**Chapter 8: Calista's Calling**
"Stay still, you stubborn mule!" Calista chided, though her tone held no real bite.
The young elf maid frowned in concentration, slender fingers glowing with verdant energy. She carefully traced the ethereal sigils over Aleya's feverish brow, channeling her innate healing magic.
Aelar watched the process with silent apprehension from a corner of their ramshackle dwelling. His newly awakened firemana smoldered within, a sensation both wondrous and unsettling. After the recent revelations and burdens thrust upon his narrow shoulders, focusing on this simple task helped ground him.
As Calista's sylvan aura washed over his ailing mother, Aleya's pained grimace eased slightly. The harsh, racking coughs that had been tormenting her for days slowly subsided. Aelar allowed himself a flicker of hope...until Calista pulled back with a troubled expression.
"I've eased her discomfort," the elven girl said. Her youthful features appeared briefly older than her fourteen years. "But this wasting sickness clings stubbornly. It will take more than my novice abilities to purge fully."
Aelar felt his insides twist at her grim diagnosis. He knew with cold certainty what it meant - his mother's wretched existence would soon peter out. Like so many of the wretched unfortunates inhabiting the noisome slums, she would simply waste away in abject agony while the privileged elite looked on in disgust.
His hands clenched at his sides, unbidden wisps of smokeless flame flickering briefly across his knuckles. Perhaps he could...no. The memory of Praxis's dire warnings about the ruinous potential of his newfound flamemana held him back.
With visible effort, Aelar released the pent frustration in a ragged exhalation. There would be a reckoning one day for the cruelties the upper crust visited upon the suffering masses. But lashing out now before gaining mastery proved nothing.
"Thank you for trying, Calista," he said, mustering a tremulous smile for his friend. "Your efforts mean more than you know."
The elf girl regarded him steadily, her forest-green eyes gleaming with empathy and fondness. They'd first encountered one another amid the teeming refugee camps on the city outskirts after a recent brush war with the southern provinces. Aleya had been one of the displaced refugees scraping together a bare existence under martial rule.
It was there the unlikely duo struck up their fateful bond over Calista's naive inquisitiveness about the tribulations of the downtrodden castes. Though Aelar had been a hardened urchin from birth, something about the young elf's inquisitive kindness touched his calloused heart. And Calista, by contrast, had found herself increasingly enchanted by the boy's fierce yet melancholic spirit.
Despite their vastly divergent origins, the pair remained close once Calista's noble family eventually returned to the capital's patrician enclaves. She never judged Aelar for his squalid circumstances, slipping away every few days to secretly share teachings, stories or warm camaraderie.
Now, with Aleya's decline imminent and Aelar's miraculous awakening, their friendship felt poised at a precipice neither quite grasped. The elven maid reached out, lightly clasping his hand in a gentle squeeze.
"This burdens you terribly, doesn't it?" Calista murmured. "Far more than your young eyes should ever have witnessed."
Aelar swallowed hard and gave a jerky nod, all his earlier bravado crumbling at her tender compassion. Tears stung his eyes, blurring his vision before he ruthlessly blinked them away. He was uncommonly blessed to call this perceptive noblewoman friend, a kindred spirit despite their disparate stations.
"My awakening has...altered my perspectives greatly these past few days," he admitted in a hushed tone laced with lingering awe. "I've been shown flashes of wider cosmic mysteries and sagely tutelage beyond anything I dared dream."
Unconsciously, his thumb traced the pulsing azure cipher etched over his heart—Luminaria's first "baptismal" marking sealing his soul to the transcendent path blazed before him. Calista's keen gaze instantly locked onto the arcane symbol, her eyes widening slightly.
"What...What did they call you?" she asked, equally hushed. "Those two strangers who've visited then vanished like ephemeral hallucinations?"
Aelar hesitated a beat before replying in all solemnity: "Luminaria. And Praxis. Emissaries from..." He trailed off, uncertain how to even articulate the enormity of the cosmic realms and incarnated celestial forces he'd briefly glimpsed.
If anyone could begin to countenance such revelations, though, it was Calista with her elven mysticism and prodigious grasp of the arcane already. So perhaps—
"You must tell me everything that has transpired, Aelar," she urged in tones torn between anticipation and trepidation. "I can sense cosmic undercurrents stirring around you unlike anything I've witnessed before. Speak plainly—what destiny burns within your awakened flame?"
Their gazes locked for a suspended moment, two kindred spirits hovering on that profound threshold. Then Aelar released a shuddering sigh and leaned forward, the dam of secrecy within his soul fracturing under their bond's weight.
For the next candlemark, he spoke in hushed yet impassioned whispers recounting every auspicious terror and humbling revelation that had so recently shaken his world. Aelar omitted no detail from his awakening's catalyzing catalyst to Luminaria's sobering revelations of his blazing fluremana core's true nature and import.
Throughout it all, Calista remained utterly silent and rapt, absorbing each portentous word and nuance with an elven sorcerer's uncanny perception and insight. When Aelar's recounting finally tapered off with Luminaria's promise of further tutelage, the young maid's face glowed with something almost akin to...beatific reverence.
"By the ancient roots and standing megaliths..." She exhaled an exuberant laugh rich with profound wonder and delight. "I knew you carried spirit and fire like no other wretch of these slums, Aelar. But to be the manifest rebirth of a Celestial Flamemana Core? Such is the stuff of legends even the greatest archmages of my people would scarcely fathom beyond sheerest fable!"
Aelar blinked, momentarily taken aback by her rapturous reaction and unabashed awe. Clearly Calista not only grasped the import of his unprecedented awakening, she positively revered it to some degree. An odd warmth blossomed in his breast, loosening the coil of dread that had kept him awake these past nights.
"You...truly believe it then?" he asked, unable to keep wonder from tingeing his own voice. "That I've been marked for paths of such cosmic gravity...despite my dismal upbringing and station?"
Calista reached out and grasped his hands anew, squeezing them with heartfelt ardor. For once, her large elvish eyes held no pity or melancholy for his tribulations, only exhilarated conviction.
"Believe it?" She practically laughed again with an elfchild's giddy glee." I revere the forces that let me behold the miracle!"