The lights went out.
A pulse of blue energy came from the experimental housing on the table and removed them from the equation entirely. A half-second of pure dark, and then the blue was everywhere: through the cracks in the wall, out the windows, back in through the windows carrying small glittering contributions of broken glass that moved in the wrong direction, retreating in arcs and settling into their frames in perfect reverse.
The tavern filled with blue.
Then the floor was no longer where it had been.
This happened to everyone's bodies simultaneously and without warning, which produced a range of immediate responses: Vander grabbed the nearest fixed object, which turned out to be not fixed; Claggor looked down and then looked at the space below where down had been; Mylo said something brief and comprehensive and began a slow rotation in the middle of the room; and Powder spread her arms out and laughed.
Vi was already checking for the threat and finding only the blue magic field and the miniature structure of light hovering in the air above Jayce's equipment: a circle of runes, assembled in sequence, each one settling into position with the precision of something that had been waiting for this arrangement.
A wineglass floated up from a table. Nobody had touched it. It drifted through the bar's new vertical arrangement, found the edge of the rune circle, passed through it, and was gone. The other end of the circle was somewhere else in the room. The wineglass was there.
Jayce had forgotten to breathe.
He looked at the circle. He looked at where the wineglass had been. He turned around in the zero-gravity environment with the expression of a man whose entire life's work has just introduced itself.
He found Liam.
Liam was sitting where he had been sitting. Both feet on the floor. Shizuku beside him. Neither of them was floating.
They were looking at the rune circle.
"It's different from divine script constructs," Shizuku said. She had her eyes narrowed with the specific focus she brought to things she intended to understand completely. "Fundamentally different."
"Divine script is code," Liam said. "The characters are a programming language. They describe what the ability is supposed to do, but the ability still needs a practitioner to inject aura and activate it. The script handles precision and structure; the person provides the power." He paused. "This is not that."
Shizuku picked up the thread: "This, when it forms, is already active. Already capable of effect. You could walk into it without knowing what it was, with no Nen, no training, no understanding of what natural energy is, and it would do what it was designed to do." She looked at the rune circle. "It doesn't need a practitioner. It is the practitioner."
"Maybe," Liam said, "magic is alive."
The two of them looked at each other. The same thought arriving from both directions at the same moment.
Natural energy on Runeterra was not the same thing as natural energy in the HxH world. In the HxH world it was ambient, neutral, a collective emission from living things with no organizing principle beyond accumulation. Here it had been organizing itself for a long time. Long enough to produce awareness. Long enough to produce demigods. The Soul of Ionia, an ancient presence the size of a continent. The bear and the phoenix and the ram and the wind guardian of this coast, individual natures with individual wills and physical presence in the material world.
But those were the ones that had finished becoming.
What about the others?
Every piece of magic ever worked in this world: every rune drawn, every circle assembled, every spell discharged through a mage's hands. Were those also living things, at some earlier stage? Not yet aware, not yet named, but drawing on the same primordial field that the demigods had drawn on to crystallize into being? Not practitioners channeling power but embryos of something larger, organized clusters of magical energy following a pattern that was not a practitioner's intention but the pattern's own?
Amniotic fluid surrounding a world. Fetuses in the fluid, forming.
Liam felt something that was not quite a sound and not quite a touch, more the impression of air moving past an ear: the distant, faint, possibly imagined singing of a bird.
Jayce removed the crystal from the housing.
The rune circle destabilized. The blue light dispersed. Everyone in the room had approximately half a second to adjust their expectations and then they all arrived at the floor in a distributed pattern. Nobody fell badly. Vander caught Powder. Mylo and Claggor caught each other and then looked in opposite directions. Vi landed on both feet, which was simply the way Vi landed.
The bar broke into noise. People talked over each other. Vander listened to several of them at once with the patience of a man who has spent years as the point where the lower city processed its feelings. After a while he began to quietly indicate toward the door, and people began, one by one, to take the hint.
When the room had thinned to the core group and Jayce, Vander looked at Liam.
He had spent the last hour observing rather than speaking. He had watched what Liam's healing had done to his shoulder. He had watched the blue field of the hextech experiment take the bar apart and reassemble it. He had watched a group of children absorb the language of an entirely new framework for understanding the world with the enthusiasm of people who have never been told what isn't possible.
"Psychic ability," he said. He did not phrase it as a question. It was more the sound of a man discovering that the correct word for something had been in his vocabulary the whole time.
"Close enough," Liam said. He shifted slightly, and something small and directional left his hand and settled into Vander. Not a Star Mark. Lighter than that. A single organized ball of natural energy, finding the body's existing channels by instinct and opening them.
Every pore opened at once. Every suppressed capability in the man's substantial frame found the surface.
Vander stood with the expression of someone who has just been handed an extra set of lungs.
"Enhancement type," Shizuku said. She had used the Aura Reading technique — Liam had taught it to her in the walk through the lower city, and with the natural energy to spare she had run it cleanly. "Physical amplification. Your strength, speed, endurance, everything you already do, all of it becomes more of what it is."
Vander closed his hand into a fist, feeling the mass of it.
"Ten of Silco's Shimmer soldiers," he said.
"At least," Liam said.
Vander sat back against the bar with his arms folded. He had been waiting his whole life to feel like this was a trick. He was still waiting. The feeling of the power moving through him was very straightforwardly real, and very straightforwardly his.
He listened.
The remaining evening passed in the tavern's central room with most of the lights on and the windows patched with cloth from behind the bar. Liam sat with his back against a pillar and went through what he knew of each person's type and what it meant in practice. He had done this before, in other configurations, and had learned that the most useful thing to give people at this stage was not a complete theory but a direction.
For Jayce: Enhancement. Everything the mind is already capable of, amplified. He visibly imagined the scientific implications of this and had to sit down.
For Claggor: Emission with Enhancement tendency. Things sent out at range, maintained from a distance. He thought about this quietly for a while and then began asking careful questions about control mechanics.
For Mylo: Manipulation shifted toward Emission. He had the lock-pick in his hand before Liam finished explaining. There was no surprise in this for anyone.
"There is no door I can't open," Mylo said. He said it with the complete and specific confidence of someone who has just received a professional credential he already assumed he had.
For Vi: Transmutation with Enhancement tendency. The underlying capability was not just strength but change: the ability to make aura into something with qualities it didn't start with. Liam looked at her pink hair and the way she carried herself and said: "There's an ability I know that was developed by a Transmutation user with a similar lean toward Enhancement. It works with elasticity. Stretching, compression, impact distributed through the stretch. You'd modify it."
Vi had no idea what this meant technically.
"Think of it as your punches having reach," Shizuku said.
"And memory," Liam added. "The impact stays connected to you. You feel what you hit."
Vi thought about this.
"Spider silk," Liam said, for reasons the room didn't understand, and smiled at nothing in particular.
For Powder: Specialization. The honest answer was that there was nothing to teach about what her type would do, because it would do something entirely its own and no prior example applied. What he could give her was the foundation: the four basics, and then time, and then whatever emerged when a particular quality of mind and particular history and particular way of seeing the world engaged with a framework that had no predetermined output for her.
He did not say this to her in a way that was ominous. He said it in the way of someone reporting a genuinely open question with genuine curiosity about the answer.
Powder listened with the expression of someone filing information in a place she intended to return to.
The city was going to be awake for a while yet. Through the patched windows the sounds of it were clear: people still talking, still gesturing upward at the empty sky where the light curtain had been, still working through what they had seen and what it might mean for people whose names they knew and people they would never meet.
Vi and Powder's names were in a lot of those conversations. Liam could hear the word "Vi" from multiple directions without trying.
Caitlyn, somewhere across the canal, was sitting at a window.
Liam could feel the Star Marks. He always could, the whole constellation of them, distributed across the world he could reach from the position he was currently occupying. Most of them were familiar. Some were quiet. Some were active.
One was walking toward a canal.
He let the present location of his attention slip sideways, into the body of the man with dreadlocks who had left the tavern thirty minutes ago.
The shrine was in a part of the lower city where the compressed architecture opened unexpectedly into a small square that had been cleared by intention rather than accident. Old cleared spaces in old cities are usually old cleared spaces for a reason. The reason here was the mural on the wall at the back of the square: a long-haired figure, staff in one hand, wind in the other, the iconography of a goddess who had protected the coastline long enough to be named and painted and prayed to and gradually, as her miracles stopped happening, quietly remembered less.
The Nen-body looked at the mural. Behind the body, the real Liam sat in the tavern with his eyes closed, his actual consciousness running the possessed frame remotely.
"Your congregation has thinned," the body said, to the mural. "Centuries without a miracle will do that." The voice was the possessed man's voice, which was the wrong voice, but the words were Liam's. He had learned, through practice, that the content of what was said mattered more than the container. "If you were produced by the magic field of this world, what does mortal belief mean to you? Is it sustenance? Or just a habit mortals developed because they needed somewhere to direct gratitude?"
The wind moved.
It didn't come from any direction in particular. It was simply present, suddenly and fully, where it had not been a moment before.
"Without living beings," a voice said, from inside the wind, "there is no magic field."
The mural changed. Not dramatically. Not with the drama of divine manifestation in stories that want you to know something important is happening. More the way a very still surface of water develops depth when you look at it from a certain angle: the paint, the plaster, the old faded goddess, acquired dimension. A vague figure condensed from the layered air in front of it. Long hair, loose clothing, a hand extended.
The hand reached toward the chest of the man with dreadlocks.
Liam, inside the body, felt the hand close on something that was not the body. A shape of him — the outline of who he actually was, in the form of white light — began to separate from the borrowed frame.
The goddess of wind had recognized the tenant.
She was drawing him out to look at him properly.