Three weeks had passed since the sound of hoofbeats faded into the morning mist, taking Roderick and his men to war. Three weeks of waiting, of watching the road for ravens that rarely came, of pretending that life could continue as normal when everything felt fundamentally wrong.

  The first letter arrived after ten days—a brief note confirming safe arrival at Thornfield and successful reunion with Uncle Gareth's forces. The second came a week later, reporting that they'd marched further east toward the contested city of Millhaven. Since then, silence.

  Elenora spent her days managing the manor with a kind of desperate efficiency, throwing herself into ledgers and correspondence as if keeping busy could somehow bring her husband home sooner. She held Clarisse constantly, finding comfort in the weight of the baby in her arms. But Alec could see the signs of strain—the dark circles under her eyes, the way she started every time a rider approached the gates, the forced brightness in her voice when she spoke of anything related to the war.

  Alec had tried to be the dutiful son, staying close to the manor, helping with small tasks, reading from his books in the solar while his mother worked nearby. But today, the walls felt like they were closing in around him. The familiar stones seemed to press closer with each passing hour, and the carefully measured routine of manor life felt like a prison.

  He needed air. He needed space. He needed to feel connected to something larger than the suffocating weight of waiting.

  So he'd slipped away after the midday meal, telling Mila he was going to practice his letters in the garden. Instead, he'd made his way to the postern gate and into the forest that bordered the manor's northern edge. The guards knew him, trusted him to stay within the boundaries they'd set. Just into the tree line, they'd said. Close enough to hear the horn if danger threatened.

  But Alec had ventured deeper.

  The forest in late spring was a cathedral of green light, ancient oaks and ash trees forming a canopy so thick that the world below existed in perpetual twilight. The air here was different—cleaner somehow, charged with something that had nothing to do with the magic stones of civilization. It smelled of moss and rich earth, of flowering trees and the distant promise of rain.

  Alec walked until he could no longer see the manor walls, following a deer path that wound between massive tree trunks whose bark bore scars from centuries of storms. The forest floor beneath his feet was soft with layers of fallen leaves, muffling his footsteps until he moved like a ghost among the trees.

  He found himself in a small clearing where sunlight actually reached the ground, painting everything in shades of gold and green. A stream bubbled somewhere nearby, its voice mixing with the whisper of wind through leaves and the distant call of birds. Without conscious thought, Alec sank to his knees in the center of the clearing, suddenly overwhelmed by the magnitude of everything he couldn't control—the war, his father's safety, the future of his family.

  In his previous life, Alexander had never been one for meditation or spiritual reflection. But this moment demanded something of him, some acknowledgment of his helplessness in the face of forces beyond his understanding or influence.

  He closed his eyes and tried to do what his books said magic users were supposed to do—reach inward, find the spark of mana within himself, nurture it into something useful. He'd done it before, in small ways, with small magics. He'd learned to find that inner warmth, that sense of energy that lived somewhere near his heart.

  But today, as he reached deeper into himself than ever before, looking for comfort in his own power, something unexpected happened.

  Instead of warmth spreading outward from within, he felt a tingling sensation that seemed to come from outside, from the very air around him. It started as barely more than the feeling of standing too close to a storm, that electric anticipation that made hair stand on end. But as he focused on it, it grew stronger.

  The sensation crawled across his skin like gentle lightning, raising goosebumps along his arms and neck. It was not unpleasant—quite the opposite. It felt like recognition, like greeting an old friend after long separation. Without understanding why, Alec found himself reaching out toward this external energy, the way one might stretch toward warmth on a cold day.

  The moment his consciousness touched it, the world exploded.

  Not literally—there was no sound, no flash of light, no physical impact. But something fundamental shifted in Alec's perception, as if someone had suddenly given him new senses he'd never known he was missing.

  He could see the mana.

  It flowed through everything—streams of silver-blue light that moved like water through the air, pooling in places of power, rushing along invisible currents that connected all living things. The trees around him blazed with it, their roots creating a vast underground network of pulsing energy. The stream nearby was a river of liquid light, its water carrying mana downstream to nourish countless other lives.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  But that wasn't the overwhelming part.

  The overwhelming part was the Source.

  Deep beneath his feet, deeper than rock and earth and the roots of mountains, Alec sensed something vast and ancient and utterly alien to human understanding. It was not consciousness as he understood it—it had no thoughts, no desires, no will of its own. It simply was, the way a mountain is, or an ocean.

  Gia.

  The word came to him without his knowing how, like a memory from someone else's life. This was Gia, the spirit of the world itself. Not a goddess to be worshipped or a being to be bargained with, but the fundamental force that caused life to exist at all. The endless cycle of birth and death, growth and decay, creation and destruction that produced the energy mortals called mana.

  Through his connection to this primordial force, Alec understood things that no six-year-old should be able to comprehend. He saw the delicate balance that allowed life to flourish—how death fed life, how destruction enabled creation, how the mana that powered magic was simply the universe's way of recycling the energy of existence itself.

  He sensed the great pulse of it, like a heartbeat that took eons between beats. In that rhythm was everything—every plant that pushed through soil toward sunlight, every predator that culled the weak to strengthen the herd, every magic user who drew power from the endless dance of existence.

  And he understood that this connection, this ability to touch Gia directly rather than simply drawing on the mana she produced, was not normal. The books spoke of mage sight, of the ability to see magical auras and flows of power. But this was different. This was like seeing the source code of reality itself.

  The emotions that crashed over him were too large for any human mind to fully process. Wonder at the incredible complexity and beauty of it all. Humility in the face of something so vast and ancient. Terror at the implications of what he was experiencing. And underneath it all, a deep, bone-deep loneliness that came from suddenly understanding how truly alone individual consciousness was in a universe driven by forces that operated on scales beyond mortal comprehension.

  Alec felt tears streaming down his face, though he couldn't say if they were tears of joy or sorrow or simply the body's response to experiencing something beyond its ability to cope with. His hands were pressed flat against the earth, and he could feel the pulse of Gia through the soil, through the roots, through the very stones beneath the forest floor.

  For a moment that lasted either seconds or hours—time had lost all meaning—he was connected to everything.

  He felt the deer drinking from the stream a hundred yards away, sensed the hawk circling high overhead, knew the exact number of ants in the colony beneath a fallen log at the clearing's edge. The boundary between self and world dissolved, and Alec Gothsend—son of a viscount, reincarnated office worker, child with magic in his blood—became part of something infinitely larger.

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the connection snapped.

  Alec gasped and fell forward, his hands clutching at ordinary earth that now felt dead and lifeless compared to the vibrant network of energy he'd just experienced. The mage sight faded, leaving him with normal vision that seemed impossibly limited, like trying to see through a keyhole after standing in a vast cathedral.

  He retched, his body rejecting the experience it was never meant to have. The physical world reasserted itself with brutal efficiency—the smell of loam and leaves, the sound of his own ragged breathing, the feel of bark against his back as he slumped against the nearest tree.

  But the memory of what he'd experienced remained, seared into his consciousness like a brand. He had touched Gia, the source of all mana, the breathing of the world itself. And in that touch, he'd glimpsed truths that mortal minds weren't designed to hold.

  As feeling slowly returned to his body, Alec realized something fundamental had changed within him. The small spark of magic he'd always carried now felt different—not larger, exactly, but deeper. More connected to something vast and eternal. When he experimentally reached for his power, it responded with an eagerness that hadn't been there before, like a dog that had finally remembered its master's voice.

  He could still feel it, faintly—that vast network of life and energy that connected everything to everything else. It was like remembering a dream upon waking, growing fainter with each moment but never quite disappearing entirely. And deep beneath everything, he could sense the slow, eternal pulse of Gia herself, beating to a rhythm that had existed since the world's birth and would continue long after its death.

  The sun had moved considerably by the time Alec felt strong enough to stand. His legs shook like a newborn colt's, and he had to lean against trees for support as he made his way back through the forest. The familiar path seemed subtly different now, as if he was seeing it through new eyes—which, in a way, he was.

  By the time he reached the manor walls, Alec had managed to school his expression into something approaching normal. But inside, he was reeling from the implications of what had happened. He had touched the source of magic itself, experienced a connection that went beyond anything described in any book he'd read.

  And he was only six years old.

  That night, as he lay in his bed listening to baby Clarisse's peaceful breathing, Alec stared at the ceiling and tried to make sense of what he'd experienced. The books spoke of great mages who could tap into ley lines, natural flows of mana that crisscrossed the world. They told stories of arch-mages who could draw power from multiple schools of magic, of legendary figures who could reshape reality itself.

  But none of them spoke of touching Gia directly. None described the ability to see the underlying structure of existence itself.

  As sleep finally claimed him, Alec couldn't shake the feeling that his life had just taken another fundamental turn. First the memories of his past life, then the manifestation of his magic, and now this—a connection to the very source of magical power.

  The war raged beyond the valley walls, his father faced unknown dangers, and the kingdom teetered on the edge of chaos. But here, in the quiet darkness of his room, Alec Gothsend had discovered something that might change everything.

  He had touched the heart of magic itself. And somehow, impossibly, it had touched him back.

  The question now was what he was supposed to do with that knowledge. And whether a six-year-old boy—even one with the memories of a grown man—could bear the weight of such power without losing himself in the process.

  Outside his window, the forest whispered secrets in the wind, and somewhere beneath the earth, Gia continued her ancient dance of life and death, creation and destruction.

  The world had just become a much larger—and more dangerous—place.