"Mom, look! My mana awakened!"
"Mom, me too!"
Arthur and Cedric stood side side, palms outstretched, the air above their fingers rippling with the unmistakable distortion of raw, unfiltered power.
"Oh, praise the heavens!" Her voice hitched, years of silent dread evaporating in a single, ragged breath.
She lunged forward, gathering them in. "I knew it. My sons—true mages!"
"Bwahaha! You'll both leave your old man in the dust!"
A booming roar rattled the framing as their father charged in, bringing with him the sharp stench of pine resin and dried sweat. The heat of his unbridled pride poured over them like an open kiln.
"This demands an uproar!" he bellowed, throwing his thick arms wide. "No dry crusts tonight. We're emptying the market stalls!"
He locked his hands onto their shoulders, his fingers trembling with suppressed exhilaration. For the first time, he barely had to tilt his head to meet their gaze.
"My two sons," he growled, the words thick and jagged in his throat. "Awakening on the exact dawn of your thirteenth year."
He crushed them against his chest, locking them into a suffocating embrace.
"Health. Power. Discipline. You hold it all. I could not be prouder."
That night lived in grease, woodsmoke, and shouting iron.
Their father kept his word, scouring the village market stalls until the rough oak trestle groaned beneath roast fowl, salt pork, and brimming jugs of spiced apple cider. For three incandescent hours, the little timber home swelled like a tavern at midsummer. Cedric drank his cider with foam clinging to his lip, his laughter ringing high against the smoke-stained rafters, while Arthur sat with his open palms resting on his knees, tracing the delicate, electric hum circulating beneath his skin. It felt like a sacred coronation. The threshold had been crossed; the long-dreaded silence of the heavens had finally broken into song.
Then the grease congealed on cold pewter plates. The hearthfire dissolved into gray, powdery bone-ash.
And the days began to unspool.
The fracture opened by the second dawn. Cedric woke with a sharp gasp, clutching his spine as fine, needle-thin fractures of black-gold broke through his skin, braiding outward into an intricate, suffocating mandala of divine ink that drank the ambient morning light. Their mother collapsed onto the floorboards in tears of reverent terror; their father poured another heavy tumbler with hands that trembled in quiet awe. Cedric had been claimed. A patron had reached down through the veil to crown him before the ink on his registration ticket was even dry.
Arthur waited.
Every evening, long after the lamp went out, he stood bare-chested over the cracked ceramic washbasin, scrubbing lye soap into his skin until the flesh flared raw and bleeding. He leaned close to the glass, squinting into the gloom, begging for the faintest ember, a hairline fracture of light, a solitary geometric ring to bloom across his shoulder.
Nothing answered.
Spring thawed into humid summer mud, and summer hardened into the brittle iron of winter. Eleven turnings of the moon. Three hundred and thirty dawns of Arthur driving his fists into hemlock bark and forcing his nascent circuits to dilate until the back of his throat tasted of pennies and bile. Yet no matter how brutally he strained, the wellspring inside him refused to deepen by a single drop. It remained a stagnant pool, bricked in by an invisible, immovable wall: the absolute ceiling of the fourteenth quotient.
Why… Why?
Eleven months. Eleven months since the spark caught. Why has no blessing marked my flesh?
Arthur slumped over his knees upon a rotting hemlock stump, jaw slack, letting the vitality bleed out into the dirt.
Hard-capped at the 14th Quotient. Beginner tier. Nothing more than parlor tricks.
The Magic Academy will throw my application into the furnace if I arrive without a patron blessing.
How did Cedric receive his on the very day of his Awakening?
The forest around him held no answers. Only the dry, hollow rasp of autumn hemlocks scraping against the slate sky. A gust rolled down from the crags, carrying the sharp chill of oncoming frost that bit into the sweat-drenched linen plastered to his spine. Arthur looked down at his trembling palms. The knuckle skin was shredded, leaking pale serous fluid and crusting with dark dirt from five straight hours of hammering unyielding timber. Deep beneath the flesh, his immature circuits throbbed with a dull, sickening heat—a pathetic, sputtering furnace that choked whenever he tried to summon enough mana to forge a second ignition.
A muffled crunch snapped through the dead needles behind him.
The sound carried no malice. The footsteps were rhythmic, unhurried, muffled by the soft leather of hunting moccasins. A subtle draft drifted past, displacing the metallic stench of iron and sweat with the grounding scent of dried chamomile and tallow soap.
Arthur's spine seized.
Mom.
In a single, frantic heartbeat, the calculating mechanism inside his skull snapped into gear. He could not allow her to see him like this—hollowed out, broken, sitting in the mulch like a discarded whelp. Pity was a poison he refused to drink, especially from the woman who had spent a decade risking her life tracking beasts through freezing marshland to raise him.
Arthur sucked in a sharp, quiet draft through his nose, using the sting of the cold air to purge the glaze of exhaustion from his eyes. He shoved his bleeding hands between his thighs, rolling his shoulders back, and manually arranged the musculature of his face.
He smoothed the furrow from his brow. He forced his slack mouth into an effortless, symmetrical curve. He crinkled the corners of his eyelids into the exact, practiced creases of a contented child who had merely taken a brief rest between games, tilting his chin upward to let the dying amber sunset flood his irises with an illusion of vivid warmth.
A happy boy. A dutiful son. Anyone in the village would have staked their life on the sincerity of the display.
A warm, calloused palm settled against the nape of his neck, her thumb resting directly over his racing carotid artery.