Chapter 736: What They Made Their Own

Chapter 736: What They Made Their Own

Ira pushed the smaller Hearthseal specimen away. After a month of trials, she knew which one she wanted beside her when she condensed.

The egg-sized stone and the larger specimen still resting in its red mineral bed had spent weeks on a flat rock beside her practice area. Leon found her turning the larger one toward the evening light.

"The little one takes quickly and releases too sharply," Ira told him. "This one stores more evenly. It doesn’t waste nearly as much when I draw on it."

"Then you’ve chosen?" Leon asked.

"Yes. I’m keeping it beside me while I condense." She tapped the red bed. "I want to learn how it holds the heat. I don’t want my Core answering as slowly as the stone."

"You’ve been thinking about that since the Steps," Leon said.

"You asked what kind of fighter I wanted to become." Ira grinned at him. "I did listen."

She prepared the mineral as the manual instructed, trimming its surrounding bed without damaging the skin. Eleven days of precise work left the Hearthseal inside a thin protective shell.

When Ira began condensation, her Qi Sea resisted the pressure. She could have forced it smaller; that had never been the difficulty. Keeping its circulation responsive while the foundation platform drew inward required more patience.

She rested the Hearthseal against her lower abdomen, drawing measured warmth from it while its dense structure gave her a pattern to study.

Keep the heat. Keep the movement.

She compressed the sea and platform together in stages, allowing the developing Core Embryo to settle between them. The material beside her helped replenish what the long work consumed, but every adjustment inside the embryo remained hers.

Once, the warmth reached her faster than she expected. Her first impulse was to take it all. She had chosen the larger specimen for a reason, and letting good energy escape offended her almost as much as missing a clean strike.

She stopped her intake instead.

The embryo was already carrying as much as its unfinished route could move. More would only crowd it. She waited through the urge to push, feeling the circulation settle before accepting another measured thread.

I’ll hit harder when it’s ready.

That was easier to tell herself than to do. She did it anyway.

During the third week, she found the limit she had been looking for.

The dark-red embryo could take more compression. She tested a little and felt its response slow. There was greater density within reach, but a delay between intention and flame would cost her more than it gave.

She remembered the Hearthseal bed lifting free on the Steps and the speed she had needed to carry it out.

She eased off one degree.

The Embryo held. It turned. It stayed hot and quick under her hand, and when she touched it with her will it answered at once, without the delay she had felt before.

She circulated through the embryo once, then twice. On the third uninterrupted circuit, its structure crystallized around the path she had maintained.

Leon felt the change across the grass and looked up. Ira sat with both hands against her stomach, staring at something only she could sense.

Then she laughed, once, and put her face in her hands.

He went over and sat beside her and didn’t say anything. After a while she leaned sideways into his shoulder.

"It’s mine," she said into his coat. "Leon. It’s mine."

"I know," Leon said, resting his cheek against her hair.

"I didn’t let it get slow." She lifted her head. Her eyes were wet and she didn’t seem to mind. "I wanted to be the kind of fighter who holds it all in and lets it go exactly when she says. And I am. I can feel I am."

He touched her cheek with his thumb. She turned and kissed his palm, quickly, and then stood up, still holding his hand, and pulled him with her.

"Watch," she said.

She raised her other hand and opened it. A flame the size of a coin appeared above her palm, white at the heart. It didn’t flicker. It hung there, dense and quiet, and the grass a pace away began to curl brown from the heat.

She closed her hand, and it was gone at once, and the grass stopped curling.

"There," said Ira. "That’s the one I wanted."

By the fourth month, their practice area had acquired a table, a fire ring, and a little garden. Leon came back from checking the outside cell to find Loriel studying the wellheart leaves beside her notes.

"Still looking for the difference?" Leon asked, taking the opposite bench.

"I found it." Loriel turned a leaf to show him the fine veins beneath it.

"My vitality slows when I compress it this way," Loriel said, indicating her notes. "The wellheart holds it densely, but these small circuits keep feeding into larger ones. There’s movement throughout the structure."

"Can you use that?" Leon asked.

"I think so. I need to find the arrangement that suits me."

It took her six weeks.

She used a prepared cutting to study the effect while compressing her Qi Sea and foundation platform into their embryo. The smaller loops fed larger ones without abandoning the circulation between them. Leon checked on her and left her room to work.

Twice she stopped to correct a failure. One imbalance made the cutting root abruptly and then wilt. Another left her dizzy enough to require two days of rest. She recorded both before trying again.

Leon brought her food during those two days and found her staring at the failed cutting.

"Have you learned anything from glaring at it?" he asked.

Loriel looked up. "I fed the new growth before the older veins could sustain it. I thought it was responding well because the roots grew so quickly."

"And now?"

"Now I know what I missed." She moved the cutting beside her notes rather than throwing it away. "I wish it hadn’t needed to die for me to notice."

He put the bowl within reach. She ate while he stayed, then returned to the little drawing of veins that had kept her occupied all morning.

On the forty-third day of this work, a ring of grass and small white flowers spread around her feet.

It stopped a pace away. Loriel completed another circulation through the newly crystallized Core before opening her eyes.

"Early Golden Core," Loriel said, hoarse from the long silence. Then she smiled. "It kept moving. All the way through."

Later, after resting, she demonstrated on three seedlings. Each received a different measured flow: one barely stirred, one unfurled a leaf, and the third began to bud. She altered the last without disturbing either of the others.

"Now you’re showing off," Vyra said.

"Yes," Loriel admitted, pleased enough not to deny it.

She spent the following months consolidating, as Ira was doing with her own Core. Neither mistook first success for completed preparation. By the ninth month, both could sustain their new circulations through sleep and ordinary activity.

Leon later found Loriel watering the ordinary bellshade before either of the wellheart specimens.

"It still doesn’t do anything useful," she told him. "I still like it best." She moved aside to show him a new blue flower, and he stayed until she had finished watering it.

He would have liked another quiet afternoon there. Instead, he checked the time and went to inspect the room outside. Mardoc had already been on the road when they entered, and their private year was nearly over.