"Before you understand power in Aethermoor, understand this: the world does not give. The world takes, and sometimes, if you are strong enough, you take it back."
The forest had a name, as most things in Aethermoor did, and like most things in Aethermoor, the name was a warning dressed in poetry.
Seris called it the Ashenreach, and she said it with the matter-of-fact cadence of someone who has learned not to flinch at things they cannot change. The Ashenreach was the western buffer of the Varenith province — three hundred miles of old-growth darkness that served as both natural border and unofficial grave. Things lived in it. Some of them were animals. Some were not.
Luceo learned this during the first hour of walking, as Seris outlined it in the precise, unemotional tones of a person reciting a list of hazards rather than describing a world. She spoke the way people speak when they have decided information is more useful than comfort.
He listened, and filed things, and asked occasional questions. She answered most of them.
She is either telling the truth or has the most elaborate deception I have ever encountered. Either way, the information is useful.
What he learned:
The world was called Aethermoor. It was not one kingdom but several dozen, arranged in a loosely hierarchical mess that had been at some form of war for most of its recorded history. At the top of the hierarchy — not by election or agreement but by the simple and irrefutable logic of violence — sat the Undying Pantheon: seven beings of immense cultivated power who had collectively decided they were gods and had, over the course of several centuries, made this opinion difficult to dispute.
Cultivation was the word for what passed here as magic, except that was too small a word. Cultivation was the systematic development of one's Aether core — the seat of metaphysical energy located in the chest, three inches below the sternum — through a combination of spiritual discipline, physical refinement, and exposure to the ambient Aether that permeated the world like invisible breath. Cultivators progressed through Realms, each Realm composed of several Stages, and at each threshold, the cultivator's body, mind, and connection to Aether deepened in ways that were, Seris informed him, difficult to describe to someone who had not experienced them.
"Have you experienced them?" he asked.
"I'm at the Third Stage of the Ember Realm," she said, without particular pride or modesty. "Which is acceptable for my age."
She is fifteen. At the Third Ember Stage. I have no Aether core, no cultivation, and a cracked sword that apparently has a name for what it is. Acceptable for my age would be a generous description of my situation.
"And the soldiers?" he asked. "The Order?"
"Second or Third Stage, most of them. Their commander is rumored to be Iron Realm." A pause. "You weren't afraid of them."
"I was afraid of them," he said. "I simply find that being afraid of things rarely improves the outcome."
✦
By midday they found shelter in the ruins of what Seris identified as an old way-station — a stone structure, roofless but walled, that someone had built and someone else had later decided not to use. They ate from her pack: hard bread, dried fruit, something preserved in salt that Luceo could not identify but ate without commentary because hunger is a more immediate concern than taxonomy.
The fire she made was small and precise, and she made it from Aether rather than flint — a gesture so casual it was clearly habit, her fingers producing a controlled warmth that she cupped into the prepared tinder as easily as breathing.
He watched this with the particular attention of someone who has decided to understand everything as quickly as possible.
"Teach me," he said.
Seris looked up. "To make fire?"
"To cultivate. To use Aether." He paused. "Any of it. Start wherever you like."
She regarded him for a long moment across the small fire. The light caught the mark on her collarbone — the spiral scar, he could see now, was definitely a brand, old enough to be healed but not old enough to be truly faded.
"You genuinely have no core," she said. Not a question.
"If I do, it hasn't introduced itself."
"That's impossible," she said flatly. "Everyone born in Aethermoor has a core. It forms before birth. It's—" She stopped. "You're not from Aethermoor."
She is sharper than she appears, which means she appears very sharp indeed.
"I told you I wasn't."
"I thought you meant a different province." She studied him with a new kind of attention — the focused look of someone reclassifying information. "Transmigrant. They call it transmigration when a soul crosses the Veilboundary between planes. There are texts about it. Old ones." She hesitated. "Most transmigrants die within hours of arrival. The Aether-density disparity—"
"Clearly I didn't."
"Clearly." She pulled her knees to her chest, a gesture that for a moment made her look precisely the age she was — a child who had been asked to be older than felt reasonable. "The blade. That's why it chose you. A Voidtouched weapon will sometimes bond to a transmigrant soul because the Void and the Veil have certain resonances—" She stopped again. "I'm explaining things as if you know what those words mean."
"Pretend I don't."
"The Void is the space between planes. Some objects fall through it and come back... changed. Your blade fell through something. So did you. That's why it found you. It recognized what you are."
Recognized what you are. What a tremendously vague and ominous thing to say.
"And what am I?" he asked.
She looked at him. The fire made her silver hair look amber, and her dark eyes were very steady.
"I don't know yet," she said. "But the brand on my collarbone reacted when you drew your blade." Her voice was flat and even, reporting a fact. "It hasn't reacted to anything in two years. It reacted to you."
Silence. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the Ashenreach, something called out — a long, falling note that was almost musical, almost human, almost.
"What is the brand?" he asked finally.
For the first time, something complicated moved across her face — grief and fury in quick succession, compressed into a feature so brief he might have imagined it.
"A slave-mark," she said. "For the Hollowed. What the Order calls people like me — cultivators born outside the sanctioned bloodlines. People the Pantheon decided shouldn't have power." She looked at the fire. "They brand us so they can track the Aether. So they can hunt us if we grow too strong."
A world with gods who brand children for the crime of existing. Charming. Truly. The creativity of cruelty never fails to disappoint in its consistency.
He said nothing for a moment.
"The blade," Seris continued quietly, "reacted to you. That means one of two things." She looked at him directly. "Either you're carrying power you don't know about, or you're going to develop something the existing order was not built to accommodate."
"Both options sound deeply inconvenient," he said.
"Most things worth anything are."
✦
She did teach him, that afternoon, in the way of someone who teaches because knowledge matters more to them than gatekeeping.
The basics of cultivation, she explained, began with sensing. Not sight, not hearing — something beneath both, a faculty that most Aethermoor natives exercised without thinking from childhood, like breathing or hunger. The Aether core, located at the sternum's hollow, was simultaneously a reservoir and a lens: it gathered ambient Aether, refined it, and projected it outward or stored it for deeper transformations. Every Realm represented a fundamental change in the core's capacity and the cultivator's relationship to Aether.
The Ember Realm — the first — was awareness. Contact. The recognition that the world was filled with something invisible and living.
The Iron Realm was solidification. The core hardening, the Aether becoming something that could be wielded rather than merely felt.
The Jade Realm began transformation. The cultivator's body itself began to change.
Beyond that, she admitted, her knowledge became largely theoretical.
"The Pantheon sits in what's called the Sovereign Realm," she said. "Or beyond. Nobody alive has seen the full extent of what that means. Their power is..." She searched for the word. "Geological. It's the difference between a river and the ocean. The ocean doesn't care about the river."
"The ocean can be crossed," Luceo said.
She looked at him with that steady gaze.
"What do you feel," she asked, "when you hold the blade?"
He picked it up, lying beside him. Held it. Tried to do what she had described — the reaching inward, the listening beneath hearing.
And found—
Nothing. And then something that was barely something. The ghost of a warmth, deep in his chest, in a place he had always associated simply with the mechanism of his heartbeat. Not Aether, exactly. Something older than the word for it. Something that felt less like a reservoir and more like a scar.
Well. That is interesting.
"Something," he said. "I'm not sure what."
Seris leaned forward. Her eyes had gone sharp and focused.
"The crack in the blade," she said slowly. "It's resonating with whatever that is. I can feel it from here." She sat back, and the look on her face was one he would come to recognize — the expression of someone encountering a problem they find intellectually compelling and personally concerning in equal measure. "You said the blade followed you home."
"Loosely speaking."
"It's not just a Voidtouched weapon," she said. "It's bonded. To you, specifically. And whatever is in you — whatever core equivalent a transmigrant develops — it's forming around a fracture."
"Meaning?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"In conventional cultivation," she said carefully, "a fractured core is a disaster. It means the Aether leaks, the power is unstable, the cultivator cannot progress beyond a certain point." She paused. "But there are old texts — very old — that describe a different kind of fracture. Not a damage. A design." Her eyes met his. "They called it Voidshaping. The practice of building a core around an absence rather than a presence."
Building something around an absence. That is the most accurate description of myself I have ever heard.
"Is that good or bad?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "The texts were banned three hundred years ago by the Pantheon."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Of course they were," he said finally.
Outside, the Ashenreach settled into the long, patient darkness of a world that had learned to make night feel permanent.
Luceo looked at the crack in his blade and thought, for the first time since waking on foreign soil, that perhaps being here was not entirely a mistake.
Or possibly it is the mistake of all mistakes. Either way. Forward.