The lecture hall smelled of parchment and pride.
Kael's footsteps were muffled by the thick velvet rug that lined the corridor. He had walked this path once before, in another body—just not in this life. Here, now, in the Arkanian royal palace, every echo of his soft leather shoes was a whisper that didn't belong.
Two guards standing by the arched double doors barely gave him a glance. They didn't salute. Not even a nod. Third Prince or not, he had long been declared an anomaly—an error stamped into the ledger of royal lineage.
Still, he pushed the doors open.
The moment he stepped into the classroom, the buzz of young noble voices dipped. Dozens of heads turned. Older boys and girls, his brothers among them, sat in perfect rows at polished obsidian desks. Sunlight cut in through geometric skylights above, casting sharp lines of gold across the floor like celestial judgments.
At the center of the room stood Tutor Vallen. His crimson robe was lined with gold sigils that flickered faintly with stored magic, and his eyes were sharp as razors behind half-moon spectacles.
Kael swallowed. He was barely tall enough to see over the desk in front of him. But he raised his chin anyway.
"I've come to attend today's Core Theory class," Kael said, keeping his voice even.
Vallen looked up from his rune-inscribed slate. His expression did not shift.
"You?" he asked, with a flicker of amused disdain. "We're discussing advanced Core Pulse harmonics today. Not broken circuits and laughable aberrations."
A few students snickered. Kael recognized the sound—it was the same tone his half-brother Jaros used when he stepped on dying insects.
"I've read the first tome of Core Theory," Kael said carefully. "And the Arkan Codex on Pulse Tuning."
Vallen walked toward him slowly. "Reading," he said, "is not understanding. Your core is gravity." The word dropped like a stone in a still pond. "A dead-end force. It doesn't resonate. It consumes."
Kael's hands curled into fists at his sides. The familiar chill of shame began to rise—but he strangled it. "All magic comes from force," he said. "If gravity is a force, then—"
"You speak as if you're in a physics lab, boy," Vallen snapped, the last word slicing into the air like a whip. "You are not in your dusty little corner of books and fantasy. You're in the court of power. Magic is will, shaped through affinity. And gravity is no more a gift than a stone tied to your neck."
Someone laughed behind him. Kael didn't turn.
"Leave," Vallen said, turning away.
"I want to learn."
The room stilled again. Kael's voice had risen—not a shout, but louder than it should've been. It came from somewhere in his chest that still remembered being seventeen, standing in a debate hall, refusing to believe that ignorance should go unchallenged.
Vallen stopped mid-step. "Then learn this," he said, gesturing toward the wall where glowing glyphs danced in sequence.
A floating projection shimmered into view—complex diagrams of magical pulses, frequency harmonics, and spiraling elemental patterns. "If you can answer this," he said, "you may stay."
Kael stepped forward.
The diagram was beautiful, in a way only precision could be. It showed a stable tri-elemental resonance: fire, wind, and lightning. A system of feedback and flux. The question: how to convert it into a quad-cascade core structure.
Kael's breath caught. He could almost see it.
But his mind wasn't built to think in elemental harmonics. Not anymore.
He reached instinctively for a framework that made sense—force vectors. Interference waves. Gravitational lensing and harmonics. His thoughts drifted into calculations of vector collapse and field overlays, friction curves and entropy bleed. The magic in the room didn't speak that language.
Silence stretched.
Vallen's lips twisted. "As expected."
Kael said nothing. He turned and walked toward the door.
Behind him, someone whispered, "The walking void."
The door closed with a soft click. His hands were trembling.
Dust Tower stood far from the royal gardens, like a forgotten thought at the edge of consciousness.
Kael sat cross-legged in the narrow chamber that had become his refuge. A thin notebook lay in front of him—its pages filled with dense writing, diagrams, and questions that chased their own tails.
He flipped to a blank page and wrote:
Core Theory = Elemental-based interpretation of magic Gravity = force, not element I think in forces, not flames.
His hand paused.
I am not broken. I am thinking on a different axis.
He set the quill down and exhaled slowly.
Failure in the lecture hall wasn't the real pain—it was the certainty in Vallen's eyes. The absolute belief that Kael's core wasn't just weak. It was wrong. Anti-magic. A black hole in a world made of light.
He closed his eyes.
The memory returned with frightening clarity: a fall through stars. Dying in his old world. That final moment of breath stolen by entropy. A mind splintering and reforming in a new body, under a new sky.
He wasn't supposed to be here. Not in this world. Not in this tower. Not with gravity.
And yet...
Kael reached for the pebble on the stone floor beside him. He held it in his palm, focused his will—not with emotion, but calculation.
"Mass is constant," he whispered. "Weight is mass times gravitational acceleration."
He pushed.
The pebble didn't grow heavier.
He pulled.
It trembled slightly, but didn't rise.
Kael frowned. "The force vector is too weak," he muttered. "Or maybe... I'm visualizing the wrong axis."
He reached deeper. Not into muscle, but into mind.
Gravity isn't fire. It's not summoned in bursts. It's always there. Constant. Passive until directed.
He imagined the pebble's weight being overwritten—not added to, but shifted. He imagined standing on the moon, where weight is one-sixth. Then on Jupiter, where it would be over twice as much.
The pebble twitched. Moved.
Kael's heart skipped.
He shifted his focus—visualized a 10% increase in downward pull. The pebble thudded slightly against the floor. Tiny. But real.
He released it. The effect faded.
"Gravipoint," he murmured.
A new spell name. Not just a spell—a concept.
He smiled faintly. The bitterness was still there, but it no longer tasted like failure. It tasted like work. Progress.
Proof.
That night, he stood at the edge of the Dust Tower balcony. The stars overhead didn't match any sky he once knew, but he looked at them the same way he always had—in wonder.
He wasn't welcome in court.
He wasn't welcome in the palace.
But he had a mind that refused to kneel.
And gravity, for all its silence, never stopped working.
They called him a void.
Fine. Let them.
A black hole wasn't a failure of light—it was its end.
And someday, the stars that mocked him would learn what it meant to be pulled in.
To be continued…