Ezra stared at the impossible thing hovering above his mother's palm.
It was a sphere of water, roughly the size of a grapefruit, hanging where it had no right to be. No dripping, no sagging. Perfectly suspended. It rotated on an invisible axis, slow and deliberate, catching the crystal light and shattering it across the nursery ceiling in dancing shards.
Each tiny motion was wrong.
If this had been a high-speed pump or some clever microgravity experiment, his brain would have had somewhere to put it. But there were no machines here. No pipes. No containment field humming in the background. Just his mother, a stone room, and water that refused to obey.
His throat felt tight.
The earlier incident—when his awareness had swollen outward and he'd felt people as sources of light in his mind—had already shoved him past comfort. But that he could still half-rationalize as some kind of altered sensory processing, a body missfire.
This wasn't that.
On Earth, even at his loneliest, he'd always had one constant: the rules held. Gravity was down. Entropy climbed. Energy conserved.
Here, he was staring at something that shouldn't be possible.
For the first time in two lifetimes, he felt a very specific homesickness. Not for people. For coherence.
Underneath that ache, something old and sharp stirred. The thing that had dragged him through textbooks in the orphanage library, late-night papers, particle data reports. A hunger that had nothing to do with milk or comfort.
I need to know why.
"Mama is strong, little one," Aerwyna said softly.
Her voice anchored him back to the room. She stood by the shuttered window, the night beyond a rectangle of ink and distant starlight. The nursery itself was warmer than it had any right to be; the walls held the day's heat, and somewhere below, furnaces and kitchens filled the keep with a low, constant breath.
She adjusted her stance, shifting her weight, Ezra cradled in the crook of her left arm. With her right hand she held the spinning sphere at eye level, a casualness in the pose that didn't match the way her gaze kept darting to the heavy oak door.
She checked the latch. Checked the gap at the bottom, where lamplight might show footsteps. Only when she was sure the corridor outside was empty did she relax her shoulders a fraction.
"One of the most talented Elementalists in all Rex Imperium," she went on, but the boast was a whisper. "I can even use chantless techniques. Delayed casting, too."
Ezra's infant face stayed sober. Internally, he winced.
Chantless. She said it like the words were the fuel, like skipping the verbal component turned it into a higher form of power. It sounded to him like learning to do long division in your head instead of mumbling through the table. Impressive, yes. But not… fundamentally different.
"I only ever lost to your father, Reitz, in a duel," she added, flicking the sphere with a fingertip.
The surface dimpled, ripples flowing around her nail, then smoothed back out. No droplets escaped.
"I hate to admit it," she muttered, "but that man is formidable."
Her Field pulsed faintly when she said his name. Ezra couldn't see it, exactly, but he'd learned to recognize the sensation: the air getting somehow thicker, like the moment before thunder. Her "presence" spiked and then settled again, a heartbeat he could feel without ears.
Aerwyna looked down at him, as if gauging how much had gotten through.
"Do you understand, Ezra?" she asked.
He nodded slowly, tiny chin dipping once. His brow pulled together, the expression uncannily adult on such a soft face.
He understood enough. Power, duels, hierarchy. Words he could map to some kind of structure. The logic underneath—that was full of holes.
"You are such an intelligent boy," she cooed, seeing the wrinkle of his forehead and mistaking it for wonder instead of disbelief. "You must have inherited the capacity of the Riverruns. We Water Elementalists have the deepest reservoirs. It is the nature of the element—to hold, to fill."
Ezra's thoughts stalled.
That's not an explanation; that's a slogan.
She didn't know why water-aspected mages had higher "capacity." She only knew the rhyme they all said to each other about it.
"The Lakebornes currently hold the North-East Seat," Aerwyna went on, the name sour on her tongue.
She set the water sphere hovering of its own, fingers loosening, and crossed to the narrow window, turning sideways so she could keep both the courtyard and the floating spell in her peripheral vision. Crystal light traced the pale line of her jaw, the faint hollow under her cheekbones. Ezra watched her Field stretch thin toward the glass, a ripple of attention more than anything else.
"Rain Lakeborne snatched the title of Primarch Seat," she murmured. "But I will challenge him. I must. Especially now… with your father fallen from the Rex Imperia's grace."
The last words came out tighter than the rest.
Ezra filed it in the "very important, no context yet" drawer in his mind. Reitz. Rex Imperia. "Fallen from grace." All signals that the political environment outside this room was not stable.
He had enough problems inside his own skull.
"Ele… men… tali?" he asked aloud, wrestling his tongue around the foreign syllables.
Aerwyna blinked, then smiled, the tension softening. "Elementalists," she corrected gently. "Powerful mages who specialize in the Four Fundamental Pillars."
"Elemen… what eleme?" he pushed, fingers clenching and unclenching in the blanket. He hated not having a definition precise enough to dissect.
She came back to the crib and sat on the edge, shifting him so he sat upright against her chest, his head resting under her chin. The sphere of water drifted along beside them like a tame moon, bound to the radius of her reach.
"Elements are the building blocks of reality, Ezra," she said.
He could hear the cadence of repetition: this was something she'd been told, word for word, in classrooms and halls.
"Everything you touch, everything you see, is made of them. Earth, Water, Air, Fire."
Ezra's hands flailed instinctively.
No, it isn't, he wanted to shout. Matter is— He didn't have the vocabulary in this language for quarks or gluons or field excitations. The best he could have done was something like "very small pieces that talk to each other," and somehow he doubted that would help.
He caught maybe two thirds of her words, but the parts he did get were enough to irritate him on a deep, structural level.
Unaware of the internal meltdown, Aerwyna continued, ticking them off on her fingers, water sphere circling her wrist.
"They each have their nature," she said. "Fire is Purity—it burns away the excess, so its spells are the most potent. Earth is Stability—it grants range and persistence. Air is Velocity—it carries speed. And Water…"
Her eyes softened as she looked at the hovering globe.
"Water is Capacity. It holds more, for longer. It carries. It remembers."
Ezra sagged slightly against her.
Fire is not "pure," he grumbled internally. It's just a high-energy transition. You're giving metaphors a job description.
He didn't fully grasp the terms she used—some were culturally loaded, some plain—but enough meaning slipped through that he could see the shape of their mental model. The universe, in this worldview, wasn't a set of equations; it was a cast of characters.
"The strongest Elementalists become Primarchs," Aerwyna said, voice dropping again.
A floorboard creaked somewhere beyond the door. She went statue-still, even the water sphere halting its spin. Ezra could hear her heart pick up, faster against his back.
Bootsteps passed in the corridor. A murmur of voices. Then silence.
When she finally let out her breath, it trembled.
"There are four titles," she went on, lower. "North, South, East, West. A Primarch is a master who can command, even master the three of the four elements."
Her gaze drifted toward the ceiling, as if she could see the distant capital through stone.
"But the Emperor… the Rex Imperia…"
Her Field tightened, drawing in close, as if even speaking the title too loudly might call attention.
"He is the only one who is the master of all four. He is the absolute peak."
Ezra's mind snagged on the structure. Specialists in threes, one in four. It was less about metaphysics and more about architecture.
So the Primarchs hold the corners of the system, and the Rex stands at the intersection, he thought. Control of more axes, more degrees of freedom. A higher-dimensional solution to the same equation.
"Look, Ezra," Aerwyna said.
She extended her right hand again. The water sphere drifted up into the space between them. Candlelight slid over its surface, turning her blue eyes almost purple in the reflection.
"This is simple work," she said. "A child's toy, for me. But for you…"
She trailed off, watching him.
He locked onto it.
Inside, his brain did what it had always done in the lab. Measure. Compare. Search for inconsistencies.
The sphere held together without any container. No visible force constricted it, no membrane. Droplets that should have fallen simply… didn't. The surface tension looked impossibly high. When she nudged it with a fingertip, it deformed and recovered without shedding mass.
He tried to imagine an invisible lattice around it—some kind of field gradient, a pressure well. He tried to imagine micro-gravity, or a localized vector manipulation. Every hypothesis ran into the same brick wall: there was no equipment. No apparatus. No anything.
Only her.
Aerwyna smirked faintly at his intense stare. "You're making that face again," she said. "Like your father when he looks at war maps. Little scholar."
He tore his gaze away long enough to scowl up at her, which only made her chuckle.
"Watch," she repeated.
The water spun faster. She didn't speak. She didn't move her lips.
For a long heartbeat, nothing happened. Ezra could feel her Field coiling, drawing tighter and tighter into the space around her palm.
Crack.
The sound was more in his skull than in the air.
One moment liquid, the next—solid.
The sphere turned to ice. Cleanly. No frost creep. No visible condensation. No plume of mist. No evidence of energy being drawn from the surroundings.
Ezra made a small, strangled noise.
His head throbbed. You didn't get phase change for free. In every lab he'd ever been in, getting water to freeze that quickly meant either a ridiculous heat sink or an insane pressure regime. Here, she had neither.
She hadn't moved the thermal energy anywhere. She'd simply… overruled it.
"Chantless," Aerwyna said, pride curling her lips. "I can freeze anything within a yard of my body if my Will is firm enough."
The last word carried weight. Not "mana," not "Field"—Will. As if intent itself was a type of work that could be applied.
Ezra pressed the heel of his tiny hand into his forehead. The ache was sharp now, as if his thoughts were pressing against physical limits.
"Am I confusing you, little one?" Aerwyna asked.
"Yes, Mama," he muttered. It wasn't a dodge this time.
Her expression changed instantly. Pride guttered. Fear flared in its place, quick and sharp. She snapped her hand closed; the ice sphere shattered soundlessly into mist, dissipating into the warm air.
She clutched him closer, turning her body so that she stood between him and the window, between him and the door. The nursery suddenly felt smaller. The shadows seemed thicker around the edges of the crystal list.
"It is good to know," she whispered into his hair, "but dangerous to speak of."
Her heart galloped against his cheek.
"We have enemies, Ezra. The walls have ears. You must promise me—never show your talent. Not to the maids. Not to Catalyna. Only to me and your father."
He didn't answer. He wasn't sure he could promise that. His entire life had been built on poking at things until they revealed their secrets. Hiding this instinct felt like asking a muscle to forget how to contract.
She rocked him gently, as if he were on the verge of crying. He wasn't—but the motion soothed her.
"You must not speak to strangers," she continued, voice fierce in its softness. "Not until you are two at least. If they know…" Her jaw tensed. "If the other Nobles know what you are, they will strike. They do not want the Blackfyre line to rise again."
"Black… fyre," he repeated clumsily, less because he didn't understand and more because he wanted to hear what she'd say next.
She drew back to look at him, eyes searching his face as if she could see into the future written there.
"You are the son of a Blackfyre," she said. "By the laws of magic, you will inherit his element. Sons always take the father's flame. It is impossible for you to learn my Water first. Your soul is shaped by his blood."
Ezra blinked.
Element inheritance, he thought. Mode-locking based on lineage. Their model really is deterministic. Father → fire, mother → water, child. He looked at the spot where the ice sphere had just been. And yet I saw water first. I can feel it when she moves. So either their law is approximate, or I'm… broken. Or both.
Aerwyna didn't see the abstract exercise. She saw a baby staring at her like he understood too much.
"Maybe when you are older," she went on more softly, stroking his hair, "when you become a Primarch, you will learn to force the Water as well."
She said it like a distant blessing. As if "Primarch" was a word you reserved for ballads and impossible dreams, not a practical career track.
"But until then, we must be careful," she murmured. "I will tell Reitz tonight."
A small, involuntary smile tugged at the edge of her mouth.
"Knowing that oaf," she added under her breath, "he will probably laugh, point at his privates, and claim it is because he has 'good seed.'"