I stood among a patch of wildflowers where the forest thinned, and the world began to show its mortal face.
The trees behind me whispered faintly, as if trying to remember a farewell they'd never spoken. I did not look back. Before me, a city pulsed with distant lights—scattered stars clinging to the husk of a dream not yet willing to fade.
I could see it clearly now: the sprawl of rooftops and crooked towers, broken by glowing veins of energy that threaded between crumbling districts. The nearest side of the city vibrated with something… wrong. A corrupted pulse. Energy twisted by neglect and suffering. Yet deeper within, as my eyes traced the flow of power toward the city's heart, something else emerged—calm, ordered, cleaner. At the center stood a towering castle, its aura choked in a knot of conflicting energy. But to its right, a smaller structure shimmered faintly. It was quiet, but pure. Creation energy, untainted.
I watched it for a long time.
I did not move for hours. Maybe longer.
I had no reason to rush. I had no destination. Only the feeling that I must go forward, into the wound of the world.
And so I lingered.
Days passed—I cannot say how many. I wandered down the mountainside, slowly. I studied the moss on stone, the paths made by deer and shadow. I listened to wind catch in the hollows of trees, trying to make sense of the patterns. Sometimes it spoke like breath, sometimes like sorrow. Sometimes it said nothing at all.
I found a brook at one point, and sat beside it. I placed my hand in the water, letting it flow through my fingers. It felt like time—slipping away, constant, ungraspable. I wondered if mortals ever hated time the way I did.
I tasted berries from a thorned bush. They were sour, but they reminded me of something—though I could not name what. I watched birds fight for territory. I saw a fox limp across a trail with an arrow still lodged in its flank. It didn't cry. It simply kept moving.
Mortality was a quiet kind of brutality.
Watching the other creatures I copied them, I slept beneath an overhang, not out of need, but out of…? Curiosity? I don't know. When I closed my eyes, I dreamed of fire. Not of destruction, but of birth. I saw something emerging from ash—myself, maybe. Or the world. Or both.
By the time I reached the edge of the city, two days had passed—perhaps more.
But before I stepped forward, I hesitated. Every one of these mortals I had seen, wore something—fabric, rags, armor, threadbare layers that clung like second skin. Without truly knowing why, I reached inward. Threads of creation answered, weaving around my form until I looked like them. Like the forgotten. Like I belonged to this crumbling edge of the world.
Then I entered the city through its forgotten side.
The slums.
The contrast was immediate.
Here, the world sagged.
Crumbling walls leaned like drunkards. Roofs bore wounds patched by tarps and jagged tiles. Children stared at me from alleyways—some curious, some hollow, some laughing. But the laughter never reached their eyes.
I walked past puddles of refuse and ash. Rats darted freely. People scrubbed clothes in cracked basins, or stared at nothing at all. Others simply lay in the streets, unmoving.
It wasn't just poverty.
The air here pulsed with something deeper. Something old. An echo.
A fracture.
I stopped near a collapsed shack. My gaze wandered, not as a man, but as something trying to become one. I studied the decay. The weight of it. The silence that pressed on these people like a second skin.
Then I saw him.
A child.
Curled in a narrow alley. Bones pressing against his skin like the frame of a bird that had never flown. Maybe seven. Maybe less. His breath stirred the dust, but barely.
I felt it then—a fading spark within him.
I knelt.
His eyes fluttered open, clouded, unfocused.
He was dying.
I did not think. I placed my hand gently to his chest. And from somewhere deep within me, something stirred—a sliver of warmth, a thread of brightness.
Creation.
It flowed from me like breath returning to lungs long collapsed. Just a whisper of power, but it surged with silent defiance.
The boy gasped.
Color bloomed in his cheeks. His eyes widened, first in terror, then confusion. He scrambled back, spine hitting the wall.
"Y-you… what did you do?"
I tilted my head. "You were dying."
He coughed violently, a sound sharp enough to cut the stillness. "You're not from here. Are you… a mage?"
"I am… something."
He narrowed his eyes, though exhaustion dragged at his frame. "Why did you save me?"
"Should I have let you die?"
His jaw trembled. "Quit messing around," he muttered, another cough wracking his body. His voice cracked—not just from weakness, but from something else. "This is the slums. No one helps anyone here for free. And besides… I've got no more reason to live."
I didn't respond.
But his words stayed.
They echoed somewhere deep inside me. In a place I didn't yet understand.
I stared at him for a while, then asked, "Why do you want to die?"
He didn't answer.
Instead, I stood. And without a word, lifted him into my arms.
He flailed weakly. "Hey! Put me down! You can't just—"
"You are weak. I will carry you."
"Why?"
"I want to understand."
He fell quiet after that.
As I walked deeper into the slums, he began to speak. His name was Elias. He told me about the Ashram—a place that pretended to be holy, but wore cruelty like armor. They took in orphans and forced them into quotas.
Ethercrystal. That was the word he used.
"You know about ethercrystal, right?"
I shook my head.
He sighed. Then explained.
A mineral that stored ancient magic. It powered everything the upper cities needed—light, medicine, wards. And it was harvested by the poor. By children. Sent into etherfields—wild places where the world's veins bled unstable energy. Dangerous. Lethal.
Miss your quota, and you vanished.
"My brother didn't make the quota last month," Elias whispered. "I gave him my share. He smiled. Took it. But the next day… he was gone. They said he was sold to the South Lords."
He looked away.
"He was all I had."
Something stirred in me. A flicker of feeling that had no name. Like the first taste of something bitter and real.
We passed addicts. Madmen. Guards who beat beggars in plain view. No one stopped them.
So this was suffering.
Eventually, we reached the ruin of a neighborhood, half-swallowed by collapse.
"This is it," Elias muttered. "My place is up the stairwell—the one that's still half-standing."
But we didn't make it.
Three shadows stepped forward. Ashram goons.
One of them—a woman with cropped hair and a scar like a broken river across her cheek—spoke first.
Her hand rested on her club. Her voice cut the air.
"Who the hell are you?"