Chapter 16: Timeless Training
The pole wasn’t just cold. It was a solid rod of captured midnight, leaching the warmth from his hands and thighs with a deliberate, invasive chill. Every time he slid down, it felt less like movement and more like being consumed.
“Point your toe, Ethan! Think of it as an exclamation point at the end of a very desperate sentence!” Zephyr clapped from a plush velvet chaise that hadn’t been there a moment before. They were nibbling on grapes that looked suspiciously like polished onyx.
Ethan’s silk stockings, mended for the forty-eighth time by Madame Evangeline’s needle-thin magic, whispered against the chrome as he sank to the floor. His thighs screamed. “I can’t.” The words came out as a dry rasp. “My body doesn’t… bend this way. It’s a moral issue.”
A dry chuckle, like bones rattling in a drawer, came from the corner. Madame Evangeline sat perfectly still in a high-backed chair, Bartholomew a loaf of shadow in her lap. Her eyes, deep and impossibly old, tracked his every tremor. “Your body will do what the story requires of it, sweetling. The flesh is the most agreeable of all the plot devices. It complains, but it adapts.”
“See?” Zephyr popped another black grape. “It’s a growth journey! Literally! Your ligaments are getting a whole new perspective.”
Ethan pushed himself up, his palms stinging. The mirror across the room showed a flickering image: him, but sharper. The lines of the body in the reflection were cleaner, the arch of the back more pronounced, even as his real-self slouched in a heap of aching limbs and torn silk. It was watching him, that other-Ethan. Waiting for him to catch up.
“Why is this necessary?” he asked, not for the first time.
Madame Evangeline sighed, a sound of infinite patience worn thin. “The prophecy isn’t a suggestion scrawled on a diner napkin, boy. It is an architectural blueprint. The Grand Re-Styling demands a specific foundation. Strength, yes. Flexibility, certainly. But mostly, it requires the obliteration of a certain… residue.”
“Residue?”
“The psychic grime of your old life,” Zephyr offered cheerfully. “The patina of spilled oat milk and passive-aggressive notes from your landlord. It clogs the spiritual pores. This,” they gestured grandly at the pole, the velvet, the impossible room, “is a deep exfoliation.”
Ethan thought of his bedroom, the half-unpacked boxes, the ghost-scent of lavender from the stranger who’d started all this. It seemed as distant as a childhood memory. Another life. The dragon on his wall, half-peeled, felt like a cheap sticker compared to the visceral reality of the burn in his muscles.
“Again,” Madame Evangeline commanded.
He stood. The routine was searing itself into his neural pathways: approach, grip, lift, hook, arch, fall. A brutal, repetitive sonnet. This time, as he swung his leg, the pole shifted. Not much. Just a subtle undulation, like the spine of a great beast stirring in its sleep.
He faltered, his grip slipping. Instead of the controlled slide to the floor, he came down hard, one ankle twisting beneath him. A hot lance of pain shot up his leg. He bit back a yelp, swallowing it into a sharp gasp.
“Ooh, a spontaneous variable!” Zephyr leaned forward, intrigued.
Madame Evangeline didn’t move. “The Void is responding. It tests the integrity of the form. Can you hold the shape when the foundation moves?”
Tears of frustration and pain prickled behind his eyes. He looked at his reflection. The other-Ethan held a perfect pose, one leg extended, head thrown back in a silent laugh, utterly unfazed by the shifting ground. A perfect, beautiful lie.
He wanted to scream. To quit.