The morning smelled like coffee and something fried, warm air carrying both down the stairwell as Magnar pulled his pant leg down and stood.
"You're bleeding," Adrian said.
"I am aware."
Adrian stared at him for a moment, caught between concern and frustration. He looked at the bite mark, then at Magnar's face, then back at the bite mark. He settled on frustration. "You gonna tell me what happened?"
"No."
Adrian opened his mouth, closed it, and pointed at the door instead. "Shift starts in ten minutes."
The morning passed without incident. Magnar worked, moved through the familiar rhythms of the café, and let his hands operate independently while the rest of him was elsewhere. The bite was real. The forest was real. The mana had been real, thick and pressing, nothing like the internal reserves he had spent a lifetime drawing from. A different system entirely. Denser. Less disciplined. He had produced fire with a thought, but the output had felt slightly uneven, like speaking a language he had learned young and not used since.
He would need to account for that.
Near midday, a young woman dropped into the counter seat, ordered without looking at the board, told Magnar he looked like he needed a good evening, and left a generous tip on her way out. The door swung shut behind her and the café settled back into its quiet.
He stood there a moment longer than necessary.
"She's just being nice," Adrian said, appearing at his shoulder to collect the empty cup. He glanced at Magnar sideways. "Relax. Not everything requires analysis."
Magnar picked up a cloth and said nothing, which Adrian had apparently learned to interpret as acknowledgment because he moved on without pressing it.
Later, while Magnar was still turning over the morning's mana problem in the back of his mind, Adrian appeared beside him. "Still doing the math?"
"Always."
"Anything that concerns the rest of us?"
"No."
Adrian took the cloth from a hook, found a surface that was already clean, and wiped it anyway. "One day," he said, mostly to himself, "you're going to answer a question like a normal person."
Magnar said nothing. But something in his chest registered the comment and held it there briefly, not warmth exactly, but something adjacent to it that he did not have a better name for.
That evening, alone in his room with the window cracked and the sounds of the street filtering up from below, he set the crystal on the floor and studied it.
The surrounding stone had to go. He worked methodically, using the edge of a flat tool borrowed from the kitchen without explanation, chipping away at the outer rock in careful increments. The crystal beneath was roughly palm-sized, tapered slightly at one end. He refined the shape over the course of an hour, then threaded a cord through a natural groove near the top and knotted it twice.
He held it up.
Functional and portable. Nice.
He put it around his neck, lay down on the narrow bed, and this time did not wait for sleep to take him. He closed his eyes and invited it.
Arrival was quieter than before.
The forest came in gradually, the smell of wet earth and green things first, then the filtered light moving through leaves overhead, then the pressure of it, the mana saturating the air the way humidity saturates a room after rain. Magnar stood, oriented without difficulty, and took one slow breath.
He had expected it this time. Expectation did not make it comfortable, but it made it workable.
His instincts were calibrated for internal reserves, not environmental saturation. The mana here did not wait to be summoned, it pressed against him from every direction, patient and indifferent, already leaning in before he had decided what to ask for. The adjustment required was not effort but restraint, learning to draw precisely from something that wanted to give more than asked.
He started with fire.
A small flame appeared above his open palm, obedient but slightly larger than intended. He reduced it, held it steady, then allowed it to expand again slowly, tracing the edges of the response. When he was satisfied he extinguished it and moved to air. A controlled current ran between his hands, steady enough, though it took two attempts to keep it from broadening past its intended shape. Earth next, a small section of root beside his foot shifted, compacted, held. Better. The grounding of it helped him find the right footing.
He was recalibrating. Not recovering. That distinction mattered.
A sound reached him from the left, unhurried movement through undergrowth, something large and unbothered. He turned without stepping back.
The creature that emerged from between the trees was massive. Low to the ground and broad across the shoulders, it moved with the particular slowness of something that had never needed to hurry. Its hide was thick and dark, the color of old bark, and across its back and flanks grew protrusions of dense layered stone, not attached, not decorative, but grown, fused into the skin over what must have been decades. They caught the filtered light like the face of a cliff. Its head was wide and blunt, carried low, and the single curved horn above its snout had been worn smooth at the tip from age rather than use.
It stopped when it noticed him.
The dark eyes that settled on Magnar held no alarm. They moved across him slowly, thoroughly, and arrived at some quiet conclusion. It lowered its head and moved on. The stone formations along its spine shifted faintly as it walked, the way boulders settle after a tremor, and it disappeared back into the green without hurrying.
Magnar watched the space where it had been for a moment longer than strictly necessary.
The rocky growths were not incidental. This world's mana ran so deep and so long that it had shaped the animal's body from the outside in, slowly, patiently, across a lifetime. The creature carried the environment in its bones. That was worth sitting with.
He returned to the work.
He spent the next stretch testing combinations, small elemental pairings, transitions between one and the next, the timing required to shift without losing cohesion. The mana responded readily to everything, sometimes too readily. He kept his outputs deliberately small, mapping the gap between intention and result, noting where the translation held and where it didn't.
Then, at the edge of his patience, he allowed himself slightly more.
He directed a focused burst of air and fire at the base of a dead tree twenty feet ahead, a controlled strike, calibrated to split the trunk cleanly.
The tree did not split cleanly.
It came apart. A sharp detonation rolled outward through the forest, birds lifting from the canopy in a sudden noisy mass, the surrounding trees shuddering with the displaced air. Splinters scattered across fifty feet of ground in every direction.
Magnar stood very still.
The trunk was simply gone. Where it had stood, the ground lay newly cleared, and beyond it, visible now for the first time, a narrow trail ran between the older trees, worn faintly into the earth as though used with regularity but not often.
Something moved in him immediately. Curiosity, clean and directional, the kind that had gotten him into considerable trouble across two worlds.
He took two steps toward the trail before he stopped himself.
He did not know where it led. He did not know who used it, or what moved through this forest consistently enough to press a path into the ground. He had no map of this world's rules yet, no read on its people, no anchor beyond the crystal at his chest and the knowledge that arriving back in the present injured was a real and recurring possibility.
The trail was not going anywhere.
He stood there for a moment longer than the decision required, which was its own kind of answer, and then turned away from it.
There would be a next time. He would prepare for it properly.