The saying was not carved into stone.
It was never displayed publicly. Never sanctioned in writing. It existed instead in the spaces where professionals spoke honestly passed between senior practitioners and those they judged capable of surviving the truth.
There is nothing more dangerous than a Practitioner with nothing to lose.
It was not philosophy.
It was a warning.
The instruction chamber lay adjacent to the demonstration hall, separated by a corridor thick with dampening stone. It had once been a calibration room, back when the fort still pretended to study the sky instead of managing threats. The arrays etched into its walls were old, their lines softened by time and disuse, but no one had bothered to remove them.
They still worked.
The benches were arranged in a shallow arc, leaving the center of the room empty. A dozen practitioners sat in silence, anchors resting against throats or wrists, hands folded deliberately in laps. None of them were young.
Those who survived long enough to receive doctrine rarely were.
The Senior Magister stood at the front of the chamber, hands clasped behind his back. Up close, his age showed more clearly—fine lines around the eyes, a slight stiffness in his shoulders when he shifted his weight. His gaze, however, was sharp and unblinking.
"Power is not what kills you," he said.
His voice was calm, almost conversational.
"Mismanagement does."
No one spoke. No one moved.
"The Yara responds to guidance," the Magister continued. "It rewards coherence. It punishes impatience by erosion."
He paused, letting the words settle.
"Erosion is quiet," he added. "By the time you notice it, most of the damage is already done."
One of the practitioners a woman with graying hair pulled tight against her scalp flexed her fingers unconsciously.
"The Krag," the Magister went on, "responds to dominance. It rewards certainty. It punishes hesitation with catastrophe."
A faint tightening passed through the room. Someone swallowed.
"You are taught restraint," he said. "Not because restraint is virtuous. Because restraint is survivable."
He turned slightly, his gaze moving across the benches.
"Unrestrained practitioners do not burn brighter," he said. "They burn briefly."
That earned a quiet, humorless breath of acknowledgment from somewhere in the back.
The Magister gestured toward the empty center of the room. "You have all seen what happens when control falters," he said. "You have seen the cost of excess. What you are not often told is this—"
He stopped.
Looked at them carefully.
"The most dangerous practitioner is not the most powerful."
He let that contradiction linger.
"It is the one who has decided the cost no longer matters."
A younger man near the front shifted, fingers tightening around the edge of the bench.
"Fear keeps people alive," the Magister said. "Pain teaches limits. Loss teaches restraint."
He leaned forward slightly now, hands braced against the back of a bench.
"Take those away," he said quietly, "and you have something that cannot be negotiated with."
Elsewhere in the fort, the handler read the doctrine summary assigned to custodial staff.
It was only three pages long.
No metaphors. No history. Just thresholds.
Acceptable expenditure ratios.Observed failure patterns.Projected lifespan reduction under sustained use.
One line had been underlined by a previous reader, the ink pressed hard enough to score the page beneath it.
Practitioners deprived of consequence awareness demonstrate exponential lethality.
The handler closed the packet and sat back, rubbing their eyes.
They thought of Aurel.
They thought of the silver line.
In the records wing, a supply clerk reconciled anchor requisitions.
Two units had been flagged as irrecoverable.
One had cracked clean through its core.The other had fused internally, its channels collapsed by overload.
She entered the losses into the ledger, hesitated, then added a note in the margin:
Damage consistent with instructional application.
No further comment was required.
That afternoon, Aurel noticed a new mark on the wall near his bed.
It was small, almost hidden behind the shadow cast by the lamp. A rune, imperfectly carved, its lines shallow and uneven.
He traced it with his eyes but did not touch it.
"What's that?" he asked when the handler entered.
The handler followed his gaze. Their expression tightened.
"An old stabilizer," they said. "It shouldn't still be active."
"But it is," Aurel said.
The handler hesitated. "Yes."
Aurel nodded. He had learned not to press when answers came too easily.
After a moment, he asked, "Why do they keep using it?"
"Using what?"
"Magic," Aurel said. "When it hurts them."
The handler took longer to respond this time.
"Because sometimes," they said carefully, "the alternative hurts more people."
Aurel considered that.
"They don't stop," he said.
"No," the handler agreed. "They manage."
That answer seemed to satisfy him.
That night, in a private office lined with sealed shelves, the Senior Magister wrote a brief addendum to the day's instruction log.
No flourishes. No emotion.
Reminder to senior staff: desperation alters output patterns.Monitor practitioners exhibiting loss-indifferent behavior.Containment protocols should prioritize psychological state over raw capacity.
He sanded the ink dry, closed the ledger, and locked it away.
He did not write the saying down.
Some knowledge survived best unrecorded.
Aurel lay awake, listening to the wards hum.
The sound was steady, but thinner than before, stretched tight across something fragile. He counted his breaths, then stopped when the numbers began to blur.
He thought of the people who had been hurt.
He thought of the way the air felt when he was alone.
"I don't want to be dangerous," he whispered to the dark.
The wards did not respond.
Somewhere in the fort, a practitioner woke from sleep with a sharp pain behind the eyes and no memory of dreaming.
Somewhere else, a clerk adjusted a margin and did not know why their hands were shaking.
The system held.
But it was paying closer attention now.