When Leof came through the entrance, she stopped.

She stood in the courtyard entrance and looked at everything in it before she moved forward.

The previous wreckage caused by Hild and Mod.

And the garden, Beadu’s garden, significantly taller than it had been before the afternoon began, the vine extended two feet across the courtyard stone still pointing toward the timber target at the far wall, the two flowers sprung open, the herbs taller and bent sideways at their tops.

Leof looked at all of this for a moment.

Then she looked at Beorn and Aestrith.

"Was all of that from the others?" she said.

"Correct," Beorn said.

She looked at the courtyard for another moment, taking stock of it patiently, thorough, giving herself the time.

Then she moved forward, toward the garden, where the vine shoot began.

Aestrith moved over to Leof, stopping a few feet back from the garden, between the girl and the wall.

Beorn continue at his position on the courtyard and checked the ledger.

"Leof, we’ll be doing this a bit differently than the others." he said.

He glanced at Aestrith. "They had awakened their powers, even if suppressed, while yours hasn’t come through yet. We’re going to try to help you awaken naturally before it starts to make your sick like Mab and we have no choice left."

Leof looked at him plainly and waited.

"Aestrith is going to keep a sort of shell around where you’re standing.

He explained, "So don’t worry about hurting us or breaking something. She will contain any overflow."

Aestrith said, "It won’t hurt you either."

Her gaze stayed on Leof.

"There’s no need to be afraid. Just let it out."

Leof did not ask how that worked, she simple turned back toward the garden and let her arms hang at her sides.

The gravity shell formed.

Beorn was outside the boundary and felt its pressure pass over his position, the courtyard denser through the gravitational influence.

Outside the shell, it was just a passable pressure, easily ignorable.

On Leof’s side, although he wasn’t quite able to see it, he had enough familiarity with Aestrith’s powers by then to notice how they affected the world. She wasn’t quite increasing the gravity in the shell, but having it ready to throttle and suffocate any unstable power.

Beorn watched through it.

Leof stood near with a odd sort of stiffness patience, but there was something under the patience now that had more tension.

She was looking at the vine.

"Try it," Aestrith said.

Nothing happened for a dozen seconds.

Beorn had seen this from the previous sessions, the suppression-and-rust indication of a power that had been suppressed finding the first attempt to come back up.

But this was different from the others.

Hild, Mod and Beadu had powers that were awakened and blocked.

The friction was in the suppression.

Leof’s power had existed without ever finding a way to express itself.

When she reached for it, there was no direction waiting for her to use.

Then there was.

The vine Beadu had grown turned brown from its pointed tip inward, the green of it rolling back toward the garden the way fire spreads along fuel that has been laid out ahead of it.

The end of the vine that had been pointing at the timber target pulled back, tightened and went dry in under three seconds, leaf after leaf curling and going paper-yellow before going brown, the whole vegetation contracting from two feet of living growth into something thin and withered.

One of the two open flowers closed.

The petals drew inward and the blossom pulled itself backward toward a bud state before stopping somewhere between open and closed, at a point that was not quite either.

And at Leof’s feet, one of the stone fragments from Hild’s session crumbled at its edges.

The surface went rougher, the cut stone taking on the texture of something that had been outside in rain and cold for decades, except all at once in less time than it took to breathe, the edges going to powder where they had been sharp.

It lasted four seconds.

Aestrith kept the shell throughout.

Leof’s power pressed against the gravity boundary, and it pressed differently from anything else she had ever felt from inside her own field.

She let it come down when the flare stopped and turned to Beorn. "That was odd... her power is more abstract and formless for me than the others."

Beorn was already writing.

He had watched the vine, the flower, the stone fragment.

And he watched Leof.

She was still looking at the vine.

"Did you know which way it was going? "Older or younger?" He asked.

"There was nothing like that," she said. "I just felt it go."

He wrote that.

The tiredness on Leof was different from what it had been on the others. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

She had held the powers for a long time and then released it briefly, not the cost of hard work but the way a person goes stiff for a moment when they set down a pack they have been carrying for hours, and the body recognizes before the mind does that the weight is gone.

Although she was still standing, the slack of her shoulders and trembling of her legs were starting to become obvious.

Beorn set that aside and considered Aestrith’s gravity shell. The concept of the technique itself was already outside known theory, but it had been a reliable method to facilitate a more organic awakening.

Leof’s power either affected the composition or materials or elements, in a regression or development through time. Beorn put a question mark next to ’time’ in the ledger.

The application categories he had considered did not fit yet, as he had no accurate idea how the power over the state of physical matter could be used with only this attempt.

He noted it needed more testing sessions. He made conclusions from evidence only, and he did not have enough yet.

"Thank you," he said to Leof. "You can go rest. When you go back, send Mab."

She didn’t move yet. The little girl still stared at the vine.

The plant Beadu had grown, now brown, dry and withered, pulled back into something dead and curled.

"I didn’t really aim at it," she said. "I didn’t know it would be that."

A subtle tremor existed underneath her voice.

"I don’t want to kill things..."

Aestrith looked at her across the courtyard.

She did not comfort the girl, because it was not time for it yet.

Leof walked out.