The training courtyard behind the Oakhaven manor was usually a place of highly explosive, joyful noise. It was the designated zone where Kael and Orion routinely engaged in absolute, world-shaking mock combat, sending massive shockwaves of localized solar plasma safely into the upper atmosphere.
Today, however, the courtyard was thick with a highly unusual, heavily frustrated tension.
Orion was standing in the absolute center of the packed dirt arena. The five-year-old boy was aggressively swinging his dark, indestructible solar slag dagger. But he was not smiling, and he was not letting out his usual rumbling battle cries. His jet-black hair fell into his glowing golden eyes, and his localized heatwave was spiking with a highly chaotic, highly irritable energy. He slashed the blunt blade violently through the air, completely obliterating a harmless wooden training post with a burst of localized thermal plasma.
