Time passed after Ezra tried—and failed—to cast a spell.
Not in any grand, montage way.
Just in the slow, grinding rhythm of a castle that never stopped being itself: meals and laundry, patrol rotations, shutters opened at dawn and latched at dusk. The same footsteps in the corridor. The same cold gemlight breathing softly in the sconces.
Within that rhythm, life in Castle Blackfyre found a strange equilibrium.
Ezra innovated.
His parents contained.
And everyone pretended, with varying degrees of competence, that there wasn't an infant in the nursery who could hold adult eye contact and think in equations.
**
He began to walk.
On Earth, a human infant typically achieved anything resembling stable walking between nine and fifteen months. Ezra was doing it long before he was even close—and not in the drunken, wide-legged lurch of a normal toddler.
When he let himself use it, his gait had careful, deliberate precision.
Not learned precision.
Engineered.
He stood alone in the nursery, feet planted on the woven rug, and stared at his own legs like they were faulty hardware.
Bone density is insufficient, he thought, as clinically as he could manage in a body that still wanted to chew things. Growth plates soft. Ligaments underdeveloped. If I do this with just meat and bone, I snap.
He closed his eyes.
Breath in.
Breath out.
He didn't chant. He didn't invoke. He didn't speak at all.
He sank.
That heightened state—his parents' Field, his own private capital-letter Field—settled over him like a lens dropping into place. The world didn't get brighter, exactly. It got denser. Edges firmed. Distances became measurable.
His awareness bled past his skin and into structure.
He mapped himself.
Spine: a stacked column of unfinished segments.
Pelvis: a shallow bowl, still too pliable.
Femurs, tibias, ankles.
The tiny bones of his feet, stubbornly refusing to feel like the elegant lever system they would become.
Instead of shoving mana outward—the mistake he kept circling in every failed activation—he directed it inward.
Thread it along the skeleton.
He imagined invisible rebar laid into wet concrete.
His Field answered.
Not with fire, not with spectacle, but with a subtle thickening sensation that hugged bone from within. He skimmed muscle fibers—quadriceps, hamstrings, calves—and flooded them with a thin reinforcing layer, potentiating each contraction.
Reinforce the lattice.
Compensate for gravity.
He lifted one foot.
Placed it.
His balance wobbled for a heartbeat as his baby body tried to revert to its natural pattern—crawl, don't walk, you idiot—but the reinforcement held.
He shifted his weight. Let his center of gravity slide over his planted foot.
Took another step.
And another.
From the corner of the nursery, Catalyna froze.
The wet nurse had entered without Ezra noticing—quiet as always—and now stood with folded linens in her arms, eyes widening just a fraction before her face snapped back to calm professionalism.
"Careful, little Lord," she said, voice even. "You'll fall."
Ezra did not look at her.
He pretended not to understand, which was easier now that he had practice. He let his mouth hang slightly open. Let a little drool gather at the corner.
To her, it probably looked like a miraculous baby taking his first unaided steps.
To him, every muscle fiber was under conscious override.
He managed three more steps before a familiar warning flickered at the base of his skull.
The world tilted—just a degree, just enough.
Ezra grabbed the crib rail. Tiny knuckles whitened as pressure stabbed behind his eyes.
His breath hitched.
The nursery smeared sideways for an instant like paint dragged across glass.
Stop, he thought, teeth clenched. Stop, stop, stop—
He slammed the Field down, forcing the mana to recede before it tipped something past tolerance.
The pressure ebbed.
Nausea surged.
Sweat prickled across his scalp.
The blackouts had become rarer with time. In the first months, they'd come daily, ripping his consciousness away for hours or days as whatever process was rewriting his brain took precedence.
Now they hit once a week at most.
And always when he pushed too hard.
As long as he paced himself, he stayed conscious.
But the threat of a hard reboot was always there, humming in the background like an overtaxed breaker.
Ezra let go of the rail and allowed his knees to buckle.
He dropped to all fours in a clumsy little collapse—exactly the kind of undignified motion that made adults smile and coo instead of reach for knives.
Catalyna stepped closer, but not too fast.
Not the instinctive lunge of a panicked nurse.
Controlled.
Measured.
"Ah," she said quietly, as if she'd simply caught him playing at something childish. "There you are. That's enough heroics for today, my Lord."
Her voice was warm, almost indulgent.
But something under the tone made Ezra's skin crawl.
Her eyes were too clear.
Her footing too balanced.
She moved like someone who never tripped over her own skirts.
Aerwyna's warnings echoed like scripture.
No speaking in front of the maids.
No tricks.
No standing unless I'm here.
Spies, Ezra. Spies everywhere.
So around Catalyna, he kept his performance simple.
Babble.
Basic words.
Unsteady steps when necessary.
Floppy limbs when not.
Speech, in particular, was exhausting.
He'd learned quickly that proper enunciation required more than muscle memory. This new throat, tongue, and jaw didn't quite move the way his old ones had. The first time he forced a full clean sentence without mana —May I see the book, Mother?—half the syllables came out as mush.
Then he'd experimented.
He pushed mana into his vocal cords. Into the tiny muscles of tongue and lips.
Smoothing their motion like fine-tuning an instrument.
With the Field engaged, he could speak almost exactly as he had on Earth: crisp consonants, complex vowels, controlled intonation.
At a cost.
Hold that level of control for more than a few phrases and pressure rose behind his eyes. Vision threatened to white out.
He had stopped before another blackout hit, gasping, while Aerwyna—unaware of the micro-crisis—had simply smiled and patted his cheek.
So he adapted.
Important conversations? Clear speech, powered by mana, in short bursts.
Everyone else? Minimal words. Blunt, compact phrases.
Just enough to steer adults where he needed them to go.
Nothing more.
"Book," he'd say.
"Garden."
"Bottle."
It bruised his pride.
It preserved his uptime.
Efficiency over elegance.
Most of his hours were spent with Catalyna.
She talked.
He listened. Or pretended not to.
"…and they say the price of grain is going up again," she murmured one afternoon as she changed his linens, more to herself than to him. "River barges delayed from the east. Primarch's men requisitioned half the last convoy. The kitchens won't like that."
Ezra stared at the ceiling, tracking dust motes drifting through slanted sunlight.
Under the blanket, he flexed his fingers.
Index.
Middle.
Ring.
Pinky.
Micro-control of individual tendons.
Catalyna continued, unbothered by his apparent disinterest.
"The quartermaster says we may have to cut rations for the outer barracks if it keeps up," she murmured. "Lords will blame bandits, of course. They always do."
She clicked her tongue once—soft, disapproving.
"And when bellies go empty," she went on, smoothing the sheet with firm, practiced strokes, "men start looking for someone to hate. They call it justice. They call it duty. But it is only hunger dressed up in fine words."
Ezra kept his gaze on the ceiling.
Catalyna's voice took on that faint cadence she slipped into when she thought no one was listening closely enough.
"There is only one kind of light that feeds," she said quietly. "Not bread alone. Not coin. The kind that keeps a man from turning wolf when winter bites."
A pause.
"Do you know what it means to be strong, little Lord?"
Ezra let his mouth part, blank as any infant. A little breath. A little drool.
Catalyna exhaled through her nose, amused at her own question.
"Not to burn," she answered herself. "Not to drown. Not to crush. Those are easy. Any brute can do them.
"To be strong is to carry others when the world is heavy."
Her hand pressed briefly—too brief to be an accident—against the center of his chest as if she were testing how his breath rose.
Then she returned to her work, tone light again, as if she'd been discussing nothing more dangerous than linen.
Her words blended into the background, a steady hum of something else—half domestic talk, half sermon.
Which maid had been dismissed.
Which guard had been promoted.
Whose cousin had married into which lesser house.
She never said anything overtly political. Never named factions aloud.
But if you listened closely—and Ezra always listened—you could hear the undercurrent of tension running through the keep.
Reitz gone more often.
Patrols stretched thinner.
Extra watch posted on the southern wall.
He filed it all away, building a crude mental model of Blackfyre's immediate environment.
In between, he trained.
He practiced walking in secret, bracing his bones only when Catalyna's back was turned.
He extended his Field in tiny pulses, mapping the nursery by feel alone: the exact position of every piece of furniture, the hairline crack in the plaster by the window, the hollow patch under one floorboard where centuries of settling had shifted stone.
He checked the limits of his Field daily.
Some days he could barely push it past the crib.
Other days—if he caught a wave of that hyper-real clarity at the right moment—he could skim its edge along the corridor outside, tracing the footsteps of a passing maid without ever opening his eyes.
When pressure sharpened in his skull, he stopped.
He'd learned his lesson.
His only real reprieve came when Aerwyna stole time to visit.
Those were the hours he lived for.
"Book," Ezra demanded, standing by her knee in the safety of her private solar.
Here, with the door locked and her aura actively screening the room, he could relax his performance a little. He still wore the soft, uncertain posture of a child, but his eyes were awake.
Aerwyna laughed—tired, but genuinely amused.
"You want to read?" she asked, raising a brow. "Ezra, you are a baby."
Ezra let a thread of mana brace his throat—just enough to keep the muscles from wobbling, not enough to invite the familiar pressure behind his eyes.
"I want to learn to read," he said clearly, tapping the ledger with his palm. "Words."
Her smile softened.
"Alright, little river," she murmured. "Come here."
She lifted him onto her lap and opened a slim volume, guiding his hand to trace inked lines.
"These are letters," she said in Imperial Common. "Each one makes a sound. Put them together, and you get words."
He already had a decent grasp of spoken syntax. Months of eavesdropping had seen to that.
What he lacked was the written form—the mapping between sound and symbol.
He fixed his eyes on the page and activated his Field just enough to sharpen his focus.
The glyphs burned into memory with near-violent clarity.
He repeated the sounds under his breath, matching them to strokes.
"A… B… C…" in their equivalents.
Aerwyna watched him like he might evaporate.
When she thought he'd forget, she prompted gently. "Again? Or are you bored already?"
"Next," Ezra said.
She blinked.
Then she chuckled, something like relief threaded through it.
They made it through more letters that day than most noble children managed in a week.
She would have kept going, but duty always dragged her away. Eventually she closed the book with reluctance, kissed his forehead, and handed him back to Catalyna.
Back to the nursery.
Back to boredom.
"Soon," she whispered once, lingering at the door. "When you're older, we'll get you proper tutors. Maesters. Real books, not just primers."
Ezra nodded.
He wanted to argue—now, not later—but he understood the logic.
A one-year-old requesting treatises on mana theory didn't get educated.
He got dissected.
Patience, he told himself. Adapt to the body. Live long enough to do real work.
Reitz's visits were rarer.
When he came, they were loud.
Most evenings, if he was in the castle at all, the nursery door slammed open without warning.
"Where is my son?" Reitz thundered, half-laughing as his voice boomed off stone. "My genius, powerful, handsome heir? Where is he?"
Ezra's ears rang every time.
Aerwyna inevitably appeared a heartbeat later, hissing at him to keep his voice down, muttering about spies in the rafters and walls with ears.
Reitz ignored half of it.
He scooped Ezra up and tossed him into the air with reckless confidence that made Aerwyna look ready to faint.
For a moment, while airborne, Ezra's Field flared instinctively—tracking vector, calculating impact points, bracing for injury.
But Reitz always caught him with a grip that was firm, unshakable, and precise.
The man may act like an idiot, Ezra conceded grudgingly, but his body control is terrifying.
Once the roughhousing settled, Reitz would plant Ezra on his shoulder and launch into stories.
Bandits on the southern border.
A duel between two minor nobles over grazing rights.
Rumors of the Primarchs' men sniffing around neighboring fiefdoms.
All told in exaggerated, simplified form so as not to "worry the baby," but packed with more useful context than Reitz realized.
Ezra listened.
A world where violence was legal, codified, and celebrated.
A world where his father's casual jokes had sharpened edges.
A world where his mother counted shadows.
The first time he was allowed outside the keep proper, he almost forgot to play dumb.
"I want to go to the garden," he said one morning, tugging on Aerwyna's sleeve as she paused between meetings.
She hesitated.
"Nonsense," Aerwyna muttered at first. "The inner courtyard is no place for an infant. Too open."
Then she saw the way he was standing—no Field this time, just stubborn baby muscles shaking as he clung to her dress—and something in her expression softened.
"We could use some air," she conceded quietly.
By afternoon, Catalyna was carrying him down the main stair, Aerwyna walking behind them.
Ezra didn't protest being held.
Maintaining his walking façade the entire distance would tax him, and he needed his Field for something more important.
The moment they stepped into the Inner Courtyard, his senses flooded.
Sky.
It was the first time he'd seen this much of it at once—a wide, pale-blue dome framed by stone walls and tower tops.
Cool wind moved across his skin, carrying scents he'd never encountered in the nursery: damp earth, crushed grass, distant smoke.
The courtyard was meticulously arranged.
Stone paths carved through trimmed hedges and orderly rows of herbs.
Flowerbeds clustered around benches.
Young fruit trees lined the walls, branches pruned and trained along trellises.
Ezra's gaze slid past all of it.
He was looking for infrastructure.
His eyes locked onto the fountain at the center.
A star-shaped basin carved from pale stone, edges worn smooth by time and water.
Jets arched gracefully from the top, spilling constant streams down tiered levels into a pool below.
From there, the water flowed into five narrow canals that ran outward like rivers, feeding smaller basins and irrigation troughs.
Ezra's eyes narrowed.
No gears.
No wheel.
No simple fall driving a pump.
He reached—not with his hands, but with his Field.
Just a whisper.
A shallow skim along the stone.
He felt it.
A knot of pressure and movement embedded at the heart of the fountain.
Not alive—no warm living glow like Aerwyna or Reitz—but dense.
Active.
A singularity of directed behavior humming at a frequency just beyond understanding.
His physical eyes caught the confirmation: a faint light pulsing through a cutout in the stone, like a heartbeat behind translucent skin.
A Core, he decided. That has to be the power source.
Beside it, set into a narrow channel, was a different stone—elongated, faceted, faintly blue. Its surface was etched with precise, almost circuit-like patterns.
And that's the logic.
Core for raw mana.
Crystal for form.
Swap the crystal, change the behavior.
Swap the core, change the runtime.
A primitive solid-state machine.
He wanted, with sudden painful intensity, to touch it.
To feel how the Field interacted.
To see what happened if he altered the flow by a fraction of a degree.
"Don't squirm, little Lord," Catalyna murmured.
Her hold tightened just enough to remind him he was being observed.
"You'll fall."
Ezra swallowed frustration and went limp, letting his head rest against her shoulder like any other sleepy child.
Aerwyna wasn't looking at the fountain's guts at all.
She moved from path to path, fingertips brushing invisible lines in the air—checking wardstones, reinforcing glyphs, muttering under her breath as she strengthened the unseen lattice of protections woven into the courtyard.
Ezra watched her too.
Wardstones.
Wards.
Separate from the fountain system.
Another layer of reality he still couldn't model.
In the periphery, life went on.
Two older women sat stitching beneath a shade tree, gossiping in low voices.
A stablehand led a horse along the far wall.
A pair of young pages sprinted past with wooden practice swords clacking as they argued over who could "beat a Praetorian."
Normal.
Medieval, feudal, and deadly… but normal.
The winter sun hung pale overhead, a disk of white-gold that offered light but little heat.
The air bit at his exposed cheeks, sharp and clean.
Later, as Catalyna made another slow circuit of the frost-dusted courtyard with him bundled in furs, the sun began to sink.
Light angled.
Shadows stretched longer across snow.
Ezra tilted his head back and stared straight up.
One sun.
Some time later, back inside with the day turned dark, he pressed his face to the nursery window and watched a single familiar disc rise over the horizon.
One moon.
His chest loosened.
If he had looked up and seen two suns, or three moons, or a sky permanently cracked with auroras of uncontrolled energy, he might have broken.
Instead, the comfortable banality of a stable cycle—light and dark, regular, predictable—anchored him.
Gravity feels like one gee, he thought. Day length roughly similar. No visible radiation anomalies. This is, in broad strokes, an Earth-like system.
So why does magic work?
He watched as a servant lit a lamp in the corridor outside.
She didn't strike flint or set wick aflame.
She reached up, slid a small strip of paper out from between two embedded stones—a faintly glowing core and a crystal—and the lamp flared to life as if someone had completed a circuit.
An insulator, he realized. The paper was a magical switch. Disconnect, no light. Connect, light.
Magic wasn't "breaking" physics.
It was interacting with something else.
Some hidden layer that Earth-born science had never been able to reach.
Back on Earth, they'd mapped the baryonic component of the universe: protons, neutrons, electrons. The stuff you could touch.
Five percent of the total energy density.
The rest—
Dark matter.
Dark energy.
Placeholders.
Invisible scaffolds inferred only by their gravitational fingerprints.
Is this it? he wondered, pulse quickening. Is "mana" just their word for a controllable interface with the Dark Sector? Are living brains here hard-wired to reach into that ninety-five percent we never could touch?
It was pure speculation.
No instruments.
No controlled experiments.
No peer review.
Just a lonely physicist trapped in an infant's body, staring at a medieval lamp like it was a particle collider.
Still, the idea comforted him.
If mana was part of the missing mass-energy budget, then nothing was being created from nothing.
The equations weren't wrong.
They were incomplete.
The core drew from an invisible reservoir.
The crystal shaped the flow.
The visible effect was just the tip of a universal iceberg.
If that was true, then one day—when he had books, instruments, and maybe a few hundred spare lifetimes—he could map it.
He'd need help, though.
**
The days blurred.
From snippets of Catalyna's muttering and Reitz's stories, Ezra pieced together rough counts.
Sixty guards in regular rotation, not counting household knights.
Thirty-odd servants he'd seen directly.
More, probably, in outbuildings and fields.
Enough to hold the castle against a small force.
He also learned—by accident—of the Fortnight Weaning.
"…and after the eighth month, they'll shut him in for two weeks," one maid whispered to another in the corridor outside, unaware the child inside was awake and listening. "No visitors but the mother and wet nurse. Old tradition. 'For the growth of the magic,' they say."
"A superstitious excuse to keep the heir safe," the other sniffed. "Two weeks with no one slipping poison in his porridge, more like."
Ezra agreed with the second assessment.
Fortnight Weaning, he repeated internally.
Isolation window.
Increased surveillance.
Lower assassination risk.
Convenient for him, too.
Two weeks with minimal external observation would give him time to experiment more freely with his Field—if he could keep the blackouts at bay.
He needed Reitz before that.
The man had lived his whole life using magic in combat. Even if he couldn't explain underlying mechanisms, his instincts were shaped by the system.
His offhand comments, his casual demonstrations—data points.
Ezra sat on the windowsill cushion that night—still small enough to be cradled there with bolsters all around him—and looked south, toward the line of dark hills beyond which lay bandits, Primarchs, and gods knew what else.
Somewhere out there, his father was either drilling troops, fighting raiders, or drinking too much with fellow nobles.
Probably all three.
"Hurry back, old man," Ezra murmured under his breath.
He let just enough mana into his vocal cords to make the words clear, even if no one was there to hear them.
"I have questions only you can answer."