“Well, that was interesting,” Ren said as we made our way out of the dining hall.

“Yeah,” I responded. “It’s nice to have learnt a bit more about the place we’re going. I felt bad that I wasn’t researching more about it, but now I can keep training with no worries.”

Ren chuckled. “You know we’re headed to a school, right? There’s no need to be rushing so much right now.”

I shook my head. “Yeah, but everyone else will be so much ahead of us when we get there. So if I’m going to be the best of them, I need as much of a headstart as I can get.”

“I guess,” Ren said. “Those people have probably been training their affinities for years now.”

“Exactly. That’s why I need to train as hard as I can right now, to catch up as much as I can. My goal right now is to gain enough control over my flame to launch a projectile with it. Leonard said that that level of control would put me easily within the upper ranks of the students who would be applying with us.”

“Really?” Ren asked, looking surprised. “Even after a few years of training, most people can’t even launch a projectile?”

I huffed a laugh. “That’s a lot of judgment coming from a guy who’s never tried to make fire listen to him. Trust me, it’s a lot harder than you’d think.”

Ren smiled. “Fair enough,” he said. “How close are you?”

“Eh, I can make a few sparks,” I responded.

“And your goal is to make a projectile, something that apparently takes years of training, in a few weeks?” Ren asked incredulously.

I grinned at him, dripping confidence. “I believe in myself.”

Ren laughed in response. “Well, you certainly never had a problem in that department.”

I shrugged. “I never understood people who couldn’t believe in themselves. If you don’t do it, who's going to?”

“I think most people start out thinking that way, too. But it’s like, the more you fail in life, the harder it gets, y’know? Believing in yourself is like betting on yourself. When the thing you keep betting on keeps costing you – keeps failing – eventually, it starts to feel like a stupid investment, no matter how much belief you started with.”

“Hmm,” I said, considering his analogy. “That’s interesting, but I’ve never thought of it like that. It sounds weird, but when I say I believe in myself, I don’t mean that I don’t think I’ll fail. Or at least, in the sense that you mean to fail.” I paused, taking in a breath. “That’s the problem with your analogy. It’s black and white, y’know? When you bet, you either win big or you lose completely. And that’s why you start to lose your belief. When you keep failing, you label yourself a failure, or a bad investment, and then it feels like a dumb idea to keep believing in yourself. But that’s not the way I see it. I don’t deny myself the possibility of not achieving my goal. I understand that I might not do what I said I would. I have to, because I give myself the most colossal goals ever. If I didn’t, I’d be the first person to lose faith in myself. But when I say I believe in myself, I mean that I believe that I will do everything in my power to work for that goal. It means that by the end of it, regardless of whether or not I achieved what I wanted, I will be able to look back at myself and say that I honestly could not have tried harder. That I never cowered in front of the impossible task and gave it less than my all.”

Ren smiled at my words. It was a strange smile, full of an emotion I couldn’t really name. An emotion I wasn’t even sure had a name.

“Well, what if you’ve failed, even in that sense?” Ren asked finally, his voice full of a quiet melancholy. “What if you look back at your life and you know that you could have tried harder to get what you wanted, but you didn’t? Because of...cowardice, laziness, stuff like that?”

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“Well, that’s all in the past, isn’t it?” I responded. “How you’ve done in the past shouldn’t affect how you do today.” I stopped for a moment, considering. “Actually, no, scratch that. It should affect how you act today. It should make you better. Nobody’s perfect, and even if you’ve failed by my standards, it’s only a problem if you spend the rest of your life wallowing in that failure. But if you’re able to recognize why and how you failed to try your hardest, then the next time you need to believe in yourself, you should know exactly how you need to act. And see, that’s the other nice thing about the way I look at it. Betting on things is random, something beyond your control. And sometimes, your goals are like that too: affected by things outside of your control. But when you look at it my way, your success or failure is determined entirely by you, and no one and nothing else. Which means you aren’t just rolling dice; you are actually able to affect the outcome. So every failure is more than just the result of fate’s whim, it’s something that you can learn and grow from. Something that trains you to do better the next time.”

Ren was quiet again, as if considering my words, before suddenly turning to me with a teasing grin. “When’d you become such a philosopher?” he asked with a laugh.

“I’ve always been this smart,” I responded without missing a beat. “You’ve just never noticed.”

Ren chuckled at my response, but before he could say anything, I suddenly stopped and motioned to the room at our left. “Here’s my room, by the way,” I said, the exhaustion of the day suddenly catching up to me at the sight of the door.

Hearing the weariness in my voice, Ren smiled and patted my shoulder. “Get some sleep, Ruby. You’ll need the rest if you’re serious about your goal.”

I nodded, leaning against the door of my room. “Speaking of which, you never mentioned what you’re doing.”

Ren raised an eyebrow. “Mmm?”

“You said you were training too, right? Well, what are you training for?”

Ren grinned at me. “Oh, that?” he asked in a conspiratory whisper, raising a finger to his lips. “It’s a secret.”

“Really?” I said in a disappointed voice.

Ren laughed, turning to leave. “It’s good, trust me,” he said over his shoulder. “But I don’t want to make a promise I might not be able to deliver on.”

“Booo,” I said to his retreating back. “Laaame.”

Ren chuckled and stopped, turning around to give me a grin of challenge. “Show me a projectile of fire by the time we land, and I’ll give you something equally impossible. How does that sound?”

I responded with a grin of my own. “I’ll hold you to that, when I do accomplish my goal. And if you aren’t ready by then, I’m gonna throw a ball of fire at your face.”

“It’s a deal, then,” Ren said with a smile, turning back around and vanishing into the darkness of the unlit hallways, a final half-wave thrown over his shoulder.

The last vestiges of a smile still curving my lips, I stepped into my cozy room with exhaustion weighing on my eyelids. I barely had time to kick off my boots and unfasten my belt and cape before I hit the bed, letting the thick blanket of sleep settle over my shoulders.

–

The next few weeks passed by quite peacefully. Despite there being apparently over a hundred Earthen humans on board the ship I was on, I had very few encounters with any of them. The only people I met regularly were Grace, Leonard, and Ren. I would find Anabella and Craw occasionally in the dining halls or just passing in the halls, but with the massive size of the ship and the inordinate amount of time I spent in the training hall, the meetings were pretty rare.

I did see a few other people here and there, people that I didn’t recognize, but I never went over to say hi. I almost never had the energy to, since my schedule consisted of a breakfast with Ren, Grace, and Leonard, followed by an entire day of either combat training with Leonard or training my affinity on my own. When I would finally stumble out of the hall, usually late into the night, I would eat a light dinner – sometimes with Ren but usually alone – and head to sleep right away.

It was a painful, exhausting schedule, but not monotonous in the least. I relished every moment I spent in the training hall. In fact, I promised myself every day that I would leave early to study a little on my own about the planet I was headed to and its culture, but I never did, always too wrapped up in training to leave early.

Every day was a challenge, and while not all of them brought progress, the days that did make the rest of them worth it. The days I would manage to knock Leonard to the ground, or make a bigger or brighter flame would reignite the flame within my chest, pushing me to keep trying and trying. Every step forward made the next seem all the more inviting, shining with an allure I just could not resist.

The time flew by, slipping through my fingers as I engrossed myself in my training, and before I knew it, three weeks had already passed by.