast.
Still, Elian looked down at the staff, at the shut cluster of petals with their single hairline seam of light, and made himself unclench his fingers just slightly—not much, barely a fraction, but enough that the wood no longer bit into his palm.
Nothing happened immediately. But for one strange half-second, he thought he felt something in it stir, like a held breath deciding whether to let go.
"There," Roderic said quietly, watching his face rather than the staff.
"That’s it. Keep doing that."
"I didn’t do anything."
"That’s the whole point, you won’t know until it’s done, keep holding on to whatever your feeling right now."
Elian frowned, turning to look at his staff, it sat in his arms the same way it always did since he was awarded it at the ceremony. It was not like he wanted to always keep it with him, but he literally wasn’t able to physically part with it for more than a few minutes at a time, otherwise he started feeling a certain kind of dread, and panic that he still to this day, hasn’t managed to figure out where it came from.
He thought about what the staff had said to him at that time, he had been doing so over and over in the past weeks, trying to figure out exactly what it had meant when it said; ’try not to lie to your own reflection.’
It was then that a certain idea came to his mind.
He looked up at his surroundings, making sure that no one apart from his brother and him where present. Then, he turned to his brother.
"Can you keep watch for me?"
His brother blinked.
"For what?"
"Just make sure that.. no one walks in on me."
He was silent for a long moment, but seemingly deciding to trust his younger brother, he gave him a quiet nod.
Elian closed his eyes and took a deep breath, loosening his posture to something softer, something that he was comfortable with, his grip on the staff growing slacker so that the wood wasn’t biting into his hands anymore.
Then, with the tiniest bit of hesitation, he did something he thought he’d never do in this life time.
He untied his hair and let it fall loosely on his shoulder, in public.
Then, recalling the sensation of commanding mana through his body, he willed it to manifest as a small wisp of fire on the tip of the Everbloom.
For a moment nothing happened.
And then something sparked at the tip of the staff, and the spark turned into flame.
There it sat, a small ball of red fire, perfectly in control by Elian’s will. The usual resistance the Everbloom gave him whenever he tried to use it to channel his mana was nowhere to be felt, all that was left was a certain peaceful harmony, and the mana moving so perfectly that it took Elian quite the effort to make sure he didn’t overdo it.
It was almost a perfect execution.
Better than what he was able to do his entire life.
Roderick was staring, eyes wide open.
"What?" Elian asked.
"That was quick."
Elian shrugged.
"I figured it would be better if I followed the advice from the source itself."