Power doesn't arrive with fireworks.
It doesn't scream, or flare, or make the skies tremble not at first.
Real power hums.
It watches.
It waits.
And when it does move, it doesn't ask permission.
It simply changes everything.
I didn't know what to expect the first time it reached through me. There was no scroll, no ritual, no secret incantation. Just silence. Breath. Focus.
And the weight of a thought I didn't know how to finish.
Power came quietly.
That's what surprised me most.
It didn't roar or crackle or strain against the seams of my skin. It simply… arrived. Not like a guest entering a room, but like I had simply stopped ignoring that I wasn't alone.
The day it happened, I wasn't meditating. I wasn't training. I wasn't trying to awaken anything.
I was watching the snow fall.
The East Courtyard was deserted. The soldiers had already rotated to the outer wall. The guards who usually lingered by the marble columns had retreated from the cold.
It was quiet.
Still.
Clean.
I sat on a raised stone platform the old sundial no longer used since the estate adopted celestial clocks and watched the snow spiral down in uneven threads, catching light, vanishing on contact with the frost.
Everyone's trying to reach the stars, I thought. But none of them are looking at the space between them.
That space fascinated me. It always had.
I didn't know why. Only that something about the silence between moments felt more honest than the moments themselves.
It was there, in that pause, that it happened.
My breath slowed.
Not deliberately just… naturally.
I watched a single snowflake land near my foot. Then another. Then twenty.
They didn't melt.
They froze harder gaining clarity, sharpness, edges too fine to be natural. I blinked once.
The courtyard darkened not from shade, but from something less tangible. Like the air itself had pulled inward. Not a storm. Not mana.
A shift.
A truth.
Is this you? I asked the silence. Not aloud. Just inward.
It answered.
Not in words. In understanding.
A current of presence flowed up my spine not warm, not cold. Just real. It didn't force itself into me. It had always been there. Waiting.
My pulse synchronized with something greater.
And for the first time since my Awakening, I didn't feel hollow.
I felt… aligned.
I stood.
The snow hadn't stopped falling. But now it was swirling around me gravitating, spiraling, forming slow-motion rings without wind or command. As if something unseen was setting a perimeter around my body.
My hands didn't glow.
My skin didn't spark.
But my shadow… had changed.
Faint outlines of orbiting spheres danced along the ground. Twenty… maybe more. Each subtle. Each pulsing once every few seconds.
I felt no heat.
No energy drain.
Just awareness.
My vision sharpened. I could count the ridges on the brick across the yard. Hear the weight of snow landing on the upper shingles.
This isn't a surge, I thought. It's a lens. A focusing.
The Origin wasn't giving me power.
It was removing interference.
I heard footsteps behind me.
My senses dulled not because they failed, but because I let them. The resonance faded the moment I looked away.
Lady Elowen "my mother" stood at the far end of the courtyard. Alone. Wrapped in a robe of pale fur and layered blues. Her presence was always quiet, but never gentle. She wasn't like the others.
She never looked disappointed in me.
Just… uncertain.
She didn't speak. Only watched me. Maybe she'd seen the snow move.
Or maybe not.
"It's too cold to be outside," she said finally.
"The cold helps me think."
She tilted her head slightly, then turned to leave. Not another word.
And yet… she'd come looking.
Or watching.
Or both.
When she disappeared into the corridor's shadows, I exhaled.
The snow fell normally again.
The shadow on the ground returned to its natural shape.
But something had shifted.
Not out there.
In me.
I had not summoned the Origin Star.
I had aligned with it.
Like a mirror tilted at just the right angle, catching a light that was already there.
That night, I returned to my quarters and stood before the frosted glass.
Twenty dots, the same pattern from before.
But now I understood something new: they weren't stars above, but reflections of something within.
And the blank center? It wasn't emptiness, but the origin.