A faint, insistent heat radiated from the base of Soren's left palm—barely a tingle, more memory than sensation. He angled the blade, squared his stance, and focused on the task Valenna had once described with the casual cruelty of someone reciting a multiplication table: "If you cannot command the Aura, then the Aura will not obey."
He'd never done it right at the Academy. Faked a pass or two with clever timing and a borrowed trick from the twins. Even Mira, in her early years supervising drills, had shrugged off Soren's lack of sword-light as the kind of deficiency that would either correct itself or be corrected in the field.
Now there was no field and no audience, just his reflection in the washed-out glass of the waystation's window, and the steady, pulsing urge from the fragment embedded in his wrist.
