Dinner was a masterclass in family dysfunction that Elias, privately, found more entertaining than anything he'd witnessed in either of his lives combined.
Ortis, head of House Mellou by his own casual admission, had apparently spent the last several years almost losing half a family estate at a rigged elemental duel in the Free Cities and then chasing a rumored Flow-absorbing rock through the northern mountains for months, only to discover it was ordinary granite.
"Father was busy gambling in the Free Cities of Veridian, Aunt Elara," Aina reported, flat and utterly merciless, not looking up from her plate.
"He nearly lost our family estate on a rigged Elemental duel. Then he spent several months chasing a rumored Flow-absorbing rock in the northern mountains. It turned out to be granite. Among other...time-consuming activities."
"Aina!" Ortis whined, wounded, a genuinely aggrieved pout crossing his face, and Elias decided on the spot that he liked her considerably more than he had five minutes earlier.
Lady Elara and Ortis shared the same pale-gold hair and sharp green eyes — an unmistakable Mellou signature, visual proof of the bloodline even across the dinner table's obvious tension. Elias had inherited a stranger mix entirely: his mother's platinum blond streaked crimson at the tips from Lord Alaric's own fiery mane, and eyes that shifted between amber and emerald depending on the light, like a living argument between two great houses that had somehow ended in marriage instead of a duel.
"Your uncle is a formidable Flow user, Elias," Lady Elara said, apparently choosing to move past the granite incident entirely, "and he'll be a wonderful teacher."
"Actually," Ortis said, apropos of nothing, setting down his fork, "I won't be his tutor. Didn't show the kind of talent a person with Mellou blood ought to, if I'm honest. Nephew or not. Aina will train him a few days while we're here, and then we'll be off."
Elias's polite mask cracked for exactly one full second before he caught it.
'Is this man actually looking down on me right now.'
"That wasn't a very nice thing to say," Lady Elara said sharply — misreading, entirely, the particular flavor of murder currently simmering behind her son's expression.
Later, cornered over dessert while Lady Elara stepped out to check on something, Ortis elaborated with the easy air of a man defending an entirely reasonable position.
"Look, Elara, it's not that I don't want to teach the boy. I'm head of House Mellou. Arcane libraries, ley lines, delicate political negotiations — I have responsibilities, unlike some people."
A pointed look at Elias. "Besides — for a prodigy, he's a bit dull. Big explosion, yes, very flashy. But he couldn't even sense Aina's Flow, and she's practically glowing with it. Must be the Dukker blood, dulling his senses."
"Don't you dare speak ill of Alaric," Lady Elara snapped, eyes flashing dangerously as she swept back in at exactly the wrong moment, "or his House! My husband is Alaric the Still for a reason — a master of Flow far beyond your own flashy little displays!"
Elias watched a genuine, decades-old sibling feud detonate over roast pheasant with something close to academic fascination.
'So how exactly did my parents end up married,' he wondered. 'Was it arranged? A political move? No — they actually love each other, somehow, despite both their families apparently being unhinged. Even I can tell that much.'
Ortis backed off with both hands raised in mock surrender.
"Merely objective, dear sister. No offense intended." He stood, stretching. "We'll stay a few days. I'll put him through some basic training. See if he's worth my precious, busy time."
Aina followed him out of the dining hall, paused deliberately in the doorway, and shot Elias a small, insufferable smirk before vanishing after her father.
Elias felt a vein pulse visibly in his temple. 'That smug little—'
His mother pulled him into a tight hug, murmuring half-apologies on her brother's behalf, something about him just being tired from travel. Elias let her, forced a wobbly, convincing smile, and excused himself to "rest" — walking away with his spine perfectly straight and his expression gone cold and calculating the instant he was out of sight down the hall. Servants he passed actively stepped out of his path without quite knowing why.
He was already planning.
A week passed with no sign of the promised "testing." Elias, cross-legged on the back lawn with a well-worn Flow textbook, had moved on to experimenting on his own in the meantime — trying to crystallize the vapor of Flow that hung above his infinite sea, the way certain rare gems supposedly formed over centuries of accumulated residual energy.
A shadow fell over him, cool and sudden. Aina, predictably unimpressed, snatched the book straight out of his lap without so much as a warning.
"What are you reading?" She flipped through it with detached curiosity — and then stopped, frowning, at a page dense with his own margin notes: English words and improvised mathematical Flow-notation, utterly foreign to this world, scrawled between lines of advanced theory. Her lip curled.
"What is this gibberish? Are you intentionally trying to soil this book, you imbecile?" She threw it back at him with a grunt of disdain.
"Don't you dare ruin valuable knowledge with your childish scribbles."
Elias rose slowly to his feet, a cold anger building somewhere beneath his ribs.
"What do you want, Aina."
She shoved him — not hard enough to knock him over, but hard enough to insult him properly.
"Respect your elders, boy. You're not that special."
Blue light crackled at her fingertips, the same current that had flattened him a week ago without warning. "Among my various abilities, I can control electromagnetism. A very difficult Trait for a Flow user to master, even for a Saint. But I am simply that much better." Her eyes held a clear, silent dare.
"Why do you feel the need to tell me this?" Elias asked, tilting his head, genuinely baffled by her apparent need for validation.
"Because you have Mellou blood," she said, as if that explained absolutely everything.
"I won't let you disgrace the House. Awakening early means nothing. It's as normal as breathing for us. It's about true power. True control."
Something in Elias — old, tired, Ethan-shaped — surfaced fast and hard as she kept talking. He remembered fists in a school hallway. He remembered Liv looking away, telling herself it was kinder not to get involved. He remembered dying because the world was unfair, and meeting a god who'd confirmed exactly that, gleefully, to his face, and then sent him here anyway.
But now he had Flow. Now, for the first time in two lives, he had something like leverage.
"Oi," he said, cutting cleanly through her tirade. A single, multicolored spark of Flow popped in the air between them, and his eyes went swirling amber and emerald.
"Who do you think you're looking down on?"
From the dining hall window, Ortis — mid-bite of toast, mid-lie to his sister about his true intentions for the week — watched the explosion of light rip skyward over the training field and grinned like a man who'd just found a very large sum of money in an old coat pocket.
"Well," he said, setting the toast down entirely. "Aint that something."