The stars were wrong.

  Elias sat on a log by the roadside, staring up at the night sky. The constellations had drifted. The Hunter was too low on the horizon. The Weeping Mother had lost a star from her eye.?

  It was a small detail, but it made his chest ache with a hollow, cold pressure. It was the same feeling he got when he reached for a book on a shelf, only to find the wood rotted away beneath his fingers.

  Evidence, his mind supplied unhelpfully. Evidence that you are a ghost haunting a world that forgot you.?

  He looked down at the campfire Rylus had built. It was a pitiful thing—a handful of damp pine twigs struggling to consume a log. The smoke smelled of resin and wet ash.?

  It smelled like the night Arion left.

  “Tea tastes better when you boil the water with Intent, Elias,” Master Arion had said, three hundred years ago, stirring a copper pot over a blue magical flame. “Fire is not just heat. It is a request. You are asking the water to change.”?

  Elias extended his hands toward Rylus’s fire.

  He waited for the warmth.

  He felt nothing.

  His skin, pale and suffused with the void-mana of the Athenaeum, acted like a heat sink. The fire warmed the air, but the warmth died before it reached his bones.

  He wasn't cold, exactly. He just wasn't warm. He hadn't been warm in centuries.?

  He pulled his hands back into his sleeves.

  "You are murdering the turnips," Elias said.

  Rylus jumped. The Knight was hunched over a small iron pot, stirring a bubbling gray sludge.

  "Sir?"

  "The stew," Elias clarified. "You are boiling it at a Rolling High. The turnips will disintegrate before the dried meat hydrates. You must simmer at a Gentle Low."?

  Rylus looked at the pot. He looked tired.

  There were dark circles under his eyes, and a smear of mud on his cheek from the cart incident.

  "It is food, Sir," Rylus said wearily. "Not alchemy. It just needs to be hot."

  "Texture matters," Elias argued. "Mouthfeel is a component of morale."

  He reached for the pot. He didn't need a spell. He just wanted to adjust the position of the wood, to lower the heat. A simple, physical action.

  Slap.

  A wooden spoon cracked against his knuckles.

  Elias froze. He stared at his hand. A red mark was forming on his pale skin.

  He looked at Rylus. The Knight was holding the spoon like a weapon, his eyes wide with sudden panic at what he had just done.

  "No magic," Rylus whispered, his voice trembling but firm. "You promised. No physics. No thermodynamics."

  Elias slowly lowered his hand.

  He felt a strange sensation in his chest. It wasn't the cold ache from the stars.

  It was… heat? A flush of indignation?

  No. It was novelty.

  Someone had stopped him. Someone had told the Grand Archivist no and backed it up with a spoon.

  "I was merely going to adjust the log," Elias said stiffly.

  "Eat your turnips," Rylus said, turning back to the pot.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Dinner was a quiet affair. The turnips were mush. The meat was like leather. Elias ate it all, because wasting resources was inefficient, but he did not enjoy it.?

  After the meal, Rylus began scrubbing the pot with sand.

  Elias reached into his Inventory. He needed comfort. He needed something familiar.

  He pulled out a pipe.

  It was a masterpiece of the Third Era—carved from [Ironwood], inlaid with silver runes that prevented the bowl from ever getting too hot to hold. He had smoked this pipe while cataloging the Scrolls of the Deep in 992.

  He packed it with a pinch of [Dried Rot-Leaf]. It wasn't tobacco, but it burned slow and smelled like old libraries.

  He needed a light.

  He looked at the campfire. It was dying. He could ask Rylus for the flint, but Rylus was busy, and Elias still felt the sting of the spoon.

  "I can do this," Elias whispered.

  He didn't need a complex spell. Just a spark. A tiny, microscopic ignition point.

  He focused. He visualized a match. A single, fragile flame. He clamped down on his mana, restricting the flow to a trickle so thin it was barely there.?

  [Ignite].

  He snapped his fingers.

  He didn't create a match.

  He created a star.

  FZZZT.

  A ball of pure, white plasma the size of a marble materialized on the tip of his thumb.?

  It made no sound. It was too hot for sound.

  The light was blinding. It bleached the color out of the forest, turning the night into a stark, high-contrast photograph.

  The moisture in the air instantly vaporized. Elias felt his throat click shut as the humidity dropped to zero percent in a millisecond.

  The heat didn't radiate; it punched.

  "Sir?" Rylus yelled, shielding his eyes.

  Elias panicked. He tried to snuff it out. He pinched his fingers together.

  The star vanished.

  Darkness slammed back into the clearing. Elias blinked, purple spots dancing in his vision.

  "I..." Elias started. "I think I modulated the output correctly, but the ambient mana density is—"

  "FIRE!"

  The scream came from the darkness.

  Elias turned.

  Five hundred yards away, across the open field, a barn stood silhouetted against the night sky.

  The roof was blazing.

  The thermal radiation from Elias's "spark"—which had traveled at the speed of light—had hit the dry hay in the loft. It hadn't sparked a fire; it had flash-ignited the entire structure.?

  "Oh," Elias said.

  The pipe slipped from his numb fingers.

  It hit a rock.

  Crack.

  The [Ironwood] stem, which had survived the fall of the Second Empire, snapped in two.

  Elias looked down at the broken pieces. He felt a sharp, metallic taste in his mouth.

  Mana burn. Or maybe just shame.

  "MY BARN! MY WINTER HAY!"

  A man burst into their campsite. He was wearing a nightshirt and muddy boots. He was holding a pitchfork, but he wasn't attacking. He was sobbing.

  "It's gone!" the farmer wailed, falling to his knees. "The gods have smote me! A demon star fell from the sky!"?

  Elias stood up. His instinct was to fix it. [Extinguish]. [Reconstruct]. He could rewind the barn's timeline. He could pull the carbon out of the smoke and rebuild the wood.

  He raised his hand.

  Rylus tackled the farmer.

  "Stay down!" Rylus shouted, wrestling the sobbing man into the dirt. "Don't look at him! Don't look at the mage!"

  Rylus looked back at Elias. His eyes were pleading. Don’t cast.

  Elias stopped.

  He looked at the farmer. The man wasn't an enemy. He wasn't a barbarian trying to burn books. He was just a man who had lost his livelihood because Elias wanted a smoke.?

  Elias lowered his hand.

  He felt small. Smaller than he had in the Void. In the Void, he was a king of nothing. Here, he was a disaster.

  He reached into his Inventory.

  He bypassed the gold. Gold couldn't feed cows in winter if there was no hay to buy. He bypassed the artifacts.

  He found a burlap sack.

  It was heavy. It smelled of earth and sun and magic.

  Item: [Seed-Bag of the Harvest God (Replica)]

  Contents: [Eternal Grain]

  Properties: Never rots. Grows in snow. Perfectly nutritious.

  Elias walked over to the farmer. Rylus let the man go, stepping back warily.

  The farmer looked up, eyes red, face streaked with soot. He saw Elias—the pale skin, the glowing eyes, the terrifying stillness.

  Elias dropped the sack at the man's feet.

  "Compensation," Elias said. His voice was raspy. "It... never rots. Plant one seed, it grows in a day. It will feed your livestock for a century."

  The farmer stared at the sack. He looked at the burning barn.

  "Who..." the farmer whispered. "What are you?"

  Elias didn't answer. He adjusted his hood.

  "We are leaving," Elias said to Rylus.

  They walked the down the road in the dark. Rylus led way. Elias walked behind.

  They didn't speak for a mile.

  Rylus didn't scold him. He didn't yell about the fire or the danger. He just walked, his shoulders slumped, the sound of his armor clinking softly in the night.?

  That silence was worse than the spoon.

  Elias put his hand in his pocket. His fingers brushed the rough, splintered wood of his broken pipe.

  He traced the break. It was a clean snap.

  He could fix it. A simple [Mend] would fuse the fibers back together. It would be perfect. Like it never happened.

  He pulled his hand out.

  He left the pieces in his pocket. Broken.

  If he fixed it, he might forget. He didn't want to forget the smell of the burning hay. He needed to remember that he was dangerous.

  "Some things," Elias whispered to the dark, his voice barely louder than the wind, "are better left in pieces."

  Rylus glanced back. He didn't ask what Elias meant. He just nodded, once, and kept walking.?

  For a second, with the broken pipe in his pocket and a Knight who knew his name in front of him, Elias felt almost real.

  Not forgiven. Just... observed.

  Mana Consumed: 0.000004% (Solar ignition)

  Current Mood: Ashy

  Rylus Loyalty: +6 (Saw the regret)

  Inventory: -1 Pipe, -1 Sack of Divine Grain

  Reputation: The Demon Star (Rural Myth)