Useless! He nearly spat out.
Why can’t I see it.
Maybe the system was simply teasing him with the shape of a door it had no intention of letting him open.
But why would it do that? Wasn’t the whole point of the system to make Isolde’s life better. But that thought didn’t sit right either — it hadn’t lied to him yet, hadn’t dangled anything it couldn’t deliver. He’d have to ask it. Later. Not here, not now, not with—
"You’re staring."
Isolde’s voice cut clean through the window, and he startled badly enough that the notification flickered at the edges before disappearing. He realized, with a slow drop of embarrassment, that he’d been doing exactly that — looking straight through a screen only he could see, directly at her face, for however long it had taken him to read all of it.
"Sorry." He sat up properly this time, wincing as his ribs reminded him they weren’t finished healing. "I wasn’t — it wasn’t about you. Not like that."
"Then what was it about." Not quite suspicious. Just direct, the way she was direct about everything.
He didn’t have an easy answer that didn’t involve explaining a system window she couldn’t see, standing between them like a wall made of information he wasn’t ready to hand her all at once. So he gave her the truest part of it instead, the part that didn’t need the rest to make sense.
"I just want to be strong enough to protect you," he said. "That’s all I was thinking about."
Something in her face shifted in a small way, nothing as simple as a smile, but a softening around the eyes that hadn’t been there a moment ago, like a held breath finally let partway out.
"That’s a noble thing to want," she said, quieter now. "It’s also going to get you killed if you keep going about it the way you did tonight." She studied him a moment longer, some decision settling behind her eyes. "At least let me teach you something about magic first. If you’re determined to be reckless, you may as well be reckless with proper form."
He felt something in his chest ease.
"I’d like that," he said. "Really."
***
She had him sit on the floor of the study the next morning, cross-legged on a cushion dragged from the sitting room, while she positioned her chair across from him close enough that their knees nearly touched.
"Before you touch your own core," she said, "you need to understand what mana actually feels like. Most people who awaken skip this step, because what does it for them is the lazy way — force it, use it, break something, learn by accident what you should have learned on purpose. I’d rather you not learn it that way."
"Understood." He straightened, trying not to look as unprepared as he felt.
"Close your eyes."
He did.
"Mana isn’t only inside you. It’s in the air, in the wood of this floor, in the plants. Most people walk through an ocean of it their entire lives and never once notice it’s there, the same way you don’t notice the air until someone asks you to pay attention to your own breathing. So that’s where we start. Not with your core. With the room."
"How do I feel something that isn’t inside me?"
"The same way you’d notice warmth from a fire without touching it. Stop trying to reach for it. That’s the mistake nearly everyone makes first — they grab, and mana doesn’t respond well to grabbing. Just breathe, and let your attention drift outward instead of staying locked behind your own eyes."
He tried. For a long stretch of silence, nothing happened at all except the mounting embarrassment of sitting very still and feeling nothing except his own pulse and the itch of a half-healed cut along his forearm.
"I don’t feel anything."
"You’re still grabbing." She said in a way that was not unkind, just certain. "Try the plant instead of the whole room. Smaller target. Less to get wrong."
He turned his attention, such as it was, toward the potted fern she’d had moved into the study two days prior — one of the only green things in the house that hadn’t come from the wreckage. He stopped trying to find anything and simply let his focus rest there, loose, the way you’d watch something out of the corner of your eye rather than stare it down directly.
Something changed. It was just a faint impression, warm and slow, like the fern was breathing in a rhythm too gentle to actually hear. He nearly lost it the instant he noticed it, his attention sharpening out of curiosity and the sensation slipping away like water through fingers, closing too fast.
"It’s gone."
"Good."
"That’s good?"
"You felt something and lost it because you got excited and tried to hold on. That’s normal. That’s the entire first lesson, actually — mana moves toward calm attention and away from urgency. You’ll spend more time than you’d like just learning to notice it and let it go without flinching." A pause, and when she spoke again there was something almost approving in it. "Most people take a week to feel anything at all on the first attempt. You did it in under a minute."
He opened his eyes to find her watching him with an expression he hadn’t seen from her before — not quite warmth, but something adjacent to it.
"Do it again," she said. "Same fern. Don’t chase it this time when you find it. Just let it sit there and get used to being noticed."
He closed his eyes again, and this time when the faint warm rhythm returned, he made himself hold still around it instead of reaching, and it stayed.
"Now," Isolde said, quiet, watchful, "once you can do that without losing it — and it may take you the rest of the morning — we turn that same attention inward. Your core works exactly the same way. It will not respond to force any better than that fern did. It will respond to the same patience, pointed in a different direction."
He nodded, eyes still closed, the fern’s slow warmth steady now at the edge of his focus.
"I can work with patience," he said.
"We’ll see," she said, but there was no real doubt in it. "Again."