[Evelyn’s POV]

Thalissa stands at the edge of the training yard with her cane planted and a leather notebook open.

Her bright eyes track me with the intensity of a scholar watching an experiment she’s not sure won’t explode.

“Show me what you can do,” she says. “Start with something small.”

I raise my right hand and reach for the moonlight — not grasping, but opening. Silver light gathers at my palm, bending the air, creating a shimmer that distorts the stone wall behind me like heat rising from pavement.

“Visual distortion,” Thalissa notes, scribbling. “You’re bending the light spectrum around your hand. Can you extend the radius?”

I push outward. The distortion ripples, expanding until the air within arm’s reach of my body warps and shifts. Warriors watching from the colonnade lean forward, some squinting.

“Good, now intensity.”

I close my fist and concentrate. The light compresses, brightening, and when I open my hand, a flash bursts from my palm — brief, blinding, sharp enough to make Thalissa flinch and the nearest warriors throw their arms over their eyes.

“Controlled burst, useful in combat.” She’s writing fast. “What about the bond channel? Can you push the energy through Aspis?”

I reach through the bond. Aspis is in the courtyard, her presence vast and alert. I feed the moonlight into our connection, and she amplifies it — the power cycles between us like current through a loop, gaining strength with each pass. My skin glows.

“Careful,” Aspis murmurs. “The loop builds faster than you expect.”

I pull back, letting the cycle dissipate. The glow fades, and my heart rate is elevated but manageable.

Thalissa lowers her notebook. “You’ve been practicing.”

“Every night in the caves for the past three weeks.”

“It shows. The instinctive bursts I read about in Sera’s reports — the ones triggered by fear — those were raw and uncontrolled. What you just demonstrated has structure. Intention.”

She taps her pen against the page. “Now show me the shield.”

My stomach tightens. The shield is new — a sustained barrier of concentrated light, dense enough to deflect force, bright enough to disorient. In the caves, I’ve held it for thirty seconds before my control frays.

“I haven’t perfected it yet.”

“I need to see what happens when you sustain high-level output.”

I plant my feet on the flagstones and spread my hands. Through the bond, Aspis feeds me a steady current of encouragement — warm, grounding, an anchor against the tide I’m about to release.

The shield forms between my palms. Silver light condenses into something nearly solid — a curved barrier of compressed luminescence, shimmering with patterns that shift like oil on water.

I feel its weight in my muscles, my bones, the space behind my eyes where the bond lives.

Ten seconds, and the shield holds. My arms tremble with the effort of sustaining it.

“Steady,” Thalissa says from behind me. “Keep the output even.”

Fifteen seconds. The patterns in the light grow more complex, spiraling into geometries I don’t recognize. My breath comes harder, and sweat beads along my hairline.

Twenty seconds, and the floodgate opens.

There’s no warning or gradual escalation. One moment I’m holding the shield with controlled effort, and the next, power surges through me with a violence that blanks my vision.

It’s like standing in a stream and having the dam break upstream — the current that was manageable becomes a wall of force that slams through every channel in my body simultaneously.

Light erupts from me in a shockwave.

The concussion radiates outward in a sphere of blinding silver. The flagstones crack beneath my feet — fractures racing outward in jagged lines.

Thalissa stumbles backward, cane clattering. Warriors at the colonnade throw themselves sideways.

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