Instructor Ky was already there, a stark, unyielding figure against the vast, indifferent sky, his back to her as he surveyed the ring of mountains. Night sat alertly at his side. As Gessa approached, her boots crunching softly on the gravelly path, Ky turned. For a fleeting moment, as the wind caught a stray lock of his raven black hair, lifting it from his temple, Gessa felt that same unwelcome flicker of awareness she’d experienced in the bathhouse. She felt the pull of the harsh, primal magnetism of the man, the way he moved with a coiled, dangerous grace despite his slight limp.
The thought was instantly anathema, crushed by a wave of fear and resentment. She had thought herself dead to any such perception after Polan, and for it to surface, however briefly,forthisman, her appointed tormentor and reluctant guide, was deeply upsetting.
He gestured toward a flat, dark stone resting on a weathered pedestal in the center of the exposed circle. It looked innocuous, like a piece of polished river rock, but Gessa’s breath hitched. Its very smoothness, its calculated simplicity, screamed of its purpose.
“This,” Ky said, his voice cold, cutting through the wind, “is a standard Academy feedback stone. It is designed to help you focus your intent and manage the subtle energies involved in sensing and directing even minute magical flows. When your concentration on a Ley Line wavers, or your internal control slips, it will deliver a mild, corrective energy pulse. Unpleasant, perhaps, but not harmful. It teaches discipline. Stillness. Focus.”
Discipline. Stillness. Focus.Polan’s catechism. Gessa’s hands, hidden in the folds of her tunic, clenched into fists. The nausea was instant. But so too was the grim resolve. She had endured. She would endure.
“I understand, Instructor,” she said, her voice remarkably steady, she thought.
“Good.” Ky’s expression remained impassive. “Pick it up. We will begin with a simple focus exercise. Hold the stone. Clear your mind. I want you to simply maintain an even, internal stillness for a count of one hundred. No magic. Just stillness.”
Gessa approached the pedestal. The stone radiated a faint, neutral coolness. It was the opposite of Polan’s, which had always felt greasy with malice. Yet, the shape, theideaof it… She reached out a trembling hand. Her fingers recoiled as if from a brand, but she forced them forward. The stone was so distasteful, so laden with horrific association, that she couldn’t bring herself to truly grip it. Instead, she managed to balance it on her open, upturned palm, her arm held stiffly before her.
She closed her eyes, trying to find that quiet center Master Elms had spoken of, the place her magic resided before it became a storm. For a moment, a fragile, wavering stillness settled over her.One… two… three…She held the count, her breath shallow. The stone lay inert.Ten… eleven… twelve…A tiny flicker of something—pride? Hope?—touched her.I can do this. This is not him. This is different.
Then, her focus, strained by the sheer effort of will it took to even tolerate the stone near her while fighting back the rising tide of memory, wavered for a split second. A tiny, sharp pulse, like an angry insect sting, zapped her palm from the stone. Not agonizing, not like Polan’s deep, soul-shredding currents, but shocking enough in its unexpectedness, horribly familiar in itsnature.
She yelped, a small, startled sound, and the stone clattered to the hard-packed earth. Frustration, hot and jagged, bit at her. She bent quickly, snatched up the feedback stone, and placed it back on her open palm, her jaw tight with determination. She wouldnotbe defeated by this… thisthing. She would endure.
Ky, who had watched her initial hesitation and now this fumble with a deepening frown, stepped forward.
“That is not how you hold it, recruit. Your grip is an invitation to failure.” His voice was laced with impatience, his frustration at her perceived incompetence palpable. “Like this.”
Before Gessa could react, before she could voice the protest screaming in her mind, his own hand, strong and inescapable, closed over hers, pressing her trembling fingers firmly, unyieldingly, around the cold, smooth surface of the feedback stone.
“Grip it! Focus!”
His touch. The pressure on her hand, trapping the stone between their flesh. His command tofocuswhen all she felt was splintering terror. His ignorant words about her grip when itwas her soul that was recoiling. It was too much. The carefully constructed dam of her endurance, already strained to breaking by the mere presence of the stone, shattered.
Polan’s study materialized around her, engulfing the cold mountain air. The scent of his oil, its cloying sweetness and something metallic, like old blood, was suddenly thick in her nostrils, making her gag. She could feel the cold, smooth surface ofhisstone pressed into her palm, his larger, stronger hand clamped over hers, ensuring she could not drop it, ensuring she felt every nuance of his correction.
“Stillness, Gessa.”his voice, that silken, patient tone that always presaged the pain, his lips barely brushing her ears as his voice echoed in her, hot and intimate.“True peace is found in accepting guidance, my love. Why do you fight it so? It only makes it harder on us both.”
The tingle began in her palm, crawling up her arm, the sickening promise of the escalating current. She tried to brace, to retreat into that small, hard part of herself that had learned to weather these storms, the part that had kept count through endless, agonizing lessons.
He is not here,a frantic part of her mind screamed.This is the Academy. This is Instructor Ky. This is different.
But the feel of the stone, the crushing pressure of a man’s hand over hers, his voice demanding focus, demanding stillness… it was all the same. The memories, stark and vivid, clawed at her: the hours spent locked in that chair, the pain dialed to his precise measure of her disobedience, his feigned sorrow as he watched her break, his cold satisfaction when she finally begged.
She fought to hold onto the present, to the biting wind of the training circle, to the image of Ky’s stern, handsome face, so different from Polan’s cruel perfection.Endure,she told herself.You endured him. You can endure this. It’s just a stone. It’s just a lesson.
But Polan’s phantom voice was relentless, drowning out any thought of Ky, any sense of the cold mountain morning.
“You see how you force my hand, dearest?”it whispered, coiling around her sanity.“Such a trial you are. But I will correct this. I will make you perfect. For your own good.”
The remembered pain, the hopelessness, the utter violation of her will, surged through her, a black tide. Her carefully constructed walls were crumbling, her sanity fraying. Her focus on the present, on the stillness Ky had demanded, was obliterated, lost in the roaring terror of the past.
Suddenly, a small, sharp pulse from the feedback stone still trapped in her hand under Ky’s, then another, and another, insistently corrective. The Academy stone, reacting to her complete loss of mental composure, was doing precisely what Ky said it would: delivering tiny shocks for her failure to maintain focus.
But to Gessa, lost in the nightmare, each small jolt was not a mild correction; it was Polan’s current escalating, his impatience mounting, the prelude to greater agony. It was the final, unbearable turn of the screw. This was no longer just memory. It was happeningnow. He was here. He washurtingher.
A whimper, small and animalistic, tore from Gessa’s throat, a sound she was powerless to stop, the sound of a soul finally breaking under a weight it could no longer bear. “I… I will do better, my lord… please… I will be good…”
The words were a horrifying, involuntary echo from that dark past, spilling from her lips before she could bite them back. Her body began to shake uncontrollably, a violent, racking tremor. She felt the magic within her surge in a blind, terrified response to the overwhelming memories and the present, stinging pulses from the stone.
But even in the depths of her re-lived horror, a primal instinct, a desperate awareness born of the beast she had unleashed in Ky’s classroom, screamed at her:Not again! Contain it! Don’t let it out!She fought, frantically, silently, to turn the erupting power inward, to smother it, to choke it back down into the abyss from which it had sprung.
