"Which is it?"
"Show me and we'll find out together."
She uncurls her hands. The blue fire that blooms in her palms is startling, a deep cobalt that shifts to white at the edges, unlike any fire manifestation I've seen in my years of study. It's wild, leaping and sparking, responding to her fear with surges of intensity that scorch the table between us. But underneath the chaos there's a structure to it, cycling through intensity and calm in rhythms that could be beautiful if she learned to trust them.
"That's incredible," I say, meaning it.
She bursts into tears. I let her cry, keeping my own fire low and steady in my palms so she can feel the warmth of it without the pressure. Eventually she wipes her face with her sleeve, looks at the scorch marks on the table, and laughs.
"Sorry about the table."
"I've burned worse. There's a scorch mark on the ceiling of the main hall from my first week teaching here. Nobody's let me forget it." That gets a real smile. Moving from student to teacher took some time. I had to not only relearn everything I was taught wrong at the previous academy but I also had to learn how to teach. Demonstrating and helping others understand is very different than just doing.
I walk her through the basics, the breathing patterns that help fire-types regulate their output, the visualization techniques I developed at Grimrose when my own flame was so volatile it terrified everyone around me, including myself. She picks them up faster than I expected. Her blue fire responds to the exercises differently than gold fire would, pulsing instead of flowing, building in waves instead of steady streams. I adjust my approach three times during the session, learning her fire's language while she learns to speak it.
"Can I ask you something?" she says during a rest break, her hands wrapped around the cup of water I keep on my teaching desk for students who overheat.
"Go ahead."
"The darkness in your fire. Did someone do that to you?"
"In a sense. We chose to take it in. To stop someone who was hurting people like you."
"Does it hurt?"
I consider lying. The teaching manuals, the ones Ambrose drafted for faculty orientation, suggest framing the darkness as manageable and nonthreatening when speaking with students. But Maren hid for three years because adults lied to her about what her fire meant, and I'm not going to be another adult who covers the truth with comfortable language.
"Sometimes," I say. "It pushes against my fire, making it colder than it should be. Some mornings I wake up and my hands are numb and I have to spend twenty minutes warming them before I can teach."
She looks at my hands, then at hers. "But you still teach."
"Every day."
"Okay," she says, and straightens in her chair. "Show me the breathing thing again."
We work for another hour. By the end of the session her blue fire holds steady for almost thirty seconds before the fearspikes it again. Not mastery, but progress, the beginning of a relationship with her own essence that isn't defined by terror.
After she leaves I sit in the empty classroom, flexing my hands. The dark veins in my fire pulse with a rhythm that doesn't match my heartbeat. Dmitri's rhythm, filtered through my phoenix essence, persistent and alien. Teaching Maren to trust her fire while mine carries shadows feels like a contradiction I'll never fully resolve. But she doesn't need me to be uncorrupted. She needs me to be honest, to show her that fire can carry difficult things without being destroyed by them. The dark veins in my flame might actually be the most useful teaching tool I have.
Rumi finds me in the corridor between sessions. He's been teaching divine-touched students in the eastern wing, young people with traces of godly blood who spent their lives hiding it because the old system classified divine essence as unstable. He looks tired but settled, his golden aura carrying its own dark threads with a steadiness that makes me jealous. His balance was always better than my control.
"Liz is teaching in the west wing," he says, falling into step beside me.
"I know."
"Have you talked to her?"
"I've watched her work." Through the classroom windows, from the corridor, never directly. Liz teaches fire-types with a precision that comes from years of understanding exactly how fire can be weaponized against the vulnerable.
She knows every way essence can be twisted because she was the one doing the twisting, and that knowledge makes her effective in a way that should be uncomfortable but is mostly just practical. Her students learn fast. They also flinch when she raises her voice, and she notices every time, adjusting her volume, pulling back, and modulating herself with the carefulattention of someone who knows exactly what damage she's capable of.
"The students in her sessions are progressing faster than mine," I say.
"That bother you?"
"No. What bothers me is that I understand why. She knows fire from the inside. Not just how it works but how it hurts. She teaches from the wound, and the students respond to that because they're wounded too."
Rumi is quiet for a few steps. "She asked me yesterday if the students would ever stop flinching."
