Chapter 6: A Taste of True Power

Chapter 6: A Taste of True Power

The first day of Kael’s training was a lesson in humiliation. His desire was straightforward and desperate: gain just enough control to survive whatever Thorne threw at him and find a way to get his father back. He wanted a weapon. Jonah, however, seemed intent on turning him into a rock.

"Sit," the old man commanded, pointing to a flat-topped boulder in the center of the ravine, directly under the merciless midday sun.

"What for?" Kael asked, squinting against the glare.

"The Numa is bleeding. She has a fever. To speak Her language, you must first learn to endure Her pain," Jonah said, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. "Sit. Feel the sun bake the stone. Feel the stone bake you. Become part of the fever."

Kael’s cynicism, his lifelong defense mechanism, rose up like bile. "This is insane. This is exactly the kind of stuff my father used to…" He trailed off, the words catching in his throat. It was his father's path, and it had led him to being captured and used as a key. Maybe the madness had a point.

Reluctantly, he sat. The heat was a physical assault. It radiated up from the rock, through the thick soles of his boots and the denim of his jeans. The sun hammered down from above. Sweat poured from him, drenching his shirt. His only job was to sit there and cook, while Jonah watched from the shade of his shack. Hours passed. The world shrank to the pounding in his head and the burning of his skin. This wasn't training; it was torture. The obstacle wasn't just the sun; it was the voice in his head screaming that this was pointless, that he should get in his car and drive until the tires melted.

The next lesson was even more abstract. Jonah led him to a sheer cliff face, its surface a mosaic of different rock strata. "The stones remember," the hermit said, his voice softer now. "The Numa's memory is long. Place your hand here. Quiet your mind. And listen."

Kael did as he was told, pressing his palm against the warm, coarse rock. He closed his eyes and listened. He heard the wind. He heard the skittering of a lizard. He heard his own blood pounding in his ears.

"I don't hear anything," he said, frustration creeping in.

"You are listening with your ears," Jonah chided. "And your mind is too loud. You're thinking about Thorne, about your father, about how to make the sand do your bidding. You are full of noise. You must become empty to be filled. The Numa does not shout. She rumbles."

Days bled into one another in a frustrating cycle of meditation and endurance. Kael felt nothing but heat and boredom. The power that had erupted from him at the Crow's Nests felt like a distant dream, a fluke. He was still just a mechanic with a sunburn and a growing sense of dread.

The breaking point came a week in. They stood on a patch of soft, deep sand. "You have felt Her fever, you have tried to hear Her memory," Jonah said. "Now, ask Her to move."

Kael focused on the sand at his feet. He remembered the raw panic, the surge of adrenaline from the fight. He tried to replicate it, to dredge up that feeling of being cornered. He gritted his teeth, his fists clenched, trying to force the power out, to command the desert.

"Move, damn you!" he growled through clenched teeth.

A few grains of sand trembled and then lay still.

Jonah sighed. "You are trying to command a mountain, boy. You are a single drop of water trying to bully the ocean. That is not how it works."

"It worked before!" Kael exploded, his frustration finally boiling over. He was wasting time. While he was out here getting a tan, Thorne was drilling into the heart of the world, and his father was… somewhere. "I made a damn hurricane!"

He closed his eyes, focusing all his rage and fear into one explosive effort. He pictured the vortex, the screaming wind, the power. He pushed, mentally and physically, with everything he had.

The result was a spectacular failure. The sand around him convulsed, rising a few feet into the air in a disorganized, pathetic cloud before collapsing inward with a wet thump. The chaotic energy, with nowhere to go, lashed back at him. It felt like being punched in the chest by a ghost. He was thrown backward, landing hard on his back with a mouth full of grit, the wind knocked out of him.

He lay there, gasping, defeated. The great Avatar of the Sands, taken down by a puff of dust. The taste of failure was bitter and sandy.

Jonah walked over and looked down at him, his expression unreadable. "Panic is a floodlight. It is bright, blinding, and uncontrollable. It burns out quickly. Control is a lens. It takes the same light and focuses it to a single, white-hot point. You have the light. You are trying to be a floodlight again. You must become the lens."

The old man’s words, for the first time, cut through Kael’s cynicism. Focus the light. He had been trying to recreate the chaos. What if he tried to create order instead?

Kael pushed himself to his feet, spitting sand. He walked back to the center of the patch, his shoulders slumped not in defeat, but in a strange, new calm. He ignored the vast expanse of the desert. He ignored Thorne. He ignored his father. He focused on a small patch of sand directly in front of him, no bigger than a dinner plate.

He didn't try to command it. He didn't push. Following Jonah's cryptic advice, he asked. He extended a hand, not as a master, but as a partner. He reached out with his mind, with the hum of energy inside him, and connected with the sand. Then, he introduced a new element. He recalled the searing heat of the sun on the rock, the fever of the Numa that Jonah had forced him to endure. He took that memory of heat and, through the lens of his focus, poured it into that single patch of sand.

At first, nothing happened. Then, the air above the sand began to shimmer. A faint, orange glow appeared in the center of the circle, like a hidden ember being fanned to life. The hum in his head grew stronger, a clear, resonant tone. The sand began to liquefy, not from any visible flame, but from a pure, internal heat. It swirled like molten honey, the orange glow brightening to a brilliant, blinding white.

Kael grunted with the effort, sweat beading on his forehead. He wasn't just moving sand; he was changing its very nature. He raised his hand, and with it, he pulled the molten glass up from the ground. It rose in a shimmering, unstable sheet, dripping liquid light. He narrowed his focus, pushing more energy, willing it to cool, to solidify.

With a final, crystalline ping that echoed through the ravine, the process was complete.

Before him stood a solid wall of clear, rippling glass, about three feet high and two feet wide. It caught the desert sun and fractured it into a hundred tiny rainbows. It was beautiful. It was impossible. And he had made it.

Kael stared at his creation, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He had done it. He had taken the raw chaos within him and forged it into something solid, something real. It was a taste of true power, not the wild panic of survival, but the deep, resonant power of creation.

He looked at Jonah, a triumphant, exhausted grin spreading across his face. The old man was not smiling. He was staring at the glass wall with a new, grave seriousness.

"You have become the lens," Jonah said, his voice low and heavy. "But you must remember, boy… a bright enough light can be seen from a very, very long way away."

---

Miles away, in the cold, sterile heart of the New Dawn facility, a technician watched a bank of monitors displaying complex geological readings. Most of the lines were stable, a gentle, rhythmic pulse.

Suddenly, a single reading spiked. An energy signature flared to life in the middle of the desert, an anomaly so powerful and so pure it dwarfed the background noise. It was a sharp, clean spike, unlike the messy, chaotic signals their drills produced.

"Sir," the technician called out, his voice tight with uncertainty. "You need to see this."

Silas Thorne walked over, his impeccably polished shoes silent on the white floor. He looked at the screen, his cold blue eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly. He recognized the frequency, the unique signature that was so similar, yet so much stronger, than the one he'd been hunting. This wasn't the father. This was something new. Something powerful.

A slow, predatory smile touched his lips. The game had just become infinitely more interesting.

"There you are," he whispered to the screen. He turned to his chief of security, the thin man with pale eyes. "Triangulate that signal. Mobilize a recovery team. I want the source found. And I want it brought to me."