The words spill faster now.
“We still haven’t identified which Purna orchestrated the attack. The land is still sick. The Council is still divided. The Matrons want you back. The bond doesn’t stabilize. And I—” Her voice fractures. “I don’t know where to start.”
There it is. She finally admits she is scared. Her magic responds to emotion. That is its strength. And right now, she feels everything. I study her quietly.
“When I was young,” I say, “they taught me the opposite.”
She blinks.
“To feel nothing?”
“To contain everything.”
I remember it vividly. Cold stone training rings. Blood on snow. Power disciplined into silence. Emotion treated as liability. Compassion carved out like rot.
“If my magic flared unexpectedly,” I continue, “I was punished.”
Her eyes darken.
“I was told that control is dominance. That if my power reacted to feeling, then I was weak.”
She doesn’t interrupt. She doesn’t soften it with sympathy either. She just watches me, steady and intent, like she’s trying to see the shape of the boy I used to be inside the man standing in front of her.
“And did it work?” she asks.
“Yes.”
The answer is immediate.
“I learned to separate sensation from response. To feel something and give it no outlet. To stand in pain and let it pass through without expression. It made me efficient.”
“And alone,” she says quietly.
I hold her gaze. She isn’t accusing. She’s stating a fact.
“Alone is manageable,” I reply.
She steps closer without seeming to realize she’s doing it. The firelight catches in her hair, copper and gold woven through shadow. There is still tension in her posture, but it has shifted. Less defensive. More searching.
“That’s not how Purna magic works,” she says. “We don’t sever emotion from power. We refine it. Guide it. Shape it into something that feeds the land instead of burning it.”
“And when it burns anyway?”
“We learn why.”
The answer unsettles me more than it should.
She studies my face carefully. “When you stepped into the circle,” she says, “you didn’t dominate my magic.”
“No.”
“You matched it.”
“I stabilized it.”
“You anchored it,” she corrects softly.
I don’t respond. Her hand lifts before she seems to think better of it. She brushes her fingers lightly against the center of my chest, right where the suppression runes sit beneath skin and fabric. The contact is deliberate this time.