Yes and no... his story in Chronicles of Light ends with him taking the crystal out of his palm and dropping on the corpse of the guy he killed with it. Who just so happened to be the guy who taught him a lot of his crazy sword tricks. It ends with him admitting to himself that the fun part of the entire thing was hunting down a way to beat the guy and being disappointed it turned out to be that easy. And Zenos is like... fourteen at the time.

It is definetly the story of him learning just how big a difference magic and aether manipulation make in fights and him figuring out a way for a Garlean to temperately use magic. He just doesn't have a lot of control over it and gives up that particular method at the end. From what we see of the Resoance, it's just the logical end he's reached in figuring out how to permanently give Garleans aether manipulation that is permanent.