The chamber was quiet save for the soft rasp of his breathing. No storm of ash whirled here, no thunder of Barachas's strikes. Only silence—and in that silence, the weight of his own flaws pressed heavier than any blow.
Alatar sat cross-legged on the bare floor, shoulders slumped. His body still throbbed from the spar, ribs aching with each breath, but it was not pain that troubled him. It was memory.
The moment when the ash had scattered wild, slipping from his command. The instant his frost had buckled, shattering into useless shards. He had seen it—felt it—how close the weaving had come to harmony, only to collapse like brittle glass in his hands.
Barachas's voice still echoed in his skull: Focus, or drown in your own storm.
Alatar closed his eyes. The words bit deep because they were true. He was not yet master. He was still a boy chasing fireflies, thinking himself sovereign of the night.
He exhaled slow, pressing his palms to the floor. The stone was cold. Cold enough to remind him of the frost that had cracked apart in the spar. He raised his hand, summoned a thread of ash, then coaxed a sliver of ice beside it. The two lingered in the dim light, fragile as thought.
He tried to guide them together. The ash swirled, restless, eager to consume. The ice resisted, stiff, unyielding. When they touched, the frost stiffened to useless crust, or the ash smothered into dull soot. Never balance. Always one devouring the other.
His teeth clenched.
Am I too weak, or too blind?
He tried again. And again. Tiny figures of ash wrapped in ice, ice lined with veins of ash. Shapes collapsed. Forms shattered. Each failure was a mirror thrust before him, showing the cracks in his focus, in his will.
Frustration welled up, sharp and hot. He wanted to tear the air apart, to hurl the ash and ice against the walls until the chamber froze and burned alike. But he did not move. He only sat, trembling, staring at the ruin of his own making.
Slowly, a breath escaped him. The anger ebbed, leaving something stranger: fascination. For in each collapse he glimpsed a moment of beauty—the instant before failure, when the two opposed forces seemed almost to bow to one another. Ash curling into frost, frost bending around ash. Not enemies. Not allies. Something else.
Perhaps the flaw was not in the elements. Perhaps it was in him—his insistence that one must command, that one must yield.
He drew another thread of ash, another shard of ice. This time he did not force them. He let them linger close, brushing edges, turning in slow orbit. He watched them bleed against one another, not as rivals, but as dancers caught mid-step. The shape held for longer before unraveling.
A small thing. But enough to steady him.
He sat back, chest heaving, lips curling into something near a smile. A thin, cold smile, not of joy but of recognition. He had seen the path forward. Fragile, narrow, but real.
His mind drifted, unbidden, to the self he had been—the naive boy who thought suffering proof of greatness, who mistook raw hunger for strength. That boy would have raged at failure. That boy would have drowned in his own storm.
But he was not that boy anymore. Not wholly.
Weakness is not eternal. It can be carved away, if one is willing to bleed.
Alatar rose, swaying on tired legs. Ash scattered at his feet, frost ghosted across his knuckles. Imperfect, unstable, but his.
Tomorrow Barachas would press him harder, would drag him deeper into trial. He knew he was not ready. Yet readiness was a lie—no one is ready to break and rebuild. One only chooses whether to step into the fracture.
Alatar's hand closed, crushing frost and ash alike. His voice was low, certain.
"I will master this."
The chamber returned to silence. But within it, something had shifted: not the world, not yet—but Alatar himself.
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