The smell rode in on the river wind, so faint it was almost impossible to catch.
Sweet. Cold. Burnt, like wood that had been smothered under a fire for too long.
Reale's knife stopped halfway through the fish.
Around him, the other village children were still laughing on the gravel bank. One boy held up a wavering ball of flame the size of an egg.
Another made a ribbon of water tremble above his palm.
Their tiny tricks were clumsy, but in White Birch Village that was enough to make them feel like future mages.
No one noticed that Reale had stopped moving.
No one except the fish beneath his hand.
He lowered the blade again, but the smell was still there.
Wrong.
A moment later, Tori lunged toward the line of fish they had skewered beside the fire.
"I'm taking the biggest one."
"Not that one," Reale said.
Tori snorted. "You can't even make a spark, but sure, fish-boy. You know everything."
Reale did not argue.
He turned the fish over, slid the knife into its belly, and split it open with one clean pull.
The children nearest him recoiled at once.
The flesh inside was wrong—stringy in places, gray where it should have been red, and slick with a faint dark sheen around the gut.
Reale tapped the blade against the board.
"Cooked doesn't mean edible."
The little burst of silence lasted only a heartbeat.
Then someone muttered, "So what? You're still the one who can't use magic."
The others laughed again, louder this time, glad to have their footing back.
Someone bragged that he would leave the village and become a knight.
Someone else said he would join a merchant caravan.
Tori raised his chin and swore he would enter the Academy one day and learn proper magic.
Then the topic turned, as it always did, and landed on Reale.
"What about you?"
He turned the fish over once more. Firelight climbed across the skin in a soft orange shimmer.
"I want to be a chef."
The laughter this time was immediate.
"A chef?"
"So you'll cook for real adventurers?"
"Or scrub pots for mages?"
"Tori will be in the Academy and you'll be handing him his meals."
A few of them laughed hard enough to bend over.
Reale kept looking at the fire.
His ears were hot, but his voice stayed level.
"Knives and fire aren't only for killing."
That line should have sounded childish in a village where strength meant spell circuits, swords, or noble blood.
Instead, it dropped into the air and stayed there.
For one brief second, even Tori had nothing to say.
Then Insphiel stepped in.
She had been listening from the side, hands folded around a bundle of herbs she had gathered on the way back.
Her grades at the village school were the pride of White Birch Village.
The teacher said her magical sensitivity was absurdly high, higher than anything the western edge of Aster Kingdom had seen in years.
"You'd all collapse after one day on the road if nobody fed you properly," she said sharply. "Reale's food is more useful than your mouths."
She meant it.
That was what made it hurt more.
She was standing up for him.
But Reale did not want someone else to spend her kindness protecting him forever.
Before anyone could answer, hoofbeats rolled in from the village road.
Every head turned at once.
A carriage bearing the crest of the Kingdom Academy entered the village square in a blaze of polished metal and stamped leather.
Adults came out of houses. The teacher nearly tripped over himself getting to the road. Even the children fell silent.
Reale smelled the wrong scent again before he saw where it came from.
Not from the envoy.
Not from the horses.
From the long wooden case strapped along the rear of the carriage.
The black horse nearest it had its ears pinned flat and kept shifting its hooves as though it wanted to be anywhere else.
Reale stared at the case.
Sweet. Cold. Burnt.
Stronger than before.
The envoy dismounted and called for the village teacher. Then, after a brief exchange and a formal crystal test, all eyes went to Insphiel.
"High-grade affinity," the envoy said, and even his voice changed. "The cleanest circuit I've seen in the western frontier in three years."
The village erupted.
Children stared at her as if she had already left them behind.
Adults looked proud. Some looked reverent.
Reale stood beside the cooking fire, fingers rubbing salt grain by grain from his thumb.
He had known Insphiel would leave one day.
Knowing it and seeing the Academy come for her were not the same thing.
The envoy arranged for them to depart at first light in two days.
Insphiel came to find Reale after sunset.
She was excited, trying to hide it and failing. She said she would write. She said the capital had kitchens larger than the village square.
She said he should come to the city one day. She said, quietly, that he really was good enough to become something.
Reale listened.
He wanted to believe her.
But all he could smell was smoke, salt, and that cold sweetness still hanging around the carriage in the dark.
Later that night, alone in his house, he cut into the leftover pork leg he had abandoned earlier.
The smell hit him so hard his hand froze.
This time it was worse.
When the blade opened the flesh, a black drop swelled between the fibers and pushed outward.
It did not fall immediately.
It bulged under the skin first.
As if something inside was still trying to move.
A scream ripped across the village from the western pasture.
The kitchen fire shuddered.
Then, from outside his yard, came the faint scrape of something testing the wooden gate.
The latch moved.
Very softly.