CEL

It’s a cool morning, and the air smells faintly fishy. The sun is out, but as always in Malais, a thunderstorm grumbles a few miles away. Appreciative of the sunlight warming her shoulders, Cel flexes her fingers against her knees, using the texture of her soft pants and the uncomfortable press of cool concrete beneath her to ground herself. She breathes carefully, measured, and holds Daddy’s gaze as she is expected to do.

His lessons are always rather intense. He does not accept mediocrity. Not from her. Forethought is their motto, and caution is a word they avoid, for it implies cowardice. They are not cowards.

Plan ahead or you're dead, he used to tell Cel when she was little.

I’m nine now, she thinks. I’ve outgrown the need for rhyming. Forethought is fine.

She’s read hundreds of books and memorized as much as she could to impress him.

You will be great one day, he used to tell her.

I will be great, she firmly tells herself.

As Nora and ShiShi train in the apartment below, she and Daddy sit across from each other, cross-legged, on the roof. Their location wouldn’t normally be ideal for training, but Daddy is a strategic thinker. He’s a long-term planner, and he chose this rundown apartment complex for a reason.

The surrounding buildings face them with blank walls and rusty stairwells. The maintenance hut on the rooftop keeps anyone streetside from seeing what they’re up to, and the few nearby windows are either barred or covered with thick curtains and blinds from the inside. There are cobwebs between the coverings and the glass. The view isn’t enticing enough to draw eyes, not this cramped section of Malais so near the ports. No one’s going to want to look through those windows, not without a good reason. They make a point to stay quiet, so as not to give them one.

Again, strategic.

Daddy is in a short-sleeved shirt today. The thick muscles of his arms stand out, as do the many scars lining them. Cel’s envious of his strength, but not enough to go downstairs to train with Nora and ShiShi.

Daddy’s dark hair catches a slight breeze--what little breeze can reach them in such a position--and tendrils float around his head. His hair is loose today, a rare occurrence.

So is hers.

Everything has a reason.

“All these years I’ve kept your training to the bare minimum,” he starts, and she pays strict attention. Daddy’s lessons are important. “A developing firecore is a tricky thing. Dangerous. I’ve mostly just taught you what?”

“Keep the fire inside,” she says without hesitation.

She’s failed a few times, but never to any great degree. Even now, her bedspread sports a few charred patches. She only avoids getting in trouble--no, she must think smarter--she only avoids a reprimand (yes, that’s better) because her nightmares are beyond her control. (And maybe, just a little, because she is spoiled.) If she wakes up, her hands aglow with fire, who is to blame but fear?

She bites her bottom lip at the reminder. She truly must conquer her fear of water.

“Your core is getting stronger,” Daddy explains, drawing her back to the present. “It will not settle until you’re twenty or so. These next ten years will be difficult for you. In Simikee, my coretype was known. The Chief made me wear ivory cuffs around my wrists called limiters. It was the condition upon which I was allowed to live there. My mother wore them, too. Those cuffs were relics carved from the bones of ancient dragons. They contained my fire and taught me control. I only broke through their hold once, in a moment of great emotion, and it could be said that they are all that kept me from burning the continent down. Your emotions, especially your anger, is your greatest weakness, Cel.”

She nods, but she has a burning question. “Where are the cuffs now?”

He holds out his wrists for her inspection. She’s close enough to see the ugly scars around them. She’s familiar with the scars, of course, but before now she’d never know their origin. She touches one gingerly, making him smile.

“They don’t hurt, Cel.”

She withdraws anyway, smiling sheepishly at him, then offers a challenge: “Well? You didn’t answer my question.”

He laughs, but then his laughter cuts off, and his eyes shudder. “Rajask,” he says seriously, and her heart clenches. She knows Daddy doesn’t like talking about that place. “When I was there, the limiters...broke.” He scratches his well-trimmed beard and stares off into the distance. Cel understand without asking that he’s not telling her the whole truth. When he turns back to her, hsi eyes have gone stony. “Cel, you must never go there. It’s a dreadful, horrible place. Promise me you wont’ go there, no matter what.”

“I promise,” she says. She’s promised him the same thing many times before. To this day, all she knows about Rajask is that it is a highly populated, heavily fortified city on the continent across The Knell to the west, that Nora’s people originated there, and that Daddy hates it.

She has no interest in leaving Malais, so of course she won’t go. It’s an easy promise to make.

“Now, where were we? Your emotions,” Daddy says, “your temper especially must be contained. I’ve never deliberately let you summon fire. Today, you are going to try.”

Cel’s eyes widen. Her heart skips a beat. “I...really?”

“Do not treat this task lightly,” he says, dampening her excitement. “This will be...harrowing.”

She dips her chin. “Yes, Daddy.”

He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. “You must remain calm. Fire, for most people, is terrifying. Don’t panic or it will consume you.”

She scoffs. “I’m not scared of fire. I am fire. Why would I be afraid of myself?”

He looks tired. “Wildfire, Cel. That’s what they call us when we lose control. When it happens, you lose the ability to think. You just burn. It’s a hunger, like starvation, but you will never feel full. In that state, you’ll burn through anything that stands in your way: me, Nora, Fukashi.”

Cel considers this information. “At least you don’t burn?”

“Such optimism is endearing but unrealistic.” He holds out a hand and back flames begin to rise from his palm. They twist around his fingers. The ends of his hair shivers and start to rise. “Even with limiters, this amount of control took me years to master.”

Cel watches the flames, entranced. Daddy’s fire emits no light. Even the smoke it creates is only black. It looks like ShiShi’s shadows, but it burns like true fire. Cel knows from experience that her fire looks normal--all reds, yellows, and oranges. It doesn’t look like this, like fire gone bad, like something’s wrong with it.

“Why’s it black?” she asks. It’s not the first time she’s asked the question, and it probably won’t be the last. She already knows what his answer will be.

“It doesn’t matter.”

But it does. She just wishes she knew why. Why his hair and eyes and hair are all such a dark color. She wonders if his core looks the same.

Stained.

ShiShi told her something once. It was years ago. He’d taken her to a park. She’d worn a hood and stuck close to him, clinging to his hand. She’d observed the Malroix children from afar as they played, greedingly taking in the details of their blue eyes and white hair. When Cel and ShiShi got home, she asked a question that made his eyes pinch with guilt: why does one else look like me?

It’s because you’re firecored, Cel. Once upon a time, your daddy looked just like you, he’d said and drawn her into a hug. He grew up with your same red eyes and gray hair. Cores, I’d do anything to see him like that, but it happened before I met him. It happened in Rajask, I think.

That Daddy won’t even tell Fukashi how it happened is unsettling.

On the roof, black fire crawls up Daddy’s arm. His hair is all fire now, floating around his head. His veins darken and rise against his brown skin, shot through with obsidian. He looks terrifying. He looks awesome.

“Feel out your core,” he tells her, and his words crackle. “Reach deep inside yourself and find that part of you that sings.”

Cel closes her eyes and lets herself become hyper aware of her body, though she knows her firecore isn’t physical. It exists in three places at once: the living world, the Veil Between, and Styx--land of the dead, where people go when they die, the place where spirits linger before their energy is reabsorbed by the Greatcore at Rivaga’s heart.

Cel focuses on her stomach, on the deepest, centermost part of her physical self. Her core is part of her entire being, but here it feels stronger. Anchored. Here, she can imagine it as a glowing fireball. Just imagining it sends a thrill dancing through her limbs. She latches onto that joy, and she has it--her fire. She’s suddenly hyper aware of the warm blood beneath her skin, of her pounding heart, of a thrumming in her bones.

“I got it,” she says aloud, and faintly hears that same crackle in her voice.

“Good,” Daddy says. “You’re going to summon it forth, but you must be careful. Just tug at that feeling. Just a little, Cel.”

Cel tugs as best as she can, but the feeling doesn’t change. She presses her lips firmly together and tries again. She chases that joy, flings herself into it, and yanks with all her might.