Meka looked at me and asked, “If you’re a pyromancer, does that mean you’re scared of plants?”

  The question was innocent, and that was what made it dangerous. She asked because she was trying to understand me, and understanding someone always came with sharp edges. It meant opening yourself to parts of them that could cut if handled carelessly.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Not plants exactly. I was scared of the deep woods near the village where I grew up.”

  We were walking slowly. The corridor was wide and tall enough that even Meka did not need to duck, its stone walls smoothed by generations of passing bodies. Light filtered in from high, narrow windows and caught dust motes that drifted lazily in the air. My steps felt different now, not lighter exactly, but more sure of themselves, as if my body had finally remembered how to listen to itself and how to place weight without wasting effort.

  Meka tilted her head as she listened, the way animals did when they sensed something important but did not yet know why. Her ears shifted slightly as we walked, tracking distant sounds, the soft rustle of Bunny’s leaves, and my breathing.

  “It wasn’t dangerous,” I continued. “Not really. That was the strangest part. Everyone said the woods were safe. Hunters went in and out, and children played at the edge of them, daring each other to step just a little farther in. But the trees always looked evil to me. They felt ominous, as if they were watching me and waiting for me to make a mistake.”

  I slowed without meaning to as memory pulled at me whether I wanted it to or not. “They were too tall and too quiet. The way the light broke apart under the canopy made it feel like the world ended a few steps in, as if there was nothing beyond that darkness. It took me many years to leave the lights of the village and walk into that forest.”

  Meka did not interrupt. She hugged Bunny closer, leaves brushing against her chest as if the little creature was listening too. The familiar shifted slightly, branches creaking softly as it adjusted to her grip.

  I paused, the scent of damp bark and old smoke filling my mind so vividly that for a moment I was no longer walking beside her in a guild corridor. Instead, I was standing barefoot at the tree line of a long-dead village. My body remembered fear even when my mind had mastered it, and my muscles tightened at a memory they no longer needed to obey.

  “Once I learned that the forest was just another form of fuel for my magic,” I said at last, “it became easier. The fear lost its grip once I understood it, once I stopped treating it like an enemy and started treating it like a part of me that I had ignored for too long.”

  Meka nodded slowly, turning the idea over as if it needed to be tested before it could be accepted. “That makes sense,” she said, before hesitating and lowering her voice slightly. “Are you scared of anything now?”

  The question landed heavier than the last. I considered it carefully, not because I lacked answers, but because there were too many and none of them were simple.

  “I’m scared of many things,” I said. “But not in the same way. That first fear was different. It wasn’t like being afraid of spiders or heights. It was a magically reinforced fear of something that should have had no hold over me, a pressure built into the soul when you begin a school of magic that shapes the way you see the world. Once you overcome a fear like that, it is as if it was never there. The scar remains, but it no longer dictates your movement.”

  She hugged Bunny a little closer, the familiar’s leaves trembling faintly, not from fear but from awareness. “I’ll learn that too?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Soon enough. You won’t even notice when it happens at first.”

  The corridor widened into a broader passage that led toward the training hall. Sounds echoed faintly from ahead, including impacts, shouted instructions, and the dull rhythm of bodies and wood meeting in controlled violence, punctuated by sharp corrections and the scrape of boots on stone.

  I hesitated, then added, “That is part of why Oliver and Randall,” I grimaced, “that idiot, have so much distaste for your magic. Neither of them has conquered their fear.”

  Meka’s ears angled forward as she listened more intently.

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  “Oliver’s is youth,” I continued. “Power without patience. Randall’s is worse. Ignorance and incompetence twisted into arrogance. He believes confidence replaces understanding, and that certainty is the same as mastery.”

  I shook my head. “He isn’t a wizard. He’s a pyromancer. That is why I disliked calling myself one. Pyromancy is just a single school. A wizard learns many. A wizard grows by confronting what they do not wish to see.”

  She blinked. “I’m not going to be a botanomancer forever?”

  “You are one,” I said. “But you will not remain one. That was the promise I made to you, if you remember. You will be a wizard. That is a fact, my apprentice.”

  Her smile was immediate and bright, the kind that did not question whether it deserved to exist. Bunny twitched in her arms, leaves rustling softly as if approving of the declaration.

  She shifted her weight, her hooves clicking faintly against the stone. “Do you want to train as well? Greta told us that you're stronger and faster now.”

  “I just thought it might be a good idea.” She added shyly.

  I rolled my shoulders and felt the subtle tension there, the way muscle and bone aligned with less resistance than before. Every movement felt slightly cleaner and more intentional. “That’s a very good idea. Maybe we can figure out how to work together.”

  I hesitated for half a breath, then added, “It might be good to get in some practice. We can spar against one another, carefully.”

  As I gripped my staff, I swung it through the air a few times, slow and deliberate. The weight felt familiar in my hands, but the balance was different now. The motion traveled cleanly from my shoulders down through my arms, and into the staff itself, without the small hitch that used to live in my joints. I adjusted my stance without thinking, feet setting themselves as if they already knew where they wanted to be.

  Her gaze flicked to my staff and then back to my face. “Are you going to hit me with that?”

  “Only if you do something incredibly stupid,” I said evenly.

  She recoiled slightly, a reflex born of instinct rather than fear. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  “I won’t,” I said, lowering my voice. “Unless you deserve it.”

  Her ears flicked sharply. “I have very good hearing. I heard that.”

  “I know,” I said. “You were meant to. Your people are known for having great hearing after all.”

  We stopped just short of the training hall doors, and I turned to face her fully, meeting her eyes at her height and letting the moment settle between us.

  “Sometimes I will bonk you,” I said. “Lightly. It’s correction, not punishment. I won’t be malicious.”

  She swallowed, then nodded. “Okay. As long as you don’t do what you did to Oliver and the others to me.”

  “I will not,” I said. “Unless you try to harm others out of spite like they did. Don’t become that, and we will never have a problem.”

  I exhaled slowly, the breath heavier than it should have been. “I’m being harsh because I’m being honest. I’ve seen apprentices do terrible things once they tasted power and no one taught them how to carry it.”

  Undarin’s name rose unbidden in my mind.

  He had been a healer, gentle and sweet, the kind of child who healed scraped knees before anyone asked and cried when he thought he had disappointed me. I had loved him the way I loved all of my apprentices, openly and without reservation. At the time, I did not yet understand how dangerous that could be, or how love could dull the instincts meant to protect both teacher and student.

  He had been a prodigy among prodigies, and I was still learning how to teach when he was placed in my care. I was not old then and not complete. I had power, but I did not yet have the weight of centuries to temper it. I was too soft on him, not because he needed cruelty, but because love can blur the edges where discipline should live. I saw his brilliance and mistook it for balance.

  When he gained even a modicum of power, when he learned to touch the void that hides behind the light, something shifted inside him. He did not see it happen, and I did not see it happen either. He was no longer only a healer. He became precise and cold, capable of cruelty he justified as correction and convinced that suffering was simply another form of instruction.

  At first, it did not seem wrong. Wizards seek revenge and settle scores. It is not good, but it is not forbidden. I did not stop him when he went after those he believed had wronged him, because I believed it was his right to choose how to use his magic and that he would learn restraint with time.

  I was wrong.

  When villages burned under hands that were meant to heal, and when people who had never known his name died screaming beneath them, there was nothing left to excuse. There was nothing left to teach. Power without mercy had finished hollowing him out.

  I had to put him down.

  The memory tightened something in my chest. It was one of my greatest failures, not because he betrayed me, but because I had loved him and still missed what he was becoming. I would never escape that, not even in this life.

  Meka noticed the change in me immediately. She always did. “It’s okay,” she said quietly. “I understand. You’re not going to hurt me. I’m not going to hurt anyone. I promise.”

  Bunny rustled, leaves shivering as it turned toward me, branches stiff with something that was not quite aggression but not quite trust either.

  “When was the last time you fed him?” I asked.

  “This morning.”

  “Good,” I said. “I thought he might be hungry.”

  “No,” she said. “He’s just protective.”

  The doors to the training hall loomed in front of us, scarred wood reinforced with iron bands and humming faintly with wards meant to keep accidents from becoming funerals.

  “All right,” I said, resting my hand on the staff and feeling the subtle feedback through my grip. “We’re here.”