The warm memory of the mulled cider and Lyra's quiet despair collided with the cold data in Ali's mind. He couldn't just observe anymore. He had to do something. But acting meant revealing things. It meant risk.
In the grey hour before dawn, hunched in the wood-shed, he laid it out for the System.
Okay. New plan. What if I told Kaelen what I know? Not about you, obviously. But what if I said… I can feel energy, or something. That Lyra's sickness feels 'wrong' in a way that isn't just physical. That I might be able to help?
The System's response was immediate and stark.
[Scenario Analysis: Disclosure of Anomalous Knowledge.]
Probability of Positive Outcome (Kaelen believes and allows intervention): <3%.
Probability of Negative Outcome (Seen as liar, manipulator, or cursed; expulsion or execution): >94%.
Rationale: You have no credentials, no history, and a pre-existing status as an alien anomaly. Claiming hidden knowledge of a chronic, mysterious ailment his own family has failed to cure will be perceived as a predatory gambit, not an offer of aid. Your 'feeling' will be diagnosed as either madness or malign influence.
Damn it. Ali ran a hand through his hair. Fine. But what about the energy itself? You scanned it through touch. If we could get prolonged contact, could YOU do anything? Could you… nudge it? Dissipate a tiny bit? Or maybe use contact with her blocked energy as a catalyst to kickstart my own? You're already optimizing my body's systems. Can't you optimize energy flow?
[Theoretical Energy Manipulation Protocol.]
Capability Assessment: I am a pattern-recognition and optimization engine integrated with your biology. I can suggest micro-adjustments to muscular, neural, and metabolic systems because they are physical processes with observable inputs and outputs.
Metaphysical energy (designation: Mana/Ki/Vital Force) is an unknown variable. I have detected its stagnant presence in her and its dormant potential in you. I have no data on its fundamental rules, its 'circuitry,' or safe handling procedures.
Analogy: I can teach you the most efficient way to swing an axe. I cannot teach you to reshape the tree's soul as you cut it. The former is physics. The latter is metaphysics.
Hypothesis: Prolonged, focused contact might allow me to gather sufficient data to model the energy's behavior. This could, in theory, lead to a low-risk protocol for gradual, safe dispersal over months or years. It would require her explicit, informed consent and constant monitoring. It would also require you to serve as a stable conduit and grounding point—a role for which you are currently physiologically and energetically unequipped.
It was a maybe. A fragile, distant maybe buried under a mountain of ifs. But it was more than nothing.
And magic, Ali pressed on. We need to understand the basics. They must know about it. Kaelen hasn't used a spark of anything magical since I got here. No healing light, no floating tools, nothing. Why? Is it forbidden? Too weak? Does he just not know how?
[Query: Local Magical Paradigm.]
Observation: No overt thaumaturgical events witnessed. Society appears pre-industrial, survival-based. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but suggests magic is either rare, subtle, difficult, or culturally restricted.
Suggested Action: Cautious inquiry. Frame question as curiosity about the wider world, not a specific desire to learn. Leverage your established, minimally-trusted status as an ignorant outsider.
The opportunity came that afternoon. Kaelen was repairing a fishing net, his thick fingers moving with surprising deftness. Ali was nearby, grinding a new edge onto a hatchet. The rhythmic scrape-scrape of stone on metal filled a comfortable silence.
"Kaelen," Ali began, keeping his tone neutral, conversational. "I have a question about the world. Not about the forest. About… people."
Kaelen didn't look up. "Ask."
"In the stories from my old place… there was sometimes talk of magic. Of an inner strength, beyond muscle. Do such things exist here? Or were they just stories?"
Kaelen's hands stilled for a moment. Then he continued his mending, his expression unreadable. "Magic," he said the word as if tasting something both familiar and bitter. "Aye. It exists. The folk in the cities and the stone-holds have a name for its source: Mana. The breath of the world that bleeds into living things."
Ali's heart thudded. Mana. The System' designation was correct.
"Can… anyone use it?"
Kaelen snorted. "In theory, a babe has it. A worm in the dirt has it. It is life. But to use it? To shape it?" He shook his head. "That is a talent. A craft. Like blacksmithing or woodcarving, but a thousandfold more fickle. Peasants have the spark, but no time to nurture it into a flame. They break their backs in fields. Commoners might have a trick—a light, a warmth, a mend for a broken pot. Useful. Modest. The nobles, the royals, the high clans… they have the time, the teachers, the bloodlines. Their flames can become bonfires. Blades of light. Walls of force. And other races… the elves in their deep woods, the dwarves in their mountain hearts… they have their own songs to sing with it. Their own specialties."
He paused, his gaze drifting toward the longhouse, where Lyra sat in the doorway, sewing. "But here? On the frontier? Mana is a dangerous distraction."
"Why?" Ali asked softly.
"Because it is hungry," Kaelen said, his voice dropping. "To kindle that spark, to make it more than a feeling in your gut, requires focus. Study. Practice. It consumes time and energy we do not have. More than that…" He looked directly at Ali, his pale eyes serious. "It leaves a mark. Like a campfire smoke in a clear sky. It can draw attention. From beasts that hunger for such energy. From men who covet it. We survive here by being quiet. By being stone and wood, not light and noise. My father's father chose this path. To let the spark sleep. To rely on steel, sinew, and sense. It is a harder road in some ways, but a safer one."
He returned to his net. "So, yes, boy. Magic is real. It is called mana. And we do not touch it. It is not for the likes of Blackridge."
The finality in his voice was absolute. It wasn't a matter of can't. It was a matter of won't. A deliberate, generational choice for obscurity over power.
And in that moment, Ali understood the true depth of Lyra's tragedy. Her problem wasn't a lack of potential. It was a perversion of the very thing her family had sworn off. She was a silent, leaking mana-well in a household built on being mundane. They wouldn't know how to fix it, even if they understood it. Their solution had always been to ignore it, to let it sleep. But in her, it hadn't slept. It had sickened.
Telling Kaelen was now an even worse idea. He wouldn't see a daughter with a magical ailment. He'd see the very danger his family had fled manifesting in his own blood. His reaction might not be fear for her, but fear of her. Or a desperate, misguided attempt to "fix" it through the only means he knew: more herbs, more silence, more denial.
As Ali returned to his grinding, the System summarized the brutal new calculus.
[Intelligence Acquired: Mana is confirmed as local metaphysical energy source. Usage is talent and training dependent, culturally stratified.]
[Critical Context: The Blackridge doctrine is one of deliberate magical suppression/neglect for security reasons.]
[Implication: Lyra's condition is the antithesis of their survival strategy. Disclosure now carries additional risk of triggering a crisis of identity and safety within the family unit.]
[Revised Viability of 'Energy Feeling' Ruse: 0.5%.]
[Conclusion: Direct intervention is impossible without first achieving an unassailable position of trust and utility within the Steading, and potentially acquiring independent knowledge of mana manipulation from an external source.]
The path forward, which had seemed to briefly widen, had now narrowed to a treacherous crack. He had a name for the enemy: Mana. And he knew why the family was helpless against it: by their own choice, they were willfully blind.
He couldn't tell them. He couldn't use his own dormant spark. He couldn't ask for help.
All he could do was grind, build trust brick by brick, and wait for a chance to learn the very thing this household feared most. The weight of the secret had just grown heavier, forged in the cold fire of Kaelen's pragmatic, fearful wisdom.