He woke up.
Grey dust filled his lungs. He rolled onto his side, vomiting nothing but air and grit, his entire body screaming with the kind of pain that meant newborn. Weak muscles. Soft bones. A heart that had never learned to endure.
I'm a child.
The thought landed with cold, clinical certainty. He was lying in a pile of Ash—the same calcified mana he had created three hundred years ago. It was everywhere. On the ground, in the air, crusted into the cracks of the wooden hut he could now see above him.
The hut was small. Primitive. A single room with a dead hearth and a roof full of holes. Through the largest hole, he could see the sky: permanently grey with Ashfall.
It worked. The Sundering held.
He tried to sit up. His body obeyed poorly. He was maybe twelve years old, malnourished, with thin arms and a skull that felt too heavy for his neck. Orphan's rags hung off his frame. No shoes. No blankets. Just a pile of Ash for a bed.
Where am I?
Memory flooded back in fragments. His name was Kael. He had no parents. The village was called Duskwell, a speck on the edge of the Ash Wastes. He had been found as an infant, wrapped in a bloody cloth, with no note and no explanation. The villagers fed him because they feared leaving a baby to die would attract worse things.
He had lived twelve years as a mute, half-starved ghost.
And now I'm awake.
The Archmage's memories were intact—mostly. Names, spells, theories, faces. But they felt... distant. Like a book he had read long ago. He knew he had once commanded forces that could level mountains. But his child's body remembered only hunger and cold.
He needed to test something.
Kael raised his right hand. Focused. The old muscle memory of spellcasting was still there—the internal geometry, the shaping of intent, the calling of mana from the environment.
Nothing happened.
He tried again. Harder.
A faint whisper of warmth in his chest. Then nothing.
No. That's not possible.
He closed his eyes and looked inward. Every mage had mana circuits—channels through which magical energy flowed. In his past life, his circuits had been rivers, wide and deep and powerful.
Now, he saw only scars. Dry, broken channels. As if someone had taken a hot knife to every single one.
Rune-Blind.
The word was ancient, almost forgotten. A rare genetic defect where the body rejected mana entirely. Such people could not cast spells, could not enchant items, could not even sense magic beyond the most basic pressure.
He was a magical cripple.
The irony was so profound that Kael laughed. It came out as a rasping, broken sound. The Archmage who had ended an age of magic was now permanently, irrevocably, incapable of using it.
So this is what you meant, Valerius[1], he thought bitterly. This is the price of victory.
He looked at his child's hands. Scarred from work. Thin from hunger. Useless for magic.
But not useless for everything.
A memory surfaced. A footnote from his past life. A discipline so obscure, so inefficient, that even the desperate had abandoned it. It required no mana circuits. No internal power. Only knowledge, precision, and a willingness to bleed.
Rune-Smithing.
Kael's grey Ash-Eyes narrowed.
"Fine," he whispered, his first spoken word in this new life. His voice was raw and unused. "Then I'll build magic from scratch."
Outside, someone screamed.
[1] He's talking to his past self in a way, idk where i was going with this, it sounds confusing