"And pour your chaos energy into the sword. And let warn you, it is one hungry beast."
Jolthar was not sure of what she was saying, but he moved anyway.
The mont Jolthar's fingers closed around the grip, he understood why she had warned him. The sword was indeed like a thirsty beast—it imdiately began drawing upon his chaos energy, not violently but with an inexorable hunger that seed bottomless.
Within seconds, he felt a significant drain on his power.
"Control it," Ekatarina instructed. "Do not simply feed it—direct the flow. Make it serve your will, not the reverse."
Gritting his teeth, Jolthar tried to follow her instruction.
Instead of allowing the sword to draw freely upon his chaos energy, he attempted to regulate the flow, feeding it only what he chose to give. The weapon resisted, pulling harder, but gradually he managed to establish a balance.
"Better," Ekatarina acknowledged. "Now, channel your chaos through the blade. Let it beco an extension of your will."
Jolthar focused, directing his violet energy through the sword. The blade responded imdiately, flaring with brilliant light as chaos energy ran along its edges. But controlling the flow while wielding the weapon proved far more difficult than he had expected. The sword amplified his power, but it also amplified his mistakes—any montary loss of concentration resulted in wild fluctuations of energy.
After several minutes of practice, he felt confident enough to attempt more complex manipulations. He shaped the chaos energy into a cutting edge that extended beyond the physical blade and then used it to slice through several of the smaller crystal formations.
"Impressive," Ekatarina said. "Most young teen elves require days to achieve even basic competence with a chaos-born weapon."
"Now, let tell you a few things. You got your chaos from wielding the sword of your ancestor; it wasn't your own. We elves draw the chaos from our hearts, and it is easy to control after certain training, but you are different. You understand that, right?"
Jolthar nodded. He also knew that. From using the sword of chaosbane, Horgath, that's where he got his hands on Chaos. And it was completely different to his sword.
Ekatarina inhaled and continued, "I can tell the reason why you ca to sort us. You have the other two distinct energies inside, which are colliding with the chaos."
Jolthar nodded; there was no point in lying to her now.
"So, if you want to overco that, you need to practise chaos using the chaos sword. It will help you grow faster this way."
Jolthar was about to respond when she gestured toward the mountain face behind the waterfall—a sheer cliff of black stone that rose hundreds of feet into the violet-hazed sky.
"Now," she said, "use the sword to split the mountain."
Jolthar stared at her, certain he had misheard. "I'm sorry, what?"
"Split the mountain," she repeated calmly. "Cut through the stone with chaos-enhanced strikes. Divide the peak in two."
She added, "And it is not just any mountain but chaos-filled within every stone of the mountain."
Jolthar remained silent for a mont and then said, "I don't think it's possible with the amount of chaos I have now."
"It is within your capabilities," Ekatarina interrupted. "The question is not whether you have sufficient power but whether you understand how to use it."
She moved closer to him, her silver-flecked eyes intense. "Chaos is not about brute force, Jolthar. It is about finding the point where change is inevitable and applying the minimal pressure necessary to trigger that change. Every mountain, no matter how solid it appears, has fault lines—places where the stone yearns to part. Your task is to find those lines and give the mountain permission to do what it already wishes to do."
Jolthar looked from her to the imposing cliff face. The stone appeared solid and uniform, without any obvious weak points. "How do I find these fault lines?"
"Not with your eyes," she said. "With your chaos sense. Let the energy within you resonate with the potential energy trapped within the stone. Feel for the places where reality is thinnest, where change requires the least effort."
Closing his eyes, Jolthar extended his awareness beyond himself, reaching out with his chaos-enhanced senses. At first, he perceived only the solid mass of stone—ancient, compressed, seemingly immutable. But as he deepened his focus, following Ekatarina's guidance, he began to detect subtle variations in the mountain's structure.
There—a hairline fracture running vertically through the stone, invisible to the naked eye but singing with potential energy.
And there—a seam where two different types of rock t, their junction point a place of natural weakness.
Dozens of such flaws revealed themselves to his enhanced perception, a network of vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited.
"I can sense them," he said, opening his eyes. "But how do I—"
"Trust the sword," Ekatarina said simply. "And trust yourself. You are chaos incarnate, Jolthar. This mountain is rely matter waiting to be reshaped."
Taking a deep breath, Jolthar raised Vorthak above his head. He let his chaos energy flow through the blade, but this ti he didn't try to force it into a particular shape.
Instead, he allowed it to find its own path, following the lines of potential he had sensed within the stone.
The sword began to sing—a high, crystal note that seed to harmonise with the mountain itself. Power built along its edge, not the raw, overwhelming force he had expected, but sothing more refined, more purposeful.
With a shout that was part battle cry and part prayer, Jolthar brought the sword down in a vertical strike aid at the cliff face.
There was no outburst of any power. He couldn't exert the force, even to scratch the mountain surface.
He looked at Ekaterina, and she chuckled.
"Do you think it's easy to get a pass on your first try? Practice as long as you want, and we will leave this mountain after you have done so."
So Jolthar started the practice; he repeated what she said and did it several tis, but he couldn't quite exert the force to split the mountain.
A few hours passed in the blink of an eye, and Ekatarina stood nearby, with her hands folded, grinning while watching Jolthar.
He needs to feed the sword, and then he needs to pull the strong force to split the mountain. It was a difficult task; even their clan children had a hard ti performing it.
Around the evening hours, Jolthar stopped swinging the blade and focused his mind on the chaos inside him.
He closed his eyes and gripped the blade tightly. He released the chaos again; this ti, it seed like it was flowing with discipline. Then he struck the sword.
He never touched the stone. The chaos energy released by the blade leaped across the intervening space, following the fault lines he had sensed, spreading through the mountain's structure like lightning through a storm cloud.
For a mont, nothing seed to happen.
Then, with a sound like the world breaking, the mountain began to split.
The fracture started as a hairline crack at the point where his strike had been aid, but it spread with increasing speed, racing up the cliff face and down into the depths below. Stone groaned and shifted as the mountain's internal structure rearranged itself, following the new paths of possibility Jolthar's chaos had opened.
Within minutes, where once there had been a single peak, now there were two—separated by a chasm perhaps twenty feet wide that ran from base to summit. The waterfall, rather than being disrupted, now cascaded down the newly created cliff faces on both sides, its flow sohow doubled by the mountain's division.
Jolthar stared in shock at what he had accomplished. "I... I actually did it."
"You did," Ekatarina confird, and there was sothing in her voice he hadn't heard before—not just approval, but genuine amazent.
"And in doing so, you have demonstrated understanding of chaos that takes most of our people decades to develop."
The sword in his hands had grown quiet, its hunger temporarily sated by the massive working. But Jolthar could feel that the weapon had changed sohow, bonding more deeply with his chaos energy. It was no longer simply a tool he wielded but an extension of his own power.
"This changes things," Ekatarina murmured, studying both him and the split mountain with equal intensity.
Jolthar lowered the sword, feeling suddenly exhausted despite the exhilaration of success. "What happens now?"
"Now," she said, "Continue doing what you did just now, but don't exert the force into an attack. Learn it, analyse it and try to understand what you did just now." She gestured toward the divided peak.
As she stopped talking, Jolthar couldn't shake the feeling that sothing inside of him had grown profoundly. He was suppressing his other two energies, all while focusing on the chaos. He hadn't used any of the abilities of voidwrath or Beast Power. He solely depended on the chaos and achieved this feat.
Ekatarina turned to the now divided mountain, her eyes filled with wonder and peaked amusent, and she looked at Jolthar, her interest in him turned into more of a passion now.
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