I didn't wake up to a shout or a splash of water. Instead, I woke up to the sound of a whistling kettle and the smell of burnt toast.
My brain tried to fire instantly—to calculate my position, to gauge the wind resistance, to prime the engine—a reaction that would've usually been handled by my lattice. But the connection was dead. It was like trying to start a fire with wet matches. I felt a hollow, phantom ache in my chest where my core should have been humming, keeping my body functional. Instead, there was only a cold, jagged stillness that seemed to swallow my heart.
Subconsciously, I reached my hand to my chest, to probe for a heartbeat.
Nothing.
I groaned, my eyelids feeling like they'd been glued shut with sap.
They slowly creaked open, a world of effort relative to usual.
"Ah, the man himself returns to the world of the living," a voice chirped, bringing fully into consciousness. It was bright, a little too loud, and lacked any of the "void-like" dread from before.
I forced my eyes open. The "silhouette" was gone. In its place was a man wearing a coat that had one too many pockets and a hat that sat slightly crooked on a mess of untidy grey hair.He was currently balancing a small spirit-stove on his knees, trying to toast a piece of bread over a blue flame while the carriage jolted over a pothole. And then another. And another again. It's getting a bit absurd now, could somebody fix these presumably roads?"Careful," he muttered to the bread, as if it was going to stand up and respond to him. "Texture is everything."
I blinked, my vision swimming and the rest of my senses non-existent. "Who... where..."
"Me? Don't worry about that. The best I could say is the Principal. Well, the Headmaster actually. Whatever title makes you feel most like a student and least like a kinetic projectile, like you seem to like to be," he said, finally looking at me. His eyes weren't white voids anymore; they were a sharp, energetic hazel, darting around as if he were counting the threads in my velvet blanket. "And we are currently in a carriage. Specifically, a 14th-century replica. It's got terrible aerodynamics, but the upholstery is divine."
I tried to sit up, and the world did a somersault. "Why are we going so slow? My family... the manor..."
"Safe. Probably confused, definitely going to have a hell of a time explaining the new glass in the flowerbeds, but safe." He poked the toast. "And we're going slow because if I moved you any faster right now, your mana-veins would shatter like cheap porcelain. Actually, you yourself might just pop if we did. You used your core to hit a hard stop, Aren. That's like trying to stop a runaway train by hitting a mountain. You're lucky your soul is still in one piece. While we're here, want to test the popping body theory?"
He leaned forward, suddenly serious, though a stray crumb was still stuck to his chin.
"I'm assuming you've spent your whole life being overly aware. Nobody else would fight like that. Calm down. Everything must feel like a blur. But not everything is a target. You can't live in the red zone, kid. You'll burn out before you're twenty. Actually no, scrap that, fifteen."
He briefly paused pondering and handed me the piece of toast. It was blackened on one side and raw on the other.
"Eat. It tastes like failure, but it's got carbs. Probably."
I took the toast with a trembling hand. Out the window, a snail was making decent progress along a fence post, moving just as fast as we were. I felt like screaming, but the warmth of the bread against my numb fingers was... grounding.
"Is this part of the entrance exam?" I wheezed. The entrance exam wasn't for a few years still.
"This?" He gestured to the cramped, creaking carriage. "No. This is the infirmary. The exam starts when you can walk to the front of the carriage without falling over. Or when you have a core that doesn't look like a dropped porcelain plate. Whichever comes first." He shrugged his shoulders as he said this.How old... was he?
He looked both 60 and 20 at the same time, and to be honest, it was quite unsettling.
I stared at the toast. The Principal's shrug had been so casual, as if a shattered soul was something you could just glue back together with enough rest and burnt bread.
"How long have I been out?" I asked. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone twice my age, or someone who had spent a week screaming into a gale.
"About six provinces," he said, checking a pocket watch that didn't seem to have any hands on the face. He tapped the glass, sighed, and shoved it back into his coat. "Or three days. Time is a bit of a suggestion when you're leaking mana like a punctured wineskin.
"I looked down at the toast, then back at the window. The snail was gone. We had finally overtaken it. Progress. "My core," I whispered, the word feeling heavy. "You said it looks like porcelain."
"Dropped porcelain," he corrected, pointing his silver spoon at me. "The expensive kind. The kind with the gold leaf and the delicate little painted flowers. Right now, your body isn't holding your mana; it's just catching the drips. If I let you go back to your manor like this, you'd be dead by the time you tried to lift a soup spoon. Your body would try to pull from your core, find nothing but jagged edges, and simply... stop. Instead of popping? You would melt, kind of like liquid."
He reached into a deep, shadowed pocket and pulled out a small, terracotta game board used for Nine Men's Morris. It was snapped clean down the middle, the etched lines of the game jagged and misaligned. "This is you," he said, tossing the broken clay onto my lap. It felt colder than the air in the carriage. "I've stabilized the cracks for now, but I can't fix the grain. Only time does that. And quiet. Lots and lots of very boring, very slow quiet."
He leaned back, his crooked hat nearly touching the roof of the carriage."I'm taking you to the city, Aren. But not to stay. Consider this a brief introductory. Assuming you pass the exam to Sevran, that is. But, bad news, I've placed a seal on your core—think of it as a heavy iron gate. It stays shut until you're fifteen. No explosions. No mana reinforcement. No turning yourself into a projectile."
"Fifteen?" I croaked. That was seven years. A lifetime. "What am I supposed to do until then?"
"You're going to learn to walk," he said, his energetic hazel eyes finally going still. "And you're going to find out what else is in that head of yours besides a need for speed. Because the next time I see you, it should be at the gates of Sevran. And I don't accept students who break on the first day. Or any day before that. Just don't break actually."
I gripped the broken clay board. The edges were sharp, digging into my palms. I wanted to argue, to tell him I was fine, but as the carriage hit another pothole, my vision blurred and my chest flared with a cold, splintering pain.I was a bird that couldn't fly. A monster in a cage.I took a bite of the something-flavored toast. It was hard to swallow, but it was the only thing keeping the somersaulting world from spinning away entirely.The carriage wheels transitioned from the rhythmic thud of dirt to the sharp, bone-jarring rattle of city cobblestones.Where... were we?
"The city?" I rasped, looking out the window. The tall, narrow townhouses of the capital leaned over the streets like spectators at a funeral. "We aren't going home?"
"Eventually," the Principal said, finally successfully toasting a second piece of bread. "But you're staying here for a few days to... let's say, 'clarify' some things with the local authorities. Turning a city block into a vacuum for three seconds tends to generate paperwork."
He leaned back, hands behind his head, looking out at the passing architecture with a bored expression.
"Besides, you're in no condition for travelling back. I did. You need a bed that doesn't move and air that isn't full of road dust. Consider this your first lesson in the city: everything is closer, louder, and significantly more annoying."
The carriage slowed to a final, definitive halt in front of a heavy oak door. The silence that followed was deafening—no wind, no whistling kettle, just the distant sound of a city waking up and the heavy, rhythmic thud of my own, un-augmented heart.
"We're here," the Principal said.I stepped out, and the world immediately felt too small. The air in the city was thick—smelling of coal smoke, horses, and too many people. Without my brain operational enough to filter the sensory input, the smell alone made my head swim.
God... is this what all cities were like nowadays?
The Principal didn't wait for me to find my footing on the cracked cobblestone path. He smiled at me, waved, and then he gave the carriage door a firm kick shut, ensuring I couldn't walk back from sheer shock. And with a whistle that sounded far too cheerful for the situation, the horses began to pull away, seemingly much faster than they had brought me here.
If I had an operational core, I would have ran after the carriage, but my body was too resemblant of a skeleton for me to decide that was a good idea.
I wasn't actually aware of what my physical limits were. I had grown too dependant on mana from what was around the age of one.
That was a drastic oversight. If I had grown dependant on mana like this, 'I' would've died the moment I ran out.
It's not too late to do better. I could just start practicing. Now.
"Where am I going?" I muttered to myself, my hands finding their way to my chin subconsciously.
"The academy has provided you a hotel, sir." A voice beside me responded.
I immediately threw a punch.
A normal, eight-year-old speed punch.
It hit the man directly in the face.
"Owww." My hand flew back and I gripped my fingers are hard as possible.
They felt like they had shattered, although I know they hadn't.
"I wouldn't recommend that." The voice didn't even change direction.How had I not sensed him? Was I this reliant on mana for even the most basic biological functions?
Humans possess passive echolocation, even without the use of any external source, so how had I just not noticed him standing there?
"Are you ready to depart, sir?" He still hadn't turned his head at all.
"Yeah..." The misery that must've been in my voice as I said that was second to none.
Here I was, an actual, normal 8 year old. Frail. Pathetic.
My fingers were starting to bruise during my inner monologue, and, realising that the hotel was going to be able to heal my self-inflicted injuries better than sitting here and whining about it ever could, I started walking.Until I was stopped.
"You're walking in the wrong direction, sir. Unless you already have a location you intend to travel to, in which case please continue." His face was almost reactionless as he said this, but I swear I could see a small grin on his face. He was very aware that I had nowhere else to go after being dragged this far out of my home.
"Other way it is then." I tried to make heart of his comment, knowing that I couldn't do anything about it even if he were to directly insult me.
I didn't move, waiting for him to initiate movement....Nothing.
"Are we... oh y'know, going anywhere?" I turned to the man and asked.
"Have you given up on trying to lead yourself to wherever you were going, sir?" He wasn't even trying to hide his mocking of me.
"Yes." I was dejected. Mostly because, even as he was almost directly laughing at my face, I couldn't do anything.
Even worse. I wasn't even sure if I would've been able to do anything before, seeing as I couldn't even detect his mana signature.
He started moving in a direction, his gait almost unchanging.
Whereas I, having lived with what was basically mana crutches for most of my life up to this point, felt like the ground itself was stabbing my weakened skeleton with every step.
My gait was uneven, jagged, and looked more like a natural 2 year old trying to walk.
And my spine.
God my spine hurt after maybe 30 seconds of walking like this.
If walking was this bad, what was running going to be like?
Damn you, principal.