Chapter 53: One Month Later.

The days blurred into each other after that incident, Elian fully immersing himself in his training along with the other four.

Reyes’s mornings hadn’t gotten kinder, exactly, but Elian had stopped counting them as suffering somewhere around week two.

He considered it as just the shape of the day now.

Wake, run, bruise, eat, class, bruise again in a different way, sleep.

Thankfully, due to the blessing he gained from the second petal, his body had quietly renegotiated its terms with him without asking permission.

The confidence thing turned out to be less about grand declarations and more about small, stupid decisions, repeated.

He started answering questions in Restorative Theory even when he wasn’t sure he was right. He stopped apologizing whenever he thought he said something stupid. He let himself take up space in a room instead of shrinking to the size of the least noticeable thing in it.

Most importantly, he stopped panicking when the occasional love letters started hitting his desk or under his door into his dormroom.

It also helped, weirdly, that his hair that had grown thicker, and kept getting in his eyes during drills.

"Just cut it," Bellamy had said, the first time Elian complained, and Elian had said no.

It was mostly out of spite, but then he spent an evening figuring out how to tie it back into a bun instead for the drills, tight against his skull, because apparently he had opinions about his own appearance now that he’d never bothered having before.

It became a small ritual—five minutes before going for combat lessons, in front of the old mirror above the washstand in their room, getting it exactly right before anything else happened that day.

The school uniform followed shortly after, in smaller increments.

He undid a button he used to keep fastened out of habit.

He embroidered his sleeve with the help of Bellamy, found he preferred the look, and just never went back.

Cordelia’s doting grandmother, visiting for a weekend, had taken one look at him and produced a set of really expensive gold threads from somewhere in her bag like she’d been carrying them specifically in case an opportunity like this arose. Elian didn’t ask questions, mostly because the grandmother didn’t allow him.

He had it stitched into a cute floral pattern along his shoulder the next morning.

"You seem to be doing a whole thing... is this supposed to be a makeover?" Milena asked him, one evening in the library, not looking up from her notes.

"Probably, you tell me."

She still didn’t look up from her book when she answered.

"It’s a good thing. Keep doing it."

The spellwork came slower at first, and then all at once, the way Vale had warned him it might.

He spent most of the month stuck circling the edge of his first true first-circle spell—a shot of basic elemental convergence, supposed to be simple, and made significantly less simple by the fact that he had four elements arguing about who got to go first every time he tried to cast it.

Fire wanted to lead. Water disagreed. It got embarrassing before it got good.

It clicked on a random Friday evening, for no reason he could name—the elements settling into order like they’d simply gotten bored of fighting him about it—and the resulting bolt put a very respectable hole through the target dummy and knocked him flat on his back from the recoil.

Vale, watching from the sideline, had said nothing, but the corner of her mouth had done something that might, generously, be called a smile of approval.

The others moved too, in their own directions.

Rudra’s fire had gotten sharper, meaner, more controlled—the difference between his power now and before like the difference between a wildfire and a scalpel.

Oizys had stopped pretending the wind around her feet was an accident, and had started using it deliberately in drills, small precise gusts that unbalanced opponents half a second before they realized why.

Elian had quite a few close calls himself with the princess, which all ended with him being caught by Oizys before he could hit the ground in a bad way.

Darrow’s earthwork had gotten quieter and more devastating in equal measure, entire sections of the yard rearranging themselves under his feet like the ground had personally decided to help him.

Milena’s ice, if anything, had only gotten colder—Elian had stopped standing near her during drills unless he wanted to lose feeling in his fingers for an hour afterward.

Bellamy, predictably, remained exactly as unserious as ever, though his teasing now had grew stronger now that Elian was starting to become comfortable with him.

As Elian had come to know it, Bellamy was really good at illusion-craft, only growing even better with his control as they spent time training. Somehow the two facts apparently unrelated to each other by design.

A month in, standing in the yard at dawn with his hair tied back, sleeves rolled, staff steady in his hand, Elian barely recognized the version of himself that had walked out of that classroom a month ago, shaking with dread.

He wasn’t sure yet if that was a good thing.

But it felt, for the first time in a while, like his own.

Rudra and Oizys were finishing up a handicapped duel, Rudra only being able to use his untrained lightning while Oizys couldn’t use any ranged attack with her source element.

The fight was a long one, lasting well over the five minute mark before Rudra had caught Oizys lacking after a particularly heated exchange, ending the fight with a bolt of lightning that he used to paralyze her and pin her to the ground.

"That’s it for today."

Rowan Vale, their ’Master’ as all of them had come to call her, said watching from the sidelines.

"You still need to work on your close range attacks Oizys, using basic gales to end fights are only going to end up hurting you in the long run." She said as she cast a restorative spell to get rid of effects of Rudra’s spell.

She turned to the proud prince once she made sure she was okay,

"Good job, you’ve been learning faster than any of the others, all things considered." Vale nodded once at Rudra, approval as close to effusive as she got.

"Lightning suits you. Keep at it and you’ll have it under control faster than most manage in a year."

Rudra inclined his head, composed as ever, though something in his shoulders eased at the praise—small, but there if you were looking for it.

"Don’t let it go to your head," Oizys muttered from the ground, still catching her breath, wind curling irritably around her ankles like it shared her mood.

"I’ll get you next time."

"You said that last week."

"I meant it less last week."

Vale watched the exchange with the faint, weathered patience of someone who’d seen a hundred versions of this rivalry before and expected to see a hundred more.

"Enough. Go get something to eat, all of you. Tomorrow doesn’t get lighter because today was long."

They dispersed toward the dining hall in loose formation, the five of them—seven, if you counted Bellamy with Cordelia trailing a half step behind, who had joined them midway through the walk to the dining hall. Both knee deep into an argument about resonance frequency theory that Bellamy was clearly losing and refusing to admit it.

Elian fell into step beside Milena, staff slung over one shoulder.

"A month," he said, mostly to himself.

"A month," she agreed.

She glanced sideways at him—at the surprisingly cute bun, his considerably prettier uniform, the different way he carried himself now, shoulders held softer instead of the rigid nervousness he used to carry.

"You’re doing very well with the makeover thing."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"No." She looked forward again, expression soft with the certain kind of nonchalance he had come to notice of her these days.

"It’s a good thing. I just wanted you to know I noticed."

Behind of them, Bellamy’s voice rose in mock outrage over something Cordelia had said, and Darrow’s low laugh followed a beat later.

Oizys walked next to them in silence that wasn’t quite comfortable yet but wasn’t hostile either—something being built, one chaotic dinner at a time.

Rudra, as always, had disappeared somewhere before any of them could even realise he was gone.

Elian let himself smile, small and unguarded, and didn’t bother hiding it.

One month down.

He didn’t know how many more there’d be before the inevitable came looking for them.

But for now, this—the familiar walk, the noise, the people, his friends—was enough.