Sera led Sephir to a quiet garden inside the heavenly palace. Morning light came down through thick foliage and scattered shadows across the ground. Here, among all that green, Sephir's training as the goddess of wind would begin.
Her mornings started with meditation, though not the kind mortals practised. In the heavenly realm, meditation was about channelling soul power. Every being in heaven carried soul power; it was simply their life energy. Mortals carried it too. The difference was that mortals could not replenish it, and that was why their time on earth ran out. As the soul power drained away, the body weakened until it failed. The soul itself went on.
Sephir was no longer bound by any of that. She had been given the Blessings of the Goddess, which let her draw on her soul power and regrow it, all for one purpose: to wield the sacred weapons of the goddess of wind.
Her first task was learning to channel that power and widen the well it came from. The blessings sped everything up. She could burn through her soul power completely and refill it without the crushing fatigue that normally followed, so her capacity grew fast.
Then Sera brought out the arsenal.
The Tempest Vase came first, a green vessel that looked as though it had been lifted straight out of an enchanted forest. Fine patterns wound across its surface, and it seemed to pulse with a life of its own. Inside it waited elemental storms, four of them, and Sephir could call on any one. The Shredstorm was a spiteful thing, a vortex that pulled souls apart. The Ashstorm set the spirit alight and burned it down to nothing. The Abyssstorm turned water and wind on its target together, crushing a soul under a pressure it could not survive. And the Coilstorm swelled a soul past its own limits until it burst, releasing all that stolen energy at once. Each storm ate a different measure of her soul power, and the vase could call them back whenever she willed it, bound as it was to the goddess of wind herself.
The second weapon hid what it was. The Wind Blades looked like nothing at all, just two plain grips with no blades attached. But once Sephir fed her soul power into them, blades of wind bloomed out of the handles and took whatever shape she asked of them: daggers, swords, even storms. Their edges could cut through the fabric of existence itself, which made them terrible things to face anywhere in the heavenly realm.
The third was the Zephyr Harp. It looked like an ordinary instrument, if an ordinary instrument could carry that kind of aura. It had been made from the finest materials in the divine realm, and its strings and frame held a shimmer that never dulled. Underneath the music, though, was command over the winds. Sephir could play it to move the air and the elements with real precision, calming a gale or lashing it into a storm, depending on the melody. Best of all, it cost her almost no soul power, which made it the most flexible weapon of the three.
For the Trial of Death, Sephir picked the hardest of them to master. She chose the Tempest Vase.
Out on the training grounds, ringed by storms she had summoned and could not steer, she struggled to control even one. Sera suggested more than once that the harp or the blades would serve her better. Sephir would not budge.
There was more to the training than weapons. Mornings were for meditation; evenings were for combat with Sraptor. At first she sparred with ordinary blades, then began working the Wind Blades into her forms. Fighting with them meant pouring energy into a weapon while she fought, which trained both things at once.
The days were brutal. The Blessings spared her the worst of the exhaustion that came with draining her soul power, but she still finished each one worn down to the bone. What the blessing really bought her was time: soul power that would normally take years to come back returned in hours. It was an enormous advantage, and it belonged only to those who had won the Trial of Life.
As the days went on, her resolve hardened. She could feel the vase's power, the grace of the blades, the control the harp gave her, all of it settling into her like something she had been born with. The garden where she had started was churned and battered now, marked up by everything she had put into it. And the Trial of Death kept getting closer.
Somewhere in all of it, Sephir and Sera became something more than teacher and student. Sera had handed over her arsenal, but she gave her wisdom too, and Sephir understood that she was being made into a vessel for the legacy of the wind. The weight of it did not leave her shoulders. She carried it anyway. Godhood came with a price, and she had already decided to pay it.
Ten days out from the Trial, Sephir's heart had fallen into rhythm with the winds of heaven. She understood by then that the trial was not really a test of power. It was a test of will, and of how badly she wanted to protect the celestial realm. As the sun dropped below the horizon, she looked up at the starlit sky and felt her soul tangled up in the wind itself. The real test was still ahead of her. She would meet it with the strength of a goddess, the guidance of Sera, and every hour of training behind her.