Meredith had always known about magic. Her family was magic, one of the most powerful mage lines out there. Having lost her parents to all the fighting though, she stayed far away from it, focusing on school and lading a primarily normal life.
Unti...
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"You're saying my father went insane." Mer could barely form the words.
"Yes, Meredith. Like your father, your body accepts dark magic, but unlike him, it also allows for light magic. Without both you could not have healed me. That ability is just the bare bones of what you could achieve. If you can harness dark and light magic, you can surpass your father's strength but not go mad. If anyone finds out that the Aurions have a mage who can use both light and dark magic, it's dangerous for everyone involved. When you blew my arm to tatters, what had you been doing prior?"
Mer's mind was spiraling on all of this information, but the question grounded her enough to focus on a single point. "I was standing in the light. I was looking for my calling like the book said but having no luck. I wanted to feel the sun, but when I did, it was painful."
"That is what I thought." Rush held his hands out in front of him flat, palms down. "I suspect your body is like scales. If they are even, like this, the magic is balanced and stable. If you tilt it." Rush raised one of his hands up. "You may become over saturated with whatever magic energy you are absorbing. In the case of light energy, since it is not harmful to humans it won't burst inside of you, but I imagine it would make you uncomfortable, as you said.
"Did you find your calling?" Rush ran his hand back and forth on the skin of her chin lightly, and she blushed. The contact was gentle and soothing enough that she wasn't getting too upset by all this. O
Her calling had found her. In a way, as Darius Shade had written, it had reached out to her. It had known she was in danger and wanted to save her, like a living force with a will of its own. Without it, she'd be dead.
"I'm pretty sure it's dusk, dawn, or both." Mer tried to turn her head from his grip, his fingers kept hold of her, soft but unyielding. "When I healed you or whatever I did on that acid trip, I saw the light just as it touched the horizon and it coursed through my arms with the darkness."
Rush sat silent again. Why did he have to look so much like a statue when he was thinking?
"You healed me right at dusk. That might be when your magic is most powerful. If you do have scales inside of your body, it would stand to reason that you would fluctuate in how much light and dark energy you could absorb from around you all day. The scales would be even, right at sunrise and sunset.
"That unfortunately means you shouldn't be outside around the peak of any day or the darkest point at night. You would also likely only be able to heal a creature of the dark at either of those two times. Otherwise, you would have too much of either type of magic and it would unravel us."
"Unravel?" Mer asked. It was strange word to use, and Rush flinched.
"We would die, be torn up from the inside by the unstable light magic. It has to be in complete balance to coexist with the darkness and heal one of my kind." Rush paused, and his silence felt too damning as his gaze narrowed. "You realize that means you could do that on purpose, kill a vampire without having to behead them. Just by touching them, you could rip them apart from the inside out."
