The cold was no longer a sensation.
It had become a rhythm—a slow, dull ache pulsing beneath Cael's skin, syncing with his breath, his heartbeat, his thoughts. He huddled beneath a sloped ridge of jagged ice, body wrapped in torn synthetic fabric from his parka, now barely holding together. His hands were raw, red, and trembling, but he had learned—slowly, painfully—not to weep. Tears would freeze before they fell.
He wasn't dead. Not yet.
And he hadn't left.
The shard still floated in the back of his mind, like a second moon. No matter how far he wandered from that sunken crater, its presence lingered—distant, pulsing. Watching. Whispering.
"Find the patterns. Understand. You asked for this."
He couldn't tell if the voice came from inside the shard… or from some unraveling corner of his own mind.
A Cold World, A Quiet Awakening
It had been… days? Weeks? He'd lost track. Time didn't feel real here. The sun never rose, only flickered behind clouds of endless gray. The wind never stopped screaming, but the land remained still—as if the world itself were holding its breath.
He'd found things.
Ruins buried beneath layers of snow and frost—curved stone spires carved with symbols that glowed faintly when he touched them. The pulses of Essentia, as he later learned to call it, always followed.
The first time it happened, his fingertips had sparked. Not fire—something else. A vibration, like electricity—but colder, deeper.
Learning the Pattern
He spent hours tracing those glowing marks with half-numb fingers.
He sketched them into the ice with jagged rock. Over and over. Eventually, he felt something shift.
He didn't know why or how, but as he concentrated, Essentia moved.
Not much. A shimmer in the air. A faint ripple across the stone. But it was his doing.
He had discovered something no textbook, no professor, no research lab on Earth ever could've taught him:
Magic was real—and it obeyed structure.
Like a formula.
Like code.
And Cael Adrios, for all his social ineptitude and emotional detachment, was very, very good at decoding things.
The Memory in the Ice
On the seventh day—he assumed it was the seventh—he found something new.
Half-buried beneath snow and shattered crystal was a structure shaped like an arch. Its center was hollow, but rimmed with runes matching the ones he'd seen earlier.
When he placed his palm on its frame, the world around him fractured.
His body froze in place. His vision blurred.
Then: a vision.
A city of silver spires—now broken and forgotten—bathed in violet light. A great tear in the sky, jagged and howling. And beneath it, a being of smoke and stars, arms outstretched, drawing the tear closed with threads of light… screaming in silence as it vanished into the breach.
The image seared into his mind.
And then he was back.
Alone. Trembling. The arch behind him now cracked, dimmed.
First Spark
That night, Cael gathered what little firewood he could—twisted icebark from frozen tree husks—and sat near the crater again.
He closed his eyes.
Focused.
The runes. The patterns. The shard.
He whispered the symbol that had burned into his thoughts: "Vael."
And the air shimmered.
A pulse of heat swirled around his hand. A spark. Then a flicker of flame.
Tiny, but real.
His first spell.
-
He stared into the tiny fire, heart pounding.
Something deep inside him—deeper than fear or awe—hungered.
For more.
More knowledge.
More power.
More understanding.
He had come to this world broken, drifting. But now, even in this frozen graveyard of gods, he had found something he had never known before.
Purpose.
The shard pulsed once, faintly, in the back of his mind.
And Cael smiled.