Nope. Nope nope nope. Starwind generally knows what he's talking about and Abras generally does not, but every nerve in his body is screaming that this is a terrible idea. What if he overpowers it and hurts Starwind anyway? What if he aims wrong and hits himself? What if some other bad thing that hasn't even occurred to him because he's too busy holding this magic he has no safe ideas for what to do with it? (See? shout his instincts. This is what happens when you do things!) He couldn't throw the lightning even if he was somehow convinced he should; he can't even turn the "nope nope nope" into a coherent explanation and speak it.

Starwind is looking at him. Starwind's mouth is moving, saying things that Abras can't actually process because his brain is too full of aaaaaa to even hear them. 

Maybe Starwind will rescue him and help get rid of the power safely– no, he doesn't particularly look like he wants to do that, he's gesturing and raising his voice now. "You fear your own fear, boy! You must simply do it!"

(Unclear whether those are words that Abras is capable of processing either). 

Then Starwind throws up his hands and–

– a trio of wyrsa bursting from nowhere, black sinewy necks and bodies twisting in unnatural grace, scaly smoke-dark skin glistening, needle-sharp teeth lunging toward him –

AAAAAAAAAAAAA

He's back in the little stone building where everything went wrong, he's going to die Tylendel is going to die he needs to run to fight to get AWAY HELP NO

He throws the magic he was holding, throws more, grabs the biggest chunk of magic his senses can find and throws it in whatever form it happens to take, turns around and runs blindly away from the wyrsa and head first into the stone wall and then everything is mercifully void.

A while later, Savil, answering the alarm from the Work Room shields, is the one who finds him unconscious in a heap at the base of the wall and bleeding from a gash on his forehead. "What in all hells– Moondance, get over here now." Moondance is the Healer. It's not actually clear that Abras is the one worse-hurt – Starwind is splayed out on the floor at the other end of the Work Room, looking rather scorched – but at least he's not bleeding everywhere, and he's tough, he's good, whatever just happened he would've been shielding. Moondance can care for her nephew and ward first – Starwind what were you thinking what HAPPENED to him – and she can go to Starwind and see if he's all right.

What in all hells happened, she wants to scream, but it's not like she can ask anyone until later. 

When later comes, Abras is going to wake up with a pounding headache, lying in a comfortable bed with green vines over him and the sound of Moondance's flute playing nearby. 

Ow. What the fuck. He tries to reconstruct what happened, but his memories are incomplete and hurt to look at and may or may not be in chronological order. He's pretty sure that whatever it was was not good and the balance of probability is that it was his fault but for any more details he's going to need someone else to confirm things. Hopefully it can wait until his head stops feeling terrible, if that's a thing that's going to happen ever. Ow.

:Chosen, I'm here. It wasn't your fault – well, it was ninety-nine parts of a hundred not your fault, anyway: Yfandes' mindvoice makes his head pound worse, and she senses that and backs off, but keeps sending love. 

Moondance stops playing. "Abras? Are you awake? I did what Healing I could, but you will need several days to recover, you damaged your channels by pulling from the Heartstone untrained. I hope this will help." An ice pack comes from nowhere and settles on Abras' forehead. "How do you feel?" 

The ice and the love are both good, or at least they bring the average up. "I think I hit my head, I don't remember things right. What happened?"

Moondance takes a breath and lets it out. "Please do not panic. Everything is fine." (This is not actually a very reassuring start.) "You were having a lesson with my shay'kreth'ashke and he wished for you to practice offensive magic. He...also does not recall exactly what happened, but he confesses to having summoned an illusion of wyrsa in hopes of startling you into throwing the lightning when you seemed reluctant to do so. He forgot that you would have bad memories of wyrsa specifically. I am very irritated with him for this! But, he is not too badly hurt and you are not too badly hurt, you both will recover in some days, and I hope that he will learn from this."

He reaches out and squeezes Abras' arm. "It was not your fault." 

It sounds pretty his fault, actually; getting startled does not usually cause people to seriously injure everyone in the room. "So I messed up so badly at throwing lightning I hit both of us? Oh gods, I am so sorry, I was trying not to throw it but I think I thought the wyrsa were real and got scared and threw it anyway. Can you tell Starwind I'm sorry?" He wants to find the deepest darkest hole in the Vale and crawl into it and never look anyone but especially Starwind in the face again.

"...I will not. Starwind owes you an apology." Moondance sounds pretty firm on that point. "You did not hit yourself with lightning – you did run into the wall and hit your head rather hard." 

His voice softens. "You forgot where you were, no? You thought that all of it was real. What happened before. Of course you were frightened! And of course you attacked, and tried to flee. Had you really been back in that place, it would have been entirely correct to do so. And it is Starwind's fault, not yours, that he failed to foresee this." Moondance grabs a handful of his long white hair and yanks on it in frustration. "What was he thinking?" 

Abras can't answer that last question on account of he doesn't even remember what he himself was thinking. It can't have been anything other than deeply stupid.  "Thought the illusion was real and he was back getting attacked again" squares with his haze of remembered terror, and "ran into a wall" squares with the pounding in his head. It occurs to him that this fuckup was worse than all his previous fuckups combined. He puts his hands over his eyes so it will be darker and so that nobody can look at his face.

Moondance makes noises like he wants to speak a few more times, but doesn't seem to be able to think of anything to say. 

"Try to sleep," he says finally. "You will feel better in the morning." 

He is definitely feeling worse now than when he was unconscious so that makes sense. On the other hand, there is a risk that morning will include being asked to explain himself to Starwind and/or Savil and that's not a point in time he wants to let get any closer. He falls back asleep before he can decide which of these considerations is the stronger.

When he wakes up, it's morning, the headache is still there but it's a lot more bearable, and Savil is sitting at his bedside. "...Ke'chara, are you awake? You should try to eat some breakfast." 

"I'm awake. . . . I'm sorry I still can't control my magic." They've all been putting in all this work to train him and take care of him and help him deal with the consequences of his actions and he keeps ruining all their efforts by not being able to tell illusions from reality and losing control of his magic when he's scared and the more training he gets the more power he has to fuck up and hurt people with.

Savil does not actually have any way to tell what he's thinking right now. She does help him sit up and puts a breakfast tray in his lap, and then either she guesses what the look on his face means or it's possible Yfandes alerts her. 

"It's not your fault," she says. "I know you're thinking it is. You did lose control, and once you're fully trained it'll be much, much harder for that to happen, but no permanent damage was done, and. It. Wasn't. Your. Fault." 

"I need to know how to not do it again. Just practicing made it worse. How did I even get that dangerous?"

Sigh. 

"It was your first time ever casting offensive magic. Once you've practiced it at all – and it doesn't have to be aimed at a person, I don't know why Starwind insists on that, he always does – it's much easier to calibrate the force. Also, you pulled from the valley-node – the Heartstone, it's a massive reservoir of power and you were inside the sanctum so you could just...reach out and touch it. I imagine you might've noticed it before, but Starwind didn't explain what it was? Anyway. Once you've been trained in that, you'll have control of the power." 

She goes quiet, and eventually reaches out and grips his shoulder. 

"I don't really know what to tell you about the other part – I'm pretty sure you panicked and got disoriented, because of the extremely ill-advised choice of illusion, I should've rammed it into his head what a bad idea that was and that's on me and I'm sorry. And that might happen again. Magical training alone won't prevent it. But...I think time on its own will help. It's all very fresh right now and it won't be forever. In the meantime, every single person in this Vale is going to be a lot more careful of it right now. And we care about you and no one's angry." She scoffs. "Starwind's pride is a little hurt. First time a novice ever got through his shields. He was being a complete idiot, though. He knows your Gift is stronger than his. He's just...not used to thinking that way. But he'll learn." 

"So that's what that thing is. I didn't know what it did, I think I must have grabbed it by accident when I was panicking. So I need to learn not to touch that, and also--practice throwing lightning at rocks or something until I can do it without freaking out?" And then he'll he safe until he discovers the next horribly destructive thing nobody expected he could do. He briefly wishes he had just gotten the Healer's Gift and could learn that one thing and heal people and never have to fight and not have people learn to be scared of him. But that's a selfish thing to want; he ought to be happy about being powerful enough to be a Herald and willing to put in the work. But it's hard, when he feels like the work will never be done, when he'll never be able to say "yes, now I am definitely not a disaster waiting to happen".

"You'll need to learn to touch it on purpose," Savil clarifies. "That's how all Gifts are – you can't have the control not to do something until you have the control to do it." She ruffles his hair and then stands. "Why don't I take the rest of your breakfast outside and you can snuggle with Yfandes a bit? She's frantic to see you – you should've seen her when we carried you in unconscious, she actually made Moondance start Healing you in the courtyard so she could be there." 

(Yfandes has in fact been sending wafts of affection his way since he woke up, but hasn't interrupted.)

"I'll learn whatever you and Moondance and Starwind think will help." If they're not too scared to teach him, because that would be super reasonable of them. If they are too scared, he will potentially still learn things but a lot more slowly. "Going out and sitting with Yfandes sounds really nice."

The wafts of affection have stopped Abras from convincing himself Yfandes is mad at him, but the first thing he says when he sees her is still "Hello Yfandes. Sorry for scaring you." 

:Shh, it’s all right: She blows softly into his hair and then is just there, quietly, soft and warm and filling his mind with love. 

He curls up and leans his head against her neck and loves her back. She's so soft and warm and endlessly patient and kind and without question the best thing to come out of all the awfulness of the last month.