Second Light

Its funny, really. I studied takton for my whole life, hands on, and through the books. Even without my own, Only now can I kinda make sense of it now.

She let the thought sit for a while, the speed of her emotional flip caused time to slow dramatically. Probably the discontinuance of adrenaline. But then something clicked—not metaphorically. A literal click, deep in her skull. Her next breath came wrong. Panicked, offset, and out of rhythm. Like her body had skipped a step and the rest was catching up. 

Elara's anxiety began to catch up to her. She was having a palpitation.

She imagined this is what people feel like after being resuscitated.

My whole body feels like it just got hit with lightning.

Her memory jumped, unprompted. The dampsteel cuffs. She hadn't thought about them since meeting Truth. The pressure they gave off—it didn't hurt much at all. But it had done something. Like they were trying to shut off a switch she absolutely didn't have.

Tfh, a 'kynenn' with no takton.

Back then she thought it was her imagination. But now that she actually paid attention it wasn't. That foreign buzz, the way it threaded down her spine

A sound cracked nearby—someone laughing. Callum? One of the others? She couldn't tell. It didn't matter. In preparation for what was upcoming, Elara's life flashed before her eyes. Every memory she ever had was playing in totality.

Another memory surfaced. From the Foundation, years ago. She found her nose buried in a book about Takton conduction fields, trying to understand how she could manifest what she'd hoped… was her Tenkai. It compared takton pulses to waveforms. Said each Kynenn had a natural frequency, like a personal heartbeat of energy.

That idea stuck with her—Takton as rhythm. Not power, not fire, or water. Rhythm. So she picked up a second book. One on physics. Wave interference. She didn't even make it halfway through.

It was mathy, stiff—talking about sine waves and phase angles and something called destructive interference. She remembered dropping it halfway through. None of it felt reliable. The book described water ripples, speaker feedback, light beams canceling each other out. Not a separate heartbeat. Elara wasn't surprised, but she also wasn't interested.

Takton isn't a sound wave, or a ripple. It's inside us. It pulses from the bloodstream outward. That's what she'd thought back then.

But now—on the edge of blacking out, body lit up like a power grid—she understood the concept.

Takton was rhythm.

But rhythm came from somewhere.

Her nerves were firing like a cascade, muscles twitching without command. Her heart was pounding—harder than anything, harder than it should've. Every electrical current in her body was aligned. Not on purpose—on survival. She didn't have elemental power surging through her. Which meant… there was nothing to throw her off.

No noise. No fire. No current pulling her rhythm out of sync.

She wasn't a conductor.

But she was a metronome.

That's why the dampsteel had reacted. It released a voltage to cancel out the coherence. Each function together, similar to the concept of chi, creates the 'pulse' everyone refers to. Like a band to a performance, the drums alone don't make an entire instrumental. 

And the power of a Tenshi, is the conductor, they harmonize everything to one concurrent melody.

The thing about that band is, well if i start erratically playing my own piano.. The song falls apart.

"Did I knock you deaf?" Callum's voice cut through the haze—low, smug. "Have it your way."

Elara didn't answer. She couldn't. Not verbally. Her focus tunneled inward.

She tried to remember the sensation—that hum the dampsteel had sent crawling through her spine. It hadn't hurt. It had disrupted. Not something burning through her veins—but something pressing outward, trying to cancel what shouldn't have existed. And maybe that was the key.

Not force. Not flow. Friction.

Her heartbeat pounded in her ears again—off-rhythm, arrhythmic, raw. She focused on that. On the tremor in her hands. On the electric tension in her limbs. Takton was supposed to be guided. Shaped. Conducted through a bond with a Tenshi. But Elara didn't have a Tenshi. She never had.

So she'd conduct herself.

She centered the rhythm—her rhythm—threading together every signal firing in her body: cardiac pulse, nerve flicker, breath pattern. No spell. No amplification. Just the static. The fuzz. The background noise that no one ever listened for. She didn't need to build anything. She just needed it to leave her body.

One push.

A single beat, broadcast out—not with power, but with precision.

Callum's eyes flicked, almost imperceptibly. The satisfaction on his face dulled into something else.

He looked down at his palm. Curled it once. Focused.

The sigil didn't go off.

His brows twitched. He tried again—twisting his wrist, drawing on whatever internal cue he used to detonate the mark. Still nothing.

A flicker of tension crossed his jaw. He tried a third time. This time his hand clenched slightly, as if willing the reaction into place.

Nothing.

The sigil blinked once—then faded completely.

He stared at it, unmoving. 

Then, Elara saw the faintest of a smirk form on Callum's face.