What does not destroy me, makes me strong. Friedrich Nietzsche.

Three thirteen year olds and a dog stood on a path outside of a little gate. The small girl held onto the leash of the dog and she watched it as it sniffed around the path. It looked back at her a whined when it became clear to it that they were not yet going for the walk it had been promised.

"In a moment, Little Bear," Sandry soothed. "Tris is on her way."

Briar leaned against the fence while Daja moved her staff from hand to hand.

"Where is she anyway?" Briar huffed, looking up at the house. At that moment the door burst open and the redhead rushed down the pathway, clucking her tongue at Briar when he didn't move out of the way so she could open the gate and join them.

"What took you so long, Coppercurls?" he asked.

"I had to finish my chapter," she snapped. "The wait didn't kill you!"

They bickered as the four teenagers walked down the winding road towards the wall.

"Are the children inside?" Niko asked pacing in front of the three dedicates. Frostpine leaned against the counter while the two women of the house sat at the table.

"They took Little Bear out," Lark said. "Do you want them called in?"

"No," Niko replied. "I want to talk to the three of you privately."

"What about, Niko?" Lark asked. Frostpine and Rosethorn looked similarly interested as the normally calm mage paced before them.

"Niko, sit!" Rosethorn finally ordered. "You're going to drive us all crazy."

Niko smiled weakly and took a seat, rubbing his neck wearily.

"Now. What is it you want to talk to all three of us about?" Rosethorn asked, her voice deadly patient. "I have weeds that are not tending themselves."

"It is difficult," Niko said. "I am going to ask you don't interrupt."

Frostpine's eyebrows lowered. Lark felt a shiver travel up her arm. "Yes, yes," Rosethorn said. "What is it?"

"I have had visions of the four children since before I met them. Visions led me to them, of course. Most of the visions are mundane; images of Briar working in the garden or Sandry visiting her uncle, Daja delivering a note. Sometimes I get a glimpse of them in the past. You know that I get more visions about those I am familiar with?" The other mages nodded. "This is especially true of the four. I have seen more visions of their futures than about any other I have met before and some of them....

"The first one was after the earthquake. It was sparked by nothing in particular—the children weren't even in the room—but I saw.... Tris was standing in a tower....

She was looking out over the water, her face like stone though her hair blew and whipped around her face like flames. She hadn't cut her hair in a long time, now, though lightning flickered through it almost constantly, the tiny flashes of light were blue sparks in her eyes.

"He said, once, that I should live in a tower," she said, her cold voice seemingly directed to the ocean and cliffs below her.

"And you believed him?" The voice came out of the darkness of the tower, but Daja stepped out onto the platform shortly after. She was dressed in crimson.

"His visions came true," Tris said. "He just didn't have enough of them."

Daja looked out over the water and then spat over the side. "They would be alive if he had had enough visions," she said, her voice unbearable bitter. "We would have been fine, if they were alive. We wouldn't have had to...."

"Winding Circle was corrupt. You know that."

"But still. They were our family."

"We had no families."

There was utter stillness in the cottage. Niko refused to look at Frostpine, not wanting to see if the other man understood the words that had been spoken.

"The second was in Gold Ridge. Before any of the real trouble started, actually. I was scolding them for using their power to eavesdrop when it came to me. In it, Sandry and Briar were in Summersea, in the Citadel....

Sandry was sitting in a throne that certainly was not in the citadel now, a sinister creation of iron and carved wood. Briar was nearly invisible in the darkness. He leaned against the wall behind Sandry's throne, watching the soldier who reported to them that citizens were outside the gates. They were terrified of the recent death of the Duke, terrified of the soldiers the Duke's son was sending against the city. Sandry didn't look up from her embroidery.

"Oh, kill them all," she said. "What does it matter, anyway?"

In the darkness, Briar grinned.

"No." Rosethorn's voice was forceful and too loud in the pause that followed Niko's words. Frostpine, too, shook his head but Niko's gaze found Lark. Her face was pale and her dark eyes met his, full of pain. They were her fears, too.

"It doesn't mean it will happen," Niko said.

"But it means it could?" Rosethorn snapped. "No. Not my boy."

"There have been more," Niko said, ignoring her words. He was used to people doubting the things he saw; especially when it was things they didn't want to believe.

Rosethorn's lips tightened and she looked like she would argue, but she remained silent.

"The third was during the plague....

"...and then what Sandry? What is it we do then, after we have destroyed everything that meant anything to us?"

"It wasn't my fault, Daja!"

"You were the one—"

"I only wanted—"

"And I trusted in you and that stupid circle—"

"It will work. I know it will work."

"Haven't you done enough, saati? It won't work. It was never going to work. We aren't strong enough—"

"We can do anything we want to do!" There was silence after that last half-mad shriek. Silence between the two girls, silence between them and the two dead lumps in the thread ring held, silence between them and silence amongst the death that surrounded them.

"We can do it, Daja," Sandry whispered. "We can't be left alone in the dark again."

"It's not dark here, Sandry." The other girl held her hand before her eyes. "Sandry? Oh, gods. What have we done?"

The screaming cut through the silence, then.

"I don't understand," Lark said. "I don't understand where they go wrong, to end up in these places."

"It's almost impossible to tell," Niko said, sounding bone-weary. "Any number of small, seemingly innocuous decisions made for any number of reasons. I cannot tell you why these things had a chance of happening, just as I can't tell you why I have seen Sandry ruling peacefully in Emelan or Daja and Briar living happily in Summersea, or Tris at Lightsbridge, or any of the hundred other tiny futures that never come to pass for them; fights that don't happen, people they don't meet, places they don't go. I don't know." The silence rivalled that which haunted him from the previous vision.

"These are all from years ago, though," Lark said. "From when they first came to us, right after all of the traumas they were subjected to."

Niko nodded. "The bad ones were mostly from those early days and it does give me hope."

"But not all of them?" Lark asked.

Niko took a deep breath.

Briar was sitting alone in a field of plants, none of which could stay still. They writhed, as if they were trying to escape. Or were in pain.

Tris walked towards him, burning with lightning. The plants shrivelled and died, turning in on themselves as they crisped in her wake.

"Briar...." she cried, looking down at the destruction she was reaping.

Briar looked up, his emerald-green eyes as hard as stone.

"Where do we go now?" he asked, his voice cold.

"Who would take us?" Tris asked. She looked as if she was crying, but the tears sparked and evaporated as they touched her cheeks. "After everything we've done?" She sat down, a mirror image of her brother. "They were going to take our power away," she said, to the sky rather than Briar. "What were we supposed to do? We couldn't... I can't be powerless again. Never again." She put her face in her hands.

Briar looked down and screamed. The plants in the field, far away into the distance, died as one.

"I don't know what causes it. They are just moments in time. Although that last one, perhaps you can guess," Niko said.

"The Council wants us to bind their power," Rosethorn said, her voice harsh.

"Only until they're ready," Lark said. She glared at Frostpine as he snorted. "I'm not saying I agree."

"And if we give them their medallions?" Niko asked. "The medallion has been worn by monsters before."

"They are not monsters," Lark said. "They are children. Children who have been through horrific things, surely. Children who have had to do horrific things. But, Niko, they are our students. They are our... they are just children."

"We can weed out the darkness in them," Rosethorn said.

"They are not a garden, Rosethorn. They are human beings who have seen a great deal of pain in their lives and how are we to know what effect it will have on them in the future, as their power grows? If they had never come together, they would have been great mages, in time. All of you know that." Niko looked from Lark's tears to Rosethorn's quiet defiance and over to the smith, still standing against the counter with every muscle tight. "Together? Together, they could, indeed, do anything they wanted. That power in the hands of a noblewoman who watched a city die and sat, alone in the dark with the surety that she would join them? In the hands of a girl who has the stubbornness of iron and was in much the same position, floating amongst her dead only to be cast out from the only life she's known? A street boy who saw who knows what atrocities trying to survive? And a girl who has known only rage and isolation for a long, long time?"

"It is not our choice, to decide their fates for them," Frostpine said, his voice as taut as his stance. "We do not know what they will become. For every ounce of darkness, there is light and strength in all of them. And we do not have the right to decide where they're futures are going to lead."

"No, we do not."

"And so, what now?" Rosethorn asked. "What do we do now?"

"We watch," Niko said. "We watch them and we try to teach them all we can, bring all the light into their lives that is possible."

"And, I think, in the meantime, it would be best to tell the council we strongly favour them receiving their medallions," Lark added.

Niko nodded. With few other words (what was there, really, left to say?) he left Discipline.

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. Friedrich Nietzsche.