Aldric said no.
He said it standing in the center of the underground training room with both hands raised like a man physically barring a door, which was precisely what he was doing.
"Absolutely not. Two weeks is not achievable safely. You know it, I know it, and if you cite your mother's journal to me one more time, I will personally throw it into the furnace."
"The Tethering accelerates in the final stage," I countered, my voice echoing off the damp stone. "We have two to three weeks before he hits the threshold. My training timeline is three. That's not a safety margin, Aldric, that's a cliff's edge, and we're already tipping over it."
"And if you push past what your marrow can sustain, you'll be useless to him entirely!" He was shouting now, his voice raw with a decade of suppressed terror. "Do you understand? Not just unable to break the Tethering but... gone. Burned out. I watched your mother—"
"I know what you watched," I said, stepping into his space.
"Then act like it!"
We stared each other down. The single candle between us guttered in the turbulent air of his shouting, casting long, frantic shadows against the curved masonry.
"Tell me the actual line," I said, my voice dropping to a low, hard whisper. "Not the safe line. Not the 'recommended' line. Tell me the point of no return; the one where if I cross it, we have a catastrophic problem. Tell me where that boundary is, and I swear to you, I'll stay on this side of it."
Aldric pressed both palms over his face and held them there for a long, shuddering moment.
"The nosebleeds are the first warning," he said finally, his voice muffled by his hands. "If they start again, you stop. Immediately. No debate, no 'one more minute.' You sever the contact immediately."
"Agreed."
"If you feel the pull become a push, if the dark magic stops leaning toward you and starts directing you, you stop. Do you understand the difference?"
"Leaning is passive. Directing is active. I stop the moment it tries to take the lead."
"And if you feel the current in your blood start running hot, not warm, Sera, but hot, like liquid iron, you stop and you come to me immediately, regardless of the hour."
"Yes, understood."
He lowered his hands. His ancient face was etched with exhaustion and a haunting, specific kind of fear; the look of a man who had spent eleven years preparing for a moment, only to find that preparation didn't make the reality any less paralyzing.
"Your mother's entry on day sixteen of her own accelerated sessions," he said, his silver eyes searching mine. "Read it tonight. Before we begin tomorrow. She documented exactly what breaking through a threshold felt like, and precisely what to do when the pressure peaks."
"I'll read it."
"Sera."
I waited.
"If this goes wrong—"
"It won't."
"But if it does," he said, his voice fracturing clean across. He stopped, took a ragged breath, and pressed his lips into a thin line.
For a moment, he wasn't the master or the scholar; he was just a very old man who had loved a woman, watched her vanish into the dark, and spent the remainder of his life trying to ensure her daughter didn't follow.
I crossed the room and pulled him into a hug.
He felt smaller than I remembered, I'd always seen him as a giant because of the knowledge he carried, but he was slight, fragile even.
He hugged me back with the fierce, desperate grip of someone who had been waiting half a lifetime to let go of a burden.
We stayed like that for thirty seconds. We didn't speak. There was nothing left to say that the silence didn't articulate better.
Then I stepped back, wiped a stray tear from my cheek, and said, "Tomorrow. First light."
"First light," he echoed.
The accelerated sessions were a special kind of brutal. My mother's entry on day sixteen hadn't exaggerated.
She had written: It feels like trying to hold a mountain in your palms while the mountain is actively trying to become a landslide. You do not hold it still. You simply convince it which way to fall.
She was right. It felt exactly like that.
Three hours a day, twice daily. Aldric watched every second with the focused, vibrating anxiety of a man dismantling a bomb while the clock ticked in the background.
I held the contact with a full iron block; a larger, denser sample Aldric hadn't shown me before. The dark magic within it was ancient, heavy, and very much awake. I practiced the release technique, learning to guide the flow rather than fight it.
Day one: I lasted forty minutes before the current turned from warm to a simmering heat. I stopped.
Day two: Ninety minutes. No blood. No directional push. My hands were steady.
Day three: Two full hours. By the end, the dark magic in the block had stilled because it had found its proper channel.
Like a flood that had finally retreated into its banks.
After the third evening session, I emerged from the stairwell to find Caius sitting on the floor in the corridor. He was leaning against the cold stone wall, eyes closed, his breathing slow.
In the dim light, the curse markings on his hands were quieter than I had ever seen them.
I stopped. "You've been sitting outside the door during the sessions."
He opened his eyes. For a long moment, the only sound was the hiss of the low-burning torches.
"The markings calm down when you're below me," he said softly. "Even through the floor. I noticed it after the second day. The static in my head... it goes quiet."
I sat down on the floor beside him, my back against the wall. My shoulder was inches from his.
The north wing had that heavy, late-night silence of a house that had given up on waiting for the next catastrophe.
"Three days down," I murmured.
"Eleven to go," he said.
"You've been counting.
"I've been counting every minute since your first session."
I stared at the vaulted ceiling.
He did the same.
The torches flickered, casting shadows that danced across his marked skin.
"Caius."
"Yes."
"Whatever is in that sealed site, whatever this Tethering was built to unlock when we break it, it doesn't open. But that energy has to go somewhere. My mother's journal described what happens to the host when a Tethering is severed, and I need you to know. Aldric didn't tell you, and I won't lie to you."
"Tell me."
"It's not going to be painless," I said, the words feeling like stones in my mouth.
"Breaking it releases three years of accumulated energy in a single heartbeat. It will feel..." I searched for the right word. "Catastrophic. For about sixty seconds. And then it stops, and the curse is gone forever."
A long, heavy silence stretched between us.
"Sixty seconds," he repeated.
"Sixty seconds."
"You're telling me so I don't try to stop you when it happens."
"I'm telling you so you don't fight the release," I said. "If you fight it, the energy gets trapped. Everything I've read says you have to hold still and just... let it pass through you."
He was quiet for a long time, his gaze fixed on his hands. "All right, understood."
Just that. All right. A man who had spent three years staring down his own slow-motion execution was agreeing to sixty seconds of agony with the same flat acceptance he applied to everything else.
I wanted to say something, something that matched the gravity of the pact we were making. But the words didn't exist. So I just sat there beside him in the cold until the torches burned out and the dawn began to peek through the high windows.
Eleven days. We just had to make it eleven days.