BOOM.
The force rocked the West Wing of Castle Blackfyre like a siege engine impact.
Dust sifted down from carved rafters in the Great Hall. A chandelier rattled, sending shards of light skittering across the white walls. Somewhere in the kitchens, a pot clanged to the floor and a maid screamed.
"To arms!" the Captain of the Guard bellowed, halfway through a cup of watered wine. He hurled the cup aside and yanked his sword free. "West Wing! Secure the perimeter!"
The hall erupted into motion.
Men were already half-expecting it. Ever since the canyon, everyone in Blackfyre had lived with their shoulders slightly raised, waiting for the next blow. Steel rasped from scabbards. The nearest squad split without orders—half running for the stairwell, half for the outer corridor that led toward the library.
No one assumed it was an accident.
They expected assassins. They expected a second wave of high-level mages. They expected blood.
They rushed the library wing with shields up and weapons raised, boots pounding on the too-clean marble, voices snapping short acknowledgments as they fell into a practiced formation.
The doors to the West Wing library stood half-open, a thin haze of dust drifting through the gap.
The Captain signaled silently. Two men moved to either side, shields braced. Another kicked the doors wide.
"House Blackfyre!" he roared, ready to meet death.
What they found instead was Lady Aerwyna, standing in the middle of the library amidst a hanging cloud of pale dust, one hand covering her mouth as she coughed delicately.
There was a fresh crater in the floor where a reading table used to be.
Scorch marks radiated out like the petals of a burned flower. Shards of shattered marble lay scattered across the carpet like snow.
Aerwyna was dusted white from the waist down, her usually immaculate braid powdered at the edges.
"Stand down," she said, voice calm but sharp enough to slice. She waved a hand once, a small gesture of control, as if dismissing an annoying insect. "There are no intruders."
"But, Milady," the Captain stammered, lowering his shield a fraction as he took in the scene. "The explosion—"
"It was a domestic accident involving an unstable core," Aerwyna lied without blinking. "I have contained it. Return to your posts. Do not call the servants. I will deal with this… matter… myself."
She put the smallest pause before "matter."
Those who knew her shivered.
The Captain hesitated, gaze flickering from the crater to the cracked plaster above, then back to Aerwyna's expression. There was a particular glint in her eyes—bright, cold, and absolutely humorless.
The Ice Queen was in residence.
He snapped his fist to his chest.
"As you command, Milady," he said. "You heard her! Back to posts!"
The guards withdrew, more quickly than they'd arrived. No one wanted to be in the room when that particular storm broke.
The heavy doors swung shut.
They clicked into place with a soft finality.
Silence settled over the library, broken only by the slow drizzle of dust from the ceiling.
Aerwyna exhaled once, a whisper of white leaving her lips.
Then she looked up.
"Ezra," she hissed.
There, firmly embedded in the plaster twenty feet above, was a baby.
A six-month-old baby, to be precise.
He was spread-eagled, limbs buried deep enough into the plaster fresco to hold his weight. Bits of painted sky flaked around his fingers and toes. To Aerwyna, he looked like a particularly realistic cherub someone had thrown at the ceiling and forgotten.
Ezra's eyes were squeezed shut.
He was breathing hard, chest rising and falling in small, sharp gasps. His ears rang, and his whole body still buzzed like a struck bell.
Aside from that, he appeared intact.
"I TOLD YOU," Aerwyna shouted, her composure cracking like thin ice under an axe, "NOT TO TOUCH THE CORES!"
Her voice bounced off stone and shelves, rebounding through the library.
Ezra cracked one eye open.
From his vantage point, the world looked upside down. The marble floor was far away. Shelves full of books stabbed upward toward him. Aerwyna's face was a pale oval turned up in a mix of fury and fear.
He had questions.
This did not feel like a good time to ask them.
Aerwyna didn't wait for an answer.
She flicked her wrist.
The air cooled sharply as the moisture within it obeyed her will. Tiny droplets coalesced, froze, and spiraled together into solid form. An ice staircase twisted up from the floor, step after delicate step extruding from nothing, climbing toward the ruined ceiling.
Frost crackled under her boots as she ascended, every movement controlled, every foot placement precise.
She reached him, grabbed him by the back of his little tunic, and yanked.
Pop.
He came free from the plaster with a shower of dust.
The world lurched as she slung him against her hip. For a moment his stomach swooped, threatening revolt. His ears roared.
Down they went.
With another flick of her hand, the staircase dissolved into mist. The water droplets shot upward instead, filling the baby-shaped impact crater with a wave of liquid that froze in an instant, smoothing itself into the surrounding plaster. Frost crept outward, turning the repaired patch the same chalky white as the rest of the ceiling.
Anyone walking in later would never know a small child had been fired into the roof.
Aerwyna sat down hard in the nearest velvet chair, the cushioning puffing dust on impact, and laid Ezra face-down over her knees.
He had just enough time to think, Wait— before her hand came down.
Thwack.
The sound was crisp and not particularly loud, deadened by the padding of his diaper, but the sting still went through the cloth, a sharp, humiliating jolt.
Ezra froze.
Seriously woman, he thought, eyes going wide. I just got launched into the ceiling. Pretty sure my bones changed zip codes. My ears are still ringing. Now corporal punishment? Really
He didn't cry.
Partly because the pain was more shocking than actual agony. Partly because some stubborn, older part of him flatly refused to bawl over one swat. Mostly because he was still trying to jam the last few seconds into some kind of cause-and-effect chain.
His backside throbbed in a way that felt absurdly petty compared to "high-velocity impact with architectural features."
Aerwyna, for her part, did not look satisfied.
She looked shaken.
"I will have to spank you so that you will learn," she said, but her voice trembled at the edges, threads of panic fraying through the anger. "You could have died, you foolish boy."
She scooped him up, flipped him onto his back, and hugged him so tightly he squeaked.
Her face found the hollow of his neck. He felt the quick, uneven rush of her breath there, the tiny tremors still running through her shoulders.
Ezra lay still for a few heartbeats, pressed between the pounding of his own blood and the rapid drum of hers.
His brain tried to catalogue things the way it always did—height of fall, distance to floor, velocity on impact—but the rest of him registered only the clench of her arms and the faint, sharp smell of frost and ink clinging to her clothes.
His hand moved before he really decided to do it, small fingers patting her forearm.
"That was… really bad," she muttered into his hair. "You scared me."
Mental note, Ezra thought, a little dazed. That was catastrophic. No idea why. Rule change: no touching the shiny rocks.
The "shiny rock" in question sat innocently on the side table: a fist-sized core, cloudy white with faint veins of silver running through it.
He'd seen Aerwyna use it earlier that day. Light spell, demonstration, gentle glow in her palm. Afterward, she had set it aside among her papers.
"Depleted," she had told him when she caught him staring. "It has given up most of its power. It is empty now."
Apparently depleted wasn't safe.
She had also told him, on at least three separate occasions recently, not to touch the cores.
"I am not jesting, Ezra," she'd said, last time with that particular chill in her voice. "You are not to touch them. Not the cut ones. Not the raw ones. Not the powder. If you see a core, you call for an adult. Do you understand?"
He'd nodded.
He'd understood.
He just hadn't understood why.
Now he had… something.
He hadn't tried to channel mana.
He hadn't visualized a spell.
He hadn't even been doing his little reinforcement trick.
He'd just wanted to know what it felt like. The surface, the texture. Was it smooth? Slightly grainy? Warm?
He'd reached out, tiny hand wobbling, and brushed his fingertips against the core.
For a split second, there had been nothing.
Then his whole world turned into pure momentum.
No light. No heat. No pressure wave he could sense coming. One instant he was upright, reaching; the next, his stomach was somewhere near his throat and the shelves were spinning past in a blur.
It was like the core had touched him back and decided, violently, that it wanted him very far away.
It hadn't been "boom" so much as nope.
Now, sitting on Aerwyna's lap with his ears still humming and his head buzzing, the memory replayed in messy chunks.
It felt like… rejection, he thought. Like whatever I am, under all this, and whatever that is, just… don't mix.
It was the sort of thing that begged for careful, repeatable experiments.
He had a pretty strong feeling he wasn't going to be allowed anywhere near a core for a long, long time.
Aerwyna finally pulled back, scanning him visually, fingers checking his arms, ribs, legs for any sign of tenderness.
Nothing.
No fractures.
No bruises—yet.
His ears still rang, but the worst of it was fading.
"I told you not to touch the cores," she said again, quieter now. "You promised you wouldn't. Do you remember that?"
Ezra nodded.
He did remember.
It hadn't felt like the kind of promise that would end with him embedded in plaster.
Aerwyna sighed, the frustration bleeding out into sheer exhaustion.
"As punishment," she declared, more to herself than to him, as if she needed to hear the decision aloud, "you are banned from the library."
Ezra stared at her.
He felt the words land somewhere deep in his chest, heavy and stupidly painful.
"Mother, please," he said at once, wriggling against the blanket she'd wrapped him in. His vocabulary was small, but desperation sharpened it. "Read. Learn."
The library wasn't just a big room with shelves.
It was the one place in this bright, over-scrubbed cage that felt like an open window.
The smell of old paper and leather. The sight of spines marching in neat, endless rows. The weight of all the things he didn't understand yet pressing down from every direction.
He'd barely scratched it.
Now she was closing it off.
"No," Aerwyna said firmly. "Since you like experimenting with things you do not understand, I am taking the books away. You need to learn limits."
"Write?" Ezra blurted, latching onto the nearest loophole. "Teach… write?"
Aerwyna blinked. The anger in her face cracked just a little.
"Write?" she repeated. "You want to learn to write?"
He nodded fast enough to make himself dizzy.
"Safe," he said, holding up both hands as if swearing an oath. "No cores. Just ink."
Aerwyna pressed her lips together.
For a few seconds, she genuinely tried to hold the line. He could see it—the effort to keep the Ice Queen face on, to be the responsible one.
Then he met her eyes.
They were deep and purple, and a little watery from the dust and the earlier impact. He knew they were big because people kept commenting on them.
Something in her expression softened like ice left in the sun.
"Of all the things you could be fixated on, it had to be cores and crystals," she muttered.
She slumped back into the velvet, defeat written in the set of her shoulders.
"Fine," she said at last, sounding exactly like a woman who knew she had lost before the battle started. "Only the letters. And numbers. No spellbooks. No ledgers with core inventories. And you are not going into the library alone again, do you understand me?"
Ezra nodded solemnly, seizing victory before she could change her mind.
**
They shifted their lessons to the nursery.
The library door stayed closed to him, guarded not by steel, but by Aerwyna's word—a far more effective barrier.
In its place, she brought the tools of literacy to him.
A low table was dragged into the nursery and set near the window, where the light fell bright and steady through the glass. On it, a sheet of thick parchment was laid out, held flat at the corners by smooth stones. A small ceramic inkpot sat to the side, along with a short, carefully trimmed quill.
Ezra stared at it like a holy relic.
The first time he tried to pick it up, his hand betrayed him.
His fingers closed too slow, too wide, the quill shaft slipping sideways and smearing ink across his palm. His grip trembled, muscles too soft to do what his mind demanded. The quill felt absurdly heavy, as if someone had handed a spear to a squirrel.
He scowled at his own hand.
Then he cheated.
He closed his eyes, inhaled—short, shallow, still more reflex than control—and pushed.
Mana trickled along his arm.
Not much. Just a thin thread. Enough to wrap around the small muscles in his fingers and wrist, enough to steady where flesh wanted to wobble.
His hand stopped shaking.
He curled his fingers again, this time closing them around the quill with something approaching precision.
The feather rustled faintly as he lifted it.
"A," Aerwyna said, settling beside him and taking his wrist gently with her free hand. "Remember? Ah."
On the parchment, she guided him through the strokes.
Down. Down. Cross.
The resulting glyph looked… injured.
The lines were too thick in places, shaky in others, the crossbar crooked. Ink had blotted where the quill had lingered a heartbeat too long.
Ezra frowned.
Aerwyna smiled.
"That's a fine first letter," she said—and she sounded like she meant it.
He did not agree.
But he didn't argue.
He practiced.
Day after day, between enforced naps and Aerwyna's endless attempts to feed him things mashed beyond recognition, he filled page after page with letters.
Thirty-two characters in all.
Rigid. Phonetic. Each one representing a specific sound or pair of sounds, arranged in simple, sensible patterns that someone, somewhere, had wanted to be accessible to the widest possible population.
Not bad, he admitted grudgingly, as he copied another line. Clumsy, but not horrible.
The numbers were worse.
Their numeral system was a cousin to Roman numerals, all stacked symbols and positional ambiguity. No placeholder. No zero.
He stared at a counting table Aerwyna had drawn out for him, little dots under symbols, trying to convey quantities.
His skin prickled.
How do you people build bridges like this? he thought, hand tightening around the quill. You're doing everything with one eye closed.
The castle existed, so obviously they managed. But everything was workarounds and rules-of-thumb, mental abacuses and half-intuitive shortcuts.
No formal algebra, he realized. No clean notation. No real calculus. Of course they lean on magic for everything else.
He started working on his own.
At first, Aerwyna thought the extra pages he asked for were for practice. When she checked, she saw only dense swirls of lines and assumed they were some kind of expressive baby doodle.
They weren't.
Between the crude letters and shaky numerals, he began constructing a private shorthand—half-remembered symbols from another life, half inventions scribbled in the moment. He anchored it to what he could recall: exponents, variables, integrals. There were holes where proper notation should be, but he taped them over with temporary marks, intending to fix them later.
He pushed himself.
When his body sagged with fatigue, he propped his eyelids open with sheer stubbornness and the tiniest nudge of mana, sending a mild jolt through himself to stay awake.
He knew it wasn't smart.
He did it anyway.
I need a framework, he thought, watching ink dry on yet another crowded page. If magic creates matter, where does the mass come from? If it's energy, how much? If it's cheating… what is it cheating with?
He wrote the closest thing his fraying memory could reach for:
E = m c²
The symbols sat there, innocent and incomplete.
He remembered the shape of it, the way you remember the outline of a word in a language you haven't spoken in years. The meaning hovered just out of reach, like something stuck behind fogged glass.
When he tried to push through, it slipped away.
He ground his teeth.
As if someone took an eraser to my brain, he thought, frustrated. The outline's there, but the ink is gone.*
He pushed harder.
He sent another thin trickle of mana into his head, trying to sharpen the world. For a heartbeat, fine details snapped into focus—fibers in the parchment, the exact edges of the ink strokes, the faint shimmer of dust in the light.
Then the floor tilted.
Dizziness hit, rolling through him from the back of his eyes down to his toes. The room swam. The lines on the parchment warped.
His stomach lurched.
He knew this feeling.
It was the rim of the pit—the place he fell through during the blackouts.
"No," Ezra whispered, fingers digging into the edge of the table. "Not now. I'm close."
He was sure of it. Not in a logical way; there was no proof, no neat deduction. Just a coiled pressure in his chest and skull, as if something wanted to click and couldn't.
He didn't realize his aura had flared, a faint shimmer wrapping his small frame. He didn't realize he was pulling mana in just to keep his consciousness from flickering, patching over biology with brute force.
The edges of the nursery darkened.
In the corner of his eye, something flickered.
A wisp of light.
Not the warm pulse of a lamp, not the clean glow of a Light spell, but a hair-thin line of gold that crawled across the air like a stray stroke of a pen.
Ezra's gaze snapped to it.
The wisp fractured.
For a heartbeat, lines appeared in the air—a crooked v, a superscript mark, a blocky symbol standing in for mass. They overlapped with the real world rather than sitting on top of it, as if someone were scribbling notes directly onto reality.
The quill on the table wobbled on the edge.
He nudged it with a fingertip.
It tipped.
As it fell, the air around it… bent.
To anyone else, it would have been nothing—just a feathered stick dropping. But through Ezra's straining senses, the falling quill dragged a thin, golden trail behind it, like chalk on a board.
The white noise in his skull shrieked.
And then, for one impossible instant, everything lined up.
The squiggles stopped being squiggles.
They snapped into place.
An equation burned across his vision in sharp, clean gold, hanging over the dropping quill:
v = u + a·t