Valery's voice remained even, but there was a weight to it now, the weight of old knowledge being passed carefully from one set of hands to another. "As generations passed, mages arose who possessed not only the methodological precision their predecessors had developed, but also naturally high mana pools. Efficient, powerful, and unconstrained by a single technique. They took the maps their ancestors had drawn and refined them further to such a degree that entire complex pathways could be activated with a single compressed input. A word. A phrase. A command to reality."
Exalibar was quiet for a moment. "A spell."
"A spell," Valery confirmed. "And the practice of building, storing, and wielding those compressed pathways drawing mana from the environment itself and holding it in physical mediums for later use became what they called sorcery." She paused. "They were, by any honest measure, the most formidable wielders of mana in the history of the world. Not because of what they were born with. Because of what they built."
The room was very still.
"Then what happened?" Exalibar asked.
"Knowledge is dangerous in proportion to how much of it exists in one place," Valery said. "They grew wise enough to recognise that. The most advanced practitioners made a collective decision to discontinue the formal study of sorcery. Not to destroy it but to stop expanding it. To let it be. As centuries passed and the people integrated with the broader population, fewer and fewer children were born without techniques. The need for the old methods faded. The knowledge became rare. Then obscure. Then, for most of the world, theoretical."
"So why isn't it taught?" Exalibar asked. "Even as history?"
"Because governments do not like to advertise the existence of power they cannot regulate," Valery said, without inflection. "There are currently, to our knowledge, approximately one hundred mages in the world. People born without a technique. Most of them never develop their capacity meaningfully, because without guidance they don't know what they are. The government's position is that this population is too small to require institutional support, and that drawing attention to their existence creates more problems than it solves."
She let that sit for a moment, then continued.
"We believed that number was accurate. Until Lekratia."
Exalibar exhaled slowly. "The low mana levels."
"Your mission confirmed what we suspected. The suppression effect you and Sky observed is not suppression at all. It is the natural baseline of a population in which the absence of techniques has become statistically significant. Lekratia is producing mages at a rate that has no modern precedent." She met his eyes. "The cycle is beginning again."
"Is that necessarily a bad thing?"
"Mages, as a category, are not a threat," Valery said. "What follows mages, historically, is the problem. The mana levels we classify as low today would have been considered substantial by the standards of the original practitioners. A person with today's so-called low levels, applying sorcery with the efficiency those ancient practitioners achieved, could produce outcomes of an entirely different magnitude than what they originally created." She paused. "The freezing of the Three Valleys flood. That was not an advanced practitioner by historical standards. That was someone who had clearly achieved significant mastery, but was not operating at the ceiling of what sorcery can do. What happens when someone does?"
Exalibar's jaw tightened. "A fire spell with the yield of a nuclear weapon."
"Potentially. With far less preparation and far less warning." She folded her hands again. "And before you point out the obvious yes, a sufficiently powerful conventional mana user could theoretically achieve comparable destruction. But a technique constrains the mind to a single domain. A sorcerer has no such constraint. The same practitioner who froze a river could, with the right preparation, do something entirely different tomorrow."
"You're describing an unrestricted weapons system," Exalibar said flatly.
"I am describing what the government's intelligence division woke up to three days ago," Valery said. "The confirmation that at least one active sorcerer exists in the world, operating outside any known framework, in the vicinity of a country that is quietly mass-producing the population base from which more sorcerers could emerge."
The quiet between them had a different quality now. Not the silence of a standoff. The silence of two people looking at the same map.
Exalibar was the first to break it.
"No."
Valery waited.
"No," he said again, and pushed back from the table slightly. "I hear you. I understand the scale of what you're describing. And I am telling you no." His voice was controlled but the edges of it were sharp. "Three weeks ago you sent eight people into a country on your intelligence. One of them is going home with half her mana capacity gone. Permanently. She is nineteen years old and she was there because we needed her face in the tourist photos." He let that land. "Another one spent four days in a hospital bed with a rebar hole in his side. And all of that happened on a mission that was supposed to be a research extraction. Clean. Low-risk. Controlled." His eyes didn't move from hers. "You want me to walk toward a sorcerer."
"I want you to help us understand what we are dealing with,"
"Don't do that," Exalibar said. "Don't give me the version of the ask that sounds like something I can say yes to. Give me the real one."
A long pause.
"We need someone to locate the sorcerer," Valery said. "To get close enough to assess capability, affiliation, and intent. Ideally to make contact." She held his gaze. "You are the only person we have who could theoretically get close to a practitioner of that level without being immediately neutralised. Your mana signature is unclassified not in any database they would have access to. Your ability to read, adapt, and replicate mana techniques in real time gives you options that no other operative we have can claim. And if what Aisha's data suggests about your capacity growth is accurate, the gap between you and a sorcerer is closing faster than either of us fully understands yet."
"And the team?" Exalibar asked.
"That would be your decision."
"Jane is out," he said immediately. "She doesn't come anywhere near this."
"Agreed."
"I want full intelligence disclosure. Everything you have, everything you receive. No more 'suspicions' that conveniently don't make it to the briefing."
"That can be arranged."
"I want training. Real training. Not a three-week tourist exercise followed by a crisis. If you're sending us toward something like what we saw at that dam, we go in prepared or we don't go in." He paused. "And I want Aisha to have resources for her serum work. Proper resources. Lab access, testing subjects, whatever she needs. That compound failed someone because it wasn't finished. She needs the space to finish it."
Valery considered each condition as he stated it, with the measured attention of someone who had been making and evaluating agreements for a very long time. When he finished, she was quiet for a moment.
"The intelligence disclosure is already something I should have implemented from the beginning," she said. "I won't pretend otherwise. The training yes. You'll have as much time as the situation allows, and I'll be honest with you about when that window closes. Aisha's resources yes. Without qualification." She paused. "Is there anything else?"
Exalibar looked at her. The hesitation was brief but real.
"You said," he began, "that you believe the reason for my dreams is connected to this."
Valery held his gaze and said nothing. She was not confirming. She was also not denying. She was, with the precision of someone who had chosen her words with great care over many years, allowing the silence to carry exactly as much as she intended it to.
It was, Exalibar realised, as much of an answer as she was prepared to give him tonight.
He looked at the table. He thought about a white room with five hundred children in it. He thought about a girl with white hair and purple eyes. He thought about a gunshot. He thought about what it might mean that he had been carrying a dead man's memories, or his own, or something that was neither and both at once.
He thought about the way Chloe had looked standing in the devastation at the dam, her arms wrapped around herself, asking for nothing.
He thought about Jane sitting in amber light, saying nothing for a long time.
He looked up.
"I'll do it," he said. "But I have conditions beyond what I've already stated, and we'll discuss them properly. Not tonight." He stood. "Tonight I'm going home."
Valery nodded, a single, clean acknowledgement. "Of course."
He moved toward the door. Paused with his hand on the frame.
"One more thing," he said, without turning around. "The woman who saved Sky at the dam. The one with the technique the Crescent Moon strike." He could feel Valery's attention sharpen behind him. "You know who she is."
The pause that followed was a fraction too long to be nothing.
"Get some rest, Exalibar," Valery said.
He left without another word.