“You’re reacting,” he says, his voice still calm, still measured, like he’s describing something inevitable.
I wrench free, forcing distance, driving forward again, but every movement meets the same result—nothing where I expect it, resistance where I don’t, my rhythm collapsing under his control of it.
“You’re predictable.”
His palm strikes my chest before I see the movement, the force controlled, directed, enough to empty my lungs without sending me sprawling. I stagger, catch myself, force breath back in, and try again, compressing the magic tighter this time, shaping it before release?—
He intercepts it at the point of formation, turning it back along its own path, the backlash heavier now, snapping through my shoulder and dragging my arm down with it.
“You don’t control it,” he says.
“I do,” I snap, the words forced through clenched teeth as I straighten again.
“No,” he replies. “You think you do.”
I adjust, slow the next movement, try to rebuild the structure I’ve been trained into, but he doesn’t give me time to complete it. He steps in, clean and precise, and the next moment the ground hits my shoulder as he drives me down, my arm locked before I can leverage out of it, my balance gone before I can recover it.
The fight ends there.
Not because I choose it.
Because he does.
“This is the difference,” he says, looking down at me, his expression unchanged, unaffected by anything I’ve done. “Between using power and understanding it.”
I don’t answer.
I can’t.
Because there’s nothing in the moment that argues against it.
He releases me without force, stepping back like the demonstration is complete, like I was never more than that.
“Take him.”
The guards move immediately, hands locking onto my arms before I can reset, before I can pull anything back into alignment.
“You’ve been allowed too much autonomy,” he continues, turning away as if I’ve already ceased to matter. “That ends now.”
“You used this,” I say, forcing the words out as they drag me back. “The war. The villages. All of it.”
He pauses, just long enough to acknowledge the question.
“Yes.”
The confirmation lands harder than the defeat.
“A test,” he adds.
“For what?” I demand.
He glances back over his shoulder, his gaze settling on me with that same measured distance.
“For you.”
The words settle in, and everything else follows.
“You needed pressure,” he continues. “Conflict. Variables you could not control.”
