Chapter 5 — Roots in the Drought - Part 1: Changes

The years passed too quickly. Time did not ask if anyone was ready. It just went.

Lian was now four years old, almost five. His body was still that of a child, but his face no longer looked like the wrinkled baby of three years ago. The cheeks had thinned, the gaze had become more focused. The features were beginning to lean toward Lia's: the same stubborn chin, the same soft curve of the eyebrows, and that quiet attention that seemed to measure the world before speaking.

The village of Éstia remained in the same place — the same cluster of crooked houses, the same dirt road, the same smell of smoke at the end of the afternoon — but everything felt more… dry.

Fewer shouts of children running.Less smell of food.Less open laughter in the street.Less rain.

The vegetable patch behind the Raymonds' house was a perfect portrait of that. The beds, which before showed a crooked variety of greens, now displayed withered leaves, cracked soil in places, the occasional stubborn stalk lifting its head like surviving stubbornness.

Further off, the forest, which before was just a green backdrop on the horizon, gained a wrong kind of prominence.

When Lian arrived in that world, the tree line had seemed livelier. Sounds came from all sides: birds, insects, the rustle of leaves in the wind.

As the years passed and the drought approached, the silence grew along with it.

That world was less technological, but the logic of hunger remained the same: when the land dries and the animals vanish, it is always the people who pay the bill first.

That late afternoon, Lian was squatting beside one of the beds, his knees against the dry earth. His small hands passed over the surface, picking out stones, breaking clods, turning the thin layer of soil.

He pretended to be just a child playing in the dirt.

Inside, he was doing calculations.

"If the soil stays like this for another season, half these roots won't make it to the end of next month." He slid his finger along a thin crack, as if reading a line in a book. "Rainfall has decreased, the water table must be going down. And no one here seems to know what irrigation is."

He pressed his mouth closed, swallowing a sigh that did not belong in a five-year-old body.

On the opposite side of the garden, Lia poured water from a wooden bucket over the plants with almost ceremonial care. The motion was repeated, mechanical, but her look revealed the worry.

— Chris, don't shove your hand in so deep — she called, without looking directly at him. — You'll end up hurting the roots.

— Okay, Mom — Lian answered, sweetly.

He adjusted the movement, letting his hands pass only over the surface, as she expected. The earth beneath remained hard.

The name Christian Raymond already came automatically. The Lian Rid from the other life sank deeper each year, like an old layer of paint covered by newer ones.

Still, it was hard to look at the patch and not remember headlines about drought, reports on cities collapsing without water…

In the three years that had passed, everyone in the house had changed. Some for the better. Others only… more tired.

Tomy had grown older in the shoulders.

The back that had once straightened whenever he picked up the bow now seemed to carry a weight that was not only of firewood or flesh. Each time he returned from the forest empty-handed, his silence weighed heavier than any complaint.

Lia had aged in her gaze.

The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deepened, not from laughing too much, but from squinting too often, trying to make food fit into almost-empty plates. She "wasn't hungry" on too many days to be a coincidence.

Lilia had grown forward, not upward.

She had completely given up the traces of adolescence without asking anyone's permission. She took over the kitchen, the sewing, the household organization. And she still found time to give Lian an education she herself had never had.

Caliste had become almost a second adult.

She carried wood, drew water, sometimes went with her father on hunts. She still grumbled and made crooked jokes, but her eyes already carried the account of what was missing.

Will… took a different path.

He had taken a "job" in another village, farther north, doing work that changed name depending on who told the story: hunter's helper, caravan porter, road scout.

In practice, he spent long periods away; two months gone, a few days at home, then gone again.

When he was away, the house felt quieter. Lighter, in a twisted way.

Lyra had shrunk the most.

Inside and out.

Her eyes, once full of childlike brightness, now had a dull, tired sheen. Her body, which at eleven should have been bursting with energy, seemed deflated.

That whole picture was compressed into the garden.

A figure ran across the yard, tripping over her own water bucket.

— Ouch! — Lyra complained, more from the shock than from pain. She stopped, supporting her hand against the side of the house, breathing ragged.

Lian raised his head.

Lyra should be in the phase of quick growth where clothes don't keep up, plunging into every possible mischief. Instead, she looked smaller.

Not necessarily in height — although she was short for her age — but in intensity.

The dark circles, which Lian would expect only in an exhausted adult, marked her thin skin. Her movements were more contained, as if any run exacted an immediate price.

— Better save your energy, Lyra — Caliste said, appearing behind her carrying a bundle of wood on her shoulders. — You'll faint for nothing.

— Shut up, Cal… — she answered, in a thread of a voice, trying to lift her chin and sound clever like before. — I just… I just tripped…

Over the years, he was building the picture.

The lack of mana flowing through Lyra's core was not just an abstract magic problem. It had concrete effects.

While other children seemed to strengthen, fill out, adapt invisibly to the constant presence of that energy in the world, Lyra's body worked like a lamp with its wick cut. Consuming, burning… without receiving the same amount of fuel.

When he played with her, Lian used every fall, every run, every pause to observe. He tried to feel, even without being able to use anything directly, how the give and take of mana between the core and the channels that spread it through the body should work.

He didn't arrive at any miraculous discovery, but an image fixed in his head: it wasn't that mana didn't exist, but that the paths it should travel seemed partially blocked, as if clogged.

Yana's healing magic helped align, strengthen, heal… but it had a clear limit. It was a kind of mana that created and restored, not something that dismantled. It didn't break, didn't scrape, didn't "clean" whatever was stuck inside the channels.

In Lian's logic, to unblock it would require the exact opposite: a power capable of undoing whatever was blocking the flow.

For now, however, all this was just a model in the head of an ex-physics student trapped in a child's body, a stubborn theory with no proof.

She fell ill with any change in weather. She tired too quickly. She ate little. She had fevers that came and went.

There were no blood tests, no machines, no sophisticated diagnostics. But Lian had seen enough in hospitals during his previous life to recognize a body that, at minimum, wasn't keeping pace.

Caliste put the bundle of wood on the ground and, without being asked, took the bucket from their mother's hand.

— Let me bring the water, Mom — she said, adjusting the weight. — Lyra should rest a little.

Lia hesitated, her gaze returning to her daughter, who tried to hide her heavy breathing.

— You can go play, Lyra — she murmured, smoothing her hair. — But slowly, okay? Promise?

— I promise… — she answered, lacking her former energy but with a stubborn smile.

"He seems like an idiot sometimes, but…" Lian watched Caliste walk away toward the well. "...in the end, he's one of the few with his head in the right place..."

A piece of stale bread fell near Lian's foot, pulling him from that mental monologue.

— You didn't finish it — Lilia said quietly, nodding toward the kitchen. — Better eat it than let the rats have it.

Lian picked up the bread and bit slowly, feeling the dry texture scratch the roof of his mouth.

"I know you didn't finish it either."

His look rose to his sister.

Lilia had become thinner, but there was something steady about her. She had almost completely taken over caring for the house, sharing tasks with Lia. And she still found time to teach Lian to read and write with the little material they had.

She was the private teacher he had never had in his other life.

— Don't swallow like that, Chris — she grumbled, with irritated sweetness, pinching his cheek. — You'll choke.

— I won't — he replied, wiping his mouth with the back of his free hand. — I can handle it.

He felt the crumb scratch his throat as it went down.

— Come in when you're done there — Lilia added, already walking away. — We still need to review yesterday's letters.

The corner of Lian's mouth rose.

"Things are getting tighter and tighter..." he thought, watching her silhouette disappear through the kitchen door.

Lunch over the last months had become a predictable sequence:

First the meat disappeared.Then the vegetables became rarer.Then even the broth began to look more like water than food.

Lia "wasn't hungry" on too many days. Lilia "had already eaten earlier." And Tomy sometimes just stirred the stew with the spoon, pretending to be distracted.

Lian did not need graphs to know that this was the beginning of the kind of story in which villages simply disappear.

♦

Afternoons in the Raymonds' house almost always followed the same sequence.

After the outdoor chores, tending the garden, and the buckets of water pulled from the stream, came the moment of "study" — a word Lian valued more than any child in the village could understand.

He already understood almost all the spoken phrases. Some words still got stuck in his speech, but the language of that world was no longer a wall. The problem now was writing.

He would sit at the table with a piece of charcoal in one hand and a clean piece of wood in the other. Lilia brought an old book, its cover nearly detached, and opened it with exaggerated care.

The letters were strange, curved in some places, angular in others. At first they had been an indecipherable wall. Now they began to organize into patterns.

— This one — Lilia would say, pointing with the tip of her nail — is the "a". Do you remember?

— I remember — Lian murmured, carving the letter into the wood. — "A."

She smiled, proud, as if his progress were exclusively her merit.

In a way, it was.

He repeated the letters, then the syllables. Lia watched from afar, between stirring the food and caring for Lyra, and her eyes always smiled a little wetly when she saw the youngest get an entire word right.

— That boy will be smarter than all of you together — she said, half kidding, half believing. — He'll end up going to the big city, studying magic with rich people and forgetting poor old mom here.

— Nobody is that stupid — Will muttered from the corner when he was home.

Among them all, Will was the least changed in what mattered. He aged, grew taller, his face shedding some teenage mischief and gaining shadows of fatigue. But his look remained hard. The resentment, intact.

When he showed up after weeks away, he brought a sack with something: leather, salt, news from other villages.

He left the coins in Tomy's hand with an almost automatic gesture. At night, after eating, the poison came out:

— If he gets out of here, it's because someone carried the weight for him — he had murmured once, on a night when the stew was almost only water. His tone was low, but not low enough. — And that someone is never you, right, kid?

Tomy sighed, too tired to fight every time.

Lian listened in silence, absorbing each word, each pause, the way Will's voice seemed to want to fill every space.

Despite the psychological abuse, which had become almost familiar after a lifetime dealing with the previous father, Will had never laid a hand on him. That line had not yet been crossed.

"But if one day he crosses it..." The thought came dry.

He could do something. He knew that. He was not as helpless as he seemed in that small body. If he wanted, he already had enough mana and control to turn that threat into a solved problem.

But the world was still as crooked as in the previous life. The only new thing burning at the center of his chest was the mana core. At least that answered when he called.

And Lian knew that the day he decided to use it for real, he could count on it.

♦

Four years of stolen nights of sleep had been enough to push his core to what Yana called "Stage 2, stable/solid."

The gray inside no longer seemed so opaque. It was lighter, more defined, almost as if someone had polished the inside of the core. For someone his age, that was an indecent advance.

The Mana Reflux, which had started as a childish improvised trick for magical rhinitis, now had this idiotic side effect, and it was more efficient. It was enough to concentrate a bit, adjust his breathing, and the core behaved like a tilted glass inside a river; mana from outside entered in controlled little threads, spinning in circuit, without bursting or leaking.

It wasn't an elegant technique, but it was consistent.

And for someone almost five years old, consistency with mana was almost cheating.

He could keep small whirlwinds of wind spinning around his fingers for several seconds without losing control or draining the core beyond the limit.

He could form a sphere of water the size of a soccer ball, firm enough not to explode in his face as long as he paid attention.

He could concentrate air into a short push to knock down a log or push someone a step back.

He had also learned to quickly dry a piece of soaked clothing, combining wind with the heat of a timid fire, and to harden a specific point of the ground, turning soft earth into something almost as rigid as stone.

The basics.

The same basics any apprentice would take years to make "presentable."

The problem was that he didn't know real spells: he didn't know formal words, correct gestures, or ritual circles.

He learned everything by watching from the side, ripping bits of theory from books that weren't written for someone like him.

So he did what he could: he took novice tricks and twisted them until they became useful in combat or emergency.

A gust of wind became a quick sidestep.A thread of water became a blade to cut rope. A hardened patch of ground became a support to jump higher.

Simple tools, misused.

None of this could be seen.

And that was exactly how he intended to keep it, for now.

But something that wasn't in his plans decided to arrive ahead of schedule.