Noa’s fire evolves. He learns to channel it into plasma—a writhing serpent of molten energy that devours everything in its path. But his most remarkable feat comes after watching merefine my freezing techniques: learning to forge freeze-fire, a pale-blue flame that forms unbreakable chains. They don’t burn in the way his normal fire does, but they hold. And once they lock around you—there is no escape.
Gavrail, meanwhile, has mastered shadowbinding: the ability to anchor someone’s shadow to them and use it to restrict or control their movement. He begins shadowstepping too—vanishing and reappearing between slants of light like a phantom. Noa hates it. It makes Gavrail nearly impossible to pin down in combat, Noa’s fire striking nothing but empty air again and again.
By month’s end, the bay is both practice and proving ground, where I’ve discovered just how deeply my power and I are intertwined.
In trying to uncover more about how I can fuse my magick into my own body—not just wield it, butbecome it—we’ve stumbled onto something no known text has named. Noa calls itelemental embodiment, though no such term exists in the current canon of magicks.
As far as we know, Magicks have fused their elements to tools or artifacts—flaming swords, cloaks of smoke, obsidian armor made from the earth’s own bones. Even elemental fusion, like maelflare or shadowmire, is rare but recorded. But this… this is different.
This is me.
Me, transforming into an element and being rebuilt by it again and again.
We test its boundaries, its limitations. I can shift any object I’m touching as long as it isn’t alive—clothing, weapons, paper, even food. It all disappears with me in my elemental form before being pulled molecule by molecule back to solid matter.
But every time I return to flesh, I feel… less.
At first, it’s just fatigue. A headache. A pull behind the eyes. Then it starts to change—bone-deep exhaustion, memories thatshimmer at the edges like ripples, small pieces of thought I have to chase down to hold on to.
But I keep going. I don’t tell them. I can’t. Not when we are so close to breaking through, to understanding, to becoming something more than the world of magick allows.
Elemental embodiment, elemental fusion—each exacting a different toll. Some worse than others… until even I can’t ignore the difference.
When Gavrail and I fuse, shadowmire feels energizing. Steady. Dense. Like something ancient and quietly alive. It tethers us, leaving us humming, synchronized.
But with Noa… maelflare is chaos. It’s beautiful. Uncontrollable. Igniting and consuming everything around it—and sometimes, it feels like it consumes me too.
Shadowmire is a drumbeat, steady and low.
Maelflare is a strike of lightning.
Shadowmire tethers me.
Maelflare tears me loose.
And in the quiet moments after the storm fades and the mist burns off the water’s surface, I often catch Noa watching me.
He doesn’t ask. Not yet. But his fingers linger longer on my wrist, checking my pulse. His gaze drifts to my temples when I rub them. He’s noticing.
I just don’t want him toknowwhat he’s noticing.
But when his eyes follow me… When he pulls me close…
It’s like he’s trying to see what’s left. Like he’s worried I’m already slipping through his fingers, one drop at a time.
CHAPTER 41
Peace is a season, not a certainty
—The War of Unbinding: The Second Rebellion
The end of March brings with it the announcement of the fourth elemental duel, set to take place in the quad that has been transformed into an impromptu stone stadium.
Between classes, training with Noa and Gavrail, and our relentless search for answers about my lineage, elemental fusion, and any trace of embodiment in historical record—by the time my head hits the pillow at night, I am already past exhaustion. I barely remember falling asleep most evenings.
Noa never says it, but I know he worries I’m burning too hot. Stretching too thin.
Still, he doesn’t stop me.
