Aldric didn't just decline; he became a wall.
He stood in the center of the damp, subterranean training room, arms locked over his chest, his weathered face carved into something immovable.
"No," he said, the word dropping like a stone. "Absolutely not. Attempting contact with an active, full-scale living curse at your level isn't 'accelerated training.' It's a death sentence. I will not be the one to sign it."
"Aldric—"
"No, Sera!" His voice cracked, the sound ricocheting off the masonry.
I flinched.
In all our weeks of quiet study, he had never once raised his tone. He jabbed a finger at me, his hand trembling with more than just the tremors of age. "I watched your mother burn herself out because she moved too fast. I watched it happen, and I couldn't stop it. I am not watching it happen again!"
The silence that followed was suffocating. Aldric was breathing in ragged hitches, his eyes bright with a grief that hadn't dulled with time.
My mother. I had always known she hadn't died of natural causes. Aldric's careful phrasing on our first night had told me that much. But this was different. This was a warning. She had pushed, her body unable to contain the sheer velocity of the power she'd summoned.
"Tell me what happened to her," I said.
"This isn't the time — "
"Tell me now," I cut him off, my voice dangerously steady. "If I'm going to decide how fast is too fast, I need to know what the cliff edge looks like. You owe me that much."
Aldric's hand went to his face, then dropped. He then sank onto a stone bench as if the weight of the memory had finally snapped his spine.
He told me.
Apparently, she was twenty-six. A Bloodanchor who had done everything right — trained, developed, and reached a level of ability Aldric described with a reverent, broken hushedness. She had started small: easing minor blights, stabilizing the border stones from corrupt magic, the manageable work of a protector.
Then my father had pushed for more.
It wasn't a curse like Caius's. It was a territorial rot eating the Ashveil eastern lands, poisoning the wells and killing the harvests.
It was a slow death for the pack, and my father had used their suffering as a lever.
He had pressed it against her chest the same way Zoran was pressing Halvenmere against mine.
Same tactic, different hands.
The attempt had worked. The rot broke. The land lived.
And three weeks later, my mother died from the inside out. The dark magic had found every hairline fracture where she had overextended herself and turned them into wildfires.
I was three years old.
I sat on the cold floor, the weight of those that settling onto my shoulders. I didn't cry. I was too consumed by a cold, jagged anger to find tears.
My father had known. He had broken her to save his soil, then spent fifteen years burying the daughter she'd left behind because he was terrified of what I'd do once I realized what he'd traded.
"She saved the pack," I said, the words tasting like copper.
"Yes," Aldric whispered.
"And he never told anyone. Not what she was. Not what it cost."
"No."
I stood up. A terrifying stillness took root in me. It wasn't fear, and it wasn't quite grief. It was older. Quieter.
"I'm not going to kill myself," I said. "I won't touch the full curse in the next seventy-two hours. But tell me the truth, is there a middle ground? Something beyond a vial but short of total contact? Something to show Zoran the board has changed before the game is even over?"
Aldric remained silent for a long, agonizing minute.
"There is one thing," he said slowly. "The mark. The partial mating mark on your neck. If you could activate it — not just receive it passively, but push your intent through it, it would be a direct interaction. It would be visible. Measurable."
"Would it hurt Caius?"
"It would ease him," Aldric said. "Temporarily. Significantly. And if you did it in front of witnesses..."
"Zoran's courier," I said.
Aldric stared at me, his eyes wide. "You want to do this in front of the messenger."
"I want Zoran to know I am no longer a passive piece on his map," I said. "I am an active one. And I've started to move."
Another heavy silence.
"You are so much like her; your mother" Aldric said. It was the most complicated compliment anyone had ever said to me.
I didn't answer.
I just started the preparations.