The boy had not asked for a mentor.
Not once.
Not even with the weight of an unknown world pressing in around him like a cloak soaked in strangeness.
Others had begged, wept, pleaded for guidance when first awakened to the Pattern. They had hungered for safety—ritual, incantation, structured certainty. And yet Ezrel, this stranger from nowhere, observed our glyphs like a child breaking open a clock to understand time.
I stood at the edge of the southern grove, high above the circle of stone where he now worked alone. I kept my presence shielded—not through magic, but with stillness. The kind that the forest understands.
From my vantage, I watched him redraw the spell-circle with maddening precision. His movements were slow, careful, mechanical—lacking the fluidity of a traditional caster, yet somehow no less graceful.
He paused after each line. Adjusted spacing. Tilted his head. Took notes. Sometimes he altered a symbol's inner arc, or mirrored a glyph. It was as though he were running permutations, not practicing spellcraft.
He does not speak to the Pattern. He interrogates it.
The first time I felt the pulse ripple through the grove—the lattice glyph—I nearly revealed myself. It had been centuries since anyone, let alone a child with no training, triggered an autonomous layering without incantation or anchoring. The runes rotated around him like they recognized a command... but did not fully trust the speaker.
When they collapsed, I felt the Pattern sigh. Not in pain. Not in resistance. But as though curious.
Even now, I see him cross-legged, scribbling furiously into one of our scrolls as though it were a ledger of the stars. His brow furrowed not in frustration, but in focus.
A part of me—the older part, the cautious part—whispers of danger.
Magic is not a machine. It is not a system to be conquered. It feels. It remembers.
It binds more than fire and stone. It binds history.
But then I remember the look in his eyes when he first saw the Flame Bind—a look not of awe, but of understanding interrupted.
He had not flinched. He had measured.
Perhaps he does not come to destroy what we know… but to translate it.
Still, there are risks. The Pattern does not always take kindly to blunt instruments. And Ezrel is wielding curiosity like a scalpel.
I step back, my breath catching on the edge of a thought I cannot shake:
He is not following the script because he was born in a world where scripts are written and rewritten without apology.
And if he succeeds—if he maps the logic, isolates the variables, and speaks to the Pattern not in prayer but in structured command—he may open a door we sealed long ago.
A door best left forgotten.
I press a palm to the bark of the old grove tree and whisper a silence glyph over the wind.
"Watch him," I murmur to the forest. "But do not wake the old defenses… not yet."
As I turn and vanish into the trees, I wonder:
Will he learn how we wield magic?
Or will he force us to remember why we feared it in the first place?