Potential

Sirona plummeted towards the ground, shrieking his name. Arawn twisted and dove after her, watching her magic rush around her—almost pulling her to the ground faster than normal. Why wasn’t she telling her magic to slow her descent if she was going to use it at all? It was incredible how much power she had and concerning that it wasn’t protecting her.
How could her magic not act to protect her in a situation like this?
He remembered falling just once in his youth, but his magic had simply cushioned his fall so his vessel at the time came out mostly unharmed.
“Sirona, focus on not falling!”
“Arawn! Arawn, help!”
If she crashed and destroyed her human vessel, all of his plans would go up in smoke. He’d have to somehow find her another mortal vessel to exist in and help her acclimate to it if he could manage to keep her spirit from dispersing into the ether.
He pushed his magic until he sped past her. Her weight slammed into him as he stopped their descent just above the treetops. Immediately, she turned and wrapped her arms around him. He held her for a moment before gliding them into a small clearing around a stream. She clung to him, trembling in his arms and whimpering softly.
“You did very well, Sirona,” he said, carrying her towards the stream. “You’re alright. You’re safe.”
She nodded, curling tighter into him. He settled on a fall tree trunk, waiting for her to calm down, and considered the dilemma. Sirona had the potential to fly. That was phenomenal. It filled him with a strange amount of joy to think he’d have someone else to float through the skies above the human settlements and the forests.
A bittersweet feeling made him smile. The joy of flight and the ease of it hadn't been something he could share with Anu when they were still young existences on the continent. She could not learn to take to the air the way he did. He thought it might be because that was something special to him, but there didn't seem to be anything they could share no matter how hard he tried. After a while, he had stopped trying to share the little joys he'd found with her and they had grown apart.
Sharing flight with Sirona felt a little too sentimental for what he intended of her, yet he had been pushed to do so by something he couldn't explain. He wasn’t going to try and figure it out right now either. There was the more pressing concern of how little control Sirona had.
He had expected her to get a better grip on it a great deal quicker. He didn’t remember not realizing when he was going to run out of magic and knowing how to stop. Perhaps, her lack of knowledge was just a product of her not having another deity around to help her figure things out. He had the advantage of having Anu around.
He thought she was young, but how could she have no understanding of how to channel and manage her power? Her vessel was at least nineteen years old. By the time his vessel had been nineteen, he’d already developed a following, split from Anu, and filled several forests with magical life.
What had she been doing all this time in Conna? Hadn’t she used her magic at all in all these years? Even if she was pretending to be human, or assuming that she was human, she had to have had a magical accident at least once.
He winced at the thought. If she wasn’t on Anu’s side, then it was unlikely that she had. Anu would have sensed her and either killed her or turned her into a weapon.
“Arawn?” she said softly. He looked down and found her a bit pale, her eyes drooping. “I’m… a bit tired.”
“You’ve exhausted yourself—”
Something rustled the trees nearby and Arawn peered towards the sound to find a giant lizard ambling towards them. Arawn huffed. As ill-timed as it was, it wasn’t the worst thing that could have come to try and take a bite out of one of them.
“Can you stand?” Arawn asked.
She nodded, “I think so. I’m just a little sleepy… hungry maybe.”
Arawn got her to her feet and took her hand. He couldn’t risk flying again until he was sure she was calm. The best thing he could do was to get them away from the giant lizard before it smelled them. He didn’t like killing magical creatures if he could help it. It was why he stuck to flying as much as possible.
Sirona stumbled and swooned as the lizard broke through the tree line. Arawn heard her cry out as his gaze locked with the lizard. Its golden eyes widened before filling with brilliant light. It opened its mouth and let out a shrieking bellow before rushing towards them.
Giant lizards typically didn’t attack anything. It ate smaller creatures with ease and avoided most larger creatures. However, one of its favorite meals was fresh human. It went into a near frenzy at the sight of any human figure.
There was no calming a giant lizard that thought it was going to get a rare meal, and this one was more powerful than most. It had probably eaten more bandits and wayward travelers in a few weeks than most did in a year.
Sirona screamed as Arawn materialized his sword and stepped forward to meet the lizard in the small creek. It reared up on its hind legs, aiming its claws at Arawn. Arawn severed its claws and forced it to fall to the ground. It hissed as its blood began to flow in the creek. The creature hissed as its claws began to grow back. The inside of its mouth began to fill with a brilliant yellow light as Arawn drove his sword down to cut through its mouth and pin its mouth closed before it could launch its attack.
The lizard squirmed and shrieked. Beams of light shot out between its lips as the blast shattered its teeth and was forced back into its body. The body expanded and exploded into a mess of black and purple guts and blood. Arawn grimaced, sending a wave of magic over his body to clean the remains away. Arawn huffed, putting his foot on the reptile’s face and pulling his sword out with a grimace. He swung the blade through the air to get the thick, curdling blood off the surface before returning it from where he’d summoned it.
He listened to the forest, hoping that another creature wasn’t waiting to pounce. It sounded empty, but he didn’t want to chance it if he didn’t have to. Giant lizard guts had a way of alluring snakes of all sizes, and he wasn’t in the mood to fight more of his creatures.
He turned to Sirona, “Are you okay?”
She nodded, staring up at him in awe. He drew closer, peering at the streak of red on her shoulder as he kneeled to get a better look.
She’d tripped and fallen on a jagged rock. The blood smeared on the rock was a deep, human red without a single trace of a divine spark. She clutched the wound with a wince of pain and Arawn’s stomach plummeted. He should have thought of it sooner. There was very little about Sirona that had made sense from the beginning, but this made it clear.
She wasn’t a deity. She was a demigod, a half-mortal child of a deity. Of course, she had so little magical power at the moment. No wonder she had no sense of managing her magic. Her magic couldn’t reconcile her mortality and her immortality.
How extraordinary that a mere demigod had so much potential.
Her divine parent must have been fearsome. Were they still alive in a human vessel, or had they left the continent long ago?
Those were questions he would have to figure out later. He had to devise a means to divest her mortal body of its mortality so that she could access the full breadth of her power. That would have to come about as her training came along.
“I really hope the next lesson won’t be flying again,” she said. “Could we take a substantial break from that?”

Arawn chuckled, “No. Not the next lesson. I think we will hold off on flying for a while yet seeing as how little magical power you have currently.”
He looked around until his eyes fell on the corpse of the lizard and smirked, “Our next lesson will be about drawing power from the surroundings to build up your magical power.”
Sirona frowned, “The surroundings?”
He nodded, “Yes. Perhaps by our next flying lesson, we’ll be able to dance in the air.”
Sirona’s eyes widened. It sounded so romantic; she wasn’t sure how to respond.
“When will we start?”
“Right now.”