Time passed after Ezra tried—and failed—to cast a spell.
A slow rhythm of a castle that stayed itself: meals and laundry, patrol rotations, shutters opened at dawn and latched at dusk. The same footsteps in the corridor. The same cold gemlight flickering in the sconces.
Within that rhythm, Castle Blackfyre found a brittle equilibrium.
Ezra innovated.
His parents contained.
And everyone pretended, with varying competence, that the nursery didn't hold an infant who could keep adult eye contact and think in equations.
He'd been walking for a while.
With mana, he could make it look however he wanted.
Without it… the movement was still wrong.
On Earth, an infant usually found stable walking between nine and fifteen months. Ezra did it far earlier—and he avoided the wide-legged, drunken lurch of a normal toddler.
When he let himself use it, his gait came out careful. Deliberate.
Engineered.
He stood alone in the nursery, feet planted on the woven rug, and studied his legs like faulty hardware.
Bone density is insufficient, he thought, as clinically as he could manage in a body that still wanted to chew things. Growth plates soft. Ligaments underdeveloped. If I do this with just meat and bone, I snap.
He closed his eyes.
Breath in.
Breath out.
No chant. No invocation. No words.
He sank.
That heightened state—his parents' Field, his own private capital-letter Field—settled over him like a lens clicking into place. The world didn't brighten. It gained density. Edges firmed. Distances became countable.
Awareness bled past his skin and into structure.
He mapped himself.
Spine: stacked segments, unfinished.
Pelvis: a shallow bowl, still pliable.
Femurs, tibias, ankles.
The tiny bones of his feet, refusing to feel like the lever system they would become.
Instead of pushing mana outward—the mistake he circled in every failed Activation—he drove it inward.
His Field answered.
With a subtle thickening that hugged bone from within. He skimmed muscle fibers—quadriceps, hamstrings, calves—and flooded them with a thin reinforcing layer, potentiating each contraction.
Reinforce the lattice.
Compensate for gravity.
He lifted one foot.
Placed it.
Balance wobbled for a heartbeat as his baby body tried to revert to its default—crawl, don't walk, you idiot—but reinforcement held.
Weight shifted. Center of gravity slid over the planted foot.
One step.
Then another.
From the corner of the nursery, Catalyna froze.
The wet nurse had entered without Ezra noticing—quiet as always—and stood with folded linens in her arms. Her eyes widened a fraction, then her face reset into calm professionalism.
"Careful, little Lord," she said, voice even. "You'll fall."
Ezra kept his gaze off her.
He pretended to misunderstand. Easier now, with practice. He let his mouth hang slightly open. Let a little drool gather at the corner.
To her, it would read as a miraculous baby taking his first unaided steps.
To him, every muscle fiber sat under conscious override.
Three more steps.
Then a familiar warning flickered at the base of his skull.
Verdict.
Stop.
The world tilted—one degree, just enough.
Ezra grabbed the crib rail. Tiny knuckles blanched. Pressure stabbed behind his eyes.
His breath hitched.
The nursery smeared sideways for an instant, like paint dragged across glass.
Stop, he thought, teeth clenched. Stop, stop, stop—
He clamped the Field down and forced mana to recede before it tipped past tolerance.
Pressure ebbed.
Nausea surged.
Sweat prickled across his scalp.
The blackouts had become rarer with time. In the first months, they'd come daily, ripping his consciousness away for hours or days as whatever process was rewriting his brain took precedence.
Now they hit once a week at most.
Always after he pushed.
As long as he paced himself, he stayed conscious.
But the threat of a hard reboot stayed there, humming like an overtaxed breaker.
Ezra let go of the rail and let his knees buckle.
He dropped to all fours in a clumsy collapse—exactly the kind of motion that made adults smile and coo instead of reach for knives.
Catalyna stepped closer, controlled and measured.
"Ah," she said quietly, as if he'd been playing at something childish. "There you are. That's enough heroics for today, my Lord."
Her voice sounded warm. Almost indulgent.
Something under it made Ezra's skin crawl.
Her eyes stayed too clear.
Her footing stayed too balanced.
She moved like someone who never tripped over her own skirts.
Aerwyna's warnings replayed like scripture.
No speaking in front of the maids.
No tricks.
No standing unless I'm here.
Spies, Ezra. Spies everywhere.
So around Catalyna, he kept his performance simple.
Babble.
Basic words.
Unsteady steps when necessary.
Floppy limbs when not.
Speech, in particular, cost him.
Proper enunciation required more than muscle memory. This throat, tongue, and jaw didn't move like his old ones. The first time he forced a clean sentence without mana—May I see the book, Mother?—half the syllables turned to mush.
So he experimented.
Mana into vocal cords. Into the tiny muscles of tongue and lips.
Smoothing motion like tuning an instrument.
With the Field engaged, he could speak almost like he had on Earth: crisp consonants, complex vowels, controlled intonation.
At a cost.
Hold that control for more than a few phrases and pressure rose behind his eyes. Vision threatened to white out.
He'd stopped just in time, gasping, while Aerwyna—missing the micro-crisis—had only smiled and patted his cheek.
So he adapted.
Important conversations: clear speech, powered by mana, in short bursts.
Everyone else: minimal words. Blunt phrases.
Just enough to steer adults.
Nothing more.
"Book," he'd say.
"Garden."
"Bottle."
It bruised his pride.
It kept him awake.
Efficiency over elegance.
Most of his hours belonged to Catalyna.
She talked.
He listened. Or pretended not to.
"…and they say the price of grain is going up again," she murmured one afternoon as she changed his linens, speaking past him instead of to him. "River barges delayed from the east. Primarch's men requisitioned half the last convoy. The kitchens won't like that."
Ezra stared at the ceiling, tracking dust motes in the slanted sunlight.
Under the blanket, he flexed his fingers.
Index.
Middle.
Ring.
Pinky.
Micro-control of individual tendons.
Catalyna continued.
"The quartermaster says we may have to cut rations for the outer barracks if it keeps up," she said. "Lords will blame bandits, of course. They always do."
A soft click of her tongue.
"And when bellies go empty," she went on, smoothing the sheet with firm, practiced strokes, "men start looking for someone to hate. They call it justice. They call it duty. But it is only hunger dressed up in fine words."
Ezra kept his gaze on the ceiling.
Catalyna's voice slid into a faint rhythm—the one she used when she believed no one was listening closely enough.
"There is only one kind of light that feeds," she said quietly. "Not bread alone. Not coin. The kind that keeps a man from turning wolf when winter bites."
A pause.
"Do you know what it means to be strong, little Lord?"
Ezra left his mouth partway open, blank as any infant. A soft breath. A little drool.
Catalyna exhaled, amused at her own question.
"Not to burn," she answered herself. "Not to drown. Not to crush. Those are easy. Any brute can do them.
"To be strong is to carry others when the world is heavy."
Her hand pressed—brief, precise—against the center of his chest, as if checking how his breath rose.
Then she returned to her work, voice light again, as if she'd been discussing linens.
Her words became a steady hum of something else—half domestic talk, half sermon.
Which maid had been dismissed.
Which guard had been promoted.
Whose cousin had married into which lesser house.
She never named factions. Never spoke politics straight.
But Ezra always listened, and the keep's tension showed in the seams.
Reitz gone more often.
Patrols stretched thinner.
Extra watch on the southern wall.
He set it aside in his mind, building a crude model of Blackfyre's immediate environment.
Between it all, he practiced walking in secret, bracing bone only when Catalyna's back turned.
He extended his Field in tiny pulses, mapping the nursery by feel: the exact position of each piece of furniture, the hairline crack in plaster by the window, the hollow patch under one floorboard where centuries of settling had shifted stone.
He tested his range daily.
Some days he barely pushed past the crib.
Other days—when the hyper-real clarity arrived clean—he skimmed the corridor, traced the footsteps of a passing maid without opening his eyes.
When pressure sharpened in his skull, he stopped.
Lesson learned.
His reprieve came when Aerwyna stole time to visit.
Those hours mattered.
"Book please," Ezra asked, standing by her knee in the safety of her private solar.
Here, with the door locked and her aura screening the room, he eased his performance. He kept the soft posture of a child, but his eyes stayed awake.
Aerwyna laughed—tired, but real.
"You want to read?" she asked, brow lifting. "Ezra, you are a baby."
Ezra braced his throat with a thread of mana—enough to steady muscle, not enough to summon the familiar pressure behind his eyes.
"I want to learn to read," he said clearly, tapping the ledger with his palm. "Words."
Her smile softened.
"Alright, little river," she murmured. "Come here."
She lifted him onto her lap and opened a slim volume. She guided his hand to trace inked lines.
"These are letters," she said in Imperial Common. "Each one makes a sound. Put them together, and you get words."
He already had spoken syntax. Months of eavesdropping had done that.
What he needed was the mapping between sound and symbol.
He fixed his eyes on the page and engaged his Field just enough to sharpen focus.
The glyphs burned into memory with violent clarity.
He repeated the sounds under his breath, matching them to strokes.
"A… B… C…" in their equivalents.
Aerwyna watched him like he might evaporate.
When she thought he'd forget, she prompted gently. "Again? Or are you bored already?"
"Next," Ezra said.
She blinked.
Then she chuckled, and something like relief threaded through it.
They cleared more letters that day than most noble children managed in a week.
She would have kept going, but duty always pulled. Eventually she closed the book with reluctance, kissed his forehead, and handed him back to Catalyna.
Back to the nursery.
Back to quiet.
"Soon," she whispered once, lingering at the door. "When you're older, we'll get you proper tutors. Maesters. Real books, not just primers."
Ezra nodded.
He wanted to argue—now, not later—but he understood the geometry.
A one-year-old requesting treatises on mana theory didn't get educated.
He got dissected.
Patience, he told himself. Adapt to the body. Live long enough to do real work.
Reitz's visits grew rarer.
When he came, they were loud.
Most evenings, if he was in the castle at all, the nursery door slammed open.
"Where is my son?" Reitz thundered, half-laughing as his voice boomed off stone.
He scooped Ezra up and tossed him into the air with reckless confidence that made Aerwyna look ready to faint.
For a moment, while airborne, Ezra's Field flared on reflex—tracking vector, bracing for impact.
Reitz always caught him with a grip that was firm, precise, and unshakable.
The man acts like an idiot, Ezra conceded, but his body control is terrifying.
Once the roughhousing ended, Reitz planted Ezra on his shoulder and told stories.
Bandits on the southern border.
A duel between two minor Nobles over grazing rights.
Rumors of Primarchs' men sniffing around neighboring fiefdoms.
He delivered it in exaggerated, simplified form—so as to "not worry the baby"—but the stories carried more context than Reitz realized.
Ezra listened.
A world where violence was legal, codified, celebrated, where his father's jokes were half meant and his mother counted hidden blades that weren't there.
The first time he was allowed outside the keep proper, he almost forgot to play dumb.
"I want to go to the garden," he said one morning, tugging Aerwyna's sleeve as she paused between meetings.
She hesitated.
"Nonsense," Aerwyna muttered. "The inner courtyard is no place for an infant. Too open."
Then she saw how he stood—no Field, just stubborn baby muscle shaking as he clung to her dress—and something in her expression softened.
"We could use some air," she conceded.
By afternoon, Catalyna carried him down the main stair, Aerwyna behind them.
Ezra didn't protest being held.
Maintaining the walking façade the entire distance would tax him, and he needed his Field for something more important.
The moment they stepped into the Inner Courtyard, his senses flooded.
Sky.
It was the first time he'd seen this much of it at once—a wide, pale-blue dome framed by stone walls and tower tops.
Cool wind moved across his skin, bringing scents the nursery never had: damp earth, crushed grass, distant smoke.
The courtyard was meticulous.
Stone paths cut through trimmed hedges and orderly rows of herbs.
Flowerbeds clustered around benches.
Young fruit trees lined the walls, branches trained along trellises.
Ezra's gaze slid past all of it.
Infrastructure.
His eyes locked onto the fountain at the center.
A star-shaped basin carved from pale stone, edges worn smooth by time and water.
Jets arched from the top and poured constant streams down tiered levels into a pool below.
From there, the water ran into five narrow canals that radiated outward, feeding smaller basins and irrigation troughs.
Ezra's eyes narrowed.
No gears.
No wheel.
No simple fall driving a pump.
He reached—through Field, not fingers.
A shallow skim along stone.
He felt it.
A knot of pressure and movement embedded at the heart of the fountain.
It wasn't alive—no warm glow like Aerwyna or Reitz—but it carried density.
Active.
Directed.
His eyes caught confirmation: faint light pulsing through a cutout in the stone, like a heartbeat behind translucent skin.
A core, he decided. That has to be the power source.
Beside it, set into a narrow channel, sat an elongated faceted crystal, faintly blue. Its surface held precise, circuit-like etching.
And that's the logic.
Core for raw mana.
Crystal for form.
Swap the crystal, change behavior.
Swap the core, change runtime.
A primitive solid-state machine.
He wanted—sudden and sharp—to touch it.
To feel how Field interacted.
To see what happened if he altered flow by a fraction.
"Don't squirm, little Lord," Catalyna murmured.
"You'll fall."
Ezra swallowed frustration and went limp, letting his head rest against her shoulder like a sleepy child.
The sun hung pale overhead, a disk of white-gold that offered light and little heat.
Cold bit at his cheeks.
Later, as Catalyna made another slow circuit of the frost-dusted courtyard with him bundled in furs, the sun sank.
Light angled.
Shadows stretched across snow.
Ezra tipped his head back.
One sun.
Some time later, back inside, day fully gone, he pressed his face to the nursery window and watched a familiar disc rise over the horizon.
One moon.
His chest loosened.
If he'd looked up and found two suns, or three moons, or a sky permanently cracked with auroras of uncontrolled energy, he might have broken.
Instead, the stable cycle—light and dark, regular and predictable—anchored him.
Gravity feels like one G, he thought. Day length roughly similar. No visible radiation anomalies. This is, in broad strokes, an Earth-like system.
So why does magic work?
He watched a servant light a lamp in the corridor.
She reached up and slid a small strip of paper out from between two embedded stones—a faintly glowing core and a crystal.
The lamp flared to life.
An insulator, he realized. The paper was a magical switch. Disconnect, no light. Connect, light.
Magic wasn't "breaking" physics.
It was interacting with something else.
A hidden layer Earth-born science never touched.
Back on Earth, they'd mapped the baryonic component of the universe: protons, neutrons, electrons. The stuff you could touch.
Five percent of the total energy density.
The rest—
Dark matter.
Dark energy.
Placeholders.
Invisible scaffolds inferred only by gravitational fingerprints.
Is this it? he wondered, pulse quickening. Is "mana" just their word for a controllable interface with the Dark matter or Dark Energy? Are living brains here wired to reach into that ninety-five percent we never could touch?
Speculation.
No instruments.
No controlled experiments.
No peer review.
Just a physicist trapped in an infant's body, staring at a medieval lamp like it was a collider.
Still, the idea helped.
If mana sat in the missing mass-energy budget, then nothing was being created from nothing.
The equations weren't wrong.
They were incomplete.
The core drew from an invisible reservoir.
The crystal shaped the flow.
The visible effect was the tip of a universal iceberg.
If that was true, then one day—when he had books, instruments, and time—he could map it.
He'd need help.
The days blurred.
From Catalyna's muttering and Reitz's stories, Ezra built rough counts of the guards and attendants that came and went.
He needed Reitz.
The man had lived his whole life using magic under pressure. Even if he couldn't explain mechanism, he still had enough experience to at least coach him.
Offhand comments. Casual demonstrations.
Data points.
Ezra sat on the windowsill cushion that night—small enough to be bolstered there—and looked south, toward the line of dark hills beyond which waited bandits, Primarchs, and whatever else.
Somewhere out there, his father was drilling troops, fighting raiders, or drinking with Nobles.
Probably all three.
"Hurry back, old man," Ezra murmured.
He fed just enough mana into his vocal cords to make it clear, even though no one was there to hear.
"I have questions only you can answer."