Eric settled back into his seat and said nothing for a moment, simply watching the boy across from him with a warm, steady smile.
Adrian sat very still, hands resting flat against the table as though he needed the surface beneath them to remind himself of something solid. His breathing had gone shallow, quick and uneven, and a faint tremor still ran through his fingers every few seconds, the aftershock of something his body hadn't finished processing yet. His skin had paled several shades, and there was a hollow, faraway quality to his eyes, someone who had walked back into his own life after glimpsing the end of it and hadn't fully returned yet.
"How much time," Adrian finally managed, his voice thin and scraped raw, "has passed?"
"Five seconds," Eric said gently.
Adrian's eyes lifted at that, disbelief flickering behind the exhaustion. Five seconds. He'd lived through smoke and blood and his sister's still body, and God knew how many minutes of screaming into a silence that swallowed every sound, and none of it had actually happened. Not out here. Not in any way the world around them would ever know about.
He didn't say anything else. He only nodded, slow and mechanical, and let his gaze drop back down to the table, staring at some fixed point on its surface as though it might anchor him in place a little longer.
"I'll ask you about the awakening itself next time," Eric said, keeping his voice low, unhurried. "For now, there's a great deal you need to understand about what you've just become. It's a lot to take in all at once, more than any one conversation can really cover, but you'll get there. Just try to stay with me."
Something in Adrian seemed to respond to that, however faintly. His shoulders eased, a fraction. When he finally lifted his head again, some color had crept back into his face, and his eyes, though still a little glassy, found Eric's and stayed there, waiting, almost eager despite everything.
Eric studied him for a beat longer than the moment strictly called for.
That shift, from a boy trembling and hollow-eyed seconds ago to someone sitting up straighter, watching him with open, expectant curiosity, had come faster than it should have. Too fast, maybe. A small, quiet concern flickered behind Eric's calm expression. He let his vision open, just briefly, tracing down into the boy's soul to check for anything wrong, some early sign of his Aura's subconscious creeping in where it shouldn't.
Nothing. Whatever had happened, Adrian's soul sat clean and steady, untouched by anything but the ordinary, overwhelming shock of the last few minutes.
Eric let his vision fade and cleared his throat once, then again, more to give himself a beat to organize his thoughts than out of any real need.
Understood, that's a fair correction. Here's the pass with Adrian holding back more, quieter and more absorbed than curious, letting Eric's teaching carry most of the weight with only a couple of well-placed moments where something genuinely stops him.
Eric coughed twice, settling into the rhythm of something he'd clearly explained before, and began.
"It all started when the Universe itself was formed. Before that, there was nothing. Just darkness, endless and empty. Planets formed out of it eventually, collided, broke apart, and reformed from their own wreckage. Somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, life found a way to take root, and civilizations rose across every corner of it. That first stretch of time is called the Primordial Era. The start of everything that came after."
Adrian sat still, listening, his earlier restlessness settling into something quieter now, more absorbed than eager. He didn't interrupt.
"After that came the Dystopian Era," Eric continued, "and that's when Pathways first began forming. The Overseeing Pathway came first, then the Boundless Pathway, then the Time Pathway close behind it. Once those three existed, more followed rapidly, one triggering the next, until Pathways were rising everywhere. Thousands of talents emerged across the universe during that era: Aura users, Gods, Utopians, and for the first time, all of them became aware that the others existed too."
He paused there, letting that sink in before moving on.
"Naturally, that didn't stay peaceful for long. Every group had its own ideals, its own ambitions, and wherever power and greed sit close enough together, someone eventually gets corrupted by it. Fights broke out. Then a war, the worst this universe has ever recorded. It came to be known as the Dystopian War."
Adrian's jaw tightened slightly, but he stayed quiet, letting Eric keep going.
"Billions died before it finally ended. Every side had bled resources they couldn't replace, and none of them could afford to keep fighting. Three universal walls rose in the aftermath, splitting the universe into three separate regions: the Aura Region, the Divine Region, and the Utopian Region. We live in the Aura Region. The energy you awakened a little while ago, the same thing running through that sky of colors you saw, that's called Aura, and it flows through this entire region the same way Divine Blessings flow through the Divine Region for the Gods, and Utopian Energy flows through the Utopian Region for the Utopians. All three used to be one single thing, before the walls ever went up."
He let a beat of silence pass before continuing, giving Adrian room to simply absorb it rather than chase every new term.
"The Aura users who actually led the fight through that war were nine extraordinary individuals. People called them Suns and Moons, risen up out of thousands of lesser stars, because nothing about them compared to anyone else fighting beside them. In time they became known as the nine Meditation Masters, and the families and legacies they founded still shape the Aura Region today. If you'd been born on Lumenia, or one of its allied worlds, you'd have grown up reading entire volumes about their lives. They're something close to legend, even now."
"Nine people," Adrian said quietly, mostly to himself, "held together an entire side of a universal war."
"Led it," Eric corrected gently. "Held together is generous, given how much it cost everyone by the end. Once there was nothing left to gain by continuing, all sides made peace and withdrew fully into their own regions. That marked the end of the Dystopian Era and the start of what came next, the Peaceful Era. Long, quiet, largely uneventful. No new Pathways formed during that whole stretch. People simply lived."
Eric moved through all of it with practiced ease, his hands shaping small, unhurried gestures as he spoke, his eyes occasionally closing as though picturing each part of it as he described it. Adrian found himself caught, more than once, less by the history itself and more by the sheer, effortless warmth radiating off the man telling it, some quiet, persistent pull he couldn't fully explain even to himself.
He blinked, refocused, and kept listening.
Eric's expression sobered slightly as he drew a slower breath. "That era ended a long time ago, though. What we're living through now has its own name. The Cataclysmic Era. It's already stretched on for a few thousand years, and whatever balance the Peaceful Era left behind has largely worn away by now."
He unfolded his arms just enough to gesture loosely at the air between them. "Aura itself doesn't hold one fixed shape, for what it's worth. You can use it solid, coat your body in it, shape weapons from it for offense or defense. You can use it as a liquid. Some shape it into flame instead. Those are the three forms it naturally takes."
Adrian absorbed that in silence, arms wrapping loosely around himself without quite meaning to, the scale of everything Eric had just laid out settling over him like a slow, cold weight. Thousands of years. Billions dead. Entire regions carved apart by war before he'd even been born.
He hesitated, turning the question over once before finally letting it out, quiet and careful. "Is it going to happen again? Another war, I mean. Now, in this era." Adrian couldn't help but ask Mike in a shaky tone.
Eric let out a short laugh, the sound easing some of the heaviness that had settled over the table. "Nothing's confirmed yet. We're barely into this era. Prophets and Seers are still arguing over which direction it's even heading." He paused, and whatever lightness had crept into his expression a moment ago faded again, replaced by something more measured. "But if you're asking my honest opinion, there's no version of this era that ends without one. War's coming. It's just a matter of when. If I had to put a number on it, somewhere between a hundred and two hundred years from now."
Adrian sat with that for a moment, turning it over. Then, slowly, something in his shoulders loosened.
A hundred years. Two hundred. That was, for all practical purposes, forever. He wouldn't be here for any of it. He'd be old, or more likely long gone, tucked safely into whatever came after a full, ordinary life, and none of this would be his problem to solve. He could just enjoy the ride. Learn to float coffee cups, maybe punch through a wall or two if the mood struck him, and let some poor unfortunate future generation deal with the actual war part.
A small, relieved laugh slipped out of him before he could stop it.
Eric tilted his head, genuinely puzzled by the sudden shift. "Why does that make you happy? You'll be part of that war too, you know."
Adrian grinned, some of his usual brightness finally breaking back through after everything he'd just endured. "Come on, Mike. Humans don't even make it to a hundred most of the time. Even if I somehow did, I'd be too busy falling apart to swing a sword by then, war or no war. I figure I've got plenty of time to enjoy whatever this is first, and I can worry about the rest never, honestly, since I won't be around for it."
Something in Eric's chest ached faintly at that, watching the boy relax into a comfort built entirely on a wrong assumption. He let the silence stretch a beat longer than necessary, giving himself just enough time to arrange his face into something appropriately baffled.
"What do you mean?" he asked, brow furrowing with practiced confusion. "Aura users live at least three hundred years. Some considerably longer than that."
The words landed slowly, and Adrian's smile held for one more second before it started to slip.
"...What?"
Eric said nothing, letting the silence do the rest of the work.
Adrian's eyes went wide, the color draining out of his face in real time as the math rearranged itself violently in his head. A hundred years, two hundred years, that had sounded so comfortably distant a moment ago, and now, suddenly, sat well within a lifetime he'd apparently just been sentenced to.
"WAIT." His voice cracked halfway through the word. "WAIT, NO, THAT'S NOT, THREE HUNDRED YEARS?! THAT MEANS I'LL STILL BE—"
"Alive for the war, yes," Eric supplied helpfully, not even trying to hide the small, satisfied smile creeping across his face now.
"THIS CAN'T BE REAL!" Adrian's voice cracked entirely as he grabbed the sides of his own head, staring at Eric like the man had just personally reached into his future and rearranged it out of pure spite. "I HAD A WHOLE PLAN! I WAS GOING TO DIE PEACEFULLY BEFORE ANY OF THIS!