Kaelen
I spotted him by the gates just as the second dawn-bell was chiming. He stood so still, looking up at the Spire of Founding like he was trying to memorize every rune. Most of us newbloods were a mess of nerves and excitement, clustering in familiar groups from our provinces or trying too hard to look aloof. This guy, Jihan, just looked… profoundly lost. And not the "where's-the-dining-hall" kind of lost. The kind of lost you get staring into the Deepwyrm Chasm, feeling the whole vastness of the world swallow you up.
Something about it was familiar. It was the look I'd seen in my da's eyes sometimes, after a long season at the Westforge furnaces, when the heat and the noise finally faded and all that was left was the quiet echo of exhaustion. I'd promised myself I wouldn't be the anxious one here, that I'd make friends. So, I shoved down my own churning stomach and walked over.
"You look like you're trying to solve a spatial paradox before breakfast."
He turned, and his eyes were the weirdest shade of grey—clear, like quartz, but with a depth that made you feel like you were looking into something much older than his face. For a second, I swore I saw a flicker of something in them, a literal flicker, like a shard of lightning in a still pool. Must have been a trick of the morning light through the mana-veils.
He took my hand. His grip was steady, too steady for a first-day novice. "Is it that obvious?" he asked. His voice was calm, but there was a strange cadence to it, like he was choosing each word from a vast, internal library.
We got swept into the Athenaeum for Proctor Valerius's welcome speech—or welcome threat, more like. I tried to listen, really, but half my brain was busy not tripping over my own robes. The other half was sneaking glances at Jihan. He wasn't fidgeting. He wasn't whispering. He was just… observing. His gaze swept the room not with wonder, but with a kind of quiet, analytical assessment, like a master jeweler judging uncut stones. When his eyes landed on that Elara girl from the Sky-City contingent and just… stopped, I almost laughed. Okay, so he was human after all. She had that effect, with that twilight hair and the silver streak. Looked like she'd stepped out of an old ballad.
After the assembly, I dragged him towards the Practical Evocation Halls in the East Wing. "Try not to incinerate your robes. Or mine," I joked, trying to loosen him up. He gave a small, distant smile, as if the concept of accidental immolation was a remote statistical probability he'd already calculated and dismissed.
The hall was huge, all polished volcanic rock and venting shafts in the ceiling. Our instructor was a burly Earth-Aspect mage named Garn, with arms like stone columns and a voice that rumbled. "Today," he boomed, "you learn the first law of magic: control! Without it, power is a wildfire. It consumes. Now, pair up. Your focus is the Lumina Shard before you. You will not cast a spell. You will merely awaken the mana within it. A gentle nudge. Let it glow."
I nudged Jihan. "Partners?"
He nodded. We stood before our assigned shard, a milky crystal about the size of my fist. All around us, other pairs were concentrating, their faces scrunched. Faint, flickering lights began to pulse from some of the crystals, like sleepy fireflies.
"Alright, just like the theory books said," I muttered, placing my hands on the cool crystal. I reached for the well of fire inside me, that warm, restless pool I'd always felt. Carefully, I teased a single thread of it towards my fingertips, envisioning it seeping into the shard, warming it to light.
Fwoosh.
A six-inch jet of actual flame shot from my palm and licked the crystal, blackening one side. The shard didn't glow; it just got hot and smoky. Garn's heavy hand landed on my shoulder. "Control, boy from Westforge. Your passion is admirable, your subtlety is not. Again. And perhaps imagine a candle, not a forge."
Face burning hotter than my failed spell, I shot an apologetic look at Jihan. He was just staring at the blackened crystal, his head tilted.
"Your turn," I mumbled.
He placed a single fingertip on the unmarked side of the shard. He didn't close his eyes. He didn't take a dramatic breath. He just… touched it.
The transformation was instantaneous and breathtaking. The shard didn't just glow. It became a miniature sun. A pure, unwavering, brilliant white light erupted from its core, so intense I had to throw up a hand to shield my eyes. It wasn't harsh or burning; it was perfect, illuminating every corner of the vast hall with clinical clarity, casting no shadows. A collective gasp rippled through the room. Every other awakened shard in the hall dimmed in comparison, their feeble flickers seeming pathetic.
Garn stumbled back a step, his stony composure cracking. "By the Earthfather's bones… What did you do?"
Jihan withdrew his finger. The light vanished instantly, leaving a stark afterimage in my vision. The shard was pristine, not even warm to the touch.
"I… followed the instruction," Jihan said, his voice quiet but carrying in the sudden silence. "I awakened the mana within it."
"That wasn't awakening, lad," Garn breathed, moving closer and peering at the crystal, then at Jihan. "That was… a revelation. What is your affinity? Light? Pure Arcana?"
Jihan paused, as if consulting an internal list. "I am… unsure, Proctor. It responded."
"Unsure," Garn repeated, a strange mix of awe and suspicion in his eyes. He leaned in, his voice dropping. "That crystal's maximum luminal yield is a class-three spell. You just delivered a class-nine pure light event with a touch. No incantation, no somatic focus. Who are you?"
For the first time, I saw a crack in Jihan's calm. It wasn't fear. It was the look of someone who had made a fundamental calculation error. He'd tried to appear as a high-tier talent, but he'd accidentally revealed something that defied the tier system altogether.
"I am Jihan," he said simply, but the words seemed to carry a different weight now.
Garn stared at him for a long moment, then straightened, his voice returning to its normal rumble, though his eyes remained wary. "Well, Jihan. For today, you are excused from partner work. Sit. Observe. Do not touch anything else."
As Jihan moved to a solitary bench at the side of the hall, the whispers began. "Prodigy." "Freak." "How'd he do that?" His calm observation now seemed like aloof superiority. The boy I'd tried to befriend at the gates was suddenly on an island, and the water around him was getting deeper by the second.
I looked at my own blackened shard, then at him, sitting alone in a pool of quiet. The strange, lost boy was gone. In his place was a mystery, and mysteries at Astralora had a way of either becoming legends… or getting crushed.
Elara
Practical Evocation was a dull necessity. Awakening a Lumina Shard was a lesson for children, a test of basic mana sensitivity and emotional control. My mind was already three chapters ahead in the Treatise on Multi-Layered Glyph Weaving I'd smuggled into the hall. I planned to perform the exercise with exactly the required proficiency—a soft, stable glow—and return to my reading.
The commotion pulled me from a complex mental model of a tri-fold mana channel. A wave of light, pure and absolute, washed over the hall. It wasn't the warm yellow of fire or the cool blue of water aura. It was white. The white of a star's core, of unmediated magic. My skin tingled, and the dormant defensive glyphs on my bracer, a family heirloom, flared to life for a single, startled second before I suppressed them.
I followed the light to its source. The boy from the assembly. The one with the quiet, measuring gaze. Jihan.
I watched as he extinguished the light with a mere lift of his finger. I saw Proctor Garn's stunned reaction, the mix of awe and deep-seated alarm. I heard the whispers erupt around me. My partner, a talkative girl from a coastal merchant family, was already spinning theories about hidden noble lineages and artifact enhancements.
I didn't think so. Artifacts vibrate. Bloodline magic has a signature, a color, a feel. This was none of that. This was… direct. It was as if he had simply whispered to the mana inside the crystal and commanded it to become light, bypassing all the natural laws of conversion, affinity, and gradual buildup. It was impossible. And yet, I had seen it.
Intrigue was a luxury I rarely afforded. My presence here at Astralora was a carefully negotiated ceasefire in a long, cold war of expectations. My focus was meant to be on my craft, on perfecting the Art, on remaining unremarkably excellent. Getting involved with a walking anomaly was the opposite of that plan.
Yet, as I saw him sit alone on the bench, his expression not one of pride but of pensive recalculation, the scholar in me revolted against caution. What was he? A savant of an unknown scale? A living breach in magical theory? The questions were like unformed glyphs in my mind, demanding resolution.
When the session ended, I found my feet moving of their own accord. I navigated the stream of exiting students towards his bench. He was staring at his own hand, flexing his fingers slowly, as if trying to understand the mechanism.
I stopped before him. He looked up, and those quartz-grey eyes met mine. Up close, the depth in them was even more unsettling. There was no boyish curiosity there, no nervousness at being approached. Just a calm, endless pool of observation.
"That was not a class-one awakening," I said, my voice cooler than I intended. It was a statement, not a question.
He blinked, as if pulling his focus from a great distance. "No. It appears my calibration was… off."
A strange word to use. Calibration.
"Proctor Garn asked you who you are. You gave him a name. That is not what he meant, and we both know it."
He studied me for a moment longer, and I had the distinct, unnerving feeling that he wasn't just seeing my face or my robes. He was seeing the silver streak in my hair, the latent glyphs on my bracer under the sleeve, the specific textbook I had hidden in my satchel. It was the feeling of being perfectly, utterly perceived.
"Who I am is a long story," he said finally, his voice softening. "Who I want to be here is just Jihan. A student. It seems I've started poorly."
The honesty disarmed me. There was no bluster, no false humility. Just a simple acknowledgement of a social miscalculation. It was refreshing.
"Starting with a class-nine light event tends to set certain expectations," I replied, a faint, dry note entering my voice. "Or concerns."
"And what does it set for you?" he asked. The question was direct, devoid of the usual games first-years played.
I considered. "Curiosity. And a suggestion."
"Which is?"
"Learn to fail," I said. "Publicly. And soon. Or that bench will become your permanent seat." I turned to leave, then glanced back. "Control isn't just about power. It's about perception. You have none of the latter."
I walked away, my heart beating a little faster than it should. I had just engaged with the anomaly. It was a breach of my own protocol. But as I recalled the perfect, impossible light, I knew the questions would gnaw at me if I didn't. He was a puzzle, a living contradiction. And I had never been able to resist a puzzle.
Jihan
The Lumina Shard incident was a critical system error. A failure of social integration protocols. I had accessed the shard's mana matrix with a thought, using the most basic, root-level command: [ACTIVATE]. I had not considered the standard world's "processing speed" or "output limitations." To me, it was a dim bulb; I simply turned it to maximum. The result was a local reality distortion that flagged me as a major anomaly.
As I sat on the bench, I ran diagnostics.
[Social Integration Status: COMPROMISED.
[Peer Perception: Shifting from 'Unknown' to 'Threat/Phenomenon'.
[Primary Objective: Authentic Experience - PROBABILITY DECREASING.]
Kaelen's friendly concern had been replaced by wary confusion. The other students' eyes held fear, envy, suspicion. I was an unclassifiable variable in their carefully ordered world. I had become the very thing I'd hated in my old life: an outsider, isolated by my own creation.
Then, Elara approached.
Her data was fascinating. Not just her name, but the complexity of it. Her mana signature was laced with intricate, dormant glyph-work—legacy enchantments of a high order. Her analytical demeanor matched her actions in the assembly. She was a player who operated on logic and observation, not just social impulse.
Her words were not a reprimand. They were a patch. A piece of crucial code to fix my flawed subroutine.
[Incoming Directive: Learn to Fail. Purpose: Adjust Peer Perception, Establish Relatability.]
It was brilliant in its simplicity. To be human was to be flawed. My display had been flawlessly overwhelming. I needed to demonstrate error, effort, and perhaps even humorous inadequacy.
The next class was Mana Theory with Proctor Lin, a delicate woman with an Air Affinity who spoke about mana flows like they were poetry. The lesson was on basic mana attraction—drawing ambient energy into one's core to replenish it. A fundamental, easy exercise.
"Feel the world's breath," Lin was saying, her voice serene. "Let it flow to you, as water finds its level."
I closed my eyes. My omnipresent perception showed me the mana in the room like a shimmering, multi-colored mist. To draw it in normally, I would have to create a gentle vacuum in my core. But my core was not a vessel; it was a bottomless singularity. Creating a 'gentle vacuum' was like trying to sip a lake through a straw while standing in the ocean.
I tried. I visualized a tiny, narrow funnel.
The result was not a flow. It was a cataclysm.
A thunderous crack echoed in the chamber as every mote of mana in the immediate fifty-foot radius was violently ripped from the air. Papers flew off desks, Proctor Lin's hair whipped around her face, and every student gasped as they felt a sudden, painful tug at their own nascent cores. The mana didn't flow into me; it imploded around me, creating a momentary, terrifying vacuum before the atmosphere rushed back in with a second, softer whoomph.
Silence. Then, coughs and stunned mutters.
Proctor Lin stared at me, pale. "Jihan… what was that?"
I opened my eyes, adopting what I hoped was a look of sheepish, profound embarrassment. It wasn't hard to muster. "I… apologize, Proctor. I believe I inverted the polarity of the attraction field. I attempted to draw, but I… over-siphoned. A fundamental error in flow dynamics." I used the jargon deliberately, framing it as a textbook mistake made by an overzealous novice.
The tension in the room broke, shifting from alarm to bewildered humor. A snort came from somewhere. Then a laugh. Kaelen was shaking his head, a grin spreading across his face.
"Over-siphoned?" Proctor Lin repeated, placing a hand over her heart. "Young man, you nearly gave us all mana-syncope. That is not a beginner's mistake. That is a… uniquely catastrophic misunderstanding of the principle." She took a deep breath. "Perhaps… perhaps for the next exercise, you will just observe. And read chapter one. Again."
I nodded solemnly. "Yes, Proctor."
As the class returned to its exercises, now punctuated by whispered jokes about "Jihan the Mana-Vacuum," I felt the shift. The awe had been tempered by relatable failure. The fear diluted by absurdity. I was no longer an unknowable prodigy; I was the guy who had tried to drink the ocean and choked.
At the end of the class, Kaelen fell into step with me again, chuckling. "Okay, so you're a genius who can make a shard into a star, but you can't do the most basic mana-gathering without almost killing us all. I feel much better about my little torch incident now."
"It appears theoretical knowledge and practical application are… disparate for me," I said, the ghost of a genuine smile touching my lips.
"Disparate. That's one word for it." He laughed. "Come on, 'Mana-Vacuum.' Let's get to Alchemy. Try not to dissolve the cauldron, yeah?"
I followed him, feeling the weight of infinity in my core, but a lighter weight in my chest. The path to a real life, I was learning, was not paved with perfect code,but with imperfect, human mistakes. And my first friend here was walking beside me, laughing at mine.