There is a script to tragedy. A predictable, monotonous rhythm that even the most advanced societies in the Continent of Dinatis inevitably fall into.
When a queen dies, the kingdom weeps. The bells of the capital toll in a minor key. Black banners are draped over the gleaming, technological marvels of the city, and a family gathers around a hole in the ground. Even in Adrek—a kingdom of soaring airships, clockwork automata, and undisputed supremacy—a wooden box going into the dirt remains the great equalizer.
Lucien went through the motions. He rode the carriage back to the palace in suffocating silence. He stood beside his father, King Adrian Adenca Adrek, a man who looked as though someone had reached into his chest and crushed his heart.
It rained, of course. The sky always seemed to know its cue.
Through it all, Lucien stood there, a beacon of white hair and vibrant, rainbow eyes amidst a sea of black silk and umbrellas. He didn't shed a tear. He didn't scream. The darkness he had felt in his dorm room hadn't consumed him; instead, it had crystallized into a cold, hyper-rational clarity.
A fall from a window, Lucien thought, watching the casket lower. The 3D vessel is so pitifully fragile. Gravity, momentum, and hard stone. That is all it takes to extinguish a life.
When the predictable rituals of mourning concluded, the predictable period of isolation began. The King retreated to his study, drowning in his sorrow, and Lucien was sent to his royal chambers. The servants and guards whispered in the halls, pitying the poor eight-year-old boy who had locked his door and refused to come out. They assumed he was crying into his pillows, broken by the loss of his mother.
They were wrong.
Inside his vast, dimly lit room, Lucien wasn't crying. He was sitting in the exact center of his plush rug, his legs crossed, staring at the empty space in front of him.
If his mother's death had taught him anything, it was that relying on the fragile rules of the 3D world was a death sentence. To survive—to truly take control—he needed to master the 4D construct. He needed to master the Soul.
Instructor Varen called it heresy, Lucien mused, a faint, humorless smile finally returning to his face. He said formless casting would tear the body apart. Let's test that hypothesis.
Lucien closed his eyes and looked inward. He didn't try to envision an F-rank fireball or an E-rank water shield. He ignored every fundamental law of spell-casting taught in Brownton Academy. He didn't build a cognitive pipe for his Essence.
Instead, he reached out to the raw, four-dimensional entity tethered to his flesh, and he just... pulled the plug.
The air in the room instantly grew heavy. The hairs on Lucien's arms stood up. A low, vibrating hum resonated through the stone walls, rattling the glass in his windows.
He opened his eyes.
Bleeding from his fingertips wasn't a recognized elemental force. It was a shifting, viscous mass of pure, unadulterated Essence. It looked like liquid starlight, glowing with the same impossible spectrum of colors as his eyes. It was erratic, pulsing with a dangerous, unstable heartbeat.
Don't shape it into a weapon, Lucien commanded his mind. Don't give it a worldly purpose. Give it an impossible one.
He began his weird path.
He willed the liquid light to fold in on itself. Not into a sphere, and not into a cube, but into a shape that shouldn't exist in a three-dimensional plane. The Essence fought back, burning his fingertips, threatening to detonate just as Varen had warned. But Lucien's mind was a steel trap. He forced his 3D brain to comprehend the 4D geometry.
Slowly, the mass stabilized.
Hovering above Lucien's palms was a geometric anomaly—a constantly shifting, folding tesseract made of raw, prismatic soul-energy. It had no offensive capability. It had no defensive use. It was completely, utterly useless by the Order's standards.
But it was stable. It was a piece of the 4D plane, existing peacefully in a 3D room without blowing him to pieces.
Lucien stared at the floating, impossible object, the colorful light reflecting off his pale face. He had just defied a two-hundred-year-old magical ban, purely out of grief and curiosity.
"A mistake, am I?" Lucien whispered to the empty room, the tesseract spinning silently in his hands. "Let's see just how much of a mistake I can be."