"Exactly," Alaric replied. "To find the light, you must first survive the Nigredo —the blackness of your own shadows. Now, stir the coals. Not to melt the metal, but to burn away the 'you' that is afraid of the dark."

Elara reached out, her finger hovering over a symbol of a dying phoenix. "Death and rebirth," she whispered.

As the flames turned a vivid, impossible violet, Elara realized the workshop wasn't a laboratory; it was an altar. And the experiment wasn't what was in the flask—it was her.

Young Elara knelt before the Great Hearth, her eyes tracing the etched diagram on the floor—a square inside a circle, inside a triangle. To the uninitiated, it was geometry. To Alaric, it was the map of the soul.