Young Flame

“What? How do you know?” The whole reason I stopped her from Kindling was to stop her finding out about my energy. I wouldn’t have bothered if I hadn’t found out having such a high capacity was considered taboo amongst my elders.

“You just told me.”

I can only stare at her.

“Okay, fine. It’s your presence. You aren’t suppressing it as well as you might think. For a presence as strong as yours, you’d either have incredibly hot flames or a great capacity. And, well, I’m pretty good at analysing other’s fire, even if only peripherally. The white flames of your transformation are likely your hottest.”

“Is that going to be a problem?” I ask hesitantly.

“Most likely.” The grand elder nods. “Taboo is taboo for a reason, after all. You won’t be able to hide it forever, but I should be able to guide you to more effectively suppressing your presence.”

“You don’t have an issue with the fact I’ve commit both? Should you really be helping me hide it?”

“To say I don’t care about it would be wrong. The taboos are restrictions on the elders and grand elders, and while that doesn’t excuse you, I believe most grand elders can be convinced that you don’t deserve punishment considering your age.” She smirks again. “And of course I’m gonna help you hide it; I’m not about to let my new student be snapped up by any of the other grand elders.”

“New student?” I never agreed to anything like that.

Elder Yalun laughs. “You think I wouldn’t jump on such a talent? If you don’t want me as your teacher, then that’s fine.” A long, dramatic sigh escapes her lips as Yalun’s body droops. “But I would have no reason to hide a certain girl’s crimes from the rest of the elders.”

She’s teasing me, but I’m not sure if that threat is legitimate. “Alright,” I relent. Even if she’s not actually serious about telling the other elders, I have no reason to turn her down. I’m just as interested as she is in reaching the threshold of my binding. Plus, she is a grand elder; she probably has plenty to teach.

Yalun hops out of her slump with a spring. An innocent smile graces her lips as if she hadn’t just blackmailed me.

“So why can’t we travel beyond the wasteland? Why can’t we increase our capacity?” I ask. “I only recently found out that we have taboo, but I’m still uncertain what they are there for.”

“I hesitate to ask because I know it won’t be a good memory, but how long have you gone without your tribe?” the playful attitude is gone now, and Yalun kneels on a thick fur rug after rolling it out over the glass.

I sit before her as I answer. “Three or four years now.”

“Ah, then it appears there is much for me to teach beyond binding. We don’t allow áed to travel outside the wasteland because of our history. Long before even my teacher’s time, when Eldest Ember had yet ascended, we lived to the east, amongst the other races. Our records aren’t clear if we ruled over them, or lived beside them, but what we do know is that fear and resentment accumulated. An army of water mages doubling the áed population of the time attacked.”

“We, as a race, are stronger than the others, but they know our weakness. Primarily, we disallow any from travelling east because our flames inflict fear in the other races, regardless of intent. That fear always leads to them training more water mages.”

“Ah.” Considering I’d been able to burn down an entire city on accident when I was a child, there is a definite reason to believe there would be resistance against áed if they tried to live in the east. And… I think I might have already ruined the grand elders’ precautions. I haven’t exactly been discreet with how strong my flames can be in the past few years. It isn’t a question of whether they invest in water mages, but how much?

“Capacity is somewhat connected, but we mostly want to limit that because of the strain it puts on our resources in the long term.” This is a point I’ve already discovered. The minimum I need to eat to continue surviving is far greater than any other typical áed.

I could fill myself to capacity and survive for months at a time if I need to, but the total consumption is still higher than normal. The only way to fix this would be to travel to the eastern nations to consume the plentiful resources there, but that leads us back to the original problem of terrifying the other races.

“Now that your little secret is safe with me, do you mind opening up for me?” Elder Yalun spread flame across her arm in question. I nod, and she goes right back to speaking. “There are many grand elders that already have immense capacities, so you shouldn’t be too worried. They are simply relegated to living up on the Titan Alps so they don’t impact the lives of the tribes, but I doubt you’ll need to worry about that yet.”

Her flames wash over me, and this time I let them in without resistance. Despite most áed who focus on binding never able to raise their heat, her fire doesn’t lose to Tanwyn, the elder of the Logi tribe. Invisible heat flows through me and again, I relax into it.

“Oh.”

I open my eyes again to find Yalun staring at me with concern. My head tilts in question, still enjoying her warmth.

“First off, wow. Second, what the fuck. Third, how? I expected you to have enough to grow a presence, not to have more than most grand elders.” She rubs her palm into her forehead. “Seriously, you haven’t even been lying about your age. It should be impossible to gain half that much in double your life, even if you spent every second out hunting.”

“I guess no áed has been beneath the Titan Alps then,” I say, trying to ignore the growing concern that this might break the friendliness she’s shown till now.

“Beneath?” she asks before shaking her head. “Not important. Regardless of how you did it, the fact remains that you now have far too much energy to rejoin a tribe.” She groans in frustration as she rises to her feet again, pulling back on the warm flames. “It’s going to be too hard to teach you to suppress your presence now. It will grow out of your control soon enough. Sorry, but I will have to tell Śuri once he returns. He has enough experience to help you.”

I remain seated on the soft rug while Yalun paces. It’s sad that I’ll never join a tribe, but after losing mine, I’ve not had the desire to do so. That I have more energy than most grand elders is surprising, though. With as much white fire as I can wield now, I’d be able to cover horizon to horizon in the cooler yellow or orange blaze. Kalma’s corpse was incredibly beneficial in that regard.

With how almost all the other áed that reach my heat or hotter can do so with far lesser energy consumption, I think… I might be cheating. I have brute forced my flames to hotter temperatures simply by sheer mass of capacity rather than gradually improving over the years with constant effort.

As concerned as Yalun seems to be over finding out the scale of my energy, I don’t share it. Of course, I’m worried about how the other elders might view me, but Yalun has already shown that not all will despise me for the actions I have already taken. Even if all other grand elders hate me, I don’t regret pushing myself this far. If not for all the effort I’ve put in, I wouldn’t be alive and neither would many others.

Yalun lets out a deep sigh, tosser her hands up in resignation, and drops into a relaxed seat on the rug across from me. “Ah, whatever. We’ll figure something out. For now, let’s get started on binding.” She spreads her flames to mix with mine once more.

“Your fire is definitely strange. On a casual inspection, I would have missed it — well, I wouldn’t have missed your binding or capacity — but I can feel something odd about your flames. There is a subtle difference.” Her flames spread deeper through me as her eyes seem to lose focus.

We sit in silence for a minute before I become impatient. “So, how do you increase your binding?” I know it’s probably a lot slower than I’ll be comfortable with, considering Yalun is what? Centuries older than me, and still has less binding, but she isn’t the only one interested in reaching the threshold.

The grand elder snaps out of her focus. She blinks repeatedly as her mind returns, but her flames stay mixed with mine. “Ah, right. Of course,” she says. “I’ll be analysing your flames whenever I can if that’s fine; it’ll eat away at me if I can’t figure out what that difference actually is. But yes, how do I increase my binding? There are prerequisites and dangers I will have to teach you, but the basics is that we narrow our minds and nudge our connection ever so slightly closer.”

That… tells me nothing.

Yalun laughs at my obvious disappointment. “Don’t be so impatient. These things take time to teach. Usually you would have to wait until at least your second decade before you can learn, then to your third to actually attempt it. Luckily for you, I am teaching you personally.”

“A whole decade?” exactly how much is there to teach if it takes that long?

“We need that long to judge whether they have the mentality for it. More than the other disciplines, improving one’s binding requires a mind that will not give in to temptation. The dangers of failing to do so are too great to ignore.” Yalun slouches back on her hands across from me. “Besides, they spend more of that time perfecting the use of their blades.”

“What could be so dangerous about improving our connection with fire?” The idea just seems strange.

Two balls of fire appear before me. One, large and burning bright; the other, small and hollow. Yalun points to the hollow ball. “Imagine this as a representation of our mind.” She points to the larger flaming sphere. “And this is the nature of fire that we want to take in to ourselves.”

A very thin stream of the larger fire flows into the hollow ball, building an orb within an orb. “This is what we want; to take in more fire to improve our binding.” The stream cuts off and the inner flame eventually spreads into the outer shell, increasing its brightness and strength.

“But when we take in too much for our mind to handle.” The grand elder passes much more fire from the large ball into the smaller one until it exceeds the containable volume of the mind and explodes. “Our minds, our souls, collapse and become part of the flame rather than the other way around.”

I just stare at the air where she left her demonstration.

“Considering the scale of your energy, the explosion if you lose your mind will be immense. I won’t be letting you try anywhere near the Agglomerate.”

I see now why so few áed follow this path. Not only is it limited in combat effectiveness, but you are risking both yourself and those around you whenever you try to improve.

Noticing my concern, she continues. “But don’t worry, I’ll be there to make sure everything goes smoothly.”

Yalun grins at me with confidence, but I realise she’s not actually giving me a chance to refuse. A small part of me is tempted to just find my friends and leave, but I can’t deny myself the curiosity. There is always some risk associated with growth, and this is no different.

I want to reach the threshold just as much as Yalun does, but just how long will it take?