Thaila
The air crackled lively around me. Not with danger, not with fear or threat, but with anticipation. I set out for the direlands in order to find answers to my questions. In order to seek help and learn to use my powers and finally the time has come.
When Agalaya brought me to the training grounds I could feel the fire in my bones. It was in everything here. It lived in the glowing stones beneath my feet, which flickered with soft red light and heat. It whispered in the wind, warm and dry, coiling around me like a living thing. And it pulsed in my blood, more potent now than ever before.
I stood at the center of a charred, circular arena at the heart of the Fire Wolves' territory. Unlike the solemn stone stillness of the Earth Wolves, this place was alive. I could hear ancient volcanoes erupting in the distance, and the scent of ash mixed with heat wrapped around my skin like a smoke-silk
The Fire Wolves were watching my every step. Their eyes gleamed gold and orange, smoldering coals and flame beneath their fur. Some stood as their human form, cloaked in red and bronze leather, beautiful and colorful. Others crouched in their wolf shapes, fire trailing behind their tails like comets. But none of them spoke. The silence was heavy with meaning.
Today, I would either burn brighter or be consumed entirely.
A figure stepped from the shadows, a towering presence with skin the color of cooled lava and hair like molten gold. He wore no shirt, only a cloak of fire and a chest branded with ancient runes. His eyes... were flames, literal flames, dancing in the place of pupils.
"You are the flame that would not die," he said, voice like a roaring furnace. "I am Kaelen. Once, I burned a kingdom to ash. Now, I teach fire not to destroy."
I gulped, my heart hammering against my chest. "I thought my gift was meant to destroy, given to me for revenge."
"No," he said, stepping closer. "Fire transforms. Fire tests. Fire reveals. And fire soothe."
I didn't understand that, not yet but I would. Soon. The training began with silence. No flashy blasts. No throwing flames from my hands or setting trees ablaze. Kaelen simply sat cross-legged on top a basalt boulder and beckoned me to join him.
"Close your eyes," he commanded. "Find the fire inside you. But do not command it. Listen close and let it speak."
I tried. Gods knows I tried.
At first, I could only feel the usual burning that surge in my chest. The one that flared when I was angry, when I remembered Greenwood Park, the sufferings and curses, the fire, and my father's cold eyes. But every time I reached for that flame in my heart, Kaelen scolded me.
"You are not here to rage. Fire is not rage."
"It saved me," I snapped. "My gift saved me when no one else did! when I was abandoned by my entire pack."
His voice cracked like lightning through a tree trunk. "And now it will destroy you, if you don't learn the difference."
So I tried again. Day after day, we sat. Sometimes for hours. No flames. No movement. Just breath.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
On the fifth day, I sat on that burning rock for another three days before I finally heard it.
It was a whisper, barely audible beneath my thoughts. It wasn't screaming. It wasn't pleading. It was warm, steady. It sounded much like... my mother's voice, humming a lullaby through the veil in my crib when I was just a baby
I opened my eyes, trying to catch my breath.
Kaelen smiled "You found it."
I thought it was over but the real training had just begun.
He made me walk barefoot across hot coals. Not to toughen my feet he said, but to feel their heat, to understand their burn. To understand pain. I was made to hold my hand over an open flame until sweat poured down my temples, learning how close I could come without letting fear take over. Kaelen didn't speak much after that first breakthrough, he only corrected my stance or flicked sparks at me when I got too confident.
"The flame does not obey arrogance," he said once. "Only purpose."
Then came the sparring matches. These were the toughest. It wasn't the way I expected it. No weapons, bruises or torn skin.
One opponent, a red-haired girl named Ivara, smiled sweetly before hurling a whip of flame at my face. I blocked it, barely, but she wasn't done. She taunted me as we circled the arena, her words aimed like arrows at my scars.
"You're the weak one, aren't you? The cursed omega that survived by luck."
"No," I growled. "I'm not weak."
then I lunged.
My fire came with me. An uncontrolled wave of heat. Ivara shrieked as it blasted her and threw her backward. The arena exploded in light and flames shot up the arena walls, the heat was so fierce that it cracked the ground beneath us.
When the smoke cleared, Kaelen was standing over me.
"I told you," he said coldly, helping Ivara to her feet. "Fire reveals. Allow it to reveal the real you Thalia. You are not the cage they put you in."
I collapsed to my knees, shaking. I'd nearly killed her. My heart hammered, and my hands smoked.
"I didn't mean to... I didn't want to..."
He didn't scold me. Instead, he knelt beside me and held up his palm. A small, flickering flame appeared.
It danced gently, bright, controlled but not wild.
"This is not rage," he whispered. "This is intention."
He touched my forehead, and in an instant, I stood in a different place.
I was in a vast field, the sky was burning red and around me were fire wolves, thousands of them, howling and growling. In the center stood a girl, no older than sixteen. She looked like me, but her eyes were like golden fire, and her hair flowed like smoke. She raised her hands to the sky and a kingdom burned to the ground. Ita towers and walls and people went up in flames.
Then the vision changed.
A scroll appeared, floating before me, it opened in midair and a single prophecy was blazing across it:
"The flame that was meant to die shall become the light the world cannot dim."
And then I was back in the arena, Kaelen standing over me, sweat glistening on his brow.
"What... what was that?" I asked through a dry throat.
"The fire reveals the future, too," he said simply. "You were meant to die, Thalia. But you survived. Now you must choose what survival means."
After that, I stopped fearing the fire inside me. I began listening to it. When I moved, I could feel it hum in my bones where it was waiting, alive. I didn't see it as just a weapon anymore. I began to feel its potential to warm, to create, to illuminate.
Kaelen taught me how to call flame with breath alone, how to guide it with a whisper. I lit candles with a single exhale and boiled water without touching it. I learned how to produce different colors of fire and form it into shapes. It worked just like magic, only that it was fire.
Then came the final test.
He led me to a garden where every plant was dry, dead. A single tree stood at its center, almost all it's leaves were fallen.
"Light one leaf," he said. "Only one. Not the branch, not the tree. Just one leaf."
It was the hardest thing I'd ever done but all I had to do was concentrate. Really concentrate.
I raised my hand and summoned the flame. The urge hit me. The urge to let it fly, to burn everything like I once did in the woods when I escaped Greenwood.
But I didn't.
Instead, I focused. I pictured the leaf. Its veins. Its texture and breathed slowly.
A single leaf lit up. A tiny flame curled at the tip of the leaf. and glowed like a firefly, delicate and precise.
When I turned back to Kaelen, he nodded.
"You have mastered the first law of fire," he said. "Control."
He reached into his cloak and withdrew a pendant. A smooth black stone, veined red and shaped like a flame of fire. He placed it on my neck and it completed the piece of pendant on my mother's ancient heirloom. When it touched my chest, it glowed so brightly and burnt my chest badly creating a beautiful fire tattoo on my chest.
"You have earned the mark. Your flame is no longer borrowed, It is yours," he said.
That night, I sat by the lava stream, pendant warm against my chest. I looked into the glowing river, saw my reflection: older, steadier, whole.
Agalaya joined me.
"You've done well fiamma. Your mother would be proud of you."
I smiled. She brought with her a warmth that calmed my nerves. I wasn't the girl who begged for scraps in Greenwood. I wasn't the caged wolf who wept in silence.
"Have I completed my training?" I asked, eager to begin the search to find my path.
"you wish to find your path," she said as if she read my mind.
"you have only just begun, daughter of flame."
"I am ready" I whispered. It was the fire in me burning that spoke. Not me.