Draevorn Academy: The Dragon’s Last Word

Fight Small

ZYRAEL

My mother taught me to fight at age six.

She taught me to lose convincingly at age seven.

She said the second lesson was more important.

She was right.

First week of classes at Draevorn and I already understood why. Every discipline had its own training hall, its own instructors, its own specific culture of competition that the students had been quietly establishing since the ranking ceremony. The Aqua magic students were collaborative — they trained in pairs, correcting each other’s technique with the easy familiarity of people who had grown up knowing their discipline was built around connection.

The Ember magic students were not collaborative.

We were competitive in the specific way of people who had been told since birth that fire was the combat discipline, which meant every session was an audition and everyone in the room was both your training partner and your competition simultaneously.

I found that exhausting.

I also found it useful.

In a room full of people trying to outperform each other, nobody was paying close attention to the person performing adequately.

Master Edryn ran the advanced Ember magic seminar on the third day. He was a tall man, ex-military discipline, the kind of instructor who had stopped explaining things years ago because he had decided that students who needed explanations were already behind.

He ran us through technique drills from the start.

Basic construct formation. Precision targeting. Sustained output under physical pressure. Standard curriculum, standard progression, nothing I hadn’t already mapped from the training texts I had memorized before arriving.

I performed at sixty percent.

Same as the ranking. Same as everything.

The problem with performing at sixty percent in a room full of people trying to show one hundred was that eventually someone noticed the gap wasn’t effort.

A student named Bryn noticed on the second drill.

She was Ember magic from a mid-tier noble house, good technique, the specific ambition of someone who had been told their whole life that good technique plus hard work equaled advancement and had believed it completely. She watched me pull a strike in the third rotation with the focused attention of someone who had been watching everyone else’s output and had just found an anomaly.

She didn’t say anything during the drill.

She waited until we rotated partners.

“You pulled that,” she said, falling into a stance across from me. “Third rotation. You had the angle and you pulled it.”

Here we go.

“I lost the angle,” I said. “Footwork.”

“Your footwork was fine,” she said.

“It felt off to me.”

She looked at me for a moment with the expression of someone deciding whether to push further.

Then she shrugged and raised her construct.

“Your loss,” she said.

I let her score two points she shouldn’t have scored and felt Master Edryn’s attention move across the room toward us and then away again.

Good, I thought. Nothing interesting here.

The session continued.

I performed adequately. I placed mid-tier in every rotation. I made exactly the kinds of errors that a mid-tier first-year Ember magic student made — the small technical mistakes that came from moderate training rather than the deliberate suppression of an inheritance I was not supposed to have.

It required more concentration than performing well would have.

That was the specific exhaustion of it. Competence was easy. Competence disguised as mediocrity required constant management because the competence kept trying to surface on its own.

Especially here.

There was something about being inside Draevorn — the volcanic stone, the specific quality of the air in the training halls, the proximity to whatever was in the mountain beneath us — that made the Dravic magic harder to hold down than it had ever been outside the academy.

I noticed it for the first time during the fourth drill.

My construct ran hotter than I intended for approximately three seconds before I brought it back.

Not visibly hotter. Not enough to produce the wrong color or the wrong behavior. But I felt it — the Dravic magic bleeding into the Ember technique at the edges, making it more precise and more responsive than sixty percent had any right to be.

I covered it.

But it had happened.

I filed that under things to address in private and kept moving.

At the end of the session, Master Edryn dismissed the group and I was two steps from the door when he said:

“Voss.”

I stopped.

Of course.

I turned around with the expression of someone mildly surprised to be called on.

“Sir.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Not the way the warden at the gate had looked at my brand — not suspicious. Something else. The focused assessment of an experienced instructor who had just watched sixty minutes of training and had found something that didn’t add up.

“You're targeting in the second rotation,” he said. “Walk me through your approach.”

I walked him through an approach that was technically accurate and completely unremarkable.

He listened with the expression of someone who was not entirely satisfied with what he was hearing but could not identify exactly why.

“Your footwork is stronger than your output suggests,” he said.

“I’ve been working on footwork,” I said. “Output is still catching up.”

He looked at me for another moment.

“Keep working,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

I walked out of the training hall and into the corridor and kept my pace the same as it always was.

He noticed something, I thought. He doesn’t know what he noticed. But he noticed.

I needed to be more careful.

The problem was that more careful meant further below sixty percent and further below sixty percent meant more obviously deliberate which was the opposite of more careful.

I thought about that all the way back to the dormitory.

Then I thought about the way the construct had run hot for three seconds.

Then I thought about the instructor at the ranking saying my mother’s name and the one second of cold fire that followed it.

The suppression is slipping, I thought.

Not dramatically. Not visibly.

But it was slipping.

And Draevorn, whatever it was doing to the magic inside this mountain, was making it slip faster.

Winning too well was the same as losing.

I had learned that before I learned to walk.

The problem with Draevorn was that everyone here was watching closely enough to notice the difference.