The girl was eight years old and she pulled a star out of the air.
Not a real one. A mana construct Wolf knew that even then. But it sat in her palm like it belonged there, white and humming, and the crowd pressed forward and gasped, and her parents wept in the way people do when the future arrives ahead of schedule.
Wolf watched from the gate.
Greyveil Academy opened its courtyard once a year during the Mana Tide Festival, when the ley lines beneath Gravenport ran hot and the whole city smelled like lightning. Students demonstrated. Crowds gathered. Eight-year-old Wolf had squeezed through adult legs to reach the iron bars and wrapped his fingers around them and stared.
A boy conjured frost that crept across the cobblestones in patterns. A girl older than Wolf bent wind into a shape that looked almost like a bird before it came apart. A professor corrected a student's wrist angle and the student's flame doubled in size immediately, like it had just been waiting for permission.
Inside, magic looked easy. Inside, magic looked like belonging.
Wolf stayed until the crowd shifted and closed around him and he lost his spot at the bars. He didn't fight for it back. He put his hands in his pockets the same hands that had pressed against a measuring crystal three months ago and turned it dark and walked home through the festival alone, the academy's light shrinking behind him.
He didn't cry. He was eight, not five. He just walked.
Nine years later, a janitor offered him one silver to stand in a room and hold still.
Ossel was the man's name. Heavyset, smelled like cleaning solution, had the specific expression of someone who had found an easy solution to a problem and didn't see why it needed more thought than that.
"Combat class needs a practice body," he said. "Living target. You stand in the circle, the students cast, you resist naturally. One silver when it's done."
Wolf was seventeen. One silver was three days of dungeon-runner pay. He looked at the service gate not the iron gate from the festival, this one was narrower, set into the side wall, the kind of entrance that communicated clearly that you were not a guest.
He signed the form.
Ossel led him through maintenance corridors that smelled like stone dust and old mana. Wolf looked straight ahead. He had walked past Greyveil every day for nine years without looking at it. He had gotten good at that. Now he was inside and he kept his eyes forward and thought about nothing.
The combat hall was vaulted and clean, with observation seats along the upper walls and training circles marked in the floor. About twenty students waited in ranked formation, all Silver-track or close to it, wearing Greyveil's grey-and-gold. Professor Herath stood at the front mid-forties, the kind of efficient that never became warm.
Herath explained the exercise to the class. Binding Coil. A mid-tier restraint technique. Mana chains, precision-cast, designed to hold without damage. The point was control, not force. And the target here Herath gestured at Wolf the way you gesture at a piece of furniture had no mana core, which meant clean feedback. No interference. Ideal conditions.
Wolf stood in the circle and said nothing.
The first student stepped up. Young, focused, clearly nervous. She cast carefully. The chains came out right cold and exact, locking Wolf's wrists and ankles in place. He couldn't move. It didn't hurt.
She released it. Stepped back. Light applause.
The second student was not interested in careful.
Wolf felt the difference immediately more mana, less precision, the chains snapping tight with enough force to leave the skin underneath hot and aching. He breathed through it. The student noted his reaction and looked satisfied.
The third watched the second and decided that was the version worth copying.
Nobody stopped it. Not because they were cruel most of them weren't, not deliberately. It was smaller than that. One person set a standard and the rest drifted toward it because drifting is easier than choosing. Herath moved between students, correcting form, watching chains, and did not once look at Wolf's face to check what the chains were doing to the person wearing them.
By the seventh student Wolf's wrists were bruised under the cold pressure. His ribs had been caught twice by chains meant for his torso not wrong exactly, just careless. Someone's cast clipped his jaw and split his lip and he tasted blood and stood still.
He thought about the festival.
He thought about the girl with the star in her palm and her parents crying and how the crowd had pressed forward to see it, and he thought about how he was standing in the same building right now and the crowd was pressing forward to see him too, just differently.
He thought about the hollow in his chest. The place where a mana core was supposed to live. He had spent seventeen years waiting for it to do something, protect him somehow, matter in some way. It never had. It was just empty space. Having nothing hadn't kept him safe. It had only made him available.
The last student finished. Herath dismissed the class without addressing Wolf directly.
Ossel appeared from a side door and handed him one silver coin. Gestured toward the exit. Wolf took the coin. Walked out. He didn't run.
He passed a window in the corridor. Through it he could see the courtyard the same courtyard he had pressed against the gate to watch at eight years old. It looked smaller than he remembered. Most things did, once you got inside them.
He sat down outside against the academy's exterior wall and didn't get up.
Not out of despair. His legs just weren't interested in the walk home yet, and the ground was as good a place to be as any.
The city was quieting down around him. Festival lights still burned in the distance. Somewhere across the district, mana-lamps flickered on for the night shift. Wolf leaned his head back against the stone and looked up.
Gravenport's sky was almost never clear too much discharge from the dungeon district, too much interference from the upper ward enchantments. But tonight there was a gap in the haze, and through it, stars. Real ones. Still and indifferent and very far away.
He held the silver coin in his palm. One silver. He thought about what it said about his life that this was a notable day. He thought about his father saying curse and his mother saying nothing and the examiner saying I'm sorry like that was something he could use.
He thought: I'm still here.
Not as comfort. Just as fact. Small, stubborn, tired fact.
He closed his eyes.
The hollow in his chest the void, the absence, the empty space he had carried since birth got warm.
He opened his eyes.
Gold text burned in his vision, bright enough that the night went strange around it, sharp-edged and absolute, like something that had been waiting a very long time to finally be read.
DECK PROTOCOL — EMERGENCY BOOT
Host Detected: Wolf
Mana Core: ABSENT
Void Classification: STAGE ZERO
Standard magic: INCOMPATIBLE
Alternate Power Source: VOID ENERGY — DETECTED
Initializing DECK PROTOCOL...
WARNING: Host biology not optimized for this system.
Side effects will occur.
Survival is not guaranteed.
Do you accept?
[ YES ] [ YES ]
"There was never a NO option. There never is."
Wolf read it once. Read it again.
Survival is not guaranteed.
He thought about his wrists. His split lip. The one silver coin still in his palm. The professor who had not looked at him once in two hours.
He thought: when has it ever been.
He thought YES.
The hollow filled.
Not with warmth. Not with anything that had a clean name or showed up in any textbook. Something older than that something that hummed low and continuous and burned the way coals burn, patient and total. The emptiness that had defined him since before he could speak closed over and became something else entirely, something that pressed against his ribs from the inside and said here and now and finally.
Six cards appeared in the air before him. Translucent. Edged in gold that shifted like the festival lights from nine years ago. Visible only to him, hovering in the dark above the courtyard stones, waiting.
He reached out and touched the nearest one.
It hummed back.
Wolf looked up at the gap in the sky, the stars sitting still and indifferent behind it, and then back at the six cards floating in the dark in front of him.
The hollow was gone.
He didn't know yet what had taken its place. He didn't know what the cards meant or what the warning meant or what any of this would cost him. He had no way of knowing that the warmth in his chest was already spreading, already testing the boundaries of the body it had found, already beginning the slow process of becoming something the world did not have a word for.
All he knew was this: seventeen years of nothing and now something.