For two weeks I did the same exercise every morning, and for two weeks it beat me.
Purelight in my left hand. Deepdark in my right. Not spells—just the raw affinities, a palm-sized sphere of each, held a foot apart in the air in front of me while I sat cross-legged on the laboratory floor. The goal was simple. Keep them equal. Keep them from reaching for each other. Do it without thinking about it.
The last part was the problem.
Luna helped. Her golden sigils traced slowly along my forearms while I worked—Lucent Harmony, the gift that had let me carry Erebus's Deepdark and her own light in the same body for years without either one tearing me apart. With the sigils on, the two spheres sat calmly, like animals that had been told to behave. Without them, they started to drift toward each other within a minute, and I had to grab them back.
"Again," Luna said each morning, when I let the spheres go and sat there breathing hard. "Without me this time."
