Ezra had scared everyone half to death.
One moment he'd been on his little table, hunched over parchment, eyes too bright for a six-month-old as he pushed a quill around.
The next, his head had dipped forward onto his arm, and he'd gone completely slack.
Aerwyna found him like that—ink smeared on his cheek, quill still trapped in his tiny fingers, breathing shallow and too slow.
For a heartbeat, her mind went blank.
"Ezra?"
No answer.
She touched his neck, his forehead, the place over his heart. Warm. Steady. No fever, no chill.
Just… empty.
Not physically—his body was warm and alive—but in the Field. The subtle, ever-present pressure of his aura that she'd learned to feel even when she refused to acknowledge it, was gone.
Like a mage after a reckless overdraw.
Mana depletion, her training supplied, crisp and cold.
From what? her panic demanded.
He hasn't even tried a spell.
With a tight jaw, she pried the quill from his tiny fingers. She expected resistance—the way he always clung to tools with that absurd, stubbornness—but his hand opened with the limp obedience of a sleeping doll.
She lifted him from the chair and cradled him against her chest as if he might shatter.
"Catalyna," Aerwyna called, her voice just a shade too sharp.
The wet nurse hurried in from the adjoining room. "Milady?"
Aerwyna didn't bother explaining. She simply angled Ezra so Catalyna could see the slackness in his limbs, the ink on his cheek, the too-slow rise and fall of his chest.
Catalyna's eyes widened—but her hands stayed steady.
"What did he do?" she asked, barely above a whisper.
"That is what I intend to find out," Aerwyna said, and hated the tremor she couldn't keep out of the last word.
She carried him to the crib. His weight felt wrong—too light for how much fear it dragged through her.
"Help me with the blankets," Aerwyna ordered. "He's overtaxed himself. We'll let him rest and see if the Maester has anything safe for infants."
Catalyna nodded once, quick and obedient.
Between the two of them, they laid Ezra down and tucked the blanket around him as if he were much smaller than he was.
He didn't stir.
Aerwyna pulled her Field in tight—tight enough that it hugged her skin and made her teeth ache—and then let it expand in the thinnest, gentlest brush over Ezra.
Nothing flared back.
No foreign residue. No invasive weave.
Just that same unsettling emptiness, the sense of a cup scraped clean.
She sat beside the crib and stayed there, watching every rise and fall of his chest long into the night.
Catalyna offered twice to take the watch.
Aerwyna ignored her.
Every time Ezra's breath hitched, her heart stuttered with it.
Every time his fingers twitched, she leaned forward, ready to snatch him up, to force warmth into him with her own aura if she had to.
But the hours crawled by, and he did not wake.
At some point, the lamp in the corner dimmed and was replaced—quietly, efficiently. Aerwyna barely noticed.
She only noticed the way Ezra's chest rose.
And rose.
And rose.
Until the sky outside the window bruised into grey.
Ezra surfaced like someone swimming up from too deep.
First came sound—the faint clatter of dishes somewhere far away, a gull's thin cry near the outer walls, the distant thump of boots on stone.
Then came sensation.
His body was heavy.
Not the pleasant heaviness of sleep, but the leaden, awful weight of a system that had been run past its safe operating limits.
He felt as if someone had replaced his bones with wet sand.
His eyes were glued shut.
He forced them open.
The familiar canopy of his crib came into view: carved dark beams, a patch of plaster with a hairline crack, the soft play of morning light on the ceiling.
His skull throbbed dully, like a warning bell rung a long time ago and still vibrating in the background.
What… happened?
The memory snapped back into place.
The falling quill.
The way the air had seemed to twitch around it.
The thin gold lines stitching themselves into meaning—numbers, letters, that neat little relationship between speed, time, and acceleration.
v = u + a·t
Not on the page.
On the world.
Ezra lay very still, staring up at the ceiling.
That wasn't a dream.
Dreams were fuzzy around the edges. That had been sharp—like catching a formula in a textbook, not imagining one.
He could still feel the click of it. The way his mind had gone strangely quiet, like a puzzle piece finally finding where it belonged.
And then—
Nothing.
A drop. A cut. The hard reboot of his consciousness.
Mana depletion, Aerwyna had called it once, when he'd overstrained himself reinforcing his legs. This felt like that—only deeper.
Like he'd drained something behind his eyes until the lights went out.
From the corner of his vision, movement.
Catalyna sat by the window in her usual chair, positioned to see both the crib and the courtyard. She wasn't knitting. She wasn't dozing.
She was writing.
Fast.
Neat.
She finished quickly, folded the small note, and tucked it into her bodice.
Ezra squinted.
That's… odd.
Do most commoners know how to write? Maybe it's part of the requirement to work in the castle. Maybe the education here is better than I give it credit for.
The thought bounced once in his tired head and dropped away.
He didn't care.
He had bigger questions.
He pushed himself up to sit, fingers curling around the crib rail for balance.
The room lurched.
His stomach rolled.
He clenched his teeth and kept it together.
All right. One thing at a time.
That equation. That fall.
Can I do it again?
Aerwyna did not let him "do it again" that morning.
She declared him "not allowed to do anything strange," which translated into being force-fed broth, made to nap, and watched as if he were a bomb with a cracked fuse.
Ezra complied.
Mostly.
He let her think he was obedient while his mind churned behind sleepy eyelids, replaying the gold lines again and again.
By the time she carried him down the corridor to the library in the afternoon, he was buzzing with impatient energy.
"Remember," Aerwyna said, as if his six-month-old brain didn't already have it etched in, "you are to take it easy today. Letters, numbers. No trying to jump off furniture. No touching any crystals. No… experiments."
She made a face at the last word, as if the word itself had teeth.
Ezra nodded solemnly.
"Yes, Mama."
He meant it.
He also meant to see if he could make the numbers appear again.
The library was mercifully quiet.
Reitz was elsewhere, buried in reports from the border.
No guards. No servants.
Just shelves of books, a long table clear of anything breakable, and sunlight spilling through the high windows.
Aerwyna settled at one end with a stack of ledgers, posture stiff with forced normalcy.
Ezra was given his now-familiar setup at the other: a low cushion, a sheet of parchment, a small inkwell, and a quill trimmed short for his clumsy hands.
"Do be careful," Aerwyna added, perhaps for the twentieth time. "If you drop the ink, I am making you mop it with your own blanket."
"Yes, mother," Ezra said.
She smiled at that—quick, tired—and bent over her columns.
Ezra dipped his quill and drew one careful "A" to keep up appearances.
Then he set it down.
He reached for something more cooperative: a small wooden block the size of his fist, one of the counting toys Catalyna kept leaving around.
He set it near the edge of the table.
His pulse quickened.
Okay. Yesterday you were tired, frustrated, thinking about falling things.
Start there.
He closed his eyes and tried to remember how it had felt right before he passed out—the fuzzy pressure around his thoughts, the way his awareness had narrowed down to the quill and nothing else.
He breathed in.
Breathed out.
Then—very carefully—he pulled mana.
Not a flood. Not the brute reinforcement he used on muscles.
A thin thread.
He coaxed it upward behind his eyes and somewhere deeper in his skull, like drawing a filament through a narrow tube.
A thin band of pressure formed around his temples.
He opened his eyes.
The library looked the same.
Shelves.
Dust motes.
Aerwyna's braid.
He kept the warmth there and layered a thought on top of it.
Fall.
He pictured the block dropping.
The way gravity made everything speed up at the same rate, no matter how heavy.
The triangle of equations he'd learned as a teenager, forgotten, that was not to say he couldn't remember, not exactly ot was jus as if there holes punctured in his recollection, but he felt that he was slowly regaining the. His forcefullness, dragged it back up from storage by this world's refusal to behave.
For a long moment, nothing changed.
Then the lines of the room… twitched.
Not the objects.
His sense of them.
Edges shimmered slightly, as if someone had traced them again in faint gold over the existing ones.
The air felt thicker, full of invisible threads.
His head pulsed in warning.
He let out the breath he'd been holding.
"Ezra?" Aerwyna asked, glancing up. "Are you well?"
He realized his shoulders were tight and his eyes probably looked strange.
"Fine," he said quickly, pointing at his parchment. "Letters."
She relaxed and went back to her ledgers.
Ezra swallowed.
Slower.
Don't be an idiot.
He let some of the pressure drain away, leaving just enough warmth behind his eyes to feel… different.
He looked at the block.
"All right," he muttered under his breath. "Work with me."
He nudged it off the table.
It slid.
The moment it lost contact with the wood, the hazy lines snapped into focus.
Gold scribbles lunged toward it, coiling around the falling shape like excited insects. They straightened, sharpened, and resolved into something familiar:
v = u + a·t
Start speed. Acceleration. Time.
The block hit the floor with a dull thunk.
The equation vanished.
Ezra's heart hammered.
"Okay," he whispered, hardly aware he'd spoken.
His head ached, but not in the overwhelming blackout way from yesterday.
More like he'd stared too long at a bright lamp.
He waited, letting the ache ebb, then pulled the block back up.
He tried again—this time with a quill.
He balanced the feathered shaft near the table's edge, called up that thin thread of warmth again, and thought of motion and mass together.
How movement carried energy.
How a moving thing could hurt even if it was small, if it was fast enough.
He pushed.
The quill tipped and dropped.
The gold lines seized on it like a hook.
This time the shape they formed was different.
Longer. Curved.
K.E. = ½·m·v²
For a heartbeat the formula floated beside the falling quill, weight and speed and energy all bundled into those simple symbols.
The quill kissed the floor.
The gold vanished.
Ezra leaned back, breath coming quicker, an involuntary grin tugging at his lips.
Not just once.
Not a fluke.
He'd nudged something—mana, memory, whatever this world used for its strange tricks—and reality had answered with numbers.
He sat there for a moment, letting the wonder of it soak into him.
Then, because he was who he was, he started poking at it.
If I can see it… can I use it?
He turned his hand palm-up over the table.
He summoned a small warmth there—the same kind of internal control he used to stabilize his fingers on a quill.
Not dangerous.
Just a glow at the center of his palm.
The air shimmered faintly over his skin.
"Half m v squared," he whispered, the words tasting odd in this small mouth. "Come on. Do something."
He pictured the formula collapsing into a spark, imagined it turning into a tidy packet of energy he could fling.
Nothing happened.
The warmth in his hand flickered and went out as his concentration wobbled.
He scowled, tried again.
Same result.
By the third attempt, all he'd managed was to make his fingertips tingle and his headache throb harder.
"Of course," he muttered under his breath. "Of course it wouldn't be that easy."
On some level, he was relieved.
The idea of the universe handing out free explosions just because someone knew the right equation felt… wrong.
Back home, you didn't get something from nothing.
There was always a price, even if you couldn't see it yet.
Magic here seemed to ignore that.
Fire from empty hands.
Water from nowhere.
Maybe this—this overlay of numbers—was reality keeping its own books balanced.
Or maybe he was just a baby staring at a corner of a painting and pretending he understood the whole mural.
Either way, he'd found something useful.
Prediction.
If he could see the way things moved—their speed, their energy—he could figure out when to duck. Or how hard something would hit. Or when it was safe to stand his ground and when he absolutely had to move.
For an ordinary person, it would be handy.
For someone tiny in a world where grown adults could accidentally liquefy you with a miscast spell, it might be the difference between living and dying.
He chewed on that for a moment, then lifted his head.
"Mama," he called.
Aerwyna looked up immediately. "Yes, little one? Are you hungry?"
"No," Ezra said, shaking his head.
His eyes shone with a different kind of hunger.
"Mama… can you punch the air?"
Aerwyna blinked.
"…what?"
He pointed at the empty space in front of her, brow furrowed.
"Punch the air," he repeated. "Like this."
He balled his fist and made a clumsy, slow motion that was more flail than strike.
Aerwyna stared at him.
Then huffed a soft laugh.
What an odd request, she thought.
He was usually so serious—letters, numbers, stories.
This was… almost normal.
A strange little game.
"Well," she murmured, glancing toward the high windows as if expecting spies to leap in from the light itself. "I suppose it doesn't hurt anyone."
"Please, Mother?" Ezra added, laying it on thicker, voice small but insistent.
That did it.
"All right," she said, setting her quill carefully aside. "Here goes."
She stood, smoothing her skirt automatically, and stepped away from the table so she wouldn't knock anything over.
Her feet found a natural stance—one slightly ahead of the other, weight balanced.
Ezra swallowed.
He drew that thin thread of mana up behind his eyes again, but this time he didn't think about falling blocks.
He thought about her.
About the way her shoulders tensed when she lifted a ledger.
The way her hands moved when she snapped an order.
Strength coiled under soft skin.
The world sharpened.
Lines of faint gold crawled over Aerwyna's body in his sight, clustering around the joints of her shoulders, elbows, hips.
When she shifted her weight, tiny markers flared at her feet, showing where pressure built against the floor.
He could see it—the potential in her muscles, like pulled bowstrings.
This is great, he thought, heart pounding.
I can see the build-up. The direction.
"Ready?" Aerwyna asked, amused.
Ezra nodded, eyes wide.
She drew her fist back and let it fly.
Whoosh.
To Ezra, it was like watching lightning.
The numbers in his vision tried to keep up—vectors leaping from her shoulder down her arm, force estimates flickering—but the actual punch blurred right past the limits of his perception.
One heartbeat she was coiled.
The next her fist hung in the air where the hypothetical opponent's face would've been.
He blinked.
…Wait.
He rewound it in his head as best he could.
The intent had been clear, all that coiled energy neatly displayed.
But the strike itself?
His brain had barely registered it before it was over.
That was too fast.
Even with the numbers, he couldn't react in time.
By the time his ability told him this is going to hurt, it would already have hit him.
It wasn't enough to see the data.
He needed to shorten the gap between seeing and moving.
Which, for him, meant one thing.
Mana.
His body was an infant's, soft and structurally untrustworthy.
But mana—mana was an exosuit.
When he pushed it into his tendons and bones, he could make his fingers write like an adult.
When he flooded it into his legs, he could walk without snapping himself in half.
He hadn't been injured by the ceiling incident for the same reason: his Field had reflexively tightened around his skeleton at the moment of impact, bracing him from within.
A system.
A controllable reinforcement layer.
If his eyes could see the punch coming, maybe his body—reinforced—could move.
Hmm, Ezra thought, excitement pushing back against the lingering ache.
Maybe I can find a way to stretch how I feel time.
Make a moment… longer.
"Mama, again!" he blurted, the words coming out in a bright, eager squeak.
Aerwyna's irritation—never fully gone since the core incident—melted at the sound.
He looked so earnest, so ridiculously delighted by something as simple as a punch.
She laughed, a warm, surprised sound.
"Again?" she echoed.
"Again!" Ezra insisted, eyes shining.
Aerwyna shook her head, smiling despite herself.
"Very well," she said. "But just a few more. I don't want you getting ideas about hitting people, understand?"
He nodded vigorously, which she took as agreement and which he decided not to clarify.
She raised her fist.
Ezra pulled the numbers back into his eyes, bracing himself.
Aerwyna punched the empty air again.
And again.
And again.
Each strike left his vision momentarily full of swirling vectors and half-formed values—still not quite fast enough, still not quite under control, but clearer each time.
His headache sharpened, then dulled, then sharpened again, the familiar warning that he was pulling too much through too small a channel.
He didn't stop.
Not yet.
Over it all, echoing down the bright, sunlit library, was the delighted chant of a baby's voice:
"Mama again! Mama again!"
Aerwyna gladly obliged.