The explanation took quite a while, especially trying to make her understand their reason for coming all the way.
In the end, they got her to understand it, well, some of it at least. They told her what they needed to, and kept the rest of the information for when things aligned well enough.
She agreed to learn from Seraphine, and to help them if she can pull it off, which gave them hope that their journey wasnt worthless
"Okay, then. Seems like I will leave you be. If there is any problem, please do well to inform me." She glanced at them, her gaze lingering on Mira for a while longer before averting.
Lucius nodded as she closed the door behind her. She seemed to be off to make sure the reconstructions were going smoothly.
After she left, they cleared space at Mira’s table.
Seraphine took the chair across from her and set three items between them, a small candle from the shelf near the door, a cup of water from the jug on the windowsill, and one of Cophey’s ritual focusing crystals from the component pack.
She arranged them without explanation, her movements unhurried, and Mira watched each one get placed with the attention of someone cataloguing a methodology they hadn’t encountered before.
Valeria leaned against the far wall with her arms crossed. Lucius stayed near the door and said nothing.
Seraphine looked at Mira.
"I’m not going to ask you to do anything specific," she said. "I want you to look at the candle flame and tell me what happens."
Mira looked at the candle. "What should happen?"
"I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m asking you to tell me."
Mira pushed her glasses up and looked at the flame.
A minute passed. The candle burned with its ordinary steadiness, the flame moving slightly in the air currents of the small room.
Outside, wind came off the mountain and found the gaps in the building’s old timber frame and moved through them quietly.
"Nothing," Mira said. "Just the flame."
"Keep looking."
Another minute. Mira’s brow drew together slightly, not in concentration exactly, in the particular way of someone listening for a sound they aren’t sure is there.
Then her eyes changed.
Just a subtle shift in focus, the pupils adjusting to something that wasn’t in the room, the gaze going through the candle rather than at it.
She was somewhere else for approximately four seconds.
Then she blinked and was back, and pushed her glasses up, and looked at Seraphine with an expression caught between startled and uncertain.
"There was a road," she said. "Northwest. Three people walking it." She stopped. "Was that — did I do that?"
"Describe the road," Seraphine said.
"It was full of dirt, wide enough for a cart. Hills on both sides." She paused. "There was a storm above the hills."
Seraphine looked at her steadily. "That’s the road we came in on. The storm above the Stormbreak range."
Mira stared at the candle.
"You saw it without knowing that’s what you were doing," Seraphine said. "You’ve been doing that your whole life. The dreams, the fragments when you’re awake — all of it is the same ability operating without any structure around it."
"I thought I was going mad," Mira said.
"You weren’t." Seraphine picked up the focusing crystal and held it out. "Hold this and look at the water in the cup. Don’t try to see anything. Just hold it and look."
Mira took the crystal and looked at the cup.
This time it took thirty seconds.
The shift in her focus came faster than before, the ability recognizing something in the crystal’s resonance and responding to it the way a compass needle responds to north.
She was gone for longer this time. Seven seconds, maybe eight. When she came back her face was pale and her hands were unsteady and she set the crystal down on the table carefully.
"A room," she said. "Somewhere cold with stone walls. There were — I couldn’t see clearly. Shapes. People, maybe."
"Could you hold it?"
"No. It slipped." She pressed her lips together. "I couldn’t make it stay."
Seraphine nodded. She took the crystal back and looked at it for a moment, then at Mira. Then she looked at Lucius over her shoulder.
"Raw talent," she said. "Genuine. The ability is there and it’s responsive." She turned the crystal in her fingers once.
"But there’s no structure to it. No trained pathways, no control mechanism, nothing holding it open or keeping it stable." She set the crystal down. "She’s been operating on instinct her entire life and instinct only takes it so far."
"Can she learn?" Lucius asked.
"Yes." No hesitation. "The responsiveness is already there, most trained seers spend months just trying to access what she accessed in thirty seconds with a focusing crystal she’s never held before."
Seraphine looked at Mira, who was sitting very still and listening to herself being discussed with the expression of someone who had always suspected something about themselves and was now having it confirmed by a stranger.
"But learning to hold it, to direct it, to go looking for something specific and actually find it—" She paused. "That takes time. Months, maybe longer."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Mira looked at the cup of water. Then at the crystal, then at her own hands on the table.
"No one has ever said it was real before," she said. Not to anyone in particular..
Seraphine looked at her. "It’s real."
Mira was quiet for another moment. Then she pushed her glasses up.
Lucius pulled his chair forward and sat down at the table properly for the first time since they’d come through the door.
"Then we train her," he said.
Seraphine looked at him, then at Mira.
Mira looked at the crystal on the table between them, and the candle still burning beside it, and the cup of water that had shown her a cold stone room full of shapes she couldn’t quite hold.
She reached out and picked the crystal back up.
"Okay," she said. "Show me how."