Session 19 - Chapter 6: Kindling pt. IV

I begin this entry with the familiar ache behind my left eye; the one that always appears when my pupils learn something important, dangerous, or far too early for children their age. Today’s lesson was never on the schedule. It rarely is, when one teaches this class.   At the beginning of the excursion, I noticed two students absent from the group. Jaxion and Gidget, our most physically imposing child and our most mechanically gifted, had disappeared into the workshop annex. I pretended not to notice at first. Every teacher learns quickly that love in its earliest form behaves like a frightened animal: corner it and it flees; ignore it and it grows bold.   If this is anything like times prior when observing them through the thin brass-paneled walls, I would hear the soft tick-tick of tools being rearranged without purpose. No construction. No destruction. Just togetherness. They did not speak much, from what I could tell. Children in that stage rarely do. They are learning infatuation the way one learns a new alphabet: by feeling its shape long before knowing its names. I wondered, with equal parts fondness and worry, how long they would remain hidden and what courage it would take for them to rejoin the rest of the class.   I continued without them, as teachers must.   Our destination was the Driftwind. A machine so old its intentions had worn smooth like a river stone. Even standing before it I felt the weight of millennium pressing down, humming through its blue-silver ribs and articulated joints. This was no mere vehicle. It was a memory, built by hands that had once known creatures we now call myth. The shape was unmistakable: Dragon.   I have taught long enough to recognize when a child sees something familiar that the rest of us have forgotten. Ildris stiffened the moment he saw the hull. Kiiellien’s hand unconsciously rose to her chest, fingers curling as if grasping a phantom thread. Neither spoke but their silence was heavy with recognition. Were dragons prevalent in the Keepers’ time? Not as symbols. Not as stories. As neighbors, perhaps. As sky-borne facts of life. Ildris’s eyes followed the curvature of the wings with something dangerously close to grief. Kiiellien looked… homesick.   I made a note to myself: Ask later. Gently.   What struck me most about the Driftwind was what it lacked. There were no passenger benches. No observation decks. No places to sit idly and marvel. This machine did not exist to be enjoyed, it existed to be worked. Stations ringed the interior each demanding devotion, attention and intent. The Keepers, it seems, believed that travel itself was a labor and that movement required responsibility, cohesion and teamwork. Its stations were engraved with sigils I had not seen since my undergrad years, an archaic linguistic framework predating even standardized arcane notation. I traced one with my finger and felt the echo of a younger version of myself hunched over dusty tomes, believing knowledge alone could save the world.   How naïve I was.   Jaxion and Gidget eventually rejoined us. They stood just a bit too close. Would not meet each other’s eyes. Both wore expressions of studied neutrality that fooled no one with more than a decade of teaching experience. I wondered briefly and irrelevantly if they had kissed.   The children scattered like sparks in a foundry. Xhoya, Lux, Echo, Jubilee and Silas explored the Driftwind the way students explore a science museum: reverent hands, wide eyes and with questions tumbling over one another. They pressed levers and buttons, read dials without retention and whispered theories to one another as if the secrets themselves would reveal answers to questions they'd not yet formulated. For a moment they were simply children discovering the joy of understanding something vast.   Of course, Jaxion and Echo gravitated toward the brawny station. It was built for strength after all with thick harnesses and the responsibility to be everywhere all at once; it was truly resistance meant to be overcome. Jaxion’s posture shifted immediately, his shoulders squaring as if the machine itself were a challenge to his authority. Echo joined him, less performative but no less capable. Were they friends or were they simply the two most interested in the device? Something I've been asking myself the entire year without answer.   The pilot stations drew the other pair, our second class couple, if one were keeping such tallies. Ildris and Kiiellien took the helm with practiced synchronicity, movements so smooth they bordered on instinct. As the Driftwind lifted, effortlessly roaring like a great exhalation, we rose over the ocean. Miles of black water stretched beneath us broken only by moonlight, distant storm-flares and the occasional flicker of a sea-bound vessel fighting the waves below.   When the two pilots returned to the rest of us, Ildris’s demeanor had changed. What happened in those cockpits? A teacher's mind can only imagine so much but they're too well behaved and too early in their discovery of one another to have done wrong. I won't ask. They won't tell. The class will point and laugh. So is the life of an educator.   Then came the lesson. Unplanned and uncontained but necessary.   Words, I reminded them in multitudes before, have no meaning without emotion, intent and purpose. Gidget spoke first, apologizing awkwardly and haltingly to those she had wronged. She understands guilt the way a child understands gravity: she feels its pull but does not yet know how to move within it. Her peers listened, uncertain whether to believe her sincerity.   Echo followed, as he so often does, bridging gaps others do not even see. He spoke of perspectives. Of how everyone could be right at the same time. Of how no one had been wrong. He pointed out that Jaxion had been willing to walk away entirely and no one had noticed. That, I think, hurt Jaxion more than anything else said the day prior.   Gidget admitted there was no trust and Echo agreed, but added that trust cannot exist where there is no choice. They were placed together. Assigned. That is not the same as believing in one another. I took that to heart knowing my assignment of their togetherness was choice but with limited options, I chose the best from what I saw they could be, not necessarily what they are now. I've been at this for a long time children and while it might be impossible at this age, one day you'll reflect on old incomprehensible's lessons and realize the foundation they built for your inevitable later success.   Then Jaxion spoke. His words were sharp; he uses fear as a tool, death as inevitability and war as justification. What happened to him, I wondered in reserved silence. Lux, he said, should be ruled by fear. The cube would kill them all otherwise. He spoke of orders, of command structures and leadership. I saw Lux shrink inwardly. I marked it with a quiet ache. In time, perhaps throughout this school year he would come to learn that leadership is a trait that is a earned by example and trust. Good leaders are built, not born.   Silas disagreed calmly and precisely, like always. Teamwork, he said, had saved them before. Echo agreed a both acknowledged Xhoya’s brilliance. Children rarely say such things aloud. It mattered that they did, I saw her eyes glow but her lips remain pursed; she'd already spoken her words for the trip and those who chose to take them already did.   Echo continued reminding that plans don’t survive first contact. Jaxion bristled. They were not big enough to act like a military unit, Echo argued. With better communication, Jaxion countered, they could have been.   Kiiellien spoke at last in her soft and devastating manner. Leaders, she said, must come to join their weakest member to build them up together. She accused Jaxion of commanding civilians as if they were soldiers and belittling them while they stood behind him, frightened but willing. I saw it too but said nothing. Jaxion has a habit of looking forward, never aware of his peripheral and the support that flanks him. I pondered again what had happened to him to block his periphery. One day, it will blindside him.   Echo asked him to stop ordering him around. I couldn't have been more proud of Echo this day. While I don't participate in the bully-theory, today I saw the meek stand as tall as the eager. Silas, always looking for common ground proposed situational leadership where skills and talents the situation call for would be prioritized. Truly the ideals of a leader, recognizing that everyone has strengths and weaknesses. I smiled.   Somehow this encouraged Jaxion to reaffirm his oath: it was to Beaumont. Not the agency who battered and bruised him nor its leaders with their own agenda. Children often doesn't comprehend the complexity of the world around them but their discovery of it sparks brilliance and wonder, excitement and intrigue into its offerings. What I heard Jaxion say today was very different than the words that left his mouth. His oath is to Monokomana.   And Monokomana, is bleeding. Hemorrhaging. Dying.   The others asked for his loyalty to them. He could not give it. Not yet. Perhaps he knows his loyalty is never going to be to peers, to man or mortals but the land that he bleeds upon. He's waking up and one day we'll all find that patch of ownership colored in the BRN palette intentionally absent from his shirt.   I wanted to end the lesson there. Wrap it neatly. Assign reflection essays. But education rarely allows such luxury.   We had forgotten the cube. The Gazelle had not. Danger erupted with no warning, as it always does. I shouted positions, not as an instructor but as something older. Something desperate. Jubilee and I at the mouth weapons. Echo and Jaxion as shields. Lux and Xhoya at the tail and Gidget and Silas to the wings.   They listened. Gods help me, they listened. I'm so proud of you all but time, I'm afraid, is a cruel mistress who doesn't afford me even a moment to tell you.   Xhoya realized it first: We were not prey, we were predators. We fought like one too, like an eagle with talons and wings and fury. The Gazelle struck hard, Echo and Jaxion nearly fractured under the blow. But we held on. Barely.   I screamed at them to work together, they did.   The tail wrapped. The wings harried. The mouth struck. The enemy faltered. We flung it into the ocean and fled leaving a screaming trail of ancient magic in our wake, our hearts collectively pounding. Whatever submersible craft the discombobulated Gazelle found   We found land and the cube was secured and the danger delayed.For now. We returned to the classroom older, heavier and quieter.   Tomorrow we will talk about conflict resolution. About how words can wound and how they can mean nothing at all. About trust. About leadership. About why some lessons cannot wait for adulthood.   They are only children. But today they learned like veterans.   And I am so very, terribly proud of them.