The village of Brindlebrook lay nestled at the edge of rolling hills, where the morning fog drifted like pale ghosts between the trees. Roosters crowed, dogs barked, and smoke rose lazily from the chimneys of straw-thatched cottages. To anyone passing through, it was a place so ordinary it could almost vanish from memory—peaceful, simple, unremarkable.
For Kael, it was home.
The boy sat on a worn fencepost, watching his neighbors begin their daily chores. Farmers carried buckets to the fields, children chased each other through the dirt paths, and the blacksmith's hammer rang like a heartbeat at the edge of the village. Everyone had a role, a place, a purpose. Everyone except him.
Kael lowered his gaze to his hands. They were roughened by farmwork, yet powerless in every other way. In Brindlebrook, most children awakened a spark of elemental magic by the age of twelve—water for irrigation, flame for the hearth, wind to carry wagons, earth to till the soil. But Kael, now sixteen, had never shown even a flicker.
"Oi, Kael! Daydreaming again?"
The shout came from his childhood friend, Lira, balancing a basket of freshly baked bread on her hip. Her smile was warm, though her eyes carried the same pity he had grown used to.
"I wasn't daydreaming," Kael muttered, slipping down from the fencepost. "Just… thinking."
"Thinking about what it'd be like to actually cast a spell?" she teased.
Her words stung, though he forced a laugh. "Something like that."
Deep down, Kael wondered if fate had already chosen his path—to remain ordinary while everyone else grew stronger. He wanted to believe there was something more, that his quiet life was only the beginning. Yet every sunrise brought the same silence inside his chest where magic should have lived.
That night, as the village prepared for the Festival of the Eclipse, Kael stared at the darkening sky. Somewhere far above, the moon was already beginning to slide across the face of the sun. The air felt heavier than usual, as if the world itself were holding its breath.
And deep within his chest, beneath skin and bone, something faintly stirred.