"Power isn't what you hold. It's what you refuse to drop when the world reaches to take it." — old Ashes proverb
Dawn bled pale gold across the Western Base when Aelis tugged the last buckle of Kaen's new uniform into place.
The jacket was charcoal with matte plating along the ribs, trimmed in muted silver. Over his heart sat the insignia of the Ashes of the Sun—a sundered sun encircled by drifting ash-strokes—stitched so clean it seemed to breathe. The fabric hugged a body that didn't feel like yesterday's: lean, yes, but stronger; shoulders set with quiet purpose. His hair—once all black—now carried a stark white streak that fell across his brow like a scar of light. His eyes, no longer brown, held the deep calm of open water—ocean blue. When he shifted, the back of his undershirt brushed the fresh tattooed circle on his spine: a black ring, the echo of an eclipse.
Aelis's hands lingered at his collar. She tried to smile; it trembled.
"You don't have to prove anything to anyone today," she said. "Not your worth. Not your right to breathe."
Kaen swallowed. "What if… I mess it up?"
"Then you learn. And if you fall—" She thumbed away a soot-smudge on his cheek. "—you fall into people who will catch you. That's the point of a family."
He nodded. She kissed his temple, soft and fierce, then pressed a wrapped bun into his palm like a talisman. He hesitated at the flap, looking back once. Aelis stood in the light, hands clasped to keep them from shaking, a prayer tucked behind her lips.
Kaen went to class.
The academy wing was carved from black stone and old Dominion glass. Resonance veins hummed faintly beneath the floors, a constant, living pulse. Cadets had already filled Room 3-North when he stepped in—rows of desks, a slate of shimmering light sigils at the front, and an instructor who looked like she'd survived three wars and graded papers during all of them.
"Instructor Rhea Voss," someone whispered. "The iron arm."
Her right arm whirred as she wrote in the air. Sleek plates ran elbow to wrist, the inlays faintly luminous, the fingers too precise to be ordinary. She glanced up—hawk-sharp eyes; a smile that wasn't kind so much as honest.
"Ah," Rhea said, voice lazy as a knife left in the sun. "Our ash-born transfer."
Whispers rose like gnats.
"That's him—"
"Brindle Hollow—"
"Is it true he—"
Rhea snapped her metal fingers. The sound cut the room in half.
"Cadets, if you're going to speculate, at least do it with style," she drawled. "This is Kaen. He lived. That already makes him more qualified than half of you." A beat. "Pick a seat, kid."
He moved down the aisle. A freckled boy with unruly hair and a grin like a dare stuck a foot out.
The chair bit him.
A quiet zzztt snapped under Kaen's thighs. A hairline arc of lightning kissed through the seat; he jolted, half rising, biting a yelp. Laughter rippled—nervous, eager, mean. The culprit lounged two rows back, wiggling his fingers; static danced across his knuckles.
Rhea didn't look up from her sigils. "Jet. Very clever. If you've got that much spare voltage, report to Engineering after drills and power the hall lamps with your teeth."
Groans and snickers. Jet put both hands up in surrender, grin unrepentant. "Yes, ma'am."
"Kaen," Rhea said, finally pointing with the metal hand. "Front row. Beside Lana."
The girl who watched him sit had eyes like burning wine and a braid the color of dark copper. Heat bled from her skin in soft waves. She didn't smile.
Rhea's lesson came like a march. Ideology. Tactics. Method. How the Ashes fought with the people, not over them. Why they trained to outlast, not merely outshine. How resonance wasn't a weapon but a language—misread it, and it would answer with a scream.
"Teamwork," she said, pacing. The metal arm clicked softly, its plating flexing like a living thing. "You are not stars. You are constellations. Alone, you glitter. Together, you guide."
She clapped once. "Outside."
The morning training grounds breathed mist and light. Frost still clung to the low rails; sun speared through the vented ceiling in narrow beams, dust motes drifting like slow snow. Circles were etched into the stone in widening rings, each a different resonance map.
Rhea took her platform, iron arm folded across her ribs. "Pair drills. One-on-ones. Wagers in your heads only. Unit 3—you're my yardstick. Make the rest feel short."
Eyes turned—hungry, curious, wary—to the four cadets wearing the crescent-and-ash patch under their unit number.
Po stepped first, broad-shouldered, 17, calm as bedrock. He faced a spear-user from Unit 6. The spear kissed stone—Po merely breathed, heel lowering a thumb's width.
The floor answered.
A low thrum rolled out. Hairline fractures spidered in a perfect arc; the challenger's stance buckled like sand under tide. Po glided into the opening, palm to chest—no windup, no flourish—just a tremor that made the other boy's spear hop six inches from his hands. The crowd hissed; Rhea nodded once.
"Special-grade earth / tremor," she called. "Remember: Po doesn't hit the ground. He asks it to move."
Unit 5 sent a twinblade into Rayon next. Sixteen, quiet, a posture like prayer. He drew water out of the thin morning air, brilliant and impossible, gathering it into a ribbon that twined along his forearm.
The twinblade lunged. Rayon turned a half-inch, and the water turned with him—becoming a banded shield, then a blade, then a veil that drank the other boy's momentum and returned it as a heel-sweep made of rain. A crash, a gasp, and the fight was over with the gentleness of a tide erasing footprints.
"Water," Rhea said, almost soft. "Flow and refrain. If you swing at a river, you're the one who drowns."
Jet sauntered into the ring, 15 and wired with joy, facing a hammer wielder from Unit 2. Lightning licked his fingers like tame cats.
"Try not to short the floor," Rhea sighed.
Jet grinned. The hammer fell; Jet wasn't there. He broke apart into motion and reappeared a breath to the left, a braided arc of lightning snapping the hammer aside. He played rhythm—tap, tap, crack—staggering his voltage so the hammer's magnetic clamps seized at the wrong times. The final touch kissed the hammer's shaft; it welded to the ring's edge with a Sizzle of shame.
Jet bowed to the roar. "Lights are on," he called up to Rhea. "Want me to dim 'em?"
"Dim yourself," she said dryly, but the corner of her mouth lifted.
Then Lana.
She stepped into the circle, 16, all furnace and focus, and the morning brightened. She flicked two fingers; flameblossomed like silk unfurling, cuffs of fire curling around her wrists. Her opponent from Unit 4 raised a buckler and a short sword.
Lana bowed a quarter-inch—respect as sharp as offense—then moved.
Whip-fire snapped past the buckler with a dancer's precision. A backstep, a pivot, a palm that became a spear of heat aimed not at flesh but at air—stealing breath, stealing balance. Her opponent swung blind; Lana was already gone, embers tracing the arc she'd abandoned. She ended it with a vertical lash that licked the buckler's edge, superheating it just enough to make the metal scream out of the cadet's hand.
Silence, then cheers that felt like weather breaking.
Rhea raised her chin. "Unit 3, set the bar, as ordered. Good." Her gaze slid to Kaen. "New boy. In."
Kaen's throat went dry. He felt Lana's heat even before he stepped to face her, felt the eyes on his shoulders—curiosity, hunger, disdain.
Lana cocked her head. "Don't worry," she said, voice like an ember under cloth. "I won't break you. Much."
"Kind of you," he muttered.
"Don't thank me yet."
Rhea's iron fingers snapped. "Begin."
Lana did not rush.
She advanced like a forge warming, each step measured, each breath feeding the fire. A whip snapped; Kaen dodged, too late—the edge kissed his sleeve and burned a neat crescent out of it. He tried to circle, but the heat herded him, funnels of warm air turning the ring into a kiln.
"Guard up, defect," someone hissed from the crowd. Laughter snicked behind teeth.
Kaen kept moving. He'd watched, listened—Po's patience, Rayon's flow, Jet's rhythm—and none of it was his. Lana's second lash burned a line across his ribs. He grunted; the ring seemed to shrink.
"Where's your bite?" Lana's eyes sharpened. Her third strike came as a feint; the fourth landed, chopping his knee sideways. He caught himself, palms skidding across warm stone, lungs heaving. The mist above the ring had burned away. The whole world smelled like copper and cinnamon ash.
And then she pressed.
A cyclone of flame swept low—he jumped; it became a rising lash that shaved the air from his throat; he flinched and it snapped sideways into his guard, hot enough to tremble bone. He hit the ground hard. The crowd murmured. Rhea watched without blinking.
"Up," Lana said. Not cruel. Demanding.
He stood. His heart hammered and hammered.
Somewhere, far beneath the training grounds, he felt it—the quiet hum that had lived under his sternum since the cave. Not loud. Not bright. Just there.
"Again," he said.
Lana smiled. "Good."
She spun, both hands carving a figure-eight; twin braids of flame crossed and fell—perfect, lethal.
Kaen didn't think. He listened.
He stepped into the fall of heat and reached for the hum—
—and the world bowed.
The air folded around him like glass softening. Dust rose in a slow coil and didn't fall back. Sound dropped out of the ring in a bare instant—the jeers cutting to open-mouthed silence—as pressure spilled outward from Kaen's chest in a steady, circular breath. Lana's twin lashes hit the field of gravity and flattened as if someone had pressed a palm to them.
She stumbled—only a half-step, but enough. The force rolled over her like a black tide and shoved. Lana slid backward, boots shrieking across stone, a line carved in her wake. Her flames guttered—not gone, but pinned, drawn tight by weight that wasn't there a heartbeat before.
Kaen stood at the ring's center, eyes wide and water-bright. Pebbles orbited his ankles in slow, delicate ellipses. The morning sun itself seemed to hesitate in its own beams.
No one breathed.
Rhea broke it first. She exhaled through her nose, iron thumb dragging once across her jaw, and said to no one in particular, "Gravity. Fitting for a boy who drags trouble wherever he walks."
Sound tumbled back in. Lana's heel caught; she righted herself and killed the last of her flame with a twitch. For a heartbeat her expression was raw—surprise, something like interest—then the mask slid back into place. She and Kaen stared at each other across the ring, two fires that hated to admit they were the same temperature.
He moved toward her and held out a hand. "Are you—"
She smacked it aside. "Don't touch me, defect."
The word hit harder than any lash. Heat rose across the circle—hers and his—and the crowd's whispering skittered like knives across stone.
Rhea clapped, loud enough to sting. "Congratulations. You two invented a new way to ruin my morning." The smirk bled back into her mouth. "Unit 3, hydrate. Everyone else: log what you felt. Not what you think you saw. What you felt."
Kaen let his hand fall. He couldn't tell if the shake in his fingers was adrenaline or the echo of that hum still circling his heart.
As cadets broke into clustered chatter, a winter breath cut the heat.
Frost curled delicately along the rail. Elyra Valen stepped out of the mist at the far end of the grounds—white hair catching the sun, the air around her blooming tiny ice-petals that melted as they fell. No fanfare. No raised voice. Just a presence that turned heads and stilled spines.
She looked at Rhea, then at Lana, then at Kaen.
"Kaen," she said, calm as a blade laid flat on snow. "Commander Cael wants to see you."
Rhea's eyes ticked once—approval, warning, interest. "Go on then," she muttered. "Try not to bend the hallway."
Lana turned away first, tying her braid with quick, angry hands. Jet whistled low. Po folded his arms and watched the sky. Rayon, quiet as always, caught Kaen's gaze for a breath and nodded once, like a promise that didn't need words.
Kaen stepped out of the ring and followed the frost.
"Some lessons are a wound teaching itself to close." — field journal, Western Base, Year of Withering 12