Lyra's presence in the yard became a fixture over the next few days. She never stayed long, retreating inside when the chill bit too deep or a weariness overtook her, but she was there. Watching. Sometimes she'd sort beans or mend cloth, her movements slow and deliberate. Her eyes held a quiet, persistent curiosity.
Ali kept to his tasks. Her comment about the tool had been sharp, but he'd begun to see it less as calculation and more as a kind of bluntness. She lived with two gruff men and a practical mother. Sick for weeks, with only the walls for company. She probably didn't know how to be subtle.
System, he thought one afternoon as he sharpened a hoe blade, Lyra sitting on her usual bench, idly tracing patterns in the dirt. Run a passive scan. What was wrong with her? The sickness.
[Command Acknowledged. Initiating passive biometric scan...]
[Scanning Subject: Lyra of Blackridge...]
Initial Diagnosis: Post-Infectious State.
Primary Illness: Severe respiratory infection (local designation: 'Stone-Cough'). Evidence: residual inflammation in bronchial tissue, reduced lung capacity. Treatment (herbal steams, rest) appears effective. Recovery ~70%.
Ali felt a flicker of relief. But the System continued, its text turning a colder blue.
[Anomaly Detected.]
Deep-Tissue Scan Inconclusive. Initiating metabolic and sub-dermal energy profiling...
[Major Anomaly Confirmed.]
Location: Central core, near the solar plexus and diaphragm.
Description: A dense, amorphous Congenital Bio-Energetic Agglomeration. It is a knot of the subject's own latent, undeveloped metaphysical energy—call it mana, ki, vital force—that has accumulated in a physiologically incorrect location during early development.
Effect: Acts as a constant drain and inflammatory focus. The body's systems perpetually recognize it as a "self" yet "foreign" object, leading to low-grade immune response and energy diversion. It disrupts nerve and energy pathways (explaining chronic fatigue, poor circulation, susceptibility to infection). The recent illness was a severe flare-up around this static weakness.
Composition: Inert, stagnant life-force. Non-toxic, but physically obstructive. Like a river of sand dammed by its own silt.
[Cross-referencing User's Physiological Template...]
User Comparison: Your own metaphysical energy matrix is dormant/unaccessed, not absent. It is a dry riverbed. Hers is a riverbed with a stagnant, polluted pond blocking its flow.
Hypothesis: If a method to safely "awaken" or access your dormant energy could be found, it might provide a reference point for understanding her condition. Data insufficient.
Prognosis: Without a method to safely disperse or integrate the agglomeration, it will continue to degrade her health. Life expectancy significantly reduced. Local remedies treat symptoms, not cause.
Ali's hand, holding the whetstone, stilled. Her own energy? Killing her? The concepts from games were suddenly, horrifically clinical. This wasn't a curse from a villain. It was a birth defect of the soul.
He needed a closer reading. A chance came when a gust of wind tugged the mending from Lyra's lap, sending the cloth skittering his way. She moved to get it, a slight wince tightening her features.
"I've got it," Ali said. He fetched the linen and brought it back. As he handed it over, their fingers brushed.
It was nothing. A half-second of contact. But for the System, it was a direct conduit.
[Physical Contact Established!] The text flashed. [Initiating Tactile/Energetic Interface Scan!]
Data streamed in—a deeper, more intimate map of the cold, stagnant knot within her. It wasn't hostile. It was sad. A part of her that had never lived, turned into a prison.
[Scan Complete.]
Confirmation: The agglomeration is entirely composed of her own nascent energy, crystallized in a degenerative state. It has a faint, dormant resonance.
Critical Note: The contact triggered a minor sympathetic resonance in your own dormant energy matrix. Confirmation: User DOES possess a metaphysical potential. It is buried, inactive, but present. Awakening protocols remain unknown.
Ali pulled his hand back, a strange, hollow chill lingering on his skin.
Lyra took the cloth. "Your hands are rough," she said, her tone not unkind, just stating a fact. She looked at his face, her head tilting. "You look like you're thinking too hard. It's just a bit of wind."
Her observation was simple, direct. Not the analysis of a prodigy, but the notice of someone with little else to do but watch people. There was a loneliness in it.
"I was thinking about the cold," Ali said, which was true. "It gets deep, doesn't it?"
Her grey-green eyes held his for a moment, and the faint, habitual frown she wore softened with something like surprise. It was the first time anyone here had acknowledged her discomfort as something more than a symptom to be managed. "Yes," she said quietly, her hand drifting unconsciously to press against her ribs. "It sits in the bones. No fire seems to touch it."
She looked away then, back to her dirt sketches, a faint blush of color on her pale cheeks, as if embarrassed by having said so much.
Ali returned to his sharpening, the rhythmic scrape-scrape now a drumbeat for a terrifying revelation. He looked at Lyra from the corner of his eye. She was just a sick girl, tracing shapes in the dust, carrying a time bomb made of her own stolen potential inside her.
And he now knew two things with absolute, chilling certainty.
First, she was dying by inches, and her family had no idea of the true cause.
Second, buried within himself was the same kind of power that was killing her. He just had no idea how to reach it, or what to do with it if he could.
The grind of survival had just become infinitely more complex. He wasn't just building a foundation of labor. He was sitting atop a buried vault, and the key to it might be the only thing that could save a life. And he had no idea where to even start looking for it.