Title: Concentration
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: G
Length: 700 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Selece's awakening
Summary: The Mashin sleep in their shrines until a new brightness wakes them.

oOo

The Mashin slept. For many long years they waited, somnolent and dreaming slow dreams, consciousness anchored to the physical structures of those places which had been made shrines to them, resonating strongly enough with their nature that they remained bound even in their long sleep.

Rayearth was bound into the heat of the dormant volcano chosen as his shrine. Windam was tied to his drifting mountain, to the force which kept it in the air – in his realm. And Selece dreamed quietly far under the ocean, his Will saturating the stone which had been formed in his image to have enough resonance to hold him in place against the constant pull of the tides. To hold him, lest he be pulled and stretched hither and thither with the flow of water until he was everywhere and nowhere, and unable to concentrate himself back into one being.

They waited to be needed, for that was their purpose. But the cause was always bitter, and the long years of dreaming seemed sweet in comparison. Still, they all three of them loved those who earned their power and their protection; each and every time, they loved them, because it was not in the Mashin to let those they did not love claim their power.

Selece felt again the ripple’s of the Pillar’s plea for salvation through the dimness of his sleep, chasing away warm dreams, and knew that Rayearth and Windam would be stirring as well. It shook the boundaries of the world as it broke the barrier between Cephiro and the older world that lay so far away. All three mashin felt the potential of those drawn to Cephiro by that desperate prayer; those maybe-knights were not born of Cephiro, and that alone made them draw attention to them like beacons lit by the friction of their passage to Cephiro. But if the passage struck those matches which were the maybe-knights, then the moment they caught light was when the Guru set magic spinning through them, tying them to the heart and the power of Cephiro.

But only one of them burned, in truth, for only one of them turned that power to fire in their veins. Another was wrapped in air, embracing it, and the third – she let the ocean wash through her, and with it, Selece’s attention.

From that moment, Selece was drawn closer to waking with each flare of his almost-knight’s magic, awareness wrapped up in that potential and that growing power, the beacon transforming into a star – but not yet, not quite. To burn that brightly, she would need his aid. For the task ahead, she would need his protection.

Selece waited, impatiently, for her to ask. The dreaming still held him, but was close to breaking – until the moment that she was close enough he could reach out, and the dream captured her, brought her striding into his shrine and demanding his wakening.

Demanding loudly and stood before him, the brightness of her finally enough to break the ties of the spell which bound him sleeping.

The moment of transformation was a rush, and a shock. A translation first from stone into blood and bone, and thence – as she proved herself, as she let him in and as he accepted this maybe-knight as his own – into the blend of metal and spirit which would let her bear his power into battle. The concentration of his self into metal intended to protect her as she wielded the might of his spirit, harnessed to her own.

Ryuuzaki Umi, Knight of Selece. The fate of Cephiro lay in her hands, and the hands of the two girls she cherished already with a bright fierceness which Selece understood, for it was the same as he felt for her, this one who blazed ice-cold and brilliant. Hers was the only fate he was concerned with, for as long as she accepted him as her own, then she was his as well. He soaked into her armour and her weapon, and watched for the moment she would need him.

oOo