A strange unease had settled into Ella's bones with the dawn, a disquiet that had nothing to do with vampires or glowing power. It was a quiet, internal dissonance, like a melody played slightly out of key. She moved through the sunlit morning corridors of the mansion, her steps measured, but her mind felt… granular. As if the substance of her memories had been sifted, and some essential grit was missing.
Last night's triumph in the training hall—the first controlled flame—should have been a blazing brand in her memory. The heat in her palms, the shape of the fire bending to her will, the thick scent of sandalwood ash. And before that, the confrontation with Silas. The crimson eyes, the crushing weight of ancient hunger, the way her own light had pushed back the dark.
The broad strokes were there. But the mortar between the stones of those events was crumbling. When she tried to recall Silas's exact words after he called her "sparks," her mind offered only a blur of predatory implication. The moment of transition between standing defiant before him and kneeling gasping on the floor was a jump cut in her consciousness. Even the flame itself—what had she felt in the precise instant of creation? Not the exertion, but the metaphysical click of connection? It was like trying to recall the taste of water.
She paused by a tall, narrow window, pressing her forehead against the cool glass. The formal gardens below were immaculate, a geometric prison of beauty. Her reflection in the pane was pale, her eyes shadowed with a confusion that felt more invasive than fear. What is wrong with me? The question was a silent scream. Was this some side effect of using power? A mental wound from the psychic pressure of a vampire's gaze?
"You are auditing your memories."
Aaron's voice did not startle her. She had come to expect his sudden, silent appearances, as if the mansion itself condensed into his form. He stood a few feet away, observing her not with scrutiny, but with a kind of clinical recognition.
"They're… not all there," she admitted, her voice quieter than she intended. She turned from the window to face him. "It's not like forgetting a name. It's like parts of the experience were never recorded. There are gaps. Flickers instead of film."
He nodded once, a slow, deliberate motion. "Of course there are. The human mind is a scribe, Ella. It transcribes the mundane. It makes ledgers of the ordinary. But when the world bends—when reality is stressed by power, by predation, by the awakening of something primordial within yourself—the scribe's hand falters. The ink blots. Pages might be torn out entirely by the very forces you are engaging."
He stepped closer, his gaze holding hers. It was not comforting. It was educational. "You stood in a room with a creature for whom your life-force is a vintage wine. You then reached inside yourself and pulled forth a fragment of celestial mechanics, taming nuclear fire with your adolescent will. Did you believe your synaptic pathways could simply accommodate that? That you could file it away next to memories of breakfast and childhood birthdays?"
His words were not cruel, but they were brutally direct. They reframed her anxiety not as a flaw, but as a physiological and metaphysical inevitability.
"So the gaps… they're normal?" The question felt foolish, but she needed the anchor of his certainty.
"Normal? For what you are becoming, yes. Expected." He clasped his hands behind his back, adopting the posture of a lecturer. "Think of your consciousness as a fortress. A traumatic event—a true assault on the self—is like a siege engine striking the wall. The mind's defense is not always to reinforce. Sometimes, it is to collapse a section of the wall intentionally, creating a rubble-filled gap too chaotic for the invader to easily cross. The memory is sacrificed to save the citadel of the self."
Ella absorbed the metaphor. It made the emptiness within her feel less like loss and more like a strategic ruin. "Silas… and the fire… they were siege engines."
"Precisely. Your mind protected you from the full, annihilating force of the experiences by fragmenting them. What you retain are the lessons. The impression of heat. The shape of the threat. The echo of your own defiance. The essence, not the encyclopedia." He paused, letting her sit with that. "This is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of a robust survival instinct. Many who touch true power for the first time are not so fortunate. They remember everything. The blinding totality of it breaks them. They spend the rest of their days staring at walls, endlessly reliving the moment their reality shattered. Your mind has granted you the mercy of a partial amnesia."
A shiver traced her spine. The idea of being permanently trapped in the moment of conjuring the flame, feeling that raw connection sear itself onto her forever, was more terrifying than any vampire.
"How do I…?" she began, then faltered. "How do I function with pieces missing? How do I prepare for the next time, if I can't fully remember the last?"
A ghost of something—not a smile, but an expression of focused interest—touched Aaron's features. "Now you ask the correct question. You do not rebuild the missing wall. You learn to fight in the rubble. You establish new fortifications around the gap."
He began to walk slowly down the corridor, and she fell into step beside him, their footsteps echoing in unison. "You must create anchor points. Deliberate, repeatable sensations or actions that you consciously imprint during moments of high stress. A physical gesture. A specific phrase. A controlled breath pattern. These become pins on which your memory can drape itself. When the world fractures again, you reach for the pin, not the lost tapestry."
They entered the library, a vast room of soaring shelves and muted light. He went to a large, blank ledger on a central table and opened it. The pages were empty.
"Your mind right now is like this book. The major events—Silas, the First Flame—are like chapters whose titles you know, but whose text is blurred." He took a quill, dipped it in invisible ink, and made a firm, deliberate dot on the center of a page. "This is an anchor point. Not the memory itself, but a marker you place during the event. 'When I felt the fear peak, I pressed my thumb to my palm.' 'When the flame ignited, I spoke its name in my mind.' The action is simple, repeatable, and under your control. It creates a knot in the rope of experience that your mind can find later, even if the rest of the rope is frayed."
Ella stared at the single black dot on the vast white page. It seemed so small. So insufficient. "And that's enough?"
"It is a start. It is the foundation of mental discipline, which is the sister of power discipline. Tomorrow, in the training hall, we will not conjure fire first. We will practice anchoring. You will learn to place these pins before the storm hits, so they are already there when you need them."
He closed the ledger with a soft thump. "There is another possibility to consider," he said, his tone lowering, becoming more intimate with warning. "Some gaps may not be accidental collapses. They may be… deliberate excavations."
She frowned. "What do you mean?"
"As your power grows, it will not only affect the world around you. It will curate the world within you. The 'sun' you carry may find certain memories… corrosive. Shadows it wishes to burn away. Weaknesses it deems too dangerous to retain. Or, conversely, it may veil certain truths it deems you not yet ready to bear." His ice-blue eyes were piercing. "You must learn to audit these gaps as well. To ask not just 'what is missing?' but 'why is this missing?' Is it for my protection? Or for my limitation?"
The concept was dizzying. Her own power, editing her own mind. It felt like a violation from within.
"How can I trust myself," she whispered, "if I can't trust my own memories?"
"You learn to trust your instincts. Your bodily reactions. The feeling in your gut when a gap is approached." He placed a hand, cool and steady, on her shoulder. It was the first voluntary contact he'd initiated that wasn't a correction or an attack. "The memory may be gone, Ella. But the scar tissue remains. You will learn to read the scars."
He removed his hand and turned to leave. At the library door, he looked back. "Do not mourn the blanks. They are not emptiness. They are spaces where your old self ended and your new one began. They are the negative space that defines the sculpture. Study them. Respect them. And in time, you will decide which to fill with light, and which to leave in productive shadow."
Long after he left, Ella remained in the library, standing before the blank ledger. She raised her own hand, looking at her palm. She remembered the heat there, the birth of the flame. The memory was blurred, but the phantom warmth was not.
She made a fist, her nails pressing half-moons into her skin. A simple, deliberate sensation.
Anchor point, she thought.
She wasn't broken. She was being reconfigured. The architecture of her mind was being renovated to house a greater power, and the dust of construction, the temporary voids where walls once stood, were not signs of collapse.
They were blueprints.
She opened her hand, stared at the pale impressions her nails had left, and knew she would remember this moment perfectly. This calm, cold moment of understanding in the quiet library.
It was her first deliberate anchor.