Magnar did not expect pain.
To be honest, he did not know what to expect.
The ritual was meant to end elsewhere, somewhere beyond prediction or preparation. He had designed it that way. Carefully. Ruthlessly. Perhaps too well. The destination was unknown by intent.
What he had not accounted for was arrival.
His lungs seized as if filled with ash. The ground struck his back and drove the air from him in a harsh, undignified sound. Cold stone bit through his clothes. For a single, humiliating heartbeat, Magnar could not move.
The pain was real.
That alone was wrong.
He opened his eyes.
Between two squat stone structures stretched a narrow passageway, crude and uniform in their construction. The sky above was a dull gray, unbroken by stars, clouds, or the familiar undercurrent of mana.
The world felt empty.
Magnar forced himself upright. He was tall enough that standing brought his shoulders close to the lower window ledges on either side, and the alley felt narrower for it. His body responded sluggishly, as if it had forgotten how to obey. A tremor ran through his arms as he pushed into a sitting position. He flexed his fingers.
Nothing answered.
No heat. No spark. No elemental resonance.
He frowned.
Once the dizziness eased, sound crept in. Distant rumbles echoed between the buildings, heavy and rhythmic. Somewhere nearby, something hissed, followed by a metallic clatter. Footsteps passed at the mouth of the alley, accompanied by muted voices. Not alarmed. Not urgent. Ordinary.
He remained still, listening.
Carts, he thought. The rhythm was strange, but the purpose felt familiar enough. Movement. Transport. Civilization.
A laugh almost escaped him, but it died before reaching his throat.
So the ritual had worked, at least in part. He had been sent somewhere new. Whether that counted as success remained to be seen.
He rose carefully this time, keeping his back to the wall. Powerless or not, charging blindly into unknown territory was a reliable way to die.
A sharp clatter sounded above him. Magnar's gaze snapped upward just in time to see a child half-climbed out of a window onto a rusted metal stairway.
Their eyes met.
The child yelped and scrambled back inside. The window slammed shut.
Magnar watched it for a moment before nodding.
Human territory, then. That simplified matters.
The street beyond the alley was wider, lined with lights and glass panes reflecting the gray sky. More carts rolled past, closer now. As they passed, he noted spinning wheels, enclosed frames, and the absence of beasts. No magic crystal either. Whatever moved them was internal.
He kept his expression neutral and matched the pace of those around him. Observation first.
A warm glow spilled from a storefront ahead, carrying the scent of roasted beans and baked bread. People entered and exited in small groups, relaxed and unguarded.
Food. Shelter. Information.
The bell above the door rang softly when Magnar stepped inside.
Warm air brushed his face, thick with unfamiliar scents: oil, bread, something bitter beneath it. Light pooled across polished tables and tiled floors. The place was not empty, but it was resting. A few patrons lingered in low conversation.
Magnar chose a seat near the counter and waited, listening.
Orders were placed in a pattern. Short phrases. Names he did not recognize. He memorized two. When a young man approached him, dark-haired, sleeves rolled up, eyes sharp and attentive, Magnar was prepared.
"You're new here?" the man asked, casual but attentive.
"Yes."
"What can I get you?"
Magnar repeated one of the earlier orders.
The man nodded and moved away.
When the plate arrived, Magnar ate slowly and methodically. His body accepted the food with quiet relief. That, at least, had not changed.
When he finished, the man leaned against the counter again.
"You paying cash or credit?"
Magnar reached into his pocket and placed the coins on the counter. Scratched metal. Mismatched. Gathered with quiet intent from gutters and cracks in the street.
The man glanced down. The watch on his wrist caught the café light briefly, something thin and precise that had no business being on someone in rolled sleeves behind a counter. One eyebrow lifted.
"That won't cover it."
Magnar inclined his head. "Then I will work."
The man studied him more carefully now. Not the clothes. Not the coins. The posture. The calm. The absence of embarrassment. He took in the height, the lean set of the shoulders, and the face that would have been easy to look at if it had shown any emotion at all. The eyes caught him last, a pale unsettled color somewhere between grey and something else entirely, shifting under the café lights and giving nothing away.
"You even know what you're offering?"
"No. But I learn quickly."
A long second passed.
The man exhaled through his nose, halfway between a laugh and a sigh.
"Yeah. You look like it." He nodded toward the back. "Name's Adrian. You can help close."
Magnar stood. "Magnar."
Adrian blinked. "That your real name?"
"It is."
"Figures," Adrian muttered, already turning away.
The work was simple: cleaning, carrying, observing. Magnar memorized the rhythms of the place, the invisible systems that made everything function. No magic. No mana. Just repetition and habit.
When the lights dimmed and the last customer left, Adrian wiped his hands on a towel.
"You got somewhere to go tonight?"
"No."
Adrian hesitated, scratching the back of his neck.
"My grandmother owns the building. There's an empty room upstairs. You work tomorrow morning, food's covered. We'll talk after."
Magnar met his gaze. "That is acceptable."
Adrian snorted. "You talk like that on purpose?"
"Sometimes."
"Yeah. Thought so."
Night fell without ceremony.
After closing, Magnar followed Adrian up a narrow staircase to a modest room above the café. It was clean. Sparse. Sufficient.
When he was finally alone, Magnar stood in the center of the room and closed his eyes.
He reached inward. Outward. Everywhere.
Nothing answered.
No matter how carefully he probed, no matter how deeply he focused, the result remained the same: silence. A complete absence of response.
A powerless world. Was that possible?
He exhaled slowly.
The room above the café was small enough that silence had texture.
He lay on his back in the dark and reached inward for the fourth time that night. The result was the same as the third time, and the second, and the first. Silence. Complete and indifferent, the way a sealed room is silent, not peaceful, just stopped.
He rose before the city did.
The common area down the hall was empty. A rectangular device sat on the low table near the window, thin and dark, its surface catching the faint pre-dawn light from outside. He had noticed it the previous evening when Adrian had used it briefly before closing, touching its surface with his fingers and producing light and movement from within it. No heat. No resonance. No mana of any kind.
And yet it had responded.
Magnar sat down in front of it and studied it for a moment without touching anything. The construction was unlike anything he had encountered, no visible mechanism, no moving parts, no indication of what animated it.
He pressed the surface once, lightly.
It lit up.
He sat back slightly. Then forward again.
The interface resolved into something navigable within twenty minutes. The logic was not complicated once the underlying structure became apparent, a system of categories, each leading to narrower categories, each containing information. Vast amounts of it. More than any library he had seen in this world, organized with a precision that was almost magical in its own right.
He searched for magic first. The results were extensive and largely useless, fragmented histories, theories with no methodological grounding, communities of people who believed things without evidence. He moved through them efficiently, extracting what was factual and discarding the rest.
Then ruins. Ancient sites.
Here the information was thinner but more precise. Academic records. Archaeological surveys. Geographic coordinates attached to sites of historical interest, most of them unremarkable, some of them flagged for ongoing research. He cross-referenced three of them against the architectural details he had observed in the city and narrowed the list.
One site in the hills northeast of the city matched on four independent criteria.
He was reading the survey notes for the third time when a door opened behind him.
Magnar turned.
Adrian stood in the hallway, blinking against the light, hair entirely uncooperative. He stared at Magnar. Magnar stared back.
"Do you practice shadow arts?" Magnar asked.
Adrian blinked. "What."
"You made no sound crossing the floor. In my experience that requires either training or intent."
"I was half asleep." Adrian looked at the lit screen, then at Magnar, then at the screen again. "Are you using my laptop."
"Yes."
"At four in the morning."
"The hour seemed irrelevant to the task."
Adrian crossed the room and looked at the screen without touching it. His expression moved through several stages before settling somewhere between amusement and resignation. The search history was visible: magic, ancient ruins, archaeological records.
"You're researching magic," Adrian said.
"I am researching what remains of it."
"There's nothing remaining of it. That's the whole point of it being gone."
He straightened up and looked at Magnar with flat patience.
"How long have you been out here?"
"Several hours."
"Did you sleep at all?"
"Not yet."
Adrian looked at him for a moment. Then he went to the kitchen, filled a glass of water, and came back. He set it on the table next to the laptop without comment.
"The ruins in the northeast survey," Magnar said. "The site flagged in the third record. Do you know it?"
"I know of it. Old stones on a hill. People go up there sometimes." He paused. "Tourists mostly. Nothing's ever been found there."
"What makes you certain?"
"Because someone would have said something."
He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, looking at Magnar with an expression that had started to contain something other than amusement. Not suspicion. Something closer to careful reassessment.
"You really believe in this stuff."
Magnar considered how to answer that.
"I believe in evidence," he said. "The evidence suggests something existed here that no longer does. I intend to understand why."
Adrian was quiet for a moment. Then he pushed off the wall.
"Get some sleep. You look like you've been awake for a week."
"Four days."
"That's not better."
He moved back toward the hallway.
"And next time you want to use the laptop, just ask."
He disappeared into his room.
Magnar looked at the screen for a moment longer, then at the glass of water Adrian had left without explanation.
He picked it up and drank it slowly.
On the seventh day, he followed the trail into the hills.
The ruins were older than the road leading to them. Stone half-swallowed by earth, cracked by time. Posted signs warned of unstable ground.
At first he felt nothing.
Then something stirred. Faint. Almost imagined.
He followed the sensation deeper, past the signs and the marked boundary, until loose gravel betrayed him. The ground gave way beneath his foot.
He fell hard, striking stone.
The world tilted into darkness.
When he came to, his head throbbed and his hands rested against something cold and solid.
Embedded in the rock before him was a dark crystal, cracked cleanly through the center. Black, with hints of violet buried deep within.
It should have been inert.
It was not.
Magnar stared at it for a long moment before prying loose the surrounding stone and lifting the chunk into his arms.
For the first time since arriving in this world, something had answered him.
That was enough to change everything.