AETHORIA:The hollow king

What the Fire Costs

The fire came back on the second try.

Not the whole of it  not the roaring full-body torrent he'd felt in the street at Durnholt but a controlled handful of it, the size of a candle flame, sitting in the cup of his palm and actually doing what he asked it to do. Karl stared at it for longer than was probably dignified. Sera watched with her arms crossed and her expression carefully neutral, which he was beginning to understand was the face she made when something interested her.

"How does it feel?" she asked.

"Like it's mine," he said. Which surprised him. He had expected it to feel foreign, borrowed, wrong. Instead it felt like a muscle he had always had but never been allowed to use. "Is that normal?"

"For Mirrors, yes. You don't borrow Aeth. You absorb it. It becomes part of your structure. What you took from Calder's officer is yours now as much as your own blood." She paused. "The officer's bond is gone. It won't grow back fully. You should know that."

Karl closed his hand. The flame went out.

He sat with that for a moment. The man whose fire he now carried would live the rest of his life diminished — lower-ranked, reduced in power, possibly discharged from Imperial service. He was a soldier of an occupying army. He had been participating in a quarter-burn. Karl did not feel guilty. He was not sure what he felt.

"If I absorb more"

"The more you carry, the harder it is to control. Aldric Dun absorbed seventeen bonds simultaneously. That's what killed him  not the absorption itself, but the attempt to hold and direct that much power at once. The mind breaks before the body does." She said it factually, the way you state a thing that happened and cannot be changed. "One bond is manageable. Two or three, with practise. More than that becomes a question of how much you want to die."

"Good to know," Karl said.

— — —

They practised through the morning. Sera would call her shadow-Aeth up, let it move through the air between them, and Karl would try to sense its frequency without reaching for it learning the shape of power before touching it, which she said was the most important discipline a Mirror could have.

"Why?"

"Because if you reach for every Aeth you sense, you'll absorb every mage you touch. Accidentally. Without consent." She let the shadow-Aeth recede. "Imagine shaking hands with a Sear at a peace negotiation and stripping his fire in front of an audience."

"That sounds like it would cause a diplomatic incident."

"That sounds like it would cause a war," she corrected. "Which is the Solmere narrative: that Mirrors are thieves. Predators. That they can't be controlled and shouldn't be trusted." She looked at him directly. "Your control is the only argument against that narrative. Do you understand?"

Karl understood. He understood in the way you understand something that was aimed at you specifically.

He practised restraint for two hours until his head ached from the concentration. Then he ate the rest of Sera's dried rations  she had more, she said, in a supply cache near the second exit  and drank from the stream and tried not to think about Durnholt. He didn't fully succeed, but he managed well enough to keep moving.

By afternoon they reached what Sera called the Deep Centre of the Greywood, where the trees were oldest and the light was greenest and the something-that-wasn't-quite-an-animal sounds were most frequent. She walked through it without adjusting her pace. Karl stayed close and did not ask about the sounds. He had decided that what you didn't ask about in the Greywood couldn't specifically come for you because you'd acknowledged it.

This was probably not accurate. But it was sustainable.

"We'll reach the second exit by nightfall," she said. "We camp outside the forest, move through the Greyspan hills in the morning. Two days to Ashenveil." She paused. "I need you to understand something before we get there."

"Tell me."

"The resistance will want to use you. The moment they know what you are, you become an asset before you become a person. That's not cruelty  that's desperation, and there's a difference. But you need to decide what you're willing to be used for before they ask." She glanced at him. "Because once they ask, the pressure won't stop."

Karl thought about Maren on her knees. He thought about Calder's easy laugh. He thought about the grey sky that had once been blue and all the accumulated ordinary suffering of a people living under someone else's boot.

"I already know what I'm willing to do," he said.

"Do you?"

"I want to end it. The occupation. All of it." He said it plainly, without drama, because plain and undramatic was the only way he knew to say true things. "If there's a way I can help do that, I want to try."

Sera was quiet for a moment. Then, very briefly, she looked almost kind.

"All right," she said. "Then

let's get you to Ashenveil."