Dragon's Dawn: First Light (Book 1)

Chapter 7: To Athens At Last Part III; Dreams & Designs, The Journey Forward!

Chapter Seven: Athens, At Last — Part Three; Dreams and Designs — The Journey Forward!

The best conversations happen when no one is trying to have them.

They happen in the space after the significant thing — after the test, after the battle, after the revelation — when the immediate urgency has passed and the mind, relieved of its emergency duties, finally has room to think about what it actually wants to say. In that space, the real things tend to surface. Not the impressive things, not the things you'd rehearsed, but the true ones.

The courtyard, by lamplight, with the academy walls pressing warmth inward from the stored heat of the day: that was the space.

"Tomorrow's training is going to be interesting," Kazuma said.

He was doing what he did when he was thinking — turning shadows between his fingers the way other people turned coins, not as a demonstration but as a habit, the elemental equivalent of a fidget. "After today, Instructor Ling will recalibrate. The question is whether she recalibrates toward respect or toward something more organized."

"More organized is more dangerous," Brenton said. "Prejudice with a plan is more work than prejudice that improvises."

"We'll handle it," Max said. He said it with the specific confidence of someone who means it rather than someone who is saying it to make the conversation comfortable.

Mio had been listening with the attentiveness she brought to most things — a quality of focused presence that wasn't passive. "I've been thinking about the combinations," she said. "What we might be able to do together that we can't do separately." She looked at Max. "The divine aspect of your plasma — the holy element — has a resonance I can work with spiritually. I think there's an amplification possible there that neither of us could reach alone."

"The Ogre Fist combined with Colbert's earth manipulation," Aaronmar said, leaning forward. The enthusiasm in his voice was the kind that came from someone who has just understood something he'd been circling. "The impact force from the strikes running through direct terrain manipulation. The ground itself becoming the weapon rather than just the surface."

Colbert straightened. "You'd need me close to anchor the manipulation. But close in means you're the one absorbing the response force."

"That's what the Ogre Fist is for," Aaronmar said, with the simple certainty of someone describing a designed purpose. "The style is built for exactly that."

"Our shadow-walking," Natsuru said, from where she sat in the particular stillness of someone whose training made stillness the default, "would change with Gwynne's shadow manipulation underneath it. We could use her controlled shadows as architecture — fixed corridors — and move through them rather than creating the space ourselves each time."

Gwynne considered this with the serious attention she gave to tactical information. "I can hold more precise configurations than I can generate in motion. If you're generating the motion and I'm holding the structure—"

"The combination becomes more than either of us can sustain alone," Chiinah completed. The thought had arrived in both of them at the same time, via different routes.

Gilmesh's amber light was making something above his hands — not quite a display, more like thinking made visible. "Hon'oh," he said, looking at her, "if your sea element can provide the volume and I'm crystallizing its surface properties — we're not controlling water, we're controlling what water is. The ocean itself becomes a different material."

Honoo's expression moved through surprise and into the rapid calculations of someone running scenarios. "And if Hoko's Zero element is managing the thermal layer beneath—"