***
The waterball left Yao Yao's hand and drifted through the air in a crooked arc, a little faster than her earlier ones. It landed near the beast's claws and broke apart on the stone, spreading in a shallow splash. The droplets clung to the edge of its claw for a moment, a thin sheen of water sliding along the curve before dripping off.
Still harmless. Exactly what she didn't want it to be.
The beast lay stretched across the floor, one claw resting lazily in front of its face as it looked down at the splash without a hint of interest. Its wings drooped along its sides, feathers rising and falling with slow breaths.
Around it, the floor was marked with dark patches—circles of water from her earlier attempts. Some had pooled into small puddles. Others were already drying into faint outlines.
Yao Yao's shoulders sank a little. "That one was… a little bigger," she muttered.
Behind her, Kaireth watched the puddle flatten into the stone, arms loosely crossed. His face didn't say much, but she could read the judgment in the silence.
She shook out her hands. The bandages were gone, leaving the skin underneath tender when she flexed her fingers. They worked fine. Her hands weren't the issue.
The problem was her magic.
Kaireth came a little closer. "Your magic is unstable," he said. "It scatters the moment you try to form it."
"I'm trying."
"You're rushing."
"I'm not rushing."
He raised a brow. "You didn't even breathe when you cast it."
"That's not—" She stopped. It was true. She'd been holding her breath without noticing.
"But when I breathe, I lose it. And when I lose it, the ball just… falls apart."
Kaireth let out a slow breath. "You're shaping it wrong."
Yao Yao looked up at him, tired and annoyed. "What shape? It's a ball of water. How many shapes can it have?"
He didn't bother answering. He stepped closer, a small crease settling between his brows, then lowered himself beside her. His hand closed lightly around her wrist, guiding it without pushing. Her palm tilted upward under his touch.
"Here," he said. His thumb traced a small circle at the center of her palm. "Try pulling everything into this point."
She stared at her hand, frustration rising in her chest. I've been gathering it there for hours. And every attempt still fell apart the same way.
"It's not working," she muttered. "Whenever I gather it, it just turns into water. Just… water water water."
"Then stop thinking of it as water," Kaireth said. "Think of it as something you can hold in your hand."
He lifted a hand, and a thin ribbon of water rose from the floor with a soft ripple, pulled upward like a loose thread. It drifted to her open palm and settled into a shallow pool.
"Liquid takes the shape of whatever holds it," he said. "A cup. A bowl. A riverbed."
His finger brushed the surface. More water gathered from the air, thin streaks forming out of nothing and sliding toward her palm until the pool pushed upward against its own surface. When it had nowhere else to go, it slipped between her fingers and spilled to the floor.
"When nothing holds it," Kaireth continued, eyes following the liquid, "it goes wherever it can. Down a cliff like a waterfall. Across the land like a tide." He paused, letting another sheet of water spill over her knuckles. "It runs. It spreads. It follows the easiest path until something stops it."
He closed his hand gently over hers, and the stream stopped at once. The water gave a small shiver and settled, shrinking back into a shallow puddle in her palm.
He met her eyes.
"That is what you're working with. Liquid needs a container. Without a boundary, it spills the instant you summon it."
"You have to give it a shape," he said, lifting his hand again. A thin current followed the motion upward, and with a small turn of his wrist it drew together, thickening until it formed a narrow rod in the air. "Only then can you carry its weight."
He shifted his arm, and the water rod followed without bending, trailing after his hand like an extension of it.
Then he flicked his wrist toward the far wall.
The rod cut through the air in a straight, sharp line and struck the stone with enough force to send thin cracks spreading outward. Water should have burst apart on impact—yet it didn't. The rod held its form, wedged halfway into the wall, its shape bound tightly by his magic.
Yao Yao didn't register the moment he threw it. Her jaw slipped open a little, eyes drawn to the water rod lodged deep in the stone. It looked solid in a way her own magic had never managed—nothing like the splashes she'd been making.
Kaireth lowered his hand and the rod dissolved at once.
Water spilled from the cracks in a rush, running down the wall and pooling at the ground as if the shape had never existed.
"With the right shape," he said, his voice settling back into its quiet cadence, "water cuts far deeper than you'd think. Size isn't the point."
His gaze dropped to her palm. "It's the structure… and the weight. If you can't hold both at once, it'll fall apart the moment it forms."
The explanation slid into place—simple once she heard it, yet nothing she would've guessed on her own. She had been imagining power as size, something loud and overwhelming, the way tsunamis swallowed coastlines or cyclones tore through cities in her old world.
The logic wasn't foreign.
But holding that together—keeping it shaped instead of letting it collapse—was something she still couldn't picture.
"I get what you're trying to say," she said quietly, her fingers curling in. "But I don't get how to shape it."
"That's why it takes time," Kaireth said. "You need to understand how your magic rises, and how much you can draw before it slips. Once you can hold that control, only then can you shape it."
He paused, watching her carefully.
"Right now," he said, "you're not ready."
Yao Yao lowered her gaze, her jaw tightening as if she swallowed down everything she wanted to throw back at him. The stubbornness in her eyes didn't fade. It only settled in deeper.
And Kaireth saw it—the tiny change in her expression, the way her shoulders tightened the moment she heard not ready, even if she kept silent.
When she had asked for his help, he had only been curious. Curious why the bond thread had chosen her of all humans. He had stopped expecting a bond centuries ago because waiting eventually became pointless. Yet here it was, tied to a small, reckless child whose magic is as unstable as her temper.
Her magic moved strangely in her. One current shallow and flickering, another running deeper, as if its true shape hadn't surfaced yet. She had drawn on it for long enough that most humans her size would have collapsed, yet she is still going, still ready to push back at every point.
Her reserves ran deeper than she knew.
Deeper than he expected.
Without a word, Yao Yao turned away from him and stepped forward. She lifted her chin, raised both arms over her head, and set herself to try again.
She'd had enough of hearing she wasn't ready, wasn't capable, wasn't enough. She understood her body was young. Five-year-old arms, five-year-old stamina. That part made sense.
But her mind wasn't five. She couldn't accept the limits everyone kept placing on her just because her body said so. Not when she knew she could push further.
If they wouldn't trust her strength, she would make them.
Her arms wobbled the moment she lifted them, the effort heavier than she expected, but she forced them to the height she wanted.
A thin pulse stirred in her chest—the same thread of magic she had tugged again and again, worn to the point it should have snapped. Yet water still gathered between her hands, thickening into an unsteady sphere that pulled at her wrists.
Heat crawled up her throat. Pressure gathered behind her eyes until her vision blurred at the edges.
Still, she reached for more.
The sphere expanded as another thin ripple of water drifted from the floor, then another. Each puddle rose to meet her, threading upward and folding into the mass above her palms—growing because her body kept asking, even when her mind had no shape to give it.
Her breath thinned. The pull inside her chest felt different now—emptier, as if she was drawing from a well already scraped dry.
This was as large as she could force it.
It even felt like it might be her last.
Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes before she could stop them, the strain pushing up from somewhere deep, the weight above her trembling as though it could break loose at any moment.
She wasn't stopping.
Not yet.