Luenor sat cross-legged in the grass, the pulsing core of the Stone Tyrant resting in his hands like a living heart. It radiated a heat that was not warmth, but pressure—like the weight of an unseen mountain pressing against his palms.
The crystalline object was marbled with veins pouring with energy pulsating with erratic bursts. It was raw. Ancient. Untamed.
All around him were bodies of stillness. Elves, warriors, children, friends—Hera and Arwin had been there too—all strewn around him like a casualty of the battle they had just lost. Their chests barely billowed with breath. Their heartbeats were faint. The tribe's leader, Thalanar, a proud elf, knelt next to him, whispering prayers and drawing green, glowing symbols in sodden earth—runes of stability, defense, and flow.
"You are about to channel raw power, that no being your age should," Thalanar said gravely, "Do not fight it. Do not let it consume you either. Accept it and guide it. Be like a stream. Don't be like a dam."
Luenor didn't reply. His throat was parched. He simply closed his eyes.
Valdrak, the snow-white tiger who possessed intelligent golden eyes crouched, observing. Blood still stained his mouth. He had yet to eat. He was observing the boy. Valdrak's expression gave nothing away, although he flicked his tail once and his ears twitched slightly, as if sensing something. He leaned forward, not aggressively… cautiously.
As Luenor imagined the landscape in his mind, it coalesced into a world—a world of voluminous, deep, black void with sparkles of blue lighting dancing and glimmering off in the distance.
He imagined the channels that Thalanar had told him about, thin filaments of mana that streamed down his arms and legs and pooled in his chest. Unlike others, he didn't have a heart, a core. Just a void, an empty bowl.
He reached out with his mind—and he opened up.
The mana rushed from the void.
It was quick. Like a flood of energy, roaring down like waves crash against a shoreline. It did not trickle. It did not wave. It surged downward, crash after crash, until it spilled over the shores of his imagined lake, overflowing. His eyes grew wide and his body flinched in place.
"Steady!" Thalanar yelled. "Slow your draw!"
Luenor gasped with surprise as he tried to pull back the intake—but the void was unwilling to listen to the command. The void, its construct, wanted to freed, it wanted a vessel. His body seized up, as it tried to dam the storm going on within, with glowing white cracks forming on his arms and face like lightning through porcelain.
Luenor sucked in air as he struggled to reign in the core but it would not relent. It wanted to be free; it wanted a vessel. His body writhed, struggling to contain the tempest within. Consciousless fissures began to form along his arms and face that were spilling with raw light like sheets of lightning coursing through porcelain.
Thalanar relinquished his incantation and pressed his hand to Luenor's spine. Mana seals architecture, like petals opening, issued forth from his fingertips, but disintegrated as they contacted the boy's skin.
""No...at this rate - it's too late. He isn't just pulling, the core is forcing itself inside!""
Luenor screamed.
Inside his mind the rift rippled as it began to disintegrate.
Suddenly, he was in light. He stood in his families garden.
Tendrils of sunlight spilled through white stone pillars. The old tree, his tree, stood in full bloom. Its blossoms were no longer pink but instead were made of blue mana wisps. In front of it sat a man on a bench. He looked older than Luenor remembered but no less warm.
"Father..." Luenor whispered.
Tears were burning in the corners of Luenor's eyes.
"I was never strong."
"You are wrong, son." His father smiled. "You were always strong. You just did not believe it."
The mana blossoms fell against him like snow, surrounding him. Luenor stepped forward and inhaled.
And when he opened his eyes, he was not longer sitting on the grass.
He was floating.
Gasping noises came from all over the clearing.
Thalanar fell back on one knee. His eyes widened, taking in the sight. The cracks on Luenor's body were not breaks of pain, but rivulets of light. Glowing orbs began to form around him—rotating spheres of different types of mana were beginning to dance, like a constellation, like planets orbiting a sun.
Valdrak growled low, but did not move, his nostrils flaring as he sniffed the charged air.
Then Luenor's eyes snapped open—blue-white, burning like stars.
He put his hands up.
And he let everything go.
No explosion followed. No chaos. The light spilled forth in lovely rivers—gentle, radiant, precise. Mana tendrils left his body and spread out across the glade, and every strand had chosen its recipient. Every thread touched a fallen elf or companion, and flowed into them like the breath of someone returning from drowning.
Hera gasped first.
Then Arwin began to stir, choking into his broad sleeve.
Lyssari blinked and let out a small sound.
With that, more and more people began to awaken. The mana was delivered entirely perfectly, and each soul received what it needed, no more and no less. Luenor sat at the center, the channel and not the source. He did not scream. He did not falter.
He simply let go.
The whole process took a few moments. And then as if the spell had ended, the rings began to fade. The light faded. And the cracks in Luenor's skin healed over like wounds as they knit.
The process took only moments. And then, as if the spell was complete, the rings around him began to dissolve. The light faded. The cracks on his skin sealed like healing scars.
He drifted gently downward until his knees touched the grass.
He collapsed forward, panting—alive.
Valdrak, unimpressed, turned back to the last of the Stone Tyrant's remains and resumed eating noisily.
But everyone else simply stared.
Thalanar approached slowly, awe still plain on his face.
"You have no mana heart," the elf whispered, "and yet… you gave life like a god."
Luenor said nothing.
He looked at his hands, still faintly aglow.
And for the first time in his life, he felt something more than guilt or grief.
He felt whole.