The confrontation in the great hall left Elara buzzing with a volatile mix of fury and fear. Kaelen's warning—You would be wise not to shine too brightly—felt less like counsel and more like a predator toying with its prey. Back in the obsidian solitude of her chambers, the magnificent gown felt like a leaden shroud. She tore it off with Lyra's help, her fingers trembling not from cold, but from a surging, restless energy.
She could not simply sit and be consumed. The historian Kaelen's words came back to her: "It will either destroy you both, or it will create something entirely new." To avoid destruction, she needed to understand the nature of the force arrayed against her. She needed to learn.
The opportunity came the next morning. Lyra arrived with a breakfast tray of sweet, dark bread and strange, juicy berries that tasted of night-blooming flowers.
"The Commander is often in the western grove in the mornings," Lyra mentioned casually as she laid out the food. It was the first unsolicited piece of information she had offered, and Elara looked at her sharply. The Fae woman's expression was neutral, but her peridot eyes held a glimmer of something… helpful. Was it pity? Or strategy? Elara couldn't tell, but she filed the information away.
"The western grove?" Elara asked, keeping her tone light.
"A place of power," Lyra said simply. "Where the veil between worlds is thin. He goes there to… commune."
An hour later, wrapped in a heavy cloak of dark grey wool, Elara slipped from her chambers. The stronghold was quieter in the daylight hours, the eerie bioluminescence dimmed, the courtiers and warriors presumably attending to their duties. She moved through the twisting, organic corridors, following Lyra's vague directions towards the western edge of the encampment.
The air grew colder as she left the main structures behind, passing under an arch of weeping trees with silver leaves. The western grove was not a grove in any sense she understood. It was a circle of towering, petrified trees, their branches like frozen screams against the perpetually twilight sky. In the center of the circle, the ground was not earth, but a pool of what looked like liquid shadow, perfectly still and reflecting nothing. The very air hummed with a dense, potent magic that made her teeth ache.
And he was there.
Kaelen stood at the edge of the shadow-pool, his back to her. He was not in robes or armor, but in simple, dark trousers and a tunic, his powerful frame clearly outlined. His hands were slightly raised, palms facing the pool, and from them, tendrils of pure darkness seeped, swirling and merging with the abyssal water before him. The shadows around him deepened, the very light seeming to bend and bow towards him, feeding him.
This was not the magic of decay she had been taught to fear. This was a magic of silence, of potential, of the deep, formless dark that existed before the first star was lit. It was terrifying, but it was also… profound.
She must have made a sound, a faint intake of breath, or perhaps her own starlight, however suppressed, was a discordant note in this symphony of shadow. Kaelen went still. The tendrils of darkness snapped back into his hands as if they had never been.
He turned, and his face was a mask of cold anger. "What are you doing here?"
The force of his glare was like a physical blow, but she stood her ground. "Observing," she said, her voice steadier than she felt. "I was told this was a place of power. As a wielder of power myself, I was… curious."
"Curiosity is a luxury your position does not afford you," he said, taking a step towards her. The energy in the grove shifted, growing heavier, more oppressive. "This place is not for you. Your light is an affront to it."
"Is it?" she challenged, a reckless courage born of desperation taking hold. "Or is it merely a different kind of truth? You draw power from the void, the silence. I draw mine from the light that breaks it. They are two sides of the same coin."
His eyes narrowed. "A quaint philosophy. And a dangerously naive one. My power does not just exist in the silence, Princess. It creates it."
To demonstrate, he flicked his wrist. A sphere of absolute blackness, a hole in the fabric of the world, shot from his fingertips and flew past her head. It didn't make a sound, but as it passed, the very air around it was stripped of noise, of warmth, of light. It struck a petrified tree several yards behind her, and where it touched, a patch of the ancient wood simply vanished, erased from existence without a whisper.
Elara's heart hammered against her ribs. The display was meant to intimidate her, and it worked. But it also confirmed something. His magic wasn't just about shadow; it was about negation. Erasure.
"You see?" he said, his voice soft and deadly. "Your starlight may be bright, but it is a finite thing. It can be swallowed. It can be unmade."
The threat was clear. Yet, seeing his power so directly, something else clicked into place. The blight on her land—it wasn't a poison, it was an erasure. A slow, creeping negation of life, just as he had negated that piece of wood.
"Is that what you're doing to Liranel?" she asked, the question torn from her. "Are you unmaking it?"
For a fraction of a second, something shifted in his eyes—surprise, perhaps, at her perception. Then it was gone, replaced by icy disdain. "The blight is a consequence of your kingdom' own weakness. A natural failure in the face of a stronger force."
"I don't believe you," she whispered.
He closed the distance between them in two swift strides. The cold radiating from him was intense, a deep chill that had nothing to do with the air. He stood so close she could see the flecks of silver in his storm-grey eyes.
"Believe what you wish," he said, his voice a low vibration that she felt in her bones. "But understand this, this is your first and only lesson. Your power is a flickering candle. Mine is the endless night. Do not mistake your ability to push back the dark for a single moment as an ability to defeat it."
He looked down at her, his gaze dropping to her lips, then back to her eyes. The intensity was no longer just about power; it was personal, intimate in its hostility. "Now, get out of my grove."
Every instinct screamed to obey, to flee from the terrifying reality of his magic. But the scholar in her, the survivor, held fast. She had learned something vital. She had seen the enemy's face, and it was not merely a beast of destruction, but a master of void.
She took a step back, then another, her eyes never leaving his. "Thank you for the lesson, Commander," she said, her voice quiet but clear. "It was most… illuminating."
She turned and walked away, feeling his gaze boring into her back until she passed under the arch of silver trees and the grove's oppressive weight lifted. She was shaking, but her mind was racing, piecing together the clues.
He had not denied causing the blight. He had called it a 'natural failure.' And in his eyes, she had seen not just power, but a rigid, unshakeable belief in his own right to wield it.
The first lesson was over. She had learned the nature of his darkness. Now, she had to learn how to make her own light a weapon that could not be so easily swallowed.