Chapter 1
The crisp, pine-scented air of the Stoneyan woods was the first thing I truly knew. It was a far cry from the polished marble and murmuring courtiers of the palace I'd never remember. My earliest memories are of rough-hewn wooden walls, the warm scent of baking bread, and the calloused, gentle hands of Ben and May Kaltos.
They found me, a silent bundle wrapped in royal linen, discarded at the base of a great oak like an unwanted parcel. Ben, a man whose shoulders were as broad and sturdy as the trees he felled, didn't hesitate. He brought me home to his wife, May, whose kindness was as deep and nourishing as the forest soil. They named me James Kaltos, grafting me onto their family tree with a love that required no royal decree.
My childhood was one of simple, profound richness. I learned the language of the woods—the difference between the warning creak of a branch and the friendly chatter of squirrels, the secret locations of the sweetest berries, and how to read the weather in the clouds. Ben taught me the honest weight of an axe, the geometry of a clean cut, and the satisfaction of a stacked woodpile. May taught me the alchemy of the kitchen, the names of healing herbs, and the melodies of old forest ballads sung by the fireplace.
But there was always a shadow, a whispered word that followed me to the one-room schoolhouse in the nearby village: "Mana-less." The kingdom of Stoneya thrived on Mana. It pulsed in the glittering ore deep in the giant caves, sweetened the fruits in the forests, and even hummed within the very mushrooms that dotted the forest floor. It was the source of all magic, technology, and status. Children my age learned to channel it for simple charms—lighting a candle, mending a tear, enhancing a crop. I could only watch, my own hands stubbornly inert.
The official test, the one done with the cold, humming Mana meter at birth, had branded me: 00/0001. A null. A void. In the eyes of the Stone throne, I was not even a person of potential; I was a statistical anomaly, an embarrassment to be erased. In the village, it made me an object of pitying glances and sometimes cruel taunts from the other children, whose own modest Mana readings at least registered on the scale.
Ben and May never treated me as less. "A tree doesn't need magic to be strong," Ben would grunt, watching me split logs with a precision born of practice, not power. "It needs good roots and strong heartwood. You've got both." May would simply kiss my forehead and say, "Your worth isn't measured in a number, James. It's measured in here," and she'd place her hand over my heart.
Yet, I felt the difference. It was in the way I had to work twice as hard to carry what a Mana-aided child could lift effortlessly. It was in the sting of seeing a friend use a spark of Mana to light our campfire while I struggled with flint and steel. I loved my life, my parents, my forest, but I carried the ghost of that "00/0001" like an invisible, weighty stone.
Everything changed on my sixteenth birthday. A fever took me, sudden and fierce. For three days, I burned, my dreams a chaotic storm of green fields and great waterfalls, of glittering caves and the cold, judging eye of the Mana meter. May tended to me with cool cloths and whispered prayers. Ben paced, his face etched with a fear I'd never seen.
On the fourth morning, the fever broke. I awoke weak but clear-headed. As I pushed myself up in bed, a strange sensation flooded me—a warmth, a vibration, a *pressure* from within, as if a dam had burst behind my ribs. I looked at my hands. A soft, golden light, faint at first, then blazing like captured sunlight, erupted from my palms, illuminating the entire cottage with a pure, steady radiance.
Ben and May stared, their faces awash in the glow. There was no fear in their eyes, only awe. The light wasn't hot; it was comforting, like the warmth of the hearth, but it was undeniably powerful. I focused, and the light condensed into a single, dancing sphere above my hand. With a thought, I sent it to the cold fireplace. The stacked logs ignited instantly into a perfect, crackling blaze.
Trembling, I let the light fade. The cottage returned to its normal dimness, but the world had been irrevocably altered. We didn't have a Mana meter, but we didn't need one. This was not the subtle, controlled trickle of Mana the village children practiced. This was a torrent. This was an ocean where they had puddles.
Later, using a borrowed meter from a bewildered village elder, we got a reading. The needle didn't just climb; it shot past all known calibrations, spinning wildly before settling at the very limit of the device's scale. The elder, a man who'd once looked at me with pity, now stared with something akin to terror. The reading was an impossible, theoretical maximum: 100,000.
The truth, which came to me in the quiet certainty of that inner warmth, was a revelation. I was not Mana-less. The palace meter hadn't failed. My Mana was not *low*; it was of such a different order, such a profound density and purity, that their crude device could not process it. It read my potential as null because it was calibrated for a candle, and I was a star. Exiled for being a void, I had been, all along, a sun waiting to dawn.
I looked at Ben and May, the woodcutter and his wife who had given me roots and heartwood. I was James Kaltos, son of the forest. And now, I knew I was also something else—a secret the kingdom had foolishly thrown away. The Mana that flowed through Stoneya's fruits and caves was a gentle stream. The power that now hummed within me, nurtured by love and hardened by honest labor, was a tidal force. My story wasn't one of a prince discarded. It was the story of a foundation being laid, deep in the woods, for a strength the palace could never have imagined.