Chapter 7 - Kindling a Flame of Hope.

I ran.

I ran and I ran and I ran.

My heart thundered along to the beat of my feet slamming into the ground as I sprinted across the woods.

Tears threatened to fall from my eyes, but I refused to let that happen.

I didn’t even know if Dad had bothered to chase me.

They’re all the same! Selfish pricks who can’t even open their own damn eyes!

The extra fluid blurred my vision, but I still kept them in, even as I stormed through the entrance of the old building and bit my thumb to draw the blood. With a careless, rough shake, it splattered onto the ground. Light engulfed me once again and I was transported onto the grass alone.

My lip wobbled pathetically.

No more tears! I won’t waste anymore on them, I won’t!.

Slowly, I slid down the wall of the pond and rested my head on the cool stone to try and cool my head. 

I looked up at the sky. 

Starlight twinkled determinedly through my tears, illuminating the whole dome in a gentle light that threatened to blur into a single watery mess in my eyes.

Sadness, guilt, anger and an intense longing all surged up within me at once.

I blinked and a tear fell. 

Was I really so weak?

“It’s okay to cry, Ember. Crying is no weakness - it showed that you were strong enough to care for such people, despite how little they did for you. It shows you are human.” Echo comforted me.

“No!” I shouted, “It shows that I am nothing but an idiot! I hoped for years to be accepted like Angelica was. I tried to appease them, even by hurting myself to try and unlock my magic. I spent more than millions of hours training and practicing for the day I would do my first spell, to show them that I was what they hoped I’d be - the continuation of their bloodline! And as the clock ran down? With every day that I couldn’t do magic, they drifted further and further away, shunned me! I grovelled at their feet, but nothing ever worked! Nothing!”

I quietened from my outburst, “All I got in the end was hate. I was never enough.”

Defeated, I wiped my tears to look back at the unknown constellations in the sky with clarity, all apart yet connected by their light branching out in haloes.

I raised my hand to trace their hidden paths.

“I could hold the whole world in the palm of my hands and I would still never be enough, because I can’t do the only thing they ever cared about - magic!”

I was exhausted trying to run around them. But what else was I supposed to do? I was their daughter. They were all I had in this cruel, cruel world.

Who else was meant to love me, if not them?

God, I really was alone, wasn’t I?

My head dropped to my knees to block out the world and I hugged them tightly.

“Never change for them, Ember. You only ever need to change yourself for yourself. You are as lovely as you are, and despite what you think, you have your charming qualities as well - you put care into the things you love; your plants, your work, your future, but the one thing you don’t seem to put care into is yourself, in the present.”

I laughed sharply, “No way, I never put care into the things I was meant to, things that would have made me a better person. I destroyed my relationships like lighting a match in a petrol station. You know what? I hurt Dave when I was fifteen, and ever since then, he’s always hated me. He wasn’t the only one. Everything I’m getting now is nothing short of karma.”

Echo’s curiosity peaked.

“What… exactly happened between you and that piece of work?”

I sighed, “Me and Dave weren't always like this - we used to be joined at the hip, but I was the one who broke it off. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when we had an overnight school trip. Dave wanted me to come, and I couldn’t - I had to take care of Angelica whilst Dad was at a clan meeting with the district leader, and Mum wanted to visit Grandma and Grandad on the other side. Dave claimed that Mum and Dad were just using me as a free babysitter, that I was working myself to death and to refuse,” I ran my hand through my hair frustratedly. “I was so stupid and gullible. I was already on thin ice because Angelica had hurt herself by falling down the stairs and I wasn’t there to protect her, so I had no choice but to tell Dave to leave me. He wanted me to give up my efforts towards my family, and I said some really nasty things that poked at his own weaknesses. We had a fight. We ended up beating each other up. He even lost a tooth, and I broke my nose. We both ended up being put in suspension, and Dave couldn’t go on that trip either, no matter how much we both looked forward to it. After that, we just… drifted. I regret that moment so, so much. I missed my chance to apologise and now he’s with Angelica, and I’m here, alone. It was my cruelty in that conversation, things I never should have said that got me here.”

Echo mulled it all over silently. I could tell he was thinking about it carefully, and I was grateful.

He took his time before finally speaking, “You don’t deserve all of the scorn, in my opinion. You were frustrated. You were frightened at the prospect of stepping out of line and losing your place in your family. You were afraid of being shut out by the ones you loved the most.”

His words bore a deep gash into my heart, but they were the words I needed to hear.

I needed to accept the awful, awful circumstances.

“I was afraid of being alone,” I eventually admitted.

“Loneliness is terrifying for people who live as long as us,” Echo agreed. “All that time I spent in that amulet alone was like being stuck in a prison with no windows. I had no eyes to see, no limbs to move and no lungs to breathe. All I could do was try to feel the flow of magic, but even that waned over time in that cave. I had no one to watch my back, no one to-”

“-to talk to. All you needed was someone to listen.”

He made a nose of affirmation.

“Someone to listen, someone to talk to, and someone to tell me the empty words that everything was going to be okay. That we always had a place to belong. I worked with my family to make a world where we could belong, and that resulted in a horrifying war that had no victors. We-I made that choice. And I have to live with it. I can’t make what I did right - everyone from then has already passed - but you still have that chance, if you ever want to, Ember.”

I shuttered my eyes closed as a small flame of hope finally kindled within me. Maybe I still had something good in me.

“I promise to make a space where we belong. I will change myself, so that I don’t hate myself, so that I don’t regret anything.”

“You have a strong groundwork to build upon already, don’t cut yourself short. In the time I’ve spent in your body, I love the way you wrinkle your nose at something funny, how much you love food and nature and the way you spend time appreciating the things you have. Your devotion to your promises and what you love is amazing. The two worlds out there are vast, and I know that we’ll find a home in them somewhere. We will find peace. You won’t be alone. In the meantime,”

He materialised his misty self before me and bowed with a smirk.

“You have me,” He winked his blue eyes mischievously.

I giggled childishly before shoving him roughly and watching him turn into mist.

“Oh my God! You totally acted like a playboy there!”

“A playboy?”

“Yeah! A guy who chases a lot of girls!”

He visibly recoiled in disgust, “No thanks.”

I cackled, this time wiping away my tears as I cried of laughter.

“How are you feeling now?” He floated towards me to stare into my eyes and check me over.

“Better. Thanks Echo.” I smiled.

I crossed my legs on the grass and leaned against the wall of the pond, feeling the tension and anger leave. Exhaustion finally set in.

Echo hovered over me, “That took a lot out of you.”

I made a noise of agreement.

“And here I thought I was going to teach you magic in the time we’ve got until tomorrow. You’ve been following your routine perfectly so far, and after all those years of effort, you’re finally able to try my technique.”

Over the past few weeks, Echo had me running or exercising to improve my base strength, all whilst trying to concentrate my magic in my core. Although I had been doing so in the past, his exercising tasks had somehow been more efficient and faster than what Dad taught me. 

After all that hard work, I was finally ready!

I leapt to my feet.

“Really?”

“...You could say that. I’ll teach you the method I developed all those years ago. It definitely won’t be the same as doing it the natural way, but at least you can take this chance to learn how to protect yourse-”

I squealed and fist-bumped the air, “Where do I start?”

“It's not that simple. Sit down and let me explain.”

I kneeled on the ground and looked up at him patiently.

He, too, took a seat opposite me.

“All living things have a centre, from which mana pours out and fills your whole body to keep it alive. You could say it’s a bit like a volcano - Lava is stored at the centre in the base, and flows out from different passageways to the top and sides before running down and outwards in streams. We all have our paths etched out in our bodies, only they are blocked and misshapen. As we grow, the shapes of these paths become more regular and open - this is when we can use our mana at the surface.”

“So my problem is that my pathways are blocked? Will you be able to unblock them?”

“I don’t think so. Each body has a different centre, different pathway - it's like the number of veins in the body. I’d have to try and map out every single one and try to figure out its natural flow before I could do anything about it. And I don’t want to mistakenly harm you - there have been more fatalities in this process than anything else. I’ll figure out a way for you to unblock them, but for now? I have a different way of letting you use magic, though there are…drawbacks.”

“Drawbacks?” I asked hesitantly.

“Yes. It’ll hurt to force magic out when the right pathways don’t exist yet. Sometimes, it’s faster to just ignore the pathways directly and push it out from elsewhere. It won’t hurt for small tasks, but for large ones? It can hurt immensely.”

“You’ve been using my magic already like this, haven’t you? How bad could it be?”

“...Like a big ouch?” Echo answered dumbly. “I’m not sure how to describe it.”

I snorted, “What the hell does a ‘big ouch’ even mean? Let’s try a spell.”

I searched the area to see if there was anything we could do without hurting the trees. I tapped the ground with my foot in thought.

Eureka!

“Let’s try and lift a huge chunk off the ground and see what happens.”

“Okay. That’s one of the spells that require a bit more power. It should be okay to gauge this.”

My mana drained much more than I had ever felt Echo do before. I gasped as large chunks of solid floated into the air, congealing into a huge, spherical mound of dirt.

This wasn’t even as bad as my period pains!

Echo grumbled something about women having higher pain tolerance exasperatedly, which made me chuckle.

Echo increased the size of the mound and compressed it into a smooth, round dirt ball the size of a three-storey house.

The pain increased a bit more.

He spun the ball in circles, sending it far above and widening its radius. He used more magic to orbit it faster and faster.

It hurt a bit more, but still tolerable.

Echo made a noise of frustration before pumping out even more magic to lift a huge wave of water and compressing it.

“Echo, I think you can stop now.” I spoke shakily, but he didn’t respond.

I could feel his obsession with finding my limits take over, and he kept increasing the size of the water ball and keeping it in a perfect ball.

Fin was trapped inside it, spinning around frantically and dodging the few moss balls that had gotten trapped in there.

“Echo enough! You’re going to hurt Fin! Echo-”

I couldn’t bear the pain anymore and I curled into a ball.

Echo finally snapped out of it.

The dirt stopped spinning and returned to its rightful place in the ground, covering the gaping hole that had been left, and the water dropped roughly back into the pond.

The pain slowly ebbed away. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Sheepishly, Echo prodded at me, “Sorry. I got excited trying to find your limits. It won’t happen again - promise.”

He took a seat on the side of the pond.

Water splashed on his face, which ended up just passing through.

An angry Fin popped up on the surface, swimming violently in figures of eight..

Remorsefully he addressed Fin, “Yeah, sorry to you too, Fin.”

He turned back to me, “Your pain tolerance is insane.”

“Yeah, try being beaten up every other day and you start being able to ignore it way better.”

He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation before continuing on, “There's a bit more to my technique than this, but this is only the starting point. Now that you’ve felt how the magic flows in you, how would you like to try your first spell?”

“Which one are we doing first?”

“Traditionally, it’s done with a candle, but we don’t really have one here-”

We were interrupted by a few candles flying outwards aimlessly into the sky, and Fin doing acrobatic somersaults before landing in the pond again.

Echo blinked slowly, “Okay… Let’s do it on the candles.”

“Will the water affect the spell?” I questioned, signalling to the candles?”

“It’ll be fine,” He assured me.

I shook the water off the candles and set them all upright onto the flat portion of the pond wall.

“Magic is within the realm of thought, and will. The more you know about the process, the better the outcome. The more you want it to happen, the more likely it will occur. It takes more magic to go against the laws of the world than it takes to follow them. You know your modern day science right? Use that knowledge, your will of wanting to set these candles alight and practice controlling the flow of magic to light it on fire.”

I stared at the candles.

I stared at them harder.

I tried flexing my invisible magic muscles.

Echo snorted after reading my mind.

Still nothing.

“Remember - you’ve felt me pull that magic from you before. Try to push the magic out through your very pores.”

I closed my eyes and breathed in. As I breathed out, I imagined my magic permeating my bones, my muscles and skin. It felt like a million needles piercing through my skin, and it really did feel like it.

I winced.

“That’s it, that’s the flow of the magic you want. Now just do it at a less intensity and remember to light the candle.”

I did as he said. I imagined a little ball of mana seeping through my skin and appearing at my fingers.

I pinched the tip of the wick.

With anticipation, fear and the longing of eighteen years, I gave my mana the very first command.

Set alight!

With a spark, a gentle glow emanated from the string, and a warm yellow flame grew to the size of my thumb.

“Congratulations, Ember Everett - you just did your first magic spell- Uh aren’t you going to move your hand?”

The pain finally registered and I yelped as I shook my hand, knocking the candles back into the pond.

Fin shook in laughter and I sighed.

Author's Note

So this is my first decent draft of this chapter, so may change it if needed.
I made the end of the chapter humorous but I wasn't sure if I should have ended it on the line where Echo says "Congratulations!" and not have Ember burn her finger to be more impactful and emotional, rather than just ruin it with the humour.

Also could I have feedback on the flow of conversation and if the backstory detail I've added is appropriate? Thanks.

Edit: LOL WHOOPS I FORGOT TO PUT THE ACTUAL CHAPTER IN!