Training became a religion with no rest days. Breathing came first — a slow inhale through the nose, held for a count, a controlled exhale through the mouth — the supposed foundation of all Flow circulation. Elias, mind cluttered with two lives' worth of competing logic, kept trying to understand his way into a state Aina insisted could only ever be felt.
"Your breath is a storm," she said, thoroughly unimpressed, watching his chest rise too fast and fall too short.
"How can Flow circulate through chaos like that? Focus. Without it, even your effort is wasted."
He gritted his teeth, let go of the analysis for once, and simply dropped.
The garden vanished entirely. He was floating above a black, star-flecked ocean, churning with whirlpools spinning in every direction as far as he could see — his own Spirit-Domain, apparently, and a genuinely alarming amount of it, stretching to a horizon that refused to resolve no matter which way he turned.
"What do you see?" Aina's voice, somehow perfectly audible from entirely outside his own soul.
"Water," he called out, his voice echoing strangely, sounding like it belonged to someone else. "And a lot of whirlpools."
"Good — that water is your Flow. How large is your domain?"
He hesitated, scanning the hazy, indistinct boundary that seemed to recede every time he tried to focus on it.
"I... can't really tell," he admitted, which was, technically, not quite a lie.
"What direction are they spinning?"
"Clockwise."
A pause. Then, with a note of real satisfaction: "Good. You must have quite a reserve, for there to be independent spinning like that. As expected of Mellou blood."
That was close, Elias thought, letting out a slow breath. No one else needs to know my Flow exceeds the horizon in every direction I can see.
High above, obscured entirely by drifting cloud, hung the ghost-shape of his Trait Sigil — vague, unreadable, a half-remembered dream he couldn't quite bring into focus no matter how hard he squinted at it.
"Calm it," Aina instructed, offering nothing further by way of actual method.
He tried brute force first, willing the water still through sheer stubbornness. It rippled directly beneath his feet and did absolutely nothing to the chaos raging everywhere else, a small, pathetic testament to the limits of pure will.
Then he remembered the actual lesson underneath the frustration. Not force. Circulation. Going with it, rather than against it. He closed his eyes within his own soul and matched the breathing Aina had drilled into him in the garden, letting go, finally, of the need to control any of it directly.
Slowly, imperceptibly at first, the whirlpools began to sink. Vibrant colors folded back beneath the surface, one by one, until the water lay still and black and vast, reflecting the dim internal light like a galaxy caught in glass. At the center, two currents wound together into the shape of infinity, resting parallel to the still-hidden Sigil far above.
He opened his eyes to find the sun had moved a full quarter of the sky, and Aina was finishing a picnic lunch on the grass without him, an empty basket at her side.
"On to your next lesson," she said, wiping her mouth with a napkin.
"Big sis!" he protested, a bewildered squawk that earned him precisely zero sympathy.