Page 24 of Forged in Fading

Students a few paces away giggled, but they quickly covered their mouths when she glared daggers in their direction.

“Settle down.” An elf entered the room, and the students hushed immediately at her voice, soft as dalvi’s first dusting of snow. She looked only a few years older than Alvara, and tucked her waist-length dark brown waves behind ivory pointed ears, settling her pale gray eyes on her students. “Alvara will be joining us for the foreseeable future. I expect you to treat her with respect. She has offered her help in our movement against King Einar.”

One of the students whispered rather loudly, “How can she fight if she doesn’t even know how to use magic at her age?”

Gods, these younglings. Alvara whipped around and locked eyes with him. “I know how to cut someone into pieces in seconds. Is that enough for you?”

The blood drained out of his face, and his skin took on a greenish hue, to no small amount of satisfaction from Alvara.

Until she realized she was now arguing with elves twenty years younger than her. Her shoulders slumped. If King Einar didn’t kill her, this surely would.

The teacher pinned Alvara with a withering stare. “If you’re all finished chatting, we can begin. We spent last week learning how to create shields out of wind. If you’ve practiced outside of this classroom as I’ve asked, then you will also be using that skill today in our next topic: precision. Not throwing wind at an object in the small hope the strike will land, but refining that power and telling your magic exactly where to go.”

She tossed a small pebble in the air and blasted it with a gust of wind directly into the center of a target hanging on the back wall. “No rocks for a few days. Today we focus on hitting a target with wind itself. You will alternate with a partner and try to block every other one of their attempts with a shield of your own. Find a partner, and we’ll begin.”

Oh no. All the students paired off, leaving Alvara with the grubby youngling who had thought her the same age as her faded father. A pang of sorrow sliced through her hollow insides, but she pushed it away.

The youngling clearly felt as good as she did about their partnership, because he wiggled his fingers in the air.

The teacher raised her eyebrows. “Yes, Lermi?”

“I don’t have a partner.”

“Oh, but I believe you do. Lucky for you, you will be working with Alvara today. She has Dalvian magic.”

“Obviously. She has blue eyes. Doesn’t mean much if she can’t use it.” Lermi stalked over to a target. “Don’t embarrass me,” he said under his breath as he hit her with a small blast of air, tangling her hair in her face.

She didn’t allow his words to act as the spark her temper desired. Just a few weeks of this, and she would have her powers under control and move on to more pressing matters.

“Close your eyes,” the teacher began. “Imagine your power like a windstorm inside of you. Or for some, perhaps a block of ice.”

Lermi stomped on Alvara’s toe, and she yelped. Vitharen give me the strength to not throw this youngling out the nearest window.

“Feed it, but only at a pace you can manage. You control your magic, not the other way around.”

Alvara dug around in her mind and body, searching the darkness for any sign of life. As usual, she found nothing, no matter how far she drilled into the part of herself she had ignored for so long.

“Pull a single strand of wind—or ice—from the force inside of you and envision exactly in your mind what you want it to do. And will it to do it.”

Within a few minutes, wind blew throughout the classroom, yet Alvara’s magic still hid, as if taunting her. Punishing her for neglecting it.

“Having trouble?” the teacher asked.

Alvara huffed out a hot breath. “It’s like there’s nothing there. Yet when my father—” No, definitely not something to share with a complete stranger. “When I was…upset, the power was almost too much to control. But now there’s nothing.”

“I’ll admit, most elves have an issue with refining their magic, not accessing it. Maybe summon that same emotion you were feeling to see if that will fuel your magic. It’s the best place to start.”

Lermi hung his head in his hands and groaned. Apparently Alvara had not held up on her end of the deal to not embarrass him. She shot him a look before closing her eyes again.

Summoning that emotion meant thinking about her father, his life force spilling out onto the floorboards of a home that had once brought her joy. Alvara’s heart quickened, and the air in the room thinned. If she let herself feel, she was afraid she would never stop. She shook her head and pried the image from her mind. There had to be another way.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

At the end of the class, she slipped out without speaking to the teacher, who would surely bestow an embarrassing amount of pity on her, when it was the last thing she needed. She headed to the forge to work for the rest of the day, which she was looking forward to about as much as seeing Lermi again tomorrow.

The swords glinting from every corner would only remind her of the weapon lodged in her father’s chest, drenched with violence. Blacksmithing had lost its allure, at least for now, but it was the only useful skill she could offer. She had to use it, even if it pained her.