The daylight in this part of the world was nothing short of controversial. It was as bright as all day light is meant to be. Not too hot and not too cold. It was, in the simplest definition, just right. However, its controversy existed in its myriad of colors. Some say if looked at from the right angle, one could see a color that should not exist.

Perhaps this was a reia phenomenon no one had deciphered. Something unexplainable to the philosophers and scientists of soul magic. Or perhaps it was an effect of the countless transparent leaves in this forest, letting every bit of sunlight to illuminate what should be a dark and murky forest, fracturing its light in ways no one could possibly begin to imagine.

In truth, it wasn’t a difficult concept to realize, but Jabari couldn’t bring himself to find it. It had something to do with the nature of the reia. Light affinity blending with life affinity, and some reia parasite in the soil. Really, it was nothing so spectacular in the wider scope of things. Unfortunately, he was not here to discover the mysteries of the world. He was here for other reasons. One of which presented itself now.

“It’s been a minute, dad?”

Jabari turned his head the wrong way, afforded a piece of transparent leaf undulating in the air his attention instead of the sixteen-year-old girl giggling behind him.

“C’mon,” she complained. “The least you can do is look at me since you’re here. You know I haven’t seen you in too long.”

Jabari made a sound between a groan and a grunt that could’ve meant anything.

“Sulking again?” the girl asked, her soft voice carrying across the distance in a manner almost uncontrolled.

She needed to learn control. She was evolving too fast and control in the subtler things was proving her weakness. Her kind had an affinity to reia most would call unnatural. While others learned to use reia, she learned to control how much of it she used so that she needed to keep her use of reia away from actions as simple as speaking.

“You’re speaking too loudly again,” he told her. “Control your tone better.”

He heard her surprise in the silence that followed.

“Oh,” she said, finally. “I didn’t know.” She dropped her voice to barely a whisper. “Is it better now?”

“That’s not control.” He turned his attention away from the still undulating leaf and looked up at the sun through the canopy of transparency. “You’re just whispering. Control is learning not to infuse your words with so much reia. Eliminate the reia and speak as you normally would before you were souled.”

“I don’t remember how, though.”

“I taught it to you at Iron.”

“Well, what works for Iron is not working for Silver.” A hesitant pause followed, then she added: “Teach me again?”

Jabari sighed. Finally, he turned to look at her.

With a hand behind her back, she smiled at him warmly and waved. “Hi.”

She had a fair skin, tanned from the effects of the sun. Her hair was as white as snow, so deep it was unrivaled. It was as though one of the Endless had taken the snow and made of it a gift of hair for her. She stared at him with bright blue eyes. Her smile was soft and gentle, well placed on a round face, and he could almost make out the outline of both her canines behind it. It marked her as not human. It marked her as dragonkin.

“Your control at Iron does not change at Silver, only the quality of your reia does,” he told her. “You’re just being lazy. Speaking without reia is a skill of your species.”

“But my species aren’t that many left, though. You said so yourself, so how would you know.”

Jabari stood from the stump he sat on and dusted his cassock. Unsurprisingly, there was no dust.

“Speak with less reia,” he said. “That way, your voice doesn’t carry on the ambient reia. That way you don’t end up talking to everyone capable of listening.”

“But it doesn’t make sense,” she frowned. “The students from the blade leaf sect don’t have to deal with this.”

There was pause after her words, a pregnant silence filled with the knowledge of a child’s wrongdoing shared between the child and the adult. Her guilt was also in her eyes. It reminded him of how much of a terrible liar she still was.

“And how would you know that, Ayla?” His words were slow, precise. They froze her, and what was the beginning of a growing rant seized.

“I… I just meant…”

“Is there something you’d like to tell me, Ayla?”

Ayla looked down, cowed. She hated it when he used her name this way. “No, dad.”

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Jabari stepped forward until he stood in front of her. “What did you do?”

“I…”

Standing six inches taller than her, he had to look down to meet her eyes. “Ayla.”

“Yes.”

“Look at me.”

Slowly, she obeyed. When she did, he stared into amber eyes and she squirmed under his attention. It was odd that after so long his eyes still left her unnerved. Seth had gotten accustomed to it in weeks. She’d had years. Unlike the boy, he’d been a part of her life since she was six.

“You know I can’t look at you when your eyes are like that,” she mumbled.

“What did you do, Ayla?” he repeated, ignoring her words. He cared naught for whatever discomfort his eyes brought her.

She gave a deep sigh, a child accepting her faith, then stepped back and away from him. “I snuck into the blade leaf sect. Okay!” she snapped. “I was curious, and you weren’t around.”

He watched her feigned tantrum. Knew it was fake as he knew the sun was hot. She had done wrong and hoped in a bid to dissuade his ire, she would appeal to his masculine urge to dissuade her anger. How many times would he be forced to remind her that he was neither her father nor her friend. She was a weapon and he was merely the blacksmith.

“What were you curious about?”

She hesitated again, her feigned anger dissipating in the awareness of its uselessness. She bent her head again, shuffled her feet across the ground, its green and brown surface littered with colorless leaves like pieces of broken glass.

When she spoke again, her voice was barely above a whisper.

“Boys.”

Jabari restrained a sigh, kept emotions from his face. The child had almost endangered herself and ruined years of work over a curiosity for the opposite gender. Was she not even aware that none of the soul magi in the sect were of the same species as her?

“You do know that—”

“I know,” she raised her voice at him, then it softened. “I know. They are not dragonkin. None of them are. But… but I wanted to be sure. I wanted to know. To see. You already said I would train under them eventually, so I wanted to see what kind of place it was.”

“And what did you learn?”

Regardless of the unreasonableness of the logic behind the risk she’d taken, he knew her well enough to know her curiosity would make her do more. And she had.

“It’s a really big place. And their library is so massive. I remember going to the library this one time as a child when dad still cared… when I hadn’t absorbed the dragon soul fragment and become… this.”

She shook herself visibly, noticing how her voice had slowly lost its luster at the thought of older days, when she’d been happier, before Jabari had come for her. Before her father had abandoned her.

“And what did you learn of their library?” he pressed, pushing her from the despair of history.

“Well, it has way too many books on way too much martial arts. There’s even one about something called the demonic arts, which doesn’t make sense since demons aren’t real. Unless it’s some kind of metaphor.”

“Keep a broad mind, child. There exist people who believe dragons are not real just as well.”

“Then they are stupid,” she huffed. “I haven’t seen a dragon and I know they’re real. It’s like saying you’re not real, simply because people haven’t seen you.”

Jabari raised a slow brow at her statement.

“I know,” she scowled. “It doesn’t make sense. But you know what I mean. I can just feel it’s real. Dragons are real.”

“You only know that because you absorbed an entire dragon soul. It has modified you, given you a sense of things.”

“Wait! An entire soul? I thought it was just a fragment.”

Jabari shook his head. “No, child. An entire soul. You were already part dragon kin. Somewhere in your ancestry was a dragonkin. Its power manifested strongly in your blood, that was why absorbing an entire dragon soul came naturally to you.”

“So,” she raised her hands and studied them. “This has always been me, regardless of how I looked then?”

Her expression bore a touch of awe and sadness. Both not in equal parts.

He knew what she was looking at. Her hands were normal now, but she wasn’t looking at them. She was picturing what she became whenever she cycled her reia and went into combat. She’d only ever sparred against him, but it had been enough. Dragon reia didn’t need much to modify the body during combat.

She was looking at the monster she became. Not that he thought of her as one.

Besides, she would be strong enough one day, powerful enough to control it, to permit or withhold its effects. But that day was not today.

“What else did you learn?” he asked, unwilling to go into an emotional conversation.

“Their security is lax,” she said, absently, never looking up from her hands. “I barely even concealed my core, yet none of them sensed me. I think their strongest student is Gold, and their weakest is Iron. The elder is probably Baron, Herald at best.”

“It is a branch school.”

“A weak one.” She shrugged. “And they don’t seem that interesting. It makes me wonder why you’re sending me there. I don’t think there’s anything they can teach me.”

“You’ll be there for a year, then you’ll leave. And you are mistaken. They can’t teach you much in the way of soul magic, but you’re going there to learn social interactions. You’ve had none for too long.”

“But I talk to you.”

“Rarely. Too rarely.” He turned away from her and began walking away. “When you reach Barony, I’ll teach you another concealment technique. That is when you’ll enroll.”

“Barony?!” Ayla blurted. “That’s as strong as the elder… Maybe. Won’t that be a problem?”

“Not entirely. You’ll be a Baroness, but you’ll enroll as an Iron.”

He felt her frown even without looking.

“I don’t get it. So, I’ll be a Baroness masquerading as an Iron.”

“Correct,” he said. “And unless you do or say something you shouldn’t, nothing will go wrong.”

Ayla’s frown deepened as he walked away. But when she spoke again, her question touched nothing of the current subject.

“Why Ayla?” she asked.

He stopped. “Because I did not know your name.”

“I get that. But why Ayla. It just sounds special, somehow.”

“Because it is.”

He said no more and walked away. Ayla said nothing else. She stood and watched him go as she had done since he’d taken her in, abandoned in this forest at six. She’d done it for ten years now. She only had one more to go.

Walking away, he moved in the direction where the reia was most violent, evidence of a fissure. He did not hurry his steps or hasten. He moved in the same controlled calm he had done since he began his path in the world of soul magic. He moved like a man the world bowed to. A king in his domain.

Ayla, he thought.

It was a unique name. He had once walked the lengths of a realm that called the world within which they lived by that name. So, if he was being honest, he had named the girl after a world.

The potential sentimentality of it was not lost to him. Still, he did not dwell on it. Instead, he peeked into the future and plotted his next path.

When he left, it was in the silence of the wind and the herald of a fissure.