The Cursed Alpha's Substitute Bride

It was the day for my first lesson.

I didn't know what to expect since I had never done this before.

I met with Aldric at the Corridor and proceeded to the training grounds. Ready or not.

Aldric's training room was not what I expected.

It was underground and accessed through a narrow stairwell behind a bookshelf in the lower east wing that I would never have found without being shown.

The room itself was circular, stone-walled, old enough that the rock had a different quality than the estate above it. Older. Deliberate. The kind of space that had been built for a specific purpose a very long time ago and had been waiting for that ever since.

Runes carved into the floor. Not decorative ones but functional ones, their lines still faintly alive with something I could feel in my blood the moment I stepped onto them.

A single candle in the center of the room, unlit.

Aldric stood beside it with his ancient silver eyes and the particular patience of someone who had been waiting for this moment for eleven years.

"Don't try to do anything," he commanded, before I could speak. "Don't reach for it. Don't push. The first lesson is simply awareness. You've been carrying this ability your entire life without knowing it. Your body already knows what it is. Your mind is the problem."

I looked confused for a moment. "My mind?"

"You were told for nineteen years that you had nothing," he replied. "That instruction goes deep. Before you can use what you are, you have to stop believing what they told you. Those are not the same speed."

He gestured to the floor. I sat cross-legged on the runes and felt them hum against the back of my thighs. Warm, not unpleasant, the feeling of something very old recognizing something it had been designed to interact with.

"Close your eyes. Don't do anything. Just feel what's already there." He instructed.

I closed my eyes.

Silence. Cold stone. The faint hum of old runes. My own breathing, which I made slow

deliberately.

And then underneath all of it, so subtle I had been walking past it for nineteen years

without recognizing it for what it was; something.

Not heat. Not light. Something more fundamental than either.

A current, running through me the way blood ran, in a rhythm slightly offset from my heartbeat. A second pulse.

Patient. Contained. Vast in the way that deep water was vast; not loud, not aggressive,

just present in a way that suggested tremendous depth beneath the surface.

It had always been there.

I opened my eyes. Aldric was watching me already. The glance of a straightforward uncomplicated pride of a teacher seeing a student understand something important.

"You felt it, didn't you?" He asked.

"It's been there my whole life," I replied.

My voice came out differently than I expected. Quieter. Certain.

"Yes," he said. "Now - the candle."He gestured to the unlit candle in the center of the room. I looked at it.

"Don't try to light it. The candle has a minor dark enchantment on it - a lock. Your ability

interacts with dark magic, not light. Don't push power at it. Just reach toward it with

what you felt. The current. Let it ask a question of the lock."

I nodded to his request. Then I stared at the candle. Breathed. Found the current again - easier this time, now that I knew what I was looking for.

Reached.

The candle did nothing for a long moment. Then the lock on it - a tiny knot of dark magic

I could now feel the way you felt a knot in a muscle loosened. Just slightly. Just the

edges.

The flame lit. Small. Steady.

I stared at it. I had the expression of what you would describe as mesmerized.

Aldric nodded. But in the reflection of the flame I could see his face and it had an expression I had never expected from this old careful man.

He was trying very hard not to cry.

The first training was over and so we headed back.

Caius was waiting outside the stairwell when I came up. I stopped and glanced at him in confusion

He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, the curse markings visible at his collar, and he was looking right back at me with an expression I was beginning to be able to read despite his best efforts to prevent it.

"How did it go?" He asked carefully.

"I lit a candle," I replied.

A pause. His face changed slightly. Barely noticeable.

"That's... significant?" He asked.

"Aldric seemed to think so," I said. "He also looked like he hadn't expected me to manage it on the first try."

Caius looked at me for a moment. Then he said something I did not expect.

"Your father is an idiot" he said with an angry look. And then he walked away down the corridor.

I stood at hidden stairwell and felt completely confused. I went blank. That was so unfamiliar it took me a full minute to identify it. To try to understand the situation at hand.

Someone had defended me. For what seemed like the first time in my life. Quietly, matter-of-factly, as though it required no particular effort because it was simply true.

I did not know what to do with that. I smiled and then I collected it carefully, like Pip's bread, and put it somewhere I would not lose it.