"It's... lonely. To be more powerful than any man you know, and have to live like a shadow. To be special, and have to pretend you're a fool..."
- Merlin
_____________________
The first thing Johan learned about magic was that it exhausted him.
Three days after the hospital, once Greta was home and fussing over him like he was the one who'd nearly died, Johan waited until the house went dark and quiet. Thomas had picked up extra shifts at the foundry to cover the hospital bills, which meant graveyard work. Midnight to eight in the morning. The house belonged to Johan and his sleeping mother during those hours.
Perfect for experimentation.
He started in his bedroom, door locked, curtains drawn. Sat cross-legged on the floor with a pencil in front of him and tried to remember the feeling from the hospital. The heat. The sense of something flowing through him like water through a pipe.
At first, nothing happened. He stared at the pencil until his eyes watered and his head ached, willing it to move. The pencil remained stubbornly still.
Maybe it only worked when someone was dying. Maybe it required life-or-death stakes to trigger. The thought made his stomach turn. He didn't want to need desperate circumstances to access whatever this was.
He closed his eyes. Breathed. Tried to find that place inside himself where the buzzing lived.
There. Faint but present. Like a banked fire waiting for fuel.
Johan reached for it mentally, carefully, the way you'd reach for a hot pot without wanting to burn yourself. The buzzing responded, warming, spreading through his chest and down his arms.
Move, he thought, focusing on the pencil.
Nothing.
Move.
Still nothing.
Frustration built in his chest, hot and sharp. The buzzing flared in response, sudden and violent, and the pencil shot across the room like it had been kicked, bounced off the wall with enough force to leave a mark in the plaster.
Johan stared, heart hammering. He'd done that. Actually done it. Not a fluke or a desperate miracle. Repeatable. Controllable.
Or maybe not controllable. The pencil had moved with far more force than he'd intended.
Over the next week, he practiced every chance he got. Late nights when Thomas was gone. Bathroom with the door locked and water running to cover any noise. Once, desperately, during lunch at school behind the equipment shed where no one went.
He learned the shape of his power through trial and error. Small objects were easier than large ones. Lighter was easier than heavy. The closer he was, the more control he had. And control mattered, because when he pushed too hard the world tinted orange and pain lanced through his skull like someone had driven a spike between his eyes.
By the end of the first week, he could float a book six inches off the ground for nearly thirty seconds before the strain became unbearable. By the end of the second, he could move a chair across his room, slow and wobbling, before his nose started bleeding and he had to stop.
Progress. Measurable, undeniable progress.
But the more he practiced, the more questions multiplied. What was this power? Where did it come from? Was he the only one who had it?
The memory of the broken wand fragment in his nightmare kept surfacing. Gebrüder Gregorovitch, 1923. A name. A date. Evidence that whatever this was, it had existed before. Had structure. History.
Which meant there might be answers. He just had to know where to look.
_______
The attic was cramped and dusty, insulation poking through gaps in the floorboards, the air thick with the smell of old wood and forgotten things. Johan had been up here exactly twice in his life. Once, when he was seven and convinced there were monsters. Once last year helping Thomas drag down the Christmas decorations.
He'd never paid attention to Greta's trunk before. It sat in the far corner, half-hidden behind boxes of Thomas's old military gear. Dark wood with tarnished brass fittings. A lock that had long since rusted through.
Johan had been thinking about it for days. Greta never talked about Germany. Never mentioned family or her life before Sheffield. Just "the war" and then silence, a door slammed shut on the past.
But if there were answers about magic, about wands and impossible power, maybe they started with the German nurse who'd fled the Rhineland in 1947.
He pried open the trunk's lid. The hinges squealed in protest.
Inside... layers of the past, carefully preserved. Letters tied with string, the paper yellowed and fragile. Photographs in black and white showing people in old-fashioned clothes, their faces serious for the camera. A christening gown, delicate lace work gone ivory with age. A prayer book in German with passages underlined.
And at the bottom, wrapped in a silk scarf gone grey with dust: a broken wooden stick.
The moment Johan's fingers brushed it, his magic erupted.
The buzzing roared to life, so sudden and violent he gasped. Heat flooded through him, concentrated in his hands where they touched the wood. The stick hummed, vibrated, resonated with his power like a tuning fork struck in perfect pitch.
His vision tinted orange. The attic swam in his sight, everything outlined in fire. He could feel the stick trying to respond, trying to channel the magic pouring into it, but it was broken. Incomplete. The magic had nowhere to go, just cycled through the wood and back into him in a feedback loop that made his teeth ache.
Johan forced himself to let go. The stick dropped back into the trunk. The connection severed. The buzzing faded to its usual background hum.
He sat there for a moment, breathing hard, staring at the unassuming piece of wood. Twelve inches long, maybe. Blackened at one end like it had been burned. Smooth despite its age, the grain almost alive in the dim attic light.
There was writing. Burned into the wood in precise letters: Gebrüder Gregorovitch, 1923.
Brothers Gregorovitch. 1923. Forty-seven years ago.
A wand. It had to be. He'd read enough fantasy books, seen enough movies. But this wasn't fiction. This was real, solid, humming with latent power when he touched it.
Which meant magic was real. Not just his strange ability to move objects and heal his mother, but actual structured magic. Wand magic. The kind that had makers and dates and presumably rules.
He...he wasn't alone.
His hands shook as he wrapped the wand back in the scarf and tucked it into his jacket. Evidence. Proof. A thread to pull that might unravel everything.
Downstairs, he hid it under a loose floorboard in his bedroom that he'd discovered months ago. Safe. Secret. His.
.....
...
..
The Sheffield Central Library smelled like old paper and furniture polish. Johan had always liked it here. Quiet. Orderly. The kind of place where knowledge lived in neat rows waiting to be discovered.
He spent hours combing through the folklore section. Books on European mythology, collections of fairy tales, academic texts about pre-Christian belief systems. He read about witches and wizards, magical creatures, ancient rituals. Most of it was clearly fiction or exaggeration. But buried in the nonsense were occasional hints of something real.
References to "wandmakers" in medieval Germany. Stories of people who could move objects with their minds in rural Poland. Accounts of healers in Scotland who could cure impossible illnesses with a touch.
Nothing concrete. Nothing that said "magic is real and here's how it works." But enough to suggest he wasn't completely alone. That somewhere, somehow, there were others like him.
Or there had been. Past tense. The most recent accounts he could find were from the early 1900s. After that, nothing. Like magic had simply disappeared from the world.
Or gone into hiding.
He checked out a stack of books on Germanic folklore and European history. The librarian, Mrs. Adams, raised an eyebrow at his selections.
"Big project for school?"
"Just interested," Johan said, which was true enough.
She stamped the cards. "You're an unusual boy, Johan Mercer. You always look so serious...is everything okay...?"
"Yes, Mrs. Adams...I just like learning things," he said instead, and carried his books home.
.....
...
..
Thomas came home early on a Friday. Johan heard the truck in the drive while he was in the garage, practicing. He'd progressed to larger objects now. Could float tools, move boxes, even lift himself a few inches off the ground if he concentrated hard enough.
Right now, a wrench hung suspended two feet off the concrete floor, rotating slowly as Johan experimented with fine control.
The door opened. Thomas stood silhouetted in the evening light, still in his work clothes, concrete dust pale on his shoulders.
Their eyes met.
Johan's concentration shattered. The wrench dropped, hit the floor with a metallic clang that seemed impossibly loud in the sudden silence.
"Jesus Christ." Thomas's voice was barely a whisper. "How... Johan, how are you doing that?"
Every instinct screamed at Johan to lie. To deflect. To come up with some rational explanation that would smooth this over.
But he was tired of lying. Tired of hiding. And this was his father, who'd already seen him heal Greta, who'd told him to keep it secret but hadn't rejected him.
"I don't know, Dad." Johan's voice came out smaller than he wanted. "It just happens. I've been practicing, trying to control it, but I don't understand it. I can move things. I can feel..." He gestured helplessly. "Everything. The house, the foundations, the pipes in the walls. It's like everything has a pulse and I can sense it."
Thomas scrubbed a hand over his face. He looked older suddenly, worn down by too many impossible things. "This is because of what happened at the hospital. What you did for your mum."
"I think I've always had it. The hospital just... activated it, maybe. Made it stronger."
"Can you stop it? Turn it off?"
"I'm trying to control it. That's what the practice is for."
Thomas walked into the garage, pulled his folding chair out, sat heavily. He was quiet for a long moment, just breathing, processing. Johan stayed where he was, afraid to move, afraid to break whatever fragile understanding was forming.
"Your mother can't know," Thomas said finally. "She's been through enough. The hospital, the recovery. She doesn't need to worry about this too."
"I won't tell her."
"And you keep it hidden. From everyone. You understand me?" Thomas's voice hardened. "People don't react well to things they can't explain. They get scared. And scared people are dangerous, Johan. I've seen what happens when fear takes over. In Korea, in the camps. Fear makes people into monsters."
"Yes, sir."
"I mean it. No showing off. No using it at school. No matter what happens, you keep this locked down tight."
"I understand."
Thomas stared at him for another moment, then stood. "I need a drink."
He walked out. Johan heard his footsteps across the yard, the back door opening and closing. Then silence.
Twenty minutes later, Thomas returned. The whiskey bottle in his hand was half-empty, though it had been full that morning. Johan knew because he'd seen it in the cupboard when helping Greta with breakfast.
Thomas sat back down, took a long pull, didn't offer any explanation.
They sat together in the garage as evening deepened into night. Thomas drinking steadily. Johan motionless on the floor. Neither spoke. What was there to say? The world had shifted under their feet, and they were both trying to find their balance.
Finally, Thomas set down the bottle. "You're still my son."
"I know."
"Whatever you are, whatever you can do. That doesn't change."
Johan's throat tightened. "Thank you."
Thomas nodded once, sharp and military. Then stood, swaying slightly. "Come on. Your mother will have dinner ready. Act normal."
Normal. Right. As if anything about Johan Mercer was normal anymore.
But he followed his father inside, washed his hands at the kitchen sink, sat at the table while Greta served shepherd's pie and talked about her day at the hospital.