Page 45 of Embers of Midnight

“Yes.”

Ronan gives the final safety note and the room scatters. He waits for me with the patience of a mountain. Caelum peels away with a two-finger salute to Ronan and a quiet, “I’ll text,” for me—who knows what, it doesn’t matter, the gesture lands.

“Walk?” Ronan asks.

We take the long way home. The path behind the training hall smells like clean dirt and iron. The light does the late-afternoon thing where it forgives everything for a few minutes. Neither of us rushes to fill the silence; that’s new and unsettling and perfect.

“You were good today,” he says finally, like he’s announcing weather and not my entire circulatory system.

“I didn’t die.”

“You adapted.” He glances down at me, mouth curving. “You watched, you stole what worked, you shed what didn’t. That’s rare.”

Heat crawls up my neck that has nothing to do with exertion. “Please don’t say prodigy. I’ll have to walk into the river.”

“I won’t,” he says, amused. “I’ll say you’re dangerous, and we’ll make sure you stay that way without breaking.”

My chest does the thing again—that tight, painful stretch that feels like terror’s kinder cousin. “You talk like you’ve done this before.”

“Teaching?” He considers. “Holding people together while they learn to swing? Yes.” He kicks a pebble off the path with surgical precision. “The first time I shifted, I broke a door and three promises.”

I look up at him, surprised. “You make promises?”

“Fewer now.” A beat. “Stronger ones.”

The house comes into view. The porch light is already on like the house got excited we were coming back. Ronan opens the door with his shoulder and lets me pass. His knuckles brush mine accidentally-on-purpose. I pretend not to notice, because the alternative is doing something reckless with my mouth.

“Eat,” he says, like he hasn’t been watching me all day to make sure I do. “Then Darian wants your hour. He says ‘training,’ but you can tell him no.”

I roll my eyes. “I can tell him no. Will he listen?”

“No,” Ronan says, a ghost of a laugh in it. “But he’ll reschedule.”

Darian’s idea of a private training room is a space that feels like a chapel and a safehouse had a competent child. Smooth stone. Ward lines stitched into the walls like veins. A ring on the floor with embedded sigils that hum at a frequency I can stand.

He’s already there when I walk in, hair damp from his own session or the shower. He doesn’t say I look tired. He doesn’t say I look good. He nods at the circle. “We’ll make your fire remember it has edges.”

“Today we learned edges with sticks,” I inform him. “I’m trending.”

“Good.” He flips a switch; a faint shimmer lifts around the ring. “Barrier. You can flare; we won’t set off anything expensive.”

We work. It’s breath and counting and that exact feel when heat wants to climb your throat and you talk it down without strangling it. He gives instructions like instructions are a love language he understands: sparse, precise, no sting. When I wobble, he adjusts a wrist, a stance, the angle of my jaw. When my temper pricks, he doesn’t push. He waits it out like he’s stood in worse storms.

“Again,” he says when my flame skitters. “Smaller. Give it a room, not the house.”

I do. The morphsigil at my hip hums acknowledgement, a small anchor in a larger sea. Sweat runs down my spine. My breath evens. The circle glows a thin, smug gold and then stills.

Darian steps in only when the last flicker dies. He offers a towel, not a speech. “Enough.”

“You sure?” I pant. “I could burn the alphabet in cursive.”

His mouth almost smiles. “Tomorrow.”

We leave the ring as we found it. He kills the barrier, logs something on a slate like a man who worships at the altar of documentation, then walks me to the stairs without pretending he wasn’t going to.

In the hall, the house has adopted a soft evening hush. Voices from the kitchen. The smell of something garlicky and fatal. My legs feel liquid. My head feels… quiet. That’s new.

“Good work,” Darian says, and it’s not casual praise; it lands heavy, the kind that builds a spine.