The sky is still bruised with night when Lark’s voice cuts the silence.

  “Up.”

  Kael reaches the rim. Lark stands alone in the center of the Pit, barefoot, hands loose.

  “Watch once,” Lark says. “Then you start paying the price."

  He lifts his right hand, palm up. A spark appears above his skin, tiny, barely brighter than a firefly.

  Lark breathes once, slow.

  The spark swells into a perfect sphere the size of a raindrop, then a marble, then a clenched fist. It hangs there, motionless, white and merciless, edges so clean they seem to slice the dark. The air around it ripples without heat.

  Lark closes two fingers.

  The sphere collapses into a single, blinding beam of solid light.

  He flicks his wrist.

  The beam crosses thirty paces in the space of a thought. It hits the man-high ironstone slab dead center. The slab doesn’t crack; it simply vanishes, turned to glittering dust and a roar of white vapor. The beam keeps going, slams into the canyon wall, and bores a ragged, molten tunnel three meters deep before the stone finally swallows it. A wave of heat rolls back across the Pit; the air smells like burnt lightning.

  Dust settles. Silence rings.

  Lark lowers his hand.“

  That was one second of real control,” he says. “You’re starting from zero.”

  He tosses Kael the strip of black cloth.

  “Blindfold on. You’ll learn to feel it before you ever see it again.”

  Kael ties it tight. Darkness.

  Lark’s voice, close now:

  “Find the star inside your chest."

  A low whistle cuts through the ringing silence.

  Toren steps out of the shadows at the rim, arms folded, scar catching the first hint of dawn.

  “Little early for demolition, boss,” he rumbles, but his eyes are fixed on the smoking tunnel in the canyon wall.

  Behind him, Mira appears, silent as always, then Vel, barefoot, braid swaying.Lark doesn’t even glance at them. “Since you’re here,” he says, “show the kid what controlled looks like.

  ”Toren grins, cracks his neck, and hops down into the Pit. He stops five paces from Kael, lifts one hand, palm up.

  A spark.

  It swells, steady and slow, into a fist-sized sphere of steady white light. No flicker, no tremor. It just sits there, calm and perfect, bright enough that the scars on Toren’s chest stand out like pale rivers.

  He holds it for five full seconds, then closes his fist. The light vanishes without a sound.

  “Discipline,” Toren says, tapping his own sternum. “Same star. Different cage.”

  Mira drops down next, light on her feet. She raises both hands. Two sparks appear, one above each palm. They grow in perfect unison to marble-size, then start orbiting her wrists like twin moons. Faster, faster, until they’re white blurs, yet never stray an inch off path. She snaps her fingers and they’re gone.

  “Precision,” she says, voice soft. “Miss by a hair, you lose a hand.”

  Last, Vel drifts in. She doesn’t raise her hand at all. A single spark simply appears in the air two paces in front of her, no bigger than a firefly. It hovers, perfectly still, so dim Kael almost misses it, until he realizes the entire canyon has gone quieter, as if the world itself is holding its breath around that tiny point of light.

  Vel tilts her head. The spark winks out.

  “Silence,” she whispers. “The gods only notice you when you’re loud.”

  The three of them step back, leaving Kael alone again under the blindfold.

  Lark’s voice, dry:“You’ve seen four versions of perfect.

  Pick one. Then beat it.”

  He pauses.

  “Begin.”

  The blindfold stays on. Hours bleed away.

  Kael stands alone in the center of the Pit, arms loose at his sides, feet planted in the dust that still smells of Lark’s lightning. The others have retreated to the rim. No one speaks anymore. The only sounds are the wind scraping stone and the slow, deliberate rhythm of Kael’s own breathing.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Minutes stretch into an hour. Then two.

  Nothing happens. He reaches inward the way Lark taught him: past the ribs, past the frantic drum of his heart, down to the place where the Deep Flame waits like a second, colder heartbeat.

  It’s there. He can feel it. A weight heavier than bone, pulsing with the memory of seven heartbeats his mother once forced into him.

  He tries to call it.

  Nothing.

  He tries again, harder, teeth clenched behind the blindfold.

  Still nothing.

  Frustration rises first as heat in his cheeks, then as a snarl behind his eyes.

  He hates the blindfold. Hates the silence. Hates the way the others are watching him fail without saying a word.

  His shoulders knot. His fingers curl into fists hard enough to creak.And then, without warning, the Deep Flame answers.

  It doesn’t rise. It erupts.

  Light pours out of him like blood from a slit throat. It rips through his pores, through the seams of his shirt, through the fabric of the blindfold itself.

  The black cloth flares incandescent; threads burn away in seconds, drifting off his face as ash.

  He stands bathed in his own starlight.

  The sphere forms without his consent, thirty paces above the Pit floor, the size of a wagon wheel and growing.

  It is not clean. It is not perfect.

  It is a tumor of pure light, edges writhing like living flame, surface crawling with blue-white veins that look almost like screaming faces. The air around it screams too: a high, tearing note that makes the canyon walls tremble. Dust lifts from the ground in perfect circles, spiraling upward as if the sphere is inhaling the world. Every vein of starlight in the canyon walls flares in violent sympathy, rivers of blue fire racing across black stone like panicked blood. Toren swears, loud and sharp.

  Mira’s twin moons snap into existence above her palms, orbiting so fast they blur into rings.

  Vel’s tiny spark appears and immediately gutters out; even she can’t hold silence against this. Lark is already moving. He crosses the Pit in three impossible strides and slams into Kael chest-to-chest. One scarred hand clamps over Kael’s heart; the other fists in the back of his shirt.

  “Close it,” he snarls, voice raw. “Close the fucking door, Kael, now!”

  Kael can’t.

  He’s drowning in light. His ears are full of the sound of moons cracking. His mouth tastes of his mother’s last kiss and the day the sky broke.

  Lark shoves his own light into Kael’s chest like a blade.

  White fire meets white fire. For one suspended heartbeat the sphere above them swells larger, brighter, edges sharpening until they could slice the dead stars from the sky.

  Then it collapses.

  The implosion is worse than the explosion. All that light rushes back into Kael in a single brutal rush. He drops to his knees, retching glowing embers that hiss and die against the stone. The canyon walls dim again, veins fading to sullen pulses. The silence that follows is so complete it feels like deafness.

  Lark is still crouched over him, breathing hard, scar livid against his cheek.

  “That,” he says, voice hoarse, “was attempt one.”

  Second attempt. Hours later. The sun has climbed and begun its descent; shadows stretch long and bruised across the Pit.

  This time Mira is the one who steps forward.

  She kneels in front of Kael, close enough that he smells crushed herbs in her hair. Her hands settle lightly on his wrists.

  “Breathe with me,” she says, soft as falling ash.

  She guides him through it: slow inhale through the nose, hold for four beats, exhale until the lungs feel hollow. Again. Again.

  The others watch from the rim. Even Lark is quiet.

  Frustration is the enemy, she tells him. Frustration is noise. Frustration is the door creaking open.

  She places his palms together in front of his heart, fingers laced.

  “Feel the space between heartbeats,” she whispers. “That’s where control lives.”Kael tries.

  At first there is only the thunder of his own pulse.

  Then, slowly, the thunder recedes.

  The Deep Flame is still there, vast and ancient and impatient, but for the first time it is listening.

  A spark appears between his pressed palms, no larger than a raindrop, trembling like a trapped moth.

  Mira’s voice, barely audible: “Hold it gentle. Like it’s the last star in the universe and you’re the only one keeping it alive.”Minutes pass.

  The spark steadies. It grows, slow as sunrise, until it is the size of a peach stone, edges soft, color shifting from furious white to something almost silver. It hovers between his palms, perfectly still, perfectly silent.

  Mira smiles, small and real.

  “Good,” she says. “Now let it go before it remembers who it belongs to.”

  Kael opens his hands. The little star winks out like a candle in rain.

  Third and final attempt. Dusk.

  The sky above the canyon has turned the color of old bruises. The dead stars are waking, one by one, cold and watchful.

  Vel removes the blindfold herself this time. Her fingers brush the burn marks the first attempt left around his eyes.She doesn’t speak. She simply lifts both her hands, palms up, and summons her twin moons again, only this time they are smaller than marbles, orbiting so slowly they seem frozen.

  Then she steps back.

  Kael understands.

  He lifts both hands the same way.

  Breathes in the way Mira taught him.

  Reaches for the place between heartbeats.

  Two sparks appear, one above each palm.

  They are tiny. Barely visible.

  But they are perfect.

  He wills them into motion.

  At first they wobble, drunk on their own existence.

  He steadies them with nothing but focus and the memory of Mira’s gentle hands on his wrists.

  Slowly, slowly, they begin to circle.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Faster.

  They leave faint silver trails in the air like comets caught in miniature.

  Faster still, until they are white blurs, twin rings of light spinning so perfectly synchronized that they seem to share a single heartbeat.

  The canyon has gone utterly still.

  Even the wind holds its breath.

  Kael can feel the Deep Flame watching, curious now instead of hungry.

  He pours everything into the motion: the night the sky broke, Elowen’s small hand in his, the taste of ash and lightning.

  All of it channeled into two tiny moons that never stray an inch from their path.

  Ten seconds.

  Twenty.

  Thirty.

  His arms begin to shake. Sweat beads and falls, hissing where it touches the light.

  Lark’s voice, low from the rim: “Enough.”

  Kael lets go.

  The twin moons collapse into a single soft flash, then vanish.

  For one heartbeat the entire canyon is dark.Then every dead star overhead flickers, just once, like something on the far side of the universe blinked in recognition.

  Kael lowers his hands.

  His legs give out.

  Mira catches him before he hits the ground. Vel’s fingers brush the hair from his forehead, gentle as moth wings.

  Lark stands over them all, scar catching the first true starlight of the night.

  “Day one,” he says quietly. “Tomorrow we do it again.”

  Above them, the dead stars keep watching.

  But for the first time in four years, one of them looks afraid.