Chapter 2 — That Which Refuses to Be Controlled
Three weeks had passed since the night Aaron saw the white bracelet pulsing against his nephew's wrist, and in that time, the house with the blue shutters had gradually stopped looking like a home and started looking like a training camp.
Zayn had noticed it on the third day, when Aaron pushed the old living room table against the wall and rolled up the rug to clear the space. He'd noticed it even more on the seventh day, when a man he'd never seen before — tall, silent, a tattoo of a circle broken into seven fragments on his shoulder — came and sat at their table for breakfast without introducing himself, drank a coffee, and left without a word after watching Zayn eat his cereal like he was evaluating a lab animal.
"Who was that?" Zayn had asked.
"Someone from the UPA," Aaron replied, not looking up from his own cup.
"The UPA?"
"Union of Paladin Alliances. You'll be hearing a lot about it now."
That was all he got that day, and the following days brought little more explanation — only exercises. Breathe. Feel. Listen to the silence beneath your skin. Aaron kept repeating that Boréalis wasn't a weapon you brandished, but a door you learned, very slowly, to crack open without tearing it off its hinges. Zayn, who had never been patient a day in his life, found these abstract lessons unbearable — until that morning, the twenty-first day, when Aaron woke him before dawn and said only:
"Today, we leave the house."
---
The forest behind the Al-Kage property had never seemed particularly mysterious to Zayn — a tangle of oaks and pines he'd crossed hundreds of times on his bike, chasing stray cats or fleeing, when he was younger, the wrath of a neighbor whose gate he'd once repainted. But that morning, following Aaron down a path he'd never noticed, winding between trees that grew older and more silent the deeper they went, Zayn understood that this forest hid something twelve years of biking and running had never revealed.
They emerged into a perfectly round clearing, as if someone had cut it out of the surrounding vegetation with a stamp. The grass there was strangely tall and an almost phosphorescent green, and at the center, planted in the earth like markers, stood seven dark wooden stakes connected by a woven cord.
"This is where your training truly begins," Aaron said.
"Are we gardening?"
Aaron ignored the sarcasm. He walked to the center of the circle, crouched down, and pressed his palm flat against the earth. A shiver instantly ran through the surrounding grass, like a wave spreading out from his hand toward the edges of the clearing.
"Boréalis isn't just an artifact, Zayn," he said, standing back up. "It's a key. And what it opens are doors to Neverland — the world the Primals come from, creatures as old as the celestials themselves, bound to those who bear an artifact like yours. Some bearers spend their entire lives without ever managing to summon a single one. Others summon one on their very first attempt, and regret it immediately."
A faint hum sounded, and a thin holographic interface suddenly burst from the bracelet, projecting a bluish silhouette of light into the air — a translucent young woman with sharp, serene features.
"Synchronization confirmed," said the hologram's soft voice. "Hello, Zayn. My name is Aurora. I'm going to help you choose your Primal."
"An AI... in my bracelet?" Zayn breathed, stunned.
"Boréalis gives you what you need so you don't choose blind," Aaron explained. "Listen to her."
A list of silhouettes began scrolling before Zayn's eyes, each with a name and a brief description. Aurora stopped on one of them.
"Initial recommendation: Citrolle. Lower-tier Primal, suited to a first bond. Risk level: moderate."
"'Moderate,'" Zayn repeated, not exactly reassured.
"Great," he said, his throat suddenly dry. "And what category am I going to fall into?"
"We're going to find out together," Aaron replied, without smiling. "Give me your arm."
Zayn held out his wrist, the one where Boréalis rested, its green core pulsing faster than usual, as if it too sensed that something was about to change. Aaron placed two fingers on the bracelet, closed his eyes, and murmured words in a language Zayn didn't recognize — rough, ancient, almost painful to hear.
The green core suddenly blazed with light so intense Zayn had to shut his eyes.
"Go ahead," Aaron said, his voice suddenly more distant. "Feel it. Don't fight it. Let it come to you."
Zayn felt something shift beneath his skin — not pain, but pressure, as if an invisible hand were gently pressing against the inside of his chest, searching for a way out. He breathed in, the way Aaron had taught him for three weeks, and for the first time, instead of resisting that pressure, he let it rise.
The air in front of him split open.
It wasn't a creature that emerged from it — it was Zayn himself who was pulled inside.
He felt his body warp from within, his limbs stretching, his skeleton cracking and rearranging itself into an architecture that was no longer his own. His skin hardened, turned woody, split into fissures that leaked a bluish glow. His head seemed to swell, hollow out, and get forcibly carved into a frozen grin, and when he opened his eyes again, it was to see the world through two enormous sockets of blue flame, more than two meters off the ground.
"What IS this thing?!" he screamed, and his own voice came back to him, deep, cavernous, echoing from a throat that was no longer his.
He looked down — or rather, at what was left of his eyes — and discovered his own hands had become gnarled black roots, tipped with claws that glowed electric blue. He let out a cry of pure horror, a sound with nothing human left in it, mixed with a distorted child's laugh he hadn't meant to make.
"Zayn?!" Aaron cried, stumbling back several steps, his mouth open in shock. "Is... is that you in there?"
"I DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE IT COULD BE!" Zayn roared, his warped voice shaking the leaves around them. "AARON, WHAT'S HAPPENING TO ME?!"
"Citrolle," Aaron breathed, just as disoriented, taking an involuntary step back. "Your Primal. You... you weren't supposed to become him, Zayn, you were supposed to summon him beside you, not—"
He didn't get to finish his sentence.
An unbearable pressure built in Zayn's chest — or rather, in whatever now served as his chest, a hollow space where a green glow pulsed — and before he understood what was happening, his arms rose on their own, as if moved by a will that was no longer entirely his.
"Wait—!" he cried, panicked, feeling power gathering between his claws with no idea how to stop it.
A detonation rang out, dull and massive, as if the earth itself had exhaled.
A gigantic ball of blue flame burst from between his hands, blinding, uncontrollable, and shot straight across the clearing before crashing into the trees on the far side, in an explosion that tore up the earth and hurled burning debris in every direction. Zayn screamed — in pure terror this time, no doubt about it — watching his own attack level an entire stretch of forest, trunks bending and collapsing like matchsticks, a shower of sparks rising into the still-gray dawn sky.
A sudden silence fell, broken only by the distant rumble of flames still devouring the fallen trees.
"...oh no," Zayn murmured, in his own cavernous voice, staring at his claw-hands in utter horror.
His heart — whatever it was now — was pounding.
"I CAN'T CONTROL IT!" he screamed. "AARON, I DON'T KNOW HOW I DID THAT, AND I DON'T KNOW HOW TO STOP IT!"
"Breathe," Aaron said, forcing his voice to stay calm despite the chaos spreading before them, despite his transformed nephew shaking from head to toe. "Close your eyes. Listen to me."
A faint beep suddenly sounded, coming from the green core buried somewhere in the mass of roots that now made up Zayn's torso.
"What is THAT?!" Zayn cried, alarmed by this new sound.
"The transformation countdown," Aaron replied, almost relieved. "Your body isn't ready to hold this form for long yet. Let it happen."
Beep. Beep.
The rhythm sped up, faster and faster, higher and higher, until it became one continuous, shrill tone — beeeeeep — at the exact moment the green glow nestled in his chest burst into a shower of white light.
"HOW?!" Zayn roared again, his voice wavering between his own and Citrolle's.
"Let it happen, Zayn!" Aaron shouted over the growing hum. "Don't fight it this time, let it go!"
Zayn closed his eyes. Panic. Immature. Terrified of what he'd become — this thing of roots and flame that had just leveled part of the forest without him deciding any of it.
"I don't want this..." he repeated, his voice breaking, becoming, for one breath, that of a terrified twelve-year-old boy, somewhere deep inside this carcass of wood and fire. "I don't want this..."
He focused on that last thought — not on the fear, but on the precise memory of his own hands, his own voice, the familiar weight of his own body sitting on the porch steps beside Aaron, a cup of coffee between them, the fig tree rustling in the evening breeze.
The beeeeeep peaked in one high, sharp note, then cut off completely.
The mass of roots retracted all at once, in a sharp exhale, like an oversized garment deflating, revealing underneath Zayn's much more modest silhouette — bare-chested, his shirt reduced to charred scraps, shaking in every limb, but himself again.
He dropped to his knees on the rock, gasping. The forest still smoked around him. A smell of burnt wood filled the air, acrid, almost suffocating. He looked at his body. Normal. Then his hands. Fine blue flames still danced at his fingertips, like embers refusing to fully die out.
"They're still there..." he breathed, shaking his hands frantically.
"Get down!" he shouted at the flames, as if they could hear him, as if they were stubborn guests he could order to leave.
The flames finally went out, one by one, leaving behind a smell of cold ash.
"Transformation successful," Aaron said, finally approaching, a hand extended toward his trembling nephew. "In a manner of speaking."
"'In a manner of speaking'?" Zayn repeated, a note of hysteria in his voice. "Aaron, I turned into — into I-don't-even-know-what, I fired a fireball the size of the house without even knowing I could, and I didn't even recognize myself!"
Aaron helped him up, examined his hands for a long moment, where faint gray scars, barely visible, already marked the skin where the flames had danced.
"Control: insufficient," he finally said, with the blunt honesty of a man used to telling the truth even when it isn't pleasant.
"Thanks, I noticed..." Zayn muttered, still shaking.
"Your power already exceeds your current level," Aaron went on, almost to himself, his gaze fixed on the scorched forest. "Without mastery, you're dangerous."
Zayn clenched his fists, feeling anger rise in him — anger at the fear he'd just felt, anger at his own helplessness, anger above all at that foreign voice that had spoken through his throat.
"But I felt..." he searched for the words, unable to name exactly what he'd felt, "...right. Like it was only a fragment of what I could become."
Aaron's face closed slightly, a shadow passing over his gaze.
"Primals don't lend their strength, Zayn," he said gravely. "They demand that you endure it. Those who forget that end up losing themselves in it, until they no longer know where the Primal ends and the human begins."
A heavy silence settled between them, broken only by the crackling of the last embers in the charred trees.
Zayn stood up slowly. His expression had changed — less euphoric than a moment before, more determined.
"Let's go again," he said.
"Slow down," Aaron began.
"Training resumed," Zayn cut in, with a firmness Aaron had never seen in him before. "I'm not going to stay a danger to an entire forest every time I breathe too hard, Aaron. Teach me."
---
The following weeks stretched into relentless, methodical, exhausting training. The still-smoking forest bore the scars of that first attempt — circles of scorched earth, gutted trunks, a clearing that would never quite be the same again. And beneath the silent trees that had survived, Zayn learned, fell, tried again, learned some more.
It was no longer just a matter of summoning Citrolle — that creature of pumpkin and blue flame, made of interwoven black roots, whose eyes and gaping mouth burned with incandescent blue — but of learning to become one with him without being swallowed whole. Aaron pushed him a little further each day, a little closer to the edge each day, with the cold rigor of a man who knew exactly what it cost to cross that edge unprepared.
Zayn had come to understand that power wasn't a gift you received, but a responsibility you agreed to carry, over and over, every day, without rest — and this time, unlike the insolent boy who'd tagged a stranger's car out of pure boredom three months earlier, he was ready to pay the price.
It was precisely that evening, as night fell over the charred clearing and Zayn, exhausted but standing, finally felt the blue flames obeying his will rather than dominating it, that Aaron got the call.
His phone buzzed in his pocket — a blocked number, a signal he hadn't received in years, since the days when he too had worn an artifact on his wrist. He answered, listened in silence for a long moment, and his face, usually so composed, froze in a way Zayn had never seen — not even in the kitchen, the night Boréalis was discovered.
"When?" Aaron asked simply.
A pause. Then, lower:
"How many barriers has it broken through?"
Zayn stepped closer, alarmed by the tone of his uncle's voice, but Aaron raised a hand to silence him, still listening, his face growing paler in the fading twilight.
"Understood," he finally said. "We're on our way."
He hung up, and stood still for a moment, staring at the charred forest, as if gathering the courage to say what came next.
"Aaron," Zayn said, his voice tight with a worry he no longer tried to hide. "What's going on?"
Aaron turned to him, and in his eyes, Zayn recognized that same gravity he'd seen the night Boréalis was discovered — a mixture of old fear and cold determination.
"The UPA just lost contact with one of its surveillance cells," he said slowly. "In Germany. A bearer named Yojuro, from the Harihiho clan — someone I know, someone who studies the same forces you now carry, but for a very different purpose than yours."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning," Aaron said, his voice suddenly harder, more urgent, "that something has crossed a barrier no one was ever supposed to be able to cross. Something the Harihiho clan called, in their old texts, by a single word."
He paused, and the wind, in that exact instant, seemed to hold its breath along with him.
"Error."
A cold shiver ran down Zayn's spine, independent of the day's exhaustion, independent even of the fear he'd felt facing Citrolle weeks earlier — a fear of an entirely new kind, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.
"What's an Error?" he asked, his throat dry.
Aaron didn't answer right away. He looked at his nephew, this twelve-year-old boy who had laughed in a principal's face, tagged a city car out of boredom, and now stood before him, covered in ash and gray scars, a celestial artifact pulsing at his wrist like a heart that refused to be silenced.
"A living anomaly," he finally said. "Something that shouldn't exist, and yet does. Something that, once awakened, never stops."
He placed a hand on Zayn's shoulder, heavier, more urgent than any time before.
"Pack your bag," he said. "You're leaving for the Paladin training center this year, in the United States."
Behind them, in the deepening darkness of the charred forest, a twig snapped — a tiny, almost insignificant sound, and yet enough for Citrolle, who had remained invisible since the end of the training session, to slowly turn his sockets of blue flame toward the north, as if he too sensed something approaching from the other side of the world.
Something with no name.
Something with no face.
Something that had already begun counting down the seconds until they would meet.