“Your bloodline’s way of warning you about danger it has survived before.” He pauses. “The Command ability, the autonomous shadows, the crimson manifestation — these emerge only in direct descendants of the original shadow bloodlines. Before the Division, your ancestors could do everything you’re developing and more. They were the most powerful practitioners in existence — capable of bridging elemental disciplines, communicating across vast distances, bending consciousness itself.”
Another pause. Heavier.
“The Hunter Council targeted them specifically because that kind of power doesn’t answer to institutional authority. It answers to itself.”
“Fucking hell.” I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. “I’m not just a weird student with shadow anomalies. I’m the latest model in a product line they’ve been trying to discontinue for centuries.”
Something that might be amusement crosses his face. “Crudely stated but accurate.”
Over the next hour, Bael teaches mental exercises designed for maintaining shadow control during sleep.
The technique involves establishing emotional baseline before unconsciousness — conscious instructions that shadows continue executing during dream states, the way a computer runs background programs after the user walks away from the keyboard.
“Shadows respond to emotional states more directly than conscious commands,” he explains, demonstrating subtle energy manipulation that reinforces our connection even during vulnerability. “Establish calm as the default, and protective responses only activate for genuine external threats rather than internal fears.”
The training requires something I’m not good at: letting go.
Not suppressing but allowing — feeling the full scope of each emotion and then choosing where it goes rather than slamming the lid before it reaches the surface. Bael guides me through the distinction with the patience of someone who’s had centuries to learn it, and gradually my shadows begin responding to intention rather than panic.
Something shifts during the practice.
As I allow emotional vulnerability — truly allow it, without the constant clenching I’ve maintained for weeks — my shadows begin expressing needs I’ve been burying during conscious hours. They extend toward Bael with an almost yearning quality, seeking contact that goes beyond training necessity. Not directed by me. Chosen by them.
“Your shadows reveal emotional needs you’re suppressing,” Bael observes. His own darkness responds to the invitation with a restraint that tells me he’s choosing carefully. “The connection they seek would actually strengthen control rather than diminishing it.”
What happens next grows from emotional vulnerability rather than conscious decision.
My semi-conscious state — exhaustion and dream-edge and the particular openness that comes from three nights of fighting my own nature — blurs the boundary between wanting and allowing. Shadows create a bridge between us that carries sensation without physical contact, translating desire into something that moves through darkness itself.
Every point of connection generates feeling that builds on the one before it, cascading, his ancient shadows joining mine in an exchange that feels simultaneously like dreaming and like the most awake I’ve ever been.
When intensity peaks, panic breaks through — my shadows displaying autonomous behavior throughout their entire structure, pulsing with each wave in patterns that would trigger every alarm in the building.
Bael shifts seamlessly from intimate to tactical. “Channel inward. Through the shadow core, not external manifestation.”
I struggle — the intensity makes conventional control impossible.
Sensing this, he demonstrates the alternative: not suppression but redirection. Energy flowing through internal shadow pathways rather than external movement, maintaining the full experience while reducing visible manifestation to nothing. The autonomous motion recedes from exposed surfaces, concentrating within core structure where detection can’t reach.
The technique is a revelation.
Not fighting my shadows but routing them. Not a cage but a river channel.
Afterward, breathing slowly returning to normal, I stare at the shadow dome still holding steady above us while Bael establishes the daily meditation practice that will replace my brute-force suppression approach. Morning and evening exercises targeting emotional channeling — acknowledging feelings fully before redirecting their shadow expression.
“Complete suppression becomes impossible as shadow evolution progresses,” he says, preparing to depart as the first gray light touches the eastern window. “Channeling provides sustainable alternative. You cannot stop what you’re becoming. You can only choose how it looks from the outside.”
“What we just did,” I say quietly. “Was that training, or — “
“Your shadows called to mine through distress. The connection that followed was natural response.” He pauses, and in the pause I feel the weight of what he’s not saying — that natural doesn’t mean insignificant, that the bond between us deepened tonight in ways that have nothing to do with technique. “Such connections strengthen channeling ability. Which serves your survival.”
He vanishes through a shadow-walking point too small for me to detect — one moment solid, the next simply gone, leaving an absence in the dome’s architecture that my shadows close around like water filling a space where a stone was removed.
I maintain the barrier until Iris wakes naturally, letting it dissipate gradually into normal morning shadows without seam or evidence.
In the bathroom mirror, I catch it — a flicker of autonomous movement in my reflection’s shadows, quickly suppressed but definitely present. My shadows shifting before I told them to, adjusting their position around my feet with the casualindependence of something that considers itself a partner rather than a tool.
Walking to first period, I practice channeling with each step.
