The hunger was a cathedral.
It was not a gnawing, animal thing. It was vast, hollow, and architectural—a grand, silent space built beam by beam over four centuries. Within it, Astraea's consciousness echoed.
She sat on a plastic bench in a sun-dappled city park, legs too short to touch the ground, swinging them in a rhythm older than the paved path beneath her. In her hands, a device of glass and light—a "tablet"—played a cartoon about talking vehicles. Her violet eyes, depthless and ancient, tracked the bright shapes, but her mind was elsewhere.
She was remembering the taste of starlight.
Four hundred and thirty-seven years. The first thirty-seven had been… normal. For a Void Dragon. A century of playful, instinctual growth in the shimmering dark between realms, reaching the size of a large horse, her wingspan casting cool shadows.
Then, Year 38. The Great Famine.
The mana tides that flowed between worlds like cosmic breath simply… stilled. For her kind, mana wasn't just power; it was nutrition, developmental catalyst, the very medium of their growth.
Without it, her body had frozen. Stunted. Locked in its juvenile Stage 1 form.
Her mind, however, had not.
She had watched. She had learned to shift her form, mimicking the dominant ephemerals—humans—to better observe, to survive in a world growing silent of magic. She settled into the shape of a small, dark-haired girl with eyes that held too much sky.
And then she had waited.
She watched forests she once napped in become fields, then towns, then the steel-and-glass spires of this city, New Haven. She saw languages bloom and fossilize. She saw wars flare and fade like struck matches. She saw the last crumbling stone of a castle she'd watched being built become a heritage site with a gift shop.
I remember when that castle's foundation was laid. The mason's name was Tomas. He had a daughter with red hair who brought him lunch. Now tourists buy plastic replicas of his work.
The hunger never left. It was the ache of atrophied flight muscles, the phantom weight of wings that should have been vast enough to brush clouds, the profound wrongness of seeing your own unchanging, small hands decade after decade, century after century.
It was the loneliness of being a geological fact in a world of seasonal creatures.
Then, a week ago, a vibration.
A shiver in the foundation of reality, so faint only a starved being of the void would feel it. A "Dungeon Gate," the news called it. A fissure, leaking the barest trickle of the lost mana. It had opened in the old quarry east of the city.
And now, sitting on this bench, it happened.
A deeper surge pulsed through the world's ley lines, a distant thrum of power from the stabilized gate. It washed over the park like an invisible tide.
To Astraea, it was a thunderclap.
Her breath hitched. The tablet slipped from her fingers, clattering onto the bench. Inside her, in a core that had been dark and dormant for so long it felt like a fossil, something cracked.
It was not a violent break, but the gentle, inevitable splitting of a seedcase after an eternity of drought.
A single, glorious, agonizing trickle of raw mana seeped into her parched system.
Her small body went rigid. It was a drop of water in a desert the size of a continent.
It was everything.
A sound escaped her lips—not a word, but a faint, crystalline chime, the kind a glass might make if stroked by a perfect frequency. Her violet eyes flashed, and for a second, the air around her wavered, as if seen through old glass.
And then a voice, bright, cheery, and utterly alien, spoke directly into the heart of her ancient mind.
[System initialization!]
[Mana threshold detected!]
[Welcome, Luminous Child!]
Astraea blinked slowly. The words hung in her consciousness, glyphs of friendly, blue light. Luminous Child? The concept was so ludicrous, so staggeringly incorrect, that the hunger in her soul momentarily receded before a wave of pure, undiluted bewilderment.
She looked at her small hands, the same hands that had not changed since the reign of Louis XIV. A wisp of silver energy, the barest exhale of the mana she'd absorbed, flickered at her fingertip and died.
[Initialization complete!]
[Primary directive: Foster growth & development!]
[User: Astraea]
[Biological age: ~10 years]
[Developmental tier: Latent]
[Potential: High!]
[Let's begin your wonderful journey!]
The voice was like a perpetually smiling kindergarten teacher. Astraea closed her eyes. The hunger, momentarily forgotten, roared back, now sharpened with a new, focused intensity. The trickle had awakened it fully.
It was no longer a dormant cathedral of emptiness, but a living, demanding void.
She carefully picked up the tablet. The cartoon vehicles were still chattering. She looked past them, to the city skyline, to the hidden gate pulsing miles away.
Four hundred years.
Four hundred years of watching mountains erode, of listening to the long, slow song of stone. She had the patience of bedrock. But now, for the first time since the age of muskets and powdered wigs, she had hope.
A tiny, fluttering, desperate thing.
[First quest available!]
[Quest: 'A spark of discovery!']
[Objective: Demonstrate your nascent ability!]
[Reward: 1 Minor Mana Crystal (Virtual)]
Astraea smiled, a small, quiet expression on a child's face that held the weight of forgotten centuries.
"A journey," she whispered, her voice soft, carrying the ghost of dead languages. "Yes. A very long journey indeed."
She stood, her little legs sturdy. The first gate's mana was a sip. She needed the ocean. But it was a start.
The Great Thaw, so long awaited, had begun with a single, system-misinterpreted drop.
I remember when journeys meant crossing continents on foot or sailing uncharted seas. Now they begin in government offices with paperwork.
As she walked home, she felt it—the faintest, most minuscule shift. A single millimeter of her left tibia, dormant for centuries, began the process of cellular division. It would take two weeks to complete, but it had begun.
And the Ancient Juvenile, pocketing her toy and walking home on legs that had walked this earth before this city had a name, decided to play along.
For now.
*First height increase in 400 years begins today. The System calls it a journey. I call it a long-overdue correction.*