Chapter 29: Second Petal.
Elian placed his hands on the marble, half-braced for nothing to happen at all, the way nothing usually happened when he tried too hard to make it.
The stone didn’t glow red, nor blue, nor brown.
In fact,It didn’t glow any single color at all.
Instead it flickered, fast and erratic, red bleeding into blue bleeding into a green he didn’t have a name for, into yellow, pink, white. Cycling through every shade Ines’s marble apparently knew how to produce, before finally settling into something that wasn’t a color so much as all of them at once, pulsing faintly like it couldn’t decide which to commit to.
Ines went very still, along with the entire class.
"Huh."
He crouched slightly, peering at the stone like it might clarify itself if he looked hard enough.
"That’s not... That’s supposed to settle. It always settles."
"Is that bad?" Elian asked, already bracing for the answer regardless of what it turned out to be.
"That’s not bad. But it’s not anything I’ve seen before. A different category entirely."
Ines straightened, rubbing a hand over his chiseled jaw, char dust smearing further across it.
"In my decade running this test, I’ve had few students read as dual-affinity. Fire and lightning, nature and healing, water and ice, and so on, and even that took the stone a solid minute to decide on."
The room had gone quiet in the specific way it kept going quiet around him lately, which Elian was starting to really, really hate.
"You’re not settling into anything because there’s nothing to settle into, or more likely, all of it to settle into."
Ines said slowly, working it out loud as he went.
"This stone reads elemental compatibility. You’re compatible with all of it from what it says, evenly too at that, near as I can tell, which—" he huffed something between a laugh and a groan "—is going to make today’s lesson plan considerably more complicated for you today"
"Is that rare?"
"Rare’s not the word. Rare implies it happens occasionally." Ines finally pulled his hand back from the marble, still frowning and staring at it like it owed him an explanation.
"Every mage I’ve ever tested has an element that fits them best, the way a hand fits a glove. You’re not fitting one glove. You’re apparently just... hands, all the way down, no glove required."
Somewhere behind him, Elian heard Cordelia’s sharp, delighted intake of breath, which he had no idea how he recognized, but guessed she was already reaching for her notebook.
Ines shook his head slowly, some of his usual easy confidence cracking into something closer to genuine bewilderment.
"Alright. New plan."
He glanced toward the staff still resting against Elian’s side, then back to his face, and whatever he saw there made him exhale, resigned.
"You’re not doing today’s lesson with everyone else. Go stand by that wall, we’ll try something small in each element, one at a time. Do not set anything on fire while I finish testing the other twenty-nine people who are, thank every god available, entirely normal."
Elian gave him a shy nod, walking over and standing next to a wall.
The class continued on as Ines set up practice targets for everyone, guiding each of the personally with a few points and noting down the results had worked his way down to Elian.
By the time he did reach him, Elian’s nerves had settled down into something resembling static, enough so that he was confident that he could work through it even if anything went wrong.
"Alright," Ines said, raising his voice among the myriad of sounds that populated the room currently.
"We’ll start with the harder elements first, excluding healing magic because that’s not my expertise, to the easier one’s. Try ice first, since that is one of the hardest elements to conjure."
Elian blinked.
"I’ve never even casted ice before."
"Good," Ines said, entirely unbothered.
"Then we’ll find out together how exactly how this all work."
He crouched slightly, sketching a rough circle into the stone floor with a scrap of chalk from his pocket. A target, presumably, judging by the faint shimmer that settled over it once he stepped back.
"Don’t think about how ice is supposed to feel. You don’t have a reference for that yet, which actually works in your favor. Just push mana out the way you would for anything else, and let whatever wants to happen, happen, apart from your need for it to be ice."
Elian raised a hand toward the target, entirely unsure what ’let it happen’ was supposed to feel like in practice.
He thought, without quite meaning to, of the mirror back home—the version of his own face he used to build every morning before anyone else was awake to see it—and how much easier everything had felt once he’d stopped fighting to keep that face hidden.
Let it happen,
He thought, recalling what every teacher had told him so far.
Just... let it.
He pushed the mana.
Ice erupted from the tip of his staff, growing towards the target circle.
Though the frost didn’t stop at the chalk circle.
It spread outward fast, faster than he could track, climbing up from the floor in spiraling lattices that raced toward the walls, crawled up the legs of the practice racks, fogged the air itself into something breathable only in shallow, startled gasps.
Somewhere behind him he heard someone yelp, things falling , a student’s half-cast fireball fizzling out entirely as the cold swallowed it whole.
The Everbloom, flared white-hot bright, and Elian felt something in his chest crack open—not painful, not really, but the familiar feeling of another held breath finally being let go after being trapped there for six generations.
A second petal split down its center with a sound like glass singing, the purest sound Elian had ever heard, blooming outwards entirely this time, bringing the the first petal along with it.
The frost stopped as abruptly as it had started, the whole room caught mid-transformation, breath fogging in the sudden cold, every surface within the room rendered in delicate, spreading ice crystals.
Silence.
Then, from somewhere near the back, a single slow drip as the frost on someone’s abandoned target began, very cautiously, to melt.
Ines stood in the middle of it all, eyebrows somewhere near his hairline, entirely unmoving, chalk still loose in one frost-rimed hand, jaw wide open.
"...Okay," he said, voice carefully even, hesitating for a long, long while.
"That’s... considerably more than I asked for."
Elian looked around at the ruined lesson, at thirty first-years staring at him through a haze of their own breath, and felt his face go hot despite the cold still hanging in the air.
"I didn’t mean to do that!"
"I’m aware."
Ines set the chalk down very deliberately, like it might do something unpredictable if he moved too fast.
He glanced at the staff, at the second petal now glowing bright and steady alongside the first, and something in his expression shifted from bewilderment into something more careful, more assessing.
"Vale was expecting you after this, wasn’t she?"
"...Yes."
"Good."
Ines exhaled, long and slow, watching his own breath fog in air that hadn’t been that cold two minutes ago.
"Then she can deal with whatever that was." Then he turned around to address the room. "Class is dismissed early. Everyone go find somewhere warm before I have to explain to the healer’s wing why half my first-years have frostbite."
He turned to Elian.
"You should go to the healer’s to make sure nothing is wrong. I’ll see you on the next class alright?"