Immediately, my magic surges.
The sphere pulses, fingers of lightning lashing and snapping outward. The wind around the tower intensifies, catching my hair and sending it swirling behind me.
For a heartbeat, I try to restrain it, suppress it, force it to be still, like I usually do. It starts to fight back, trying to escape my hold.
My muscles tighten, and my shoulders begin to lock. I grit my teeth.
Then I remember Severin’s teachings.
Perhaps you don’t need to control. Perhaps you only need to guide.
My attempts to retain control over my energy sphere have never worked. So maybe it’s time to stop fearing the unknown and try something new.
I widen my stance, pressing my bare feet more firmly into the cold stone. Then, instead of trying to compress my lightning, I let it travel. It uses me as its conduit, racing through my arms, down my spine, into my hips and legs, finding grounding in my feet where they’re pressed to the stone. It threads through my body in the same way lightning threads through the sky: untamed.
“Storm energy doesn’t want to be static,” I whisper to myself. “It wants to move.”
The lightning crackling in my energy sphere stops flaring outward and starts to circulate instead, rotating in smooth, controlled spirals. The globe glows brighter, a silver-white beacon in the darkening night.
I’m no longer fighting it, no longer trying to force it to stay intact.
I’m letting it move.
I think of Severin again, but this time, instead of my magic surging out of control, it pulses like a heartbeat, warm and steady and somehow at peace. Unlike every time before, it doesn’t destabilize.
The energy current threads through me, then back into the sphere, and I feel deeply connected to it, like it and I are one. My shoulders relax, and my breathing slows and deepens. The energy I hold between my palms no longer fights and writhes, because I’m no longer trying to grip it.
Now, I’m just directing it, using my body as its conduit, allowing it to circle through me instead of trying to force it into submission.
I should’ve known all along: Lightning never submits.
A small smile curls across my mouth. I stand there beneath the moonlight, with energy humming between my hands, and I start to realize something.
My struggle with my energy magic is similar to the struggle I’ve had with Severin. Out of fear, I’ve wanted to grip, control, restrain. Just like my magic, I have this worry that Severin is going to escape from me, and it makes me want to hold on to him tighter.
But nothing likes to be caged.
And if I want totrulyexperience something, whether it’s my lightning or the feelings I have for Severin, I need to be able to stop gripping so tight and just... let go.
For the first time, my energy sphere doesn’t explode into sparks of white light. Instead, I’m the one to let it go softly, to allow it to unravel into the cold night air in soft glowing threads of light.
And when it’s gone and I’m alone on the dark spire, body trembling from the amount of power I just channeled, I feel something else unravel from inside me.
The fear that’s clung to me since I first realized the depth of my feelings for Severin starts to subside, and I flick my fingers a few times, as if I can banish that energy from my body and release it into the night.
Drawing a heavy breath, I tip my face up to the sky. The moon and stars shine down on me, glowing brilliant silver against the backdrop of the night. I exhale my breath in a stream of gray.
And as I look up at the sky, I know exactly what I’m going to do.
Chapter 31
Severin
OUTSIDE, THE WEATHER IS DISMAL and gray, and inside the castle, it feels no different. My students are subdued during the lecture, some staring out the window in the lecture hall, blatantly disconnected from every word I’m saying. Looking at them, you wouldn’t know that finals are only a stone’s throw away.
When the academy’s clock chimes, its vibrations reverberating through the corridors and classrooms, my students snap out of their stupors. The lecture hall fills with the sounds of books thumping closed and chairs shifting on stone.
“Do try to wake up before our next class,” I say as the fourth-years start to file past me, heading for the doorway. I return to my lectern, where my journal is open to my notes for today’s class. Given how distracted everyone was today, I might need to repeat this lecture next class period.
