Chapter 10 THE BOY WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
Kael Ashvorne was avoiding me.
I noticed it the way I noticed most things. Quietly, without making a production of it, cataloguing the pattern over several days until the evidence was too consistent to attribute to coincidence. He had spoken to me twice in the common room on Tuesday morning and said things that no person said to someone they intended to subsequently pretend didn’t exist. He had looked at me across the training ground with that focused golden attention that didn’t know how to be casual. He had stood in the corridor outside Combat Theory for thirty seconds longer than necessary on Wednesday and I had felt his presence through the wall with a specificity that was becoming difficult to rationalize.
And then nothing, throughout the weekend and into the following week, Kael Ashvorne moved through Ironfang’s spaces with his usual commanding indifference and his gaze slid past me in public the way it slid past furniture and architectural features and other things that didn’t require acknowledgment.
Ivana noticed on day three.
“He’s doing a thing,” she said at breakfast, without preamble, in the tone she used when she had been sitting on an observation long enough that it needed to come out.
“Good morning to you too,” I said.
“Ashvorne. He’s been actively not looking at you for four days which is interesting because before that he was actively looking at you in a way he was pretending wasn’t active.” She wrapped both hands around her coffee cup. “Something happened.”
“Nothing happened.” I defended.
“Something happened that you’re not telling me about.”
I ate my breakfast. “We spoke once in the common room. It was brief and unremarkable.”
Ivana looked at me with the expression she reserved for statements she found both technically accurate and fundamentally dishonest.
“Brief and unremarkable,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“And then he spent four days making eye contact with every surface in Ironfang except your face.”
“People are busy.” I defended.
“Ariana.”
“Ivana.”
She stole something from my tray. “Fine, but when whatever this is becomes relevant I want it noted that I identified it first.”
I said nothing because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t give her more material than she already had.
My first session with Professor Maren was on Monday evening in a small practice room on the academy’s lower level that I hadn’t known existed until she led me to it through a series of corridors that got progressively older and quieter the deeper we went. The room was circular. Stone floor, high ceiling, completely empty except for two chairs set facing each other in the center. No equipment, no training apparatus, nothing that suggested physical exertion of any kind.
I looked at the empty room. “This isn’t what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“Something more physical, training and combat applications.”
Professor Maren settled into one of the chairs with the ease of someone very familiar with it. “That comes later. First we need to understand what we’re working with, you can’t train something you haven’t properly met yet.”
I sat in the other chair.
“Met,” I said.
“You’ve been suppressing this ability since you were nine years old,” she said. “Which means you have spent eight years in an active relationship with it. Not a neutral one, not an absence of relationship, but a specific and sustained opposition. You have been pushing against it every day for eight years and it has been pushing back.” She looked at me steadily. “Before we do anything else I want you to simply stop pushing. I didn’t say you just release ur nor let it out, just stop actively holding it back and tell me what happens.”
I looked at her.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it.” She responded.
It sounded simple. It was the least simple thing anyone had ever asked me to do.
I sat in the chair in the circular stone room and I breathed and I looked at the space between my hands resting in my lap and I tried to explain to eight years of ingrained reflex that it was allowed, just for a moment, to stand down.
It took longer than I wanted to admit.
The suppression was so deeply wired into how I functioned that relaxing it felt less like releasing a held breath and more like trying to unclench a fist that had been closed for so long the muscles had forgotten the alternative. I worked at it layer by layer, the way you work at something that has calcified through years of being left in one position. My breathing slowed. The room settled around me. Professor Maren sat in her chair, she watched and said nothing and waited with that long-practiced patience.
And then something. Not dramatic, not the white-edged surge I had been half dreading, the uncontrolled break of something too long compressed. Something quieter than that. A warmth that started in my sternum and spread outward through my ribcage like the feeling of stepping into sunlight after a long time indoors. Present, steady and alive in a way that my own heartbeat was alive. Fundamental, constant, something that had always been there underneath everything else and was simply now audible because I had stopped making so much noise.
I opened my eyes, I hadn’t realized I’d closed them.
Professor Maren was watching me with those amber eyes and her expression had that quality again, the warmth underneath the professionalism, the thing that looked like relief.
“There it is,” she said softly.
“It feels… “ I stopped then to find a language for something that didn’t have an obvious vocabulary. “Warm, like something that’s been cold for a long time.”
“Yes.” She nodded once. “That’s what eight years of suppression feels like when you stop. The warmth is the natural state, the cold was the effort of containment.” She briefly paused then asked “How does it feel now? In terms of size?”
I considered it honestly. “Large but not threatening. It’s not trying to go anywhere, It’s just present.”
“Good.” She leaned forward slightly. “That’s what we’re building toward. Not control in the sense of compression but rather control in the sense of relationship. You understanding it and it understanding you and the two of you making decisions together rather than you spending all your energy keeping it at bay.”
I sat with that for a moment.
“Caden made me afraid of it,” I said.
“Yes.” She answered.
“He made me feel like it was dangerous, like if it came out it would damage things. Damage me.”
“Prime ability can be overwhelming if it emerges without preparation,” Professor Maren said carefully. “That much is true but the danger was never inherent to the ability itself. The danger was in the suppression, in building that much pressure over that much time without any release or guidance.” She paused. “What Caden did was take a truth and weaponize it. Yes, uncontrolled emergence could have been difficult but controlled, gradual, supported development?” She shook her head. “That was never going to damage you, He knew that.”
The anger that moved through me when she said it was quiet and clean and very cold. Not the hot reactive kind but the kind that settled into your bones and stayed there as something more durable than heat.
“He told me I was dangerous,” I said.
“You are,” Professor Maren said simply. “But not in the way he meant it and not to the people he was pretending he was protecting.”
I let that sit. I let the warmth in my chest sit alongside it. The two things coexisting, the truth and the anger at the truth, and found that I could hold both without either one overwhelming the other which was perhaps the first evidence that whatever Professor Maren was trying to build toward was already, in some small way, beginning.
We sat for another twenty minutes. She asked questions and I answered them as honestly as I could, which was more honestly than I had answered most questions from most people in a long time. When we finished she walked me back through the progressively older corridors to the main academy level and said goodnight at the base of the east wing stairs with the calm efficiency of someone with more sessions already planned.
I walked back up to the third floor.
The corridor outside room 307 was quiet and empty.
Almost.
Kael Ashvorne was leaning against the wall beside my door.
Not casually, there was nothing casual about how Kael occupied space, everything was too deliberate for casual. He stood with his arms crossed and his golden eyes on the corridor ahead of him and when I appeared at the top of the stairs he looked at me with the expression of someone who had been standing there long enough to have reconsidered whatever had brought them there multiple times and had stayed anyway.
I stopped a few feet away.
We looked at each other.
“You know where my room is,” I said.
“Everyone knows where your room is.” He paused then finally said “I need to tell you something.”
I studied his face, the deliberate composition of it. The thing underneath that composition that he didn’t know was visible but was something complicated and urgent that he had been carrying long enough that the weight of it had begun to show in the set of his jaw.
“Alright,” I said.
He looked at me for another moment. Then he looked at the corridor around us. Empty, quiet, the academy settling into its evening.
“Not here,” he said.