I noticed him before I understood why.
There was a gap in the training ground that should not have existed—a space where conversation softened, where movement adjusted itself unconsciously. I was mid-exercise when the sensation surfaced, the same pressure I had felt at night, now faint but unmistakable.
Something was listening.
When I turned, he was there.
The old man stood near the outer wall, his travel-worn cape unmoved by the breeze, the book still in his hands. He had not announced himself, and no one seemed alarmed by his presence. That, more than anything, confirmed my suspicion.
He had not returned by chance.
He watched me for several breaths before speaking.
"You didn't wait," he said.
I lowered the practice blade, unsure whether the comment was accusation or confirmation.
"I didn't know how," I replied.
That earned a faint nod.
"Most don't."
He did not ask what I had done.
He asked what I had noticed.
As I spoke—carefully, imprecisely—he listened without interruption. When I described the pauses, the misalignments, the way the world seemed to hesitate, his fingers tightened briefly around the spine of the book.
"That's early," he murmured.
The words were not meant for me.
He looked past me, at the air itself, as though expecting it to answer.
"You haven't reached outward," he said. "That's why it hasn't broken anything yet."
Yet.
He led me away from the grounds without permission being requested or denied.
No one stopped us.
We walked until stone gave way to earth and the estate's order loosened into quiet neglect. There, beneath a stand of old trees, he finally stopped.
"Untrained magic doesn't announce itself with light or force," he said. "It begins by correcting reality where reality feels uncertain."
I thought of the stone.
The fall that never completed itself.
"That's dangerous," I said.
He smiled faintly.
"No," he corrected. "That's honest."
He did not teach me spells.
He did not open the book.
Instead, he asked me to stand still and do nothing.
That was harder than any instruction I had received.
As the pressure rose again, instinct urged me to respond—to adjust, to steady, to reach. He stopped me with a single raised hand.
"Don't invite it," he said quietly. "Let it notice you without permission."
The air tightened.
Leaves shivered without wind.
Then, slowly, the sensation receded.
The old man exhaled.
"You're not drawing power," he said. "You're allowing it."
That made me more dangerous than someone who commanded it.
When we returned, he did not disappear.
He remained.
Not openly. Not formally.
But present enough that the household adjusted without being told.
Before we parted, he asked my name again.
When I spoke it, he nodded once, then said something that stayed with me long after he left my sight.
"That name may have been given," he said, "but it is not the one the world will respond to."
Then he walked away, leaving behind the certainty that whatever had begun was no longer something I could contain alone.