Aarian was born in silence and candlelight, beneath a sky of lavender suns. His first cry echoed through a temple chamber lined with glyphs, and the villagers whispered that he was touched by something beyond. His mother named him Kael, meaning "light in the hollow" in the old tongue, and the name fit him too well.

In his early years, he barely spoke. He would sit for hours, watching flames flicker or listening to the wind rustle the trees. He never played like the other children. Instead, he disassembled broken toys to see how they worked, traced the path of falling leaves as if solving for gravity, and stared into the night sky as though remembering something just out of reach.

At three, he surprised the village healer by predicting the exact moment her potion would boil—without touching it or knowing the ingredients. At four, he mimicked the tuning forks of temple bells using only water bowls and a curious smile. By five, he had become a quiet mystery in the village—a child who learned faster than the grown men and asked questions no one understood.

By the age of five, Kael had begun experimenting in secret. Every falling leaf, every flicker of fire, every spark of glyphlight—it was as if the world whispered to him in patterns only he could read.

The village priestess called it magic. The villagers called it divine favor. But Kael knew better.

He didn’t see spells. He saw fields.

When the elder lit candles with a chant, Kael saw vibration passing through the molecules. When a traveling mage sealed a scroll with fire, Kael watched the heat flow as if tracking particles in a simulation.

And then, one day, he tried it himself.

It was during festival preparations. A group of children huddled around a mage, who amused them by conjuring flickers of blue flame with a wave of the hand and a rhythmic chant.

Kael stood silently, watching.

The mage laughed. "Would you like to try, little stargazer?"

Kael nodded.

He didn’t repeat the chant. He didn't copy the hand motion. Instead, he focused—on the air, the friction, the energy thresholds needed to break the bonds of the dry grass beneath him.

He visualized the molecules vibrating, imagined the kinetic energy he needed to tip them into combustion. He calculated it.

A tiny flame burst forth.

But not blue.

Not small.

A brief column of silver fire shot up from the grass, then blinked out in an instant—clean, silent, controlled.

The mage's smile faltered. The children gasped.

Kael blinked. His heart pounded, not from excitement—but from clarity.

He hadn’t cast a spell. He’d solved a problem.

The laws of this world bent to imagination—but Kael’s imagination was shaped by physics, not folklore. He didn’t need chants. He needed understanding.

That night, lying under a canopy of three moons, Kael whispered to the stars:

"I will not cast magic. I will control it."

He didn’t know it yet, but the world would never see magic the same way again