Silver Scars & Hollow Hearts

The First Session

Seraphine was already in the training room when he arrived.

He had expected a room that looked like a training room. He had spent fifteen years in training rooms and had a clear internal picture of what they required, open floor space, enough ceiling clearance for a shifted wolf, surfaces that could take impact without damage, adequate light.

The room Seraphine had brought him to had none of those things.

It was small, smaller than his quarters. The walls were close enough that he could have touched both sides simultaneously if he stretched, which he had no intention of doing but the option was there and the room made sure he knew it. The ceiling was low. The floor was stone, smooth and cold. There was one sconce on the far wall burning its blue-white light. There was nothing else in the room except Seraphine, standing at its center with her hands clasped behind her back and her crimson eyes on him with the particular attention she gave to things she was about to take apart and study.

"This is the training room," he said.

"Yes."

He looked around it. "It's very small."

"It is intentionally very small," she said. "Sit down."

There was nowhere to sit except the floor. He sat on the floor. She remained standing, which he noted and filed away as information about the dynamic she intended for these sessions.

"What we are doing today," she said, "is not what you think we are doing."

"What do I think we are doing."

"You think we are going to work on controlling the power, directing it, making it do what you want instead of what it wants." She looked at him steadily. "That is not what we are doing today."

"What are we doing today."

"We are doing nothing," she said. "You are going to sit in this room and I am going to sit across from you and you are not going to try to do anything at all."

He looked at her.

"That's the training."

"That is the first session's training, yes."

"Sitting."

"Existing without attempting to manage what you are," she said, with the particular patience of someone who had expected this exact response and was prepared for it.

"Which sounds simple. It is not simple. You are a man who has been managing things since before he was old enough to know that was what he was doing. You manage your environment. You manage your reactions. You manage the people around you by being what they need before they have to ask." She tilted her head slightly.

"You have been doing all of those things since you walked into this room thirty seconds ago. I watched you do them."

He opened his mouth.

"Don't manage this," she said. "Just sit."

He closed his mouth.

He sat.

The room was very quiet. The sconce on the far wall did its wrong-angle shadow work and the stone was cold under him and Seraphine settled onto the floor across from him with the fluid ease of someone who had been comfortable in her own body for so long that physical position was simply not a variable she tracked anymore.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

He tried not to manage anything.

He lasted approximately four minutes before the thing in his blood noticed that he was paying attention to it.

It was different from the night before. The night before had been a surge, uncontrolled, pressure looking for an exit. This was something subtler. The awareness of it, the specific feeling of it turning, the way something large and slow and not entirely awake turned when it registered a nearby presence, and the nearby presence it was registering was his own attention.

His eyes went amber.

He felt them go. The heat at the edges of his vision, the shift in the way light landed, the warm pull behind his temples.

Seraphine said nothing. She was watching his face with the attention of a diagnostician watching a patient's breathing, not interfering, but reading.

"It's responding to attention," he said.

"Yes."

"Every time I focus on it directly it moves toward the surface."

"Yes. That is the first thing you need to understand." She leaned forward slightly. "The original power is not a tool. Tools respond when operated. This responds when noticed. It is already operational, and has been operational for your entire life. The seal has been slowing it but not stopping it. When you give it your attention you are not activating it, you are simply becoming aware of something that was always there."

"That distinction matters."

"That distinction is everything," she said. "If you believe you are activating it, you will try to control the activation. You will brace against it, fight it the way you fight a shift that comes at the wrong time. And that fight will make every session end with something broken."

He thought about the metal cup on the desk the night before. The way it had moved without being touched.

"What broke before," he said. "When Dorian came to the room. The lantern."

"Yes."

"That was the power responding to his proximity."

"The power responding to what his proximity represents," she said. "Dorian's bloodline has a specific relationship with the original line. We will discuss that when you are further along. What matters now is that the response was not a malfunction. It was a recognition. The power knew something about Dorian that you didn't yet."

He looked at his hands.

The amber in his eyes had steadied. It was there but it was not surging, the difference between a fire in a hearth and a fire in the open, the same heat, but entirely different implications.

"What do I do with the attention then," he said. "If focusing on it directly makes it move. How do I learn anything about it."

"Sideways," she said.