The Imperial carriage assigned to Prince Alaric was a cruel joke.
It was not one of the glossy black, gold-crested marvels favored by the more prominent heirs, but a shabby, repurposed supply wagon, its leather straps cracked, its axles groaning, and its interior smelling faintly of mothballs and hay.
Kaelen settled onto the stiff velvet seat, forcing his body into the posture of a nonentity. He was leaving the Imperial Capital, the beating heart of the civilization he had saved, and no one spared him a second glance. The very guards escorting the carriage were low-ranking, their expressions bored and dismissive.
This was precisely the anonymity he needed.
As the carriage began its slow, grinding exit from the opulent city gates, Kaelen finally allowed himself to shed the persona of the anxious Prince Alaric.
The next two weeks belong to me, Kaelen decided, closing his eyes. The Arch-Mage must assess his prison.
His first action was an internal survey of the body. In his first life, Kaelen's body had been a conduit: a finely tuned machine capable of processing and storing mana on a continental scale. Prince Alaric's body, however, was a closed fist.
He probed gently for the channels, the intricate magical pathways Mages used to draw and circulate energy. They were present, a complex, ethereal road system, but every single avenue was choked, calcified, and dormant. He felt a sharp, sickening realization: Alaric hadn't been magically crippled by chance or simple lack of talent; he had been deliberately sealed.
"A sophisticated ritual," Kaelen muttered, leaning his head against the dusty window. "Perhaps performed by the Empress's own mages shortly after his birth. Designed to ensure the sixth son remained precisely that: the sixth."
This discovery was both a horror and a relief. If the seal had been mundane, Kaelen's Arch-Mage soul would be permanently useless. But the seal relied on the integrity of the Imperial magical grid. Kaelen's chosen path, the Draconic Blood Magic, was a forgotten, raw power predating the Empire. It didn't use the channels; it created them by burning through the user's essence. It would bypass the seal entirely.
The problem, however, was the vessel itself. This body was frail.
Kaelen ran a critiquing hand over his thin arm. Alaric's physical form was a disaster—weak musculature, poor circulation, and a lifetime of soft living. The journey to Stonehaven was long and harsh, a two-week endurance test just to reach his refuge.
The memories of the original Alaric confirmed the physical frailty: a boy who lived in fear of his powerful brothers, a boy who avoided even the simplest physical exertion to protect his carefully hidden secret, the fact that his body occasionally flared with an uncontrollable, dragon-like heat, a secret anomaly of his lineage.
Ah, there it is. The key. Kaelen felt a faint, residual warmth beneath Alaric's sternum.
The Draconic Heart, a dormant seed of immense, ancient power inherited from the very first Dragon Kings who founded the Imperial line. It was useless to the uninitiated, but to Kaelen, it was a forge.
He mentally isolated the seed of energy. His goal was not to gently nurture it, as a novice would, but to violently ignite it.
The process of Draconic Blood Magic was fundamentally barbaric. It required tearing open the calcified channels and forcing the primal, burning energy of the Dragon Heart to flow. It was an alchemical reaction where the soul acted as the catalyst and the body as the crucible.
Kaelen began. He started with the lowest known tier of the practice, the "Coiling Serpent" technique, a simple process meant to circulate a miniscule amount of primal energy along the spine.
He took a deep, shuddering breath, focusing all his Arch-Mage will onto the Dragon Heart. He gave a mental shove, not a nudge, demanding the energy move.
The response was immediate, overwhelming, and non-magical.
It felt as though a thousand tiny, jagged shards of glass had been simultaneously injected into his spinal column, tearing upward from his tailbone to the base of his skull.
The pain was so sharp and intense that the carriage's rough movement became a mere backdrop to the screaming agony in his own flesh.
Kaelen bit down hard on his tongue, tasting blood, muffling the cry that instinctively rose in his throat.
He could not, would not, alert the bored guards outside the carriage. He forced his facial muscles to remain placid, adopting the vacant stare of the witless prince.
W-weak. The word echoed in his mind, choked by the pain. This was the most basic step, a technique a novice could master in weeks. It had instantly incapacitated this body. The Dragon Heart had fought back, resisting the forced awakening.
He maintained the mental pressure for what felt like hours, even as beads of cold sweat beaded on his forehead and his teeth ached from clenching. He pushed until the pain crested and finally, mercifully, receded into a throbbing ache.
He had failed to move the energy even a centimeter. But he had not been destroyed.
It will be a daily battle, then. Kaelen knew he could only attempt this technique once a day without risking a catastrophic magical detonation in this frail vessel. He had two weeks until Stonehaven, giving him only fourteen tries before he reached the safety of his exile.
He spent the rest of the day in silent, strategic calculation.
He reviewed Alaric's limited knowledge of the Empire's economy and political structure. He analyzed the weak points of the Empress's governance, information useless to the original prince but gold to the reborn Arch-Mage.
He cataloged every betrayal, every strategic error, every future disaster: a roadmap of opportunities waiting for him to gain strength.
The carriage groaned and hitched. The landscape outside had long changed from manicured Imperial farmlands to wild, desolate forest. The air grew perceptibly colder, heavy with the metallic scent of unrefined mana, a sign they were nearing the northern, monster-infested frontiers.
Late in the afternoon of the fourteenth day, after his final, excruciating failure with the Coiling Serpent technique, the carriage finally jerked to a stop.
"Prince Alaric," the lead guard called without opening the door, his voice laced with patronizing finality. "This is it. Stonehaven. Our orders are to return to the capital immediately."
Kaelen pushed open the door and stepped out onto the frozen, uneven ground.
He looked up at the legendary fortress of his exile.
It was magnificent in its ruin. The walls were massive, constructed from dark, volcanic stone, but huge breaches yawned where monsters or siege weapons had done their work years ago. Turrets leaned precariously, and the great central keep was a skeleton of shattered arches. The entire peak was shrouded in perpetual, gray cloud cover.
Stonehaven was not just abandoned; it was actively decaying, slowly consumed by the wilderness it was meant to guard.
Only a handful of grim-faced, underpaid soldiers stood guard. They eyed Kaelen, the pitifully frail prince, with a mixture of pity and resignation.
Kaelen inhaled the cold, sharp air. It smelled of freedom.
He had failed every attempt to ignite his magic during the journey, but he had mastered the pain. He walked past the guards, his tattered satchel slung over his shoulder, and stepped through the broken main gate.
Inside the crumbling courtyard, the wind whistled through the shattered stone. Kaelen reached down, scooped up a handful of freezing dirt, and crushed it in his palm.
He looked back towards the distant Imperial Capital, the city of traitors.
He was weak, maimed, and alone, but he was alive.
I have reached the Shadowed Peak. Now, I shall begin my work in earnest.