Okun's hands rested flat against Dama's back, feeling the faint rhythm of the boy's soulura like a second pulse beneath the skin.

He had seen many a men and women spark, flare, and fade in his life; he knew the signatures of fear, tje blaze of fury, the slow burn of determination, the need of grief.

Yet, Dama's current was…odd. Not broken, not wrong, just odd. Different—like a dialect of soulura Okun couldn't place.

He flexed his fingers in concentration and let his thoughts swim through comparisons.

Liam's soulura was steady, flat, tranquil—gentle like a light breeze on a soothing, sunny day.

Miuson's soulura flared and blazed, a representation of his youthful determination and will.

Domitius' soulura was as blunt and solid as an anvil. Nothing more, nothing less. It befitt a man of his stature.

Dama's? The only way Okun could describe his soulura was pure—purer than any he had felt up to this point. It made the chief's brow crease with gentle curiosity. Who was this child, truly? And what had given him such an odd energy?

Okun then looked to Mumu and Nini. While faint, he could also sense soulura radiating from them as well. Not only that, but their soulura seemed to be near perfect sync with their master—which was a given, knowing they were spawns of Dama's Soulful Technique.

However, it was the slight desync—the slight impurities of their soulura—that intrigued and puzzled Okun to no end. The fact their soulura were the slightest bit different from not only Dama's, but also each other indicated they themselves had a soul. That in itself raised more questions than it answered, so Okun shelved it for now.

Focusing back on Dama, Okun felt the boy's soulura rolling—small, slow waves. That told him Dama was revisiting memories that had long ago settled into the warmer places of his heart: graves visited, goodbyes accepted. It wasn't the fierce river needed for a Forced Awakening. He needed fire—a memory that would stoke and push that current upward.

He waited.

Finally, a change came. Dama's wave-length rose; the rhythm under Okun's palms began to surge. The pressure climbed like tidewater. "Good..." Okun thought. He prepared to channel his own reserves into the boy—to be the steady sluice that might punch Dama's gates open.

Nini sat two steps in front of Dama, ears pricked, watching him with the careful attention of a companion who loved with fierce faith. Dama's face was a study: first concentration, then pain, a flinch that suggested he was remembering something inside himself he'd rather not meet.

Nini cocked her head at this, a furrow of worry tightening her stitched brow. She wanted to move forward, to nuzzle and soothe, but something in the room held her there—afraid of disturbing whatever tenuous thread Dama was walking.

Steadily, Dama's soulura rose and rose. Okun could feel it, the current answering the sparks of memory and will. He began to channel—clean, measured pulses—into Dama's back, ready to ride the boy's wave and swamp his bodily gates.

However, as suddenly as a candle snuffed, Dama's soulura went flat. The signal dropped away—vanished—leaving a strange cold through the chief's palms.

Okun's breathing paused as he studied the feeling within his hands. He couldn't pinpoint it exactly, but the chief swore he could feel traces of someone else's soulura. "Odd..." Okun thought as he let out a deep exhale of focus and contemplation.

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For a single, breathless second, nothing happened.

Then, a tiny spark flared in Dama—so small at first Okun could have missed it if he hadn't been listening with his whole body. The spark took the room like a match to open air. The moment after Okun felt it, Dama's entire body perked up and he screamed.

The scream was a physical thing. The spark didn't just glow—it detonated. Golden light gouged through the training hall—hot, living light. It expanded outward in a clean, roaring bloom.

Okun's hands flew from Dama's back and rose instinctively to shield his eyes. The light was not merely illumination—it was force. It pressed on lungs, on the diaphragm, on the very sense of balance.

Air shoved everyone else back as though the boy had just exhaled a storm: wood creaked, hair whipped, Nini's and Mumu's fur flew. The torches near them almost toppled over and the scrolls on the shelf jiggled, almost falling off.

And at the center of that wash of gold—Dama himself. The light wrapped him like a bright cloak and then, just as abruptly as it had came, the brilliance thinned and collapsed inward. The air rushed back in; the sound of silence snapped and rewove itself.

Silence, that was except for the sounds of true fear.

When the brightness died, they could see him: Dama was on the floor, doubled over. He'd propped himself up with one elbow, his hand clenching the spot where the spike had punctured through.

His breaths came as ragged, heaving sobs; his shoulders shook with aftershocks of the scream. Tears ran tracks down his face—fear-sweat stung with the rawness of shock.

No one moved to speak immediately. Each of them sat with the small, stunned silence.

Mumu and Nini then scrambled to their feet as one, stumbling over each other in their hurry. Nini's tail flicked a dozen anxious times; she skidded to Dama's side and pressed herself against him as if to anchor him back to reality. Mumu's paws hovered, clumsy and desperate, then he settled into a protective crouch, placing one paw on both.

Okun did not move immediately. He stayed seated where the gust had shoved him, one hand against the floor as if to steady the world. For a long, suspended second, he simply watched—eyes on Dama, expression wrapped in a slow thoughtfulness.

His mind turned inward. Dama's soulura—opaque, saturated, impossibly thick—had been unlike anything he'd felt in years. Most people's soulura were translucent things, almost colorless and easy to miss, like fog.

Dama's had been the opposite—pure, strong, a color so bright and honest it felt like sunlight pressed into a human form. Okun found himself thinking the boy's soul was the kind they told legends about: fierce, protective and unspoiled by negativity.

And yet, threaded through that shine, right before the eruption, Okun had felt something else.

Malice. Despair. Hatred.

It wasn't Dama, of that there was no question. It had not carried the soft signatures of kindness or will that Okun associated with the boy. Instead, it tasted of rot and darkness—a foreign force that wrenched the honest bell of Dama's aura out of tune.

For a blink, Okun had wondered if the darkness had been part of the child's from the very beginning—but the sensation was all wrong: invasive, parasitic, a scar laid into the soul rather than something grown by the soul itself.

Someone has engraved something into Dama's very being—like some curse.

He rubbed his face once, and the motion seemed to bring the edges of the present back into focus. Miuson was at his elbow before Okun realized someone had come up behind him. The youth's hand was warm and steady as he helped the chief to his feet.

"You okay, Chief?" Miuson asked, voice low and quick.

Okun nodded, the sound small. "I'm fine..." he said before his gaze snapped back to the floor where Dama was still hunched over, breath ragged and eyes blown with terror.

The boy's chest rose and fell; he clutched the place where the dream's spike had pierced. Tears tracked clean lines down his cheeks. Around him, Mumu and Nini stroked and nudged in those soft, insistent ways only the stitched creatures knew how.

Okun's thoughts churned. A wound on a soul could be made by many things—betrayal, neglect, cruelty—but this wound inflicted on Dama wasn't ordinary. It was purposeful, violent. The force he'd caught under his palms had the cold calculus of something that didn't just hurt—it wants to take, and not just stopping at his life.

For a moment, the chief felt the chill of it again down his spine.

He looked from the trembling boy to the pair of toys worrying him and then inward, asking himself with a tightness in his gut. "Who... No, what had done this to Dama? To leave such a mark inside him? Why Dama?"

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Next: (Chapter 93) Training Recoup

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