Lia was seven when the real training began.
Not games. Not play-fights. Training.
Ada was the first to push her. Cold mornings in the frostbitten clearing behind the safehouse, wooden dummies lined up like ghosts.
"You don't get to be afraid," Ada told her one morning. "Because one day, fear gets someone you love killed."
You didn't always agree with Ada's edge. You brought the balance—laughter during stretches, warm stew waiting after bruised knuckles and scraped knees.
But Lia didn't shy away from the pressure. She absorbed it.
By ten, she could take down a grown man twice her size with nothing but momentum and instinct.
By eleven, she could control the sparks in her palms—violet now, constant and terrifying in their potential.
But one night, she cracked.
She was crying in the barn after a failed exercise, hands shaking, the air around her flickering with static.
"I don't want to be a weapon," she whispered.
You sat beside her in the hay. "Then don't be. Be a shield. Be a light. Be whatever you choose."
She looked up at you, hope buried beneath the fear.
"You and Mom… do you ever get scared?"
"All the time," you said. "But we move anyway. That's the difference."
And she nodded.
And something in her changed.
Not just her power.
Her purpose.