"Super-sized spirit flame? How can that be?!"
The children erupted all at once, their voices bouncing off the white walls of the temple. Some looked at each other with wide eyes. Others stared at Lysa like they were seeing her for the first time and weren't sure what to make of what they found.
"I don't think we were even taught about Super-sized spirit flames," one of the kids muttered.
"That's because they only exist in theory," another replied. "No one has ever actually seen one."
Grey stood at the end of the line and said nothing. He watched Lysa from where he stood. She hadn't moved. She was still facing the altar with that particular stillness she used when she was processing something and didn't want anyone to know it.
He had known her long enough to recognise the difference between Lysa being calm and Lysa pretending to be calm.
This was the second one.
He couldn't blame her. Even he understood that something significant had just happened, and he was arguably the least informed person in the room.
The Envoys pulled themselves together faster than the children did.
The Druid Priestess cleared her throat, sharp and deliberate, and the murmuring died instantly. Whatever she was feeling, she had buried it somewhere below the surface and sealed it shut.
The two Priests beside her straightened. The Druid Warriors returned to their stillness as though they had never broken it.
The Priestess turned to Lysa. Of the four known spirit flame sizes above Miniscule, only three had ever been confirmed in living people. Small, Medium and Large. Super-sized had always existed as a theoretical ceiling, something the scholars argued about in old texts and the elders mentioned in hushed tones when they spoke about the upper limits of human potential.
It was the kind of thing you told children about to inspire them, not something you actually expected to walk through your door on a Tuesday morning in a village that smelled like fish and sea salt.
And yet.
The male Priest who had been silent since the rite began finally spoke, and he did not bother concealing the disbelief in his voice.
"This is unprecedented. Never did we expect to find someone who possesses a Super-sized spirit flame in a village like this."
The Druid Priestess ignored him and smiled at Lysa. It was the kind of smile that stretched a little too wide, warm in a way that also felt like it was quietly calculating something at the same time.
"What's your name, little girl?"
"Lysa, ma'am."
"Alright, Lysa." The Priestess clasped her hands together. "When you have bonded with your beast, I want you to come with us to the Emerald Palace. We will nurture you personally. You will be trained by the finest Beast Mages and Druid Priests in the world and given every resource you need to become something truly extraordinary."
Lysa held the woman's gaze for a moment. The dazed look on her face had finally cleared, replaced by something more like her usual expression, composed and measuring.
The Priestess held her smile, though something behind her eyes flickered briefly before it was smoothed away. It was clearly not the answer she had been expecting.
In her world, an invitation from the Emerald Palace was not the kind of thing people needed time to consider. It was an honour. It was the answer to prayers most people didn't even dare to pray.
But she did not push. She would come around. They always did.
The Priestess turned back toward the group and reached for the bowl on the altar.
"In that case, it is time to move on to the bonding. You will each enter the root node and..."
"Excuse me."
She stopped.
A hand was raised at the end of the line. Unhurried. Completely unaware of, or simply unbothered by, the fact that it was interrupting a Druid Priestess mid-sentence.
Grey kept his hand up and met her gaze pleasantly.
"You haven't checked my spirit flame yet."
A silence settled over the temple. Then came the whispers. A few of the kids exchanged glances. Someone near the middle of the line made a sound that was almost a laugh before thinking better of it.
Grey was aware that this was not his finest moment socially. But the alternative was being forgotten about entirely, which struck him as considerably worse.
The Priestess looked at him. A flash of irritation moved across her face, quick and sharp, before discipline smoothed it away. The two Priests beside her watched her reaction with the focused attention of people who had learned to monitor her moods the way sailors monitored the horizon.
She reached down and picked up the bowl again.
She gestured for him to approach.
Grey walked up to the altar without any particular sense of ceremony. He registered, distantly, that every eye in the temple was on him. The Priestess was already reaching for her short blade when Grey raised his own hand, bit down on his thumb without hesitation, and held it over the bowl.
The Priestess stared at him with mild disgust.
He shrugged very slightly and let the blood drop.
A small white flame rose from the bowl, soft and quiet, about what you would expect from someone who had spent his formative years befriending forest animals instead of attending lessons. The Priestess had already begun to look away, already composing the dismissal in her expression, when the flame changed.
It did not increase slowly, It simply detonated.
White spirit flame erupted from the bowl without warning, engulfing the glass entirely, climbing past the rim and curling around the outside and underneath until the Priestess's hands were buried in it all the way past her wrists. The light it threw across the walls of the temple was blinding. The warmth of it, the sheer presence of it, filled the hall like a second sun had just decided to take up residence inside a wooden bowl.
Grey stood in the middle of it and blinked.
He had been expecting Small, maybe. Possibly Medium if he was lucky. He had not been expecting the room to look like this.
"I... impossible," one of the male Priests breathed. It came out barely above a whisper, like the words had started somewhere deeper than his voice.
Nobody else managed words at all.
The eyes of everyone in the temple widened in shock as this was totally unexpected. To have two Super-sized spirit flame bearers in a backwater village which no one in the world had ever seen was nothing short of incredulous.
The Druid Priestess wasn't much better as she never expected such a situation. She almost fell down backwards due to shock and the implication of what just happened.
The children might have been shocked by Lysa's flame but it was believable due to her status as the Chief's daughter and a very talented teenager.
However they were dumbfounded by Grey's flame because they did not expect the most reckless and carefree kid in their village to be this special. They were utterly speechless.
Even Lysa seemed to struggle with the reality of it
Grey looked at their faces and felt something strange move through him. Not pride exactly. Something quieter and more unsettling than that. He was used to being looked at as the kid who skipped class, the orphan the Chief had taken in, the one who talked to animals and showed up late to sacred ceremonies. He was used to a particular quality of attention that ranged from fond exasperation to mild contempt.
Things were finally looking up for him.
The flames began to die. And as they faded, something shifted at the very edges of them. The white bled into gold, deep and rich, curling at the tips like embers before winking out entirely. It lasted only a second. Less than a second.
Grey felt it more than saw it. A warmth that moved from the bowl up through his fingers and into his chest, settling there briefly like a coal before it was gone. He looked at his hands.
He looked up at the Priestess.
She was staring at her own palms with a small, confused frown. The spirit flame should not have been able to produce heat. It never did.
It was one of the fundamental properties of spirit energy, harmless to living things, existing entirely outside the physical spectrum. And yet her hands were warm. Not painfully so, but unmistakably, inexplicably warm.
She looked at the empty bowl and then at Grey and decided not to think much about it.
She filed it somewhere in the back of her mind, behind the much larger and more pressing fact that she had just witnessed two Super-sized spirit flames in the same backwater fishing village on the same morning, a thing that had never once happened anywhere in recorded history.
She would think about the warmth later.
She straightened and looked at Grey directly.
"I'm sure you heard what I told her," she said, with a brief nod toward Lysa. "I am Priestess Kim. Druid Priestess and a Beast Grandmaster. The offer stands for you as well. Come to the Emerald Palace after your bonding and you will have access to every resource you need to grow into what you are clearly capable of becoming."
Grey looked at her for a moment. Then he nodded once, said nothing, and turned and walked back to his spot in the line.
The stares followed him the whole way. He kept his eyes forward and his face neutral and reminded himself that none of these people knew anything about him that he hadn't just accidentally revealed in the last thirty seconds.
He wasn't sure if that was comforting or not, but he knew that this could cause him some problems in the future.