The high from the day carried Projo all the way back to the tower. The three gold coins in his pouch felt heavy and real, but the true prize was the memory of fire blooming in his palm. It was his secret, his proof of power. He wasn't even tired—energy thrummed in his veins, restless and alive.
He pushed the tower door open with a grin.
Falira all but collapsed into her chair, pale and stiff, her movements sluggish with exhaustion.
"I feel like I could fight another dozen of those drakes," Projo said, pacing the small room. He flexed his fingers, staring at his hand. "That flame—it wasn't an accident. I told it to happen." He looked back at her, his excitement spilling out. "What other kinds of magic are there? Earth? Air? I can probably accomplish whatever I focus on."
His grin widened. "I bet my bath idea isn't so crazy after all!"
He held out his hand, palm up, and closed his eyes. He pictured a sphere of water floating above it. The warmth was still there in his blood, the hum of something waiting to be used. But when he opened his eyes, his palm was empty.
Falira let out a long, weary sigh. "You are not a mage, Projo. You are a forge."
She gestured weakly at her own chest. "You consumed my Mana—my 'coal'. My essence is one of control, of thought, of the potential for a hundred different intricate spells. Your nature... what you are... is a furnace of pure, primal force. It burned my potential down to its most basic, raw component: energy. Heat. Fire."
"That's just a theory," Projo said stubbornly.
"You cannot make water with fire," she replied flatly. "The flame you made was not creation—it was the afterglow of consumption. It was a receipt for the fuel you burned."
Projo looked at his palm, then back at her. "Interesting hypothesis, but it doesn't feel that way to me." Then an idea occurred.
"Care to bet on it?" He cocked an eyebrow and strode over to her, holding a hand out for her to shake. "If I can conjure a ball of water, you let me heal that wound. If I don't, I guess your hypothesis is right. Either way, you win and you get valuable data."
Falira stared at his outstretched hand.
The offer was a perfectly constructed trap for her mind. The potential for a groundbreaking data point was an almost irresistible lure.
She leaned back in her chair, and a slow, condescending smile touched her lips. "A bet? You would wager my physical well-being against a parlor trick?"
She ignored his outstretched hand. "Your entire premise is flawed, Projo. You are a forge without coal. The 'charge' you feel is residual heat, not unspent fuel. You consumed the Mana I gave you to manifest that flame. There is nothing left to transmute into fire, let alone its elemental opposite."
She looked at his still-outstretched hand. "You cannot make a wager when you have no stakes to offer. You have no power to wield until you've refueled."
Her words stung, but not as an insult. As a challenge. Bram had challenged him the same way his entire life. It wasn't because the old blacksmith thought Projo couldn't do something; it was his gruff, infuriating way of pushing him to do more than he thought he could.
A small, spiteful grin touched Projo's lips.
He kept his hand outstretched, but turned it palm-down, hovering it over her head. He angled his fingertips inward, as if cupping something unseen, and he focused. He took her condescending certainty, her absolute dismissal of him, and used it as a whetstone to sharpen his will. He focused on the thrumming, residual charge in his veins, not as heat, but as pure, raw potential.
The air above Falira grew heavy and cold, a sudden, unnatural drop in temperature. Moisture condensed, forming a shimmering, unstable sphere of liquid that wobbled in the space just below his hand.
SPLOOSH.
Half a dozen pints of ice-cold water drenched Falira from head to toe. She shot to her feet with a yelp, knocking her chair over, blue hair plastered to her face and robes dripping.
Projo didn't gloat. He just walked past her, dropped into the chair opposite her wet one, and propped his boots on the table. He flipped open the Compendium of Monstrous Anatomy as if nothing had happened.
"Brat," he muttered.
The tower was quiet but for the soft bubble of the cauldron and the slow drip… drip… drip of water from Falira's hair. Projo kept his eyes on the Compendium, a faint smirk tugging at his mouth. Her glare pressed against him like heat from a forge. He turned a page with a loud rustle.
"Get your filthy boots off my table." Her voice was a low, shivering wire of pure rage—or maybe it was from the cold.
Projo glanced up, swung his legs off the table, planted his boots on the floor with exaggerated care, and went back to reading.
She shoved her soaked hair back from her face, her eyes never leaving him. "The transmutation... it shouldn't have been possible. The residual energy was attuned to pyromancy. To force a hydrokinetic manifestation—" Her voice cracked with disbelief. "The principles are incongruous."
"Maybe your principles are wrong," Projo said quietly, not looking up from his book.
He heard her take a sharp, ragged breath. "A wager was made. The parameters were met."
Projo finally closed the Compendium and looked at her. She wore a hard, angry look of resignation. She had lost—and the part of her that lived for data couldn't let the experiment die unfinished.
"The wound," she said, gesturing to her side. "The terms of your... successful demonstration... must be upheld."
She turned her back, walking stiffly toward the hearth. She began to unlace the side of her tunic, her movements jerky and angry. It wasn't an invitation. She was presenting the problem and stripping all emotion from the act. Just another entry in her notes.
Projo closed his book and walked over to her, stopping a few paces back. He watched as she clinically unwrapped the bandage, then stood there waiting.
Finally, he just said, "No."
She looked like he had physically slapped her.
Falira stood frozen, tunic half-unlaced, the red line of her wound exposed. In a heartbeat her expression swung from fury to disbelief and back again. Her fists clenched white around the undone ties.
"No?!" she hissed. "What do you mean, 'no'? Explain yourself!"
Projo shook his head, a sad little smile on his lips. "Bossy and stubborn." He folded his arms. "Two glaring issues here, Falira. One: you didn't shake on the bet. So why should I honor it?"
"That is a legalistic loophole! A petty, semantic—"
"And two." His voice cut across hers. "You're still treating this like an equation. Stripping away anything human, anything real. Even after you've seen that approach fail."
His eyes lingered on the wound, not as a specimen or a scholar, but as a smith to flawed steel.
"So no," he finished, steady and absolute. "I will not heal you like some menial task, some mindless worker simply following directions with no passion or respect for the nature of his craft."
The air seemed to crackle. She was trapped by her own logic, by his refusal to be a variable, by the truth that her "incomplete equation" demanded something she was unwilling to provide. She stood there shivering, furious, her path to healing walled off by her own pride.
"You… you demand a variable that cannot be quantified!" she spat, her voice quivering. "Passion? Respect? These are not arcane principles! They are chaotic, sentimental abstractions! I am trying to conduct a controlled experiment to save my life, and you are demanding... poetry!"
Projo just watched her, arms still crossed, letting her desperate defense hang in the air and die. He didn't see a need to keep arguing.
The fight drained out of her. Her fury guttered like a damp flame, leaving behind only cold, miserable embers. With a choked, frustrated sound, she turned away from him, fumbling her tunic closed and hiding the wound. It was a defiant, self-destructive choice: enduring the pain rather than concede to the terms of his magic.
Projo exhaled slowly.
He recognized the stubbornness—recognized the self-isolation.
He walked back to the table and gathered their empty bowls, then tossed the greasy paper from the chicken they had shared two nights ago into the fire.
"I'll go into town in the morning," he said quietly. "Get some more food. And dry firewood."
He didn't wait for a response. He returned to his bedroll and his book, leaving her shivering by the fire, a scholar imprisoned by her own walls.
Falira sat in her high-backed chair and didn't move for a while, just staring into the flames. She didn't speak. She didn't read. She just sat there, wet and wounded, a slight, uncontrollable tremor in her shoulders.
The silence that filled the tower was no longer angry. It was the hollow, aching quiet of a truce where one side had simply refused to fight anymore, leaving the other alone on a battlefield of their own making.
The silence stretched on for what felt like forever. Sleep didn't take him, and she didn't move.
Finally, Projo set his book aside and looked at her.
"I'm sorry," he said softly. "Do you want me to give you the night alone? I can get a room at the inn."
Her shoulders stiffened. She didn't turn right away, just kept staring into the fire. When she finally breathed out, it was shaky—like a wall cracking.
"Don't," she whispered. "Don't be… illogical."
She finally turned her head to look at him. Her face was pale and streaked with moisture from the drenched hair plastered to her cheeks. The fury was gone, replaced by exhaustion and fatigue.
"A room would be an unnecessary expenditure of funds," she said, seizing on pragmatism like a lifeline. Her gaze dropped, then rose again, the mask of logic thin and fragile now. "And it would leave a gap in the observational data. Your nocturnal... metabolic and energetic states... are a crucial part of the baseline we are attempting to establish."
It was the most absurd, convoluted, and purely Falira way of saying "don't go."
She turned back to the fire. "The subject," she murmured, "is to remain in the laboratory."
Projo watched her, a small knot tightening in his chest. Teasing her again felt wrong. Cruel. It would only drive her higher behind the walls.
He looked down at his hands, then back at her shivering form. He could still feel the thrum of energy in his veins, a warm, residual power left over from their desperate exchange on the cliff. The fire and water had burned away most of it, but there was still something left.
An idea took root, quiet and uncertain.
He rose carefully, moving slow so as not to startle her. Crossing the stone floor, he stopped a few feet from her chair. She didn't look up, but he saw her shoulders tense.
Projo lifted his hand, palm open in the space between them. He closed his eyes and focused, willing the energy to obey him the same way he had turned it into water. He thought of the gentle, radiant heat of a freshly forged sword cooling on the anvil. A comforting heat—not a burning one.
Falira flinched, head snapping up, braced for some demand or altercation. Then her eyes widened, and confusion overtook alarm.
The air shifted as a gentle, invisible warmth enveloped her. A faint haze rose from her robes as damp patches lightened. The droplets on her hair and spectacles hissed away, and the last remnants of the damp chill that clung to her were pushed away.
She stopped shivering.
Filara stared, her mouth slightly agape, looking from his hand to her rapidly drying clothes. It wasn't a crude blast of power—it was careful. Gentle. A spell of comfort. Something she would probably call illogical and inefficient if she wasn't currently experiencing it herself.
When the last of the dampness was gone, Projo felt the charge ebb from his veins, leaving only a bone-deep weariness. He lowered his hand.
Falira said nothing—her face gave nothing away. The walls were still standing, but he'd passed a message through them without ever touching the stone. He had answered her fury and pain not with logic or force, but with a quiet act of care.
Projo flexed his fingers and let out a short, awkward laugh. "Whoops. Tapped out again." The clumsy admission was a way to cut through the silence before it crushed him. He didn't wait for her to classify it. He just turned and walked back to his corner.
He didn't look at her again.
But he felt her stillness—there was no sharp intake of breath, no rustle of pages, no scathing, logical dismissal.
Only silence.
He dropped onto his bedroll, dragging the thin blanket over himself. The tower was quiet, and the last of the stolen energy had been drained out of him. In its place, lay a weary, physical ache—and he found himself reflecting on how much had happened in just a handful of days.
The bandits. Mira. Gideon. Falira. The goblins, drakes, blood, and desperate kiss on the cliff. As his mind landed on the raw vulnerability in Falira's eyes, he felt exhaustion take him.
Projo slipped into sleep like a stone dropped into deep water.