There’d be no walking back such an act.
But why would he want to? Conquering hell with her by his side felt so natural, so right. Why did doing so as lovers make him so uneasy?
He rolled over to face the wall and glowered at the smooth rock. The matter wasn’t behind them. It would come to a head soon. He knew her too well. She was pretending to be indifferent, scornful even, but one wrong word from him, one mistake and she might vanish for good.
And with hell as vast as it was, he’d never find her.
He needed to understand himself, his desires, and get his house in order.
Resolute, Scorio sat up, crossed his legs, and rested his hands on his knees. He focused his mind on his breathing, and after a while felt his body relax, his shoulders droop, his tension ease.
Only then did he turn his thoughts back to Naomi.
An image came to him. The both of them up on the balcony of her tower in the ruins. A moment of peace as she rested her head against his shoulder as they watched the spirals of clouds gather around the sun-wire.
He cared deeply about her.
Loved?
In a manner. And… he wanted to love her more. But something held him back.
What?
Scorio sat still, allowing his breaths to come and go, not forcing the question, simply sitting with it.
Other memories came to him. Naomi collapsing into his arms, weeping with relief after they’d killed Evelyn and he’d truly convinced her he was still alive after years of being lost.
The Nightmare Lady trapped by his chalk lines in that dead-end tunnel, where he’d forced her to concede and agree to train him.
Naomi, a fiercely burning light on whom he could trust his life.
But.
He thought again of her tower. How she’d chosen to live there and allow fate to decide if she’d plunge to her death with its eventual collapse. Her searing, unending fury at Great Souls and their society. Her volatile nature.
There.
A vertical line appeared between his brows as Scorio focused on the flowering of unease those last memories brought him.
Something about her inner darkness, the wounds she had been dealt, made it so that he couldn’t… what? Trust her? No, he trusted her. Then…?
Scorio sighed and opened his eyes. He needed to talk this over with someone. He was so close. Lianshi? Yes, but she was both dealing with her own problems and not the Lianshi he once knew - he was reluctant to start treating her otherwise. Ravenna? No, that relationship was still fraught with its own overtones.
Nox?
That nearly made him laugh out loud.
Alain? The fact that he thought of the other Flame Vault surprised him. No, not Alain. Not only did he not truly trust the other man yet, but he didn’t seem the kind to dispense deep wisdom on matters of the heart.
A face swam up before him. Freckled and feline-eyed, wise and canny.
Moira.
Scorio immediately scoffed, then realized he did want her opinion. Except she’d use it against him, wouldn’t she? Anything he gave her became a tool in her hands. So no, but…
Scorio sighed and a heavy cloak of solitude fell across his shoulders. For all he had done, for all his victories, there was nobody he truly felt comfortable sharing this problem with, and that made him feel bitterly alone.
“Ah, well,” he whispered, and sat up straight again. “When one heart can’t be taken care of, you tend to the other.”
So he ignited with Iron and set to following Druanna’s exercises. Allowed his power to ebb and flow even as he used the Pyre Lord technique as a buffer, preventing his Heart from ever guttering.
Druanna’s words came back to him: The reason reaching Dread Blaze is so hard for so many is that the process requires patience. It’s frustrating, the constant guttering. It can take years with little result. Only the truly driven, only those burning with ambition have the resolve to see it through. Those with any inclination to contentment will find excuses to stop training, and remain a Flame Vault for the rest of this incarnation. That’s why there are two Flame Vaults for every Dread Blaze walking hell. That’s why there are more Flame Vaults than any other rank.
“Won’t be me,” he whispered, and bent to the practice. Druanna’s exercises were agonizingly simple. The goal, she had explained, was to forget precision in exchange for a fluid rocking back and forth between minimal mana burn and a full roar. A swaying oscillation, back and forth, like dancing, allowing a rhythm to build, a tempo.
Which sounded fine, but in practice it felt like trying to pour clotted honey through a wide funnel. Raising the mana smoothly from a trickle to a torrent at first produced no change, so the natural urge was to draw more, then more, and then suddenly the mana came all at once, a wave that swamped your Heart and drowned your sense of control.
The opposite was the same. Drawing down started slowly, the torrent seemed to barely ease, and then the choke became too strong and the mana would abruptly be strangled, causing your Heart to want to gutter.
Scorio fought for fluidity, and rose to move back and forth as Druanna had suggested. Attempting to correlate mana expenditure to the swaying of your body could prove an instinctive means to understand the flow, but to Scorio it just made him feel like a fool, so after a while he sat back down.
Frustration had him by the throat. Images of Naomi kept flashing through his mind.
He thought of Jova. Was she a Dread Blaze already? Where was she?
Focus.
Scorio allowed his Heart to gutter and sat back. This was going to take him years. Druanna’s exercises were meant for people without access to the Delightful Secret Marinating technique.
He needed to think this through for himself.
Currently, he was attempting to master the expenditure with the incoming stream of mana as an insurance, one he could suddenly draw on to directly feed his Heart as the threat of guttering exploded into reality from his tamping down his reservoir draw.
Perhaps he could do this differently.
The goal was to control mana expenditure, allowing him to either burn at the lightest simmer for longevity or to dump all of his mana into his Heart for emergency power.
Nowhere did it say the mana had to come from his reservoir.
Frowning, thoughtful, Scorio ignited and observed his Heart. It hung before him, a perfect sphere, massive and strange. His reservoir was contained within it, that prodigious space where he could store ungodly amounts of power. He was currently almost full, mostly with Iron but with some wisps of Bronze up top.
Slowly, deliberately, he drew from his reservoir. The mana came readily, but there was a pressure there, he realized. A pressure generated by the weight of so much mana pressing against the confines of his reservoir. The moment he began drawing, the rest sought release through this mystical aperture he created in the reservoir’s confines.
It was if an ocean sought to pour itself out all at once through a tap.
Scorio activated his Delightful Secret Marinating technique and fed the ambient mana directly into his Heart, sealing off his reservoir altogether.
For what had felt like an eternity, he’d wrestled with this technique while trapped in the Crucible. Had learned to direct the Gold mana that had pierced Ydrielle’s prism directly into his Heart so that he could burn if off without shattering his reservoir.
Frowning, Scorio drew more from the mana that swirled around his room, then less.
His control was remarkably more finessed.
He lowered the amount to a whisper, swirling the Iron around him and drawing in threads, then exerted his will and drew a mass of Iron, shoveling it into his Heart like a man trying to drown a flame by dumping too much fuel on it.
Scorio went back and forth a few times, and realized that if he ignored his reservoir he could execute Druanna’s exercises with ease.