By the beginning of summer, Caelan had developed a problem.
He could sense magic more reliably than he had a year earlier, but his control had improved far less than he wanted.
The distinction became painfully obvious during a lesson with his mother.
A small crystal rested on the table between them. Its purpose was simple: when supplied with a controlled amount of magical energy, it produced a steady light.
Caelan had activated it successfully several times that week.
Today, it refused to cooperate.
"Don't force it," Elara reminded him.
"I'm not."
"You are holding your breath."
Caelan exhaled.
He tried again, guiding the energy toward the crystal. For a moment, its surface brightened.
Then the light flickered and vanished.
He pulled his hands away.
"Why does it keep doing that?"
"That is what we're trying to determine."
"Could my control be getting worse?"
"Could it?"
He frowned at her.
Elara folded her hands on the table. "You succeeded four times yesterday and failed twice. Today, you've succeeded once and failed five times. What conclusion can you draw from that?"
"That my results are inconsistent."
"Correct. Can you conclude that your control is getting worse?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't know whether the conditions were the same."
His mother smiled. "Good. Now let's find out."
They repeated the exercise, changing only one factor at a time. Elara asked him to describe his breathing, concentration, and the sensation of directing energy toward the crystal.
Eventually, they noticed a pattern.
Whenever Caelan tried to increase the flow of energy after the crystal began glowing, his control deteriorated. He was so focused on producing a visible result that he kept pushing beyond the amount he could reliably manage.
The discovery was not particularly impressive.
It did, however, explain some of his failures.
"Your problem isn't necessarily that you lack the ability," Elara said. "You keep trying to improve the result before you've stabilized the process."
Caelan looked at the crystal.
"So I should use less energy?"
"You should first learn to produce a consistent result. Then you can work on increasing it."
For the remainder of the lesson, he focused on maintaining the faintest possible glow.
It was dull work. He wanted to see a bright light, something that would prove he was making progress.
Instead, his mother made him repeat the same exercise until he could maintain the glow for several seconds without losing control.
When the lesson ended, he had not achieved anything spectacular.
But he had achieved something he could reproduce.
That evening, he recorded the result in his notebook.
Improvement does not always mean producing a stronger effect. Sometimes it means producing the same effect reliably.
He underlined the sentence.
Then he went outside, where Tomas was waiting to challenge him to a race.
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Tomas had become faster over the past year.
Unfortunately, he had also become more confident about his abilities.
"I'll beat you this time," he announced.
Caelan looked at the stretch of road between the old oak tree and the stone trough.
"You said that last time."
"And I'll prove it this time."
Mira sat beneath the oak, carving a small wooden bird.
"Can we start before the sun goes down?"
They lined up.
Mira gave the signal.
Tomas shot forward, gaining an immediate lead. Caelan followed, keeping his pace steady rather than trying to match Tomas's opening burst.
Halfway through the race, Tomas began to slow.
Caelan passed him just before the stone trough.
Tomas arrived several seconds later, breathing heavily.
"You cheated."
"How?"
"You started running slowly on purpose."
"That's not cheating."
"You knew I'd run faster at the beginning!"
"I suspected you might."
Mira laughed.
Tomas sat on the ground, muttering about unfair advantages.
Caelan offered him a hand.
"You're faster than you used to be," he said. "You just used too much energy at the start."
Tomas stared at him.
"Are you comparing running to magic again?"
"Not deliberately."
"Well, stop doing it."
Caelan laughed and sat beside him.
For once, Tomas did not immediately argue.
They remained beneath the tree until the afternoon began to cool, talking about the upcoming village festival and whether Mira would enter the carving competition.
For Caelan, the ordinary conversation was a welcome change from lessons and experiments.
He was beginning to understand that improvement required more than discipline. It also required knowing when to stop thinking about a problem.
Three days later, his father returned from a surveying assignment with an unfamiliar object wrapped in cloth.
It was a small metal disc, no larger than Caelan's palm. Several fine grooves crossed its surface, converging around a dark central stone.
"What's that?" Caelan asked.
"An instrument recovered from a damaged survey station," Garrick replied. "I'm returning it to its owner after I finish examining the casing."
"Does it work?"
"Not properly."
Garrick placed the disc on his worktable and unwrapped the remaining cloth.
Unlike the instruments Caelan had seen before, this one had no visible needle, display, or obvious mechanism. Its grooves were unusually precise, and the dark stone seemed to absorb more light than it reflected.
"May I look at it?"
"From this side of the table."
Caelan approached.
He sensed magic within the object, but the sensation was faint and difficult to distinguish from the ambient magical field around it.
He concentrated.
For a moment, he thought he detected a repeating pattern, something that seemed to pulse and then disappear beneath the object's outer structure.
He tried to focus on it.
The sensation vanished.
"Did you feel something?" Garrick asked.
"Maybe."
"Describe it."
Caelan struggled to find the right words.
"It felt like the magic was repeating itself. But I couldn't follow it."
Garrick examined the disc without touching it.
"That may be part of its original function. The owner believes it was used to measure fluctuations in a magical field, though we haven't confirmed that."
"Why hasn't it been repaired?"
"Because we don't know enough about its construction."
Caelan studied the grooves.
"Could the pattern be damaged?"
"Possibly."
"Or could it be working differently from what you expect?"
Garrick glanced at him.
"Also possible."
Caelan smiled faintly. His father had taught him that lesson well enough.
He did not attempt to touch the object or interfere with its magic. Instead, he observed it from several angles, noting the arrangement of the grooves and the condition of the central stone.
He found no obvious explanation.
After several minutes, Garrick covered the disc again.
"That's enough for today."
"Will you keep it?"
"Only until I finish the inspection. Then it goes back to its owner."
Caelan returned to his notebook.
He recorded the object's appearance and the unusual sensation he had experienced, making it clear that he had not confirmed what caused it.
He was learning to be patient with uncertainty.
He was also learning that patience did not make curiosity any less persistent.
That night, before going to bed, he thought about the disc again.
He wondered whether his difficulty sensing its pattern came from his limited training, the object's damaged condition, or something about the way his own magic interacted with it.
He had no answer.
But unlike the frustrating exercises with his training crystal, this uncertainty did not feel like failure.
It felt like a question worth keeping.
And Caelan Veyr had become rather good at keeping questions.