Ozur Hadrossia - The Furnace

Ifrit / Kineticist

Submitted character story

Ozur Hadrossia came to the Lyceum from a river town no one at Slefwerra could place on a map. He was a quiet, slight, myopic boy who read binding-theory the way other students drank water - or wine, and who was in Coriel and Nathair's vault that night for the least dramatic reason of anyone present: he was good with materials, and someone needed to mind the vessels. He wasn't supposed to be near the channel when it formed, yet when it overdrew he was the closest body to the breach, and he did the thing he has done every day since without ever deciding to. Ozur put himself between the maelstrom and those he could try to protect.

It should have killed him. For a burning, heart-stopping eternity he thought it had. But the storm, the power, the fire didn't consume him; it *went into* him. And stayed. Ozur woke days later with skin like cooling slag, hair banked to embers, and a furnace behind his ribs that has never since gone cold. Ozur's teachers and scholars of the Lyceum concur; he has become ifrit; planar-blooded, the fire given a mortal shape. Ozur, never the dramatic sort, calls it "warm". Yet he runs hot. Usually, he's noticed long before he's seen, a dark radiant heat, welcome in some circumstances, uncomfortable in others. He's learned to sleep alone, to hold wood with a cloth so it doesn't char, to stand a careful arm's length from most anyone he likes. A pair of cinder-spider silk gloves, are among his most important possessions.

The fire made him is a sink, a well into which power of most any sort can be poured. He can take a blow meant for someone else and drink it, absorb and bank it as heat, hold a deathly weight of harm inside. For a while. Push too much into him and he overheats; the furnace has a capacity, and above it he burns from the inside out. He knows exactly where the line is, and crosses it deliberately more often than the others realize, because the boy who once minded the vessels has decided that being the wall is the thing his change is *for*, and he will burn himself hollow before letting harm reach those he cares about again.

Ozur is quietly attentive to Coriel. To call it hopeless would be to admit hope was even a consideration, which it is not. He'd be mortified to know how obvious it is to everyone but her; the way he sets himself on her flank without thinking, the way his heat steadies when she's near, the fact that of all the debts he could carry he chose hers to stand in front of. He doesn't blame her for the Overdraw, which is, in its way, the most damning thing about his regard: he's decided she is worth what it cost, still echoing the devotion that brought everyone to the vault to begin with. 

He tolerates Rill's fascination with a patience that surprises even him. The younger undine trails him like a moth after a lamp, cool water drawn to the heat without truly understanding the implications or the dangers. Ozur, who remembers being the youngest and the overlooked, cannot bring himself to send him away. He will also neither forget, nor forgive Nathair. The score he intends to settle may well cost him his life.