4th of Darkfall, 412 AH
I woke a third time, and this time the body had finished arguing with me.
No headache. The mild pain behind my right eye that had been annoying me all day was gone, downgraded from a fact to the memory of one. The shutters were closed, and the house was silent.
All day there had been sound through the walls, footsteps, the acoustic clutter of a building full of people doing things. Now, for the first time since I'd opened my eyes in this body, I was alone.
About time. There were things I could only do alone.
I got up. The floor was colder now than before and my legs still felt a little stiff. I crossed to the desk under the window.
It was a rich boy's desk with a respectable stack of heavy paper, a capped inkwell, and a graphite pencil still at its full length, its point unworn. Lessons the previous occupant of this body hadn't cared about, by the look of it. I cared.
The leather grip felt wrong in my hand until I remembered my fingers were small enough for it, which made it exactly right. Small mercies.
The desk light-stone was dark, so I opened the shutters and let moonlight onto the desk. I'd taken field notes in worse. I sat, pulled a sheet over, and started writing down the day before it could get away from me.
The page filled under my hand faster than I could second-guess it.
Ceiling stones: light, no heat. None.Made by "artificers." Fueled by "mana."Corridor-wall patterns: geometric. Junctions and nodes. Like circuits.Transporting mana?Aldric pulled my hand away. Why?Corridor warm. No fire or vents.Working hypothesis: the patterns heat the walls.
A guess, and I marked it as one.
Mana next. It was like wiring or plumbing here, infrastructure so settled nobody bothered to be impressed by it. I wrote the most important question and underlined it twice.
Do I have it?
One last thing.
Three guards in one corridor. All women.Portraits: face after face, all women.
The pattern was worth recording.
I read it back.
And the joy of having gotten it all down went cold in about the time it took to read the second line.
Because it was a confession. It read like my field notes. Junctions and nodes. Like circuits. Transporting mana? Working hypothesis. The words of a man with a degree instead of a kid three days off a head injury. A kid who didn't know his own house, reverse-engineering the local physics. Anyone who read this would reach one conclusion. Replaced.
I didn't know who might search a recovering child's desk, and I didn't have to. The servant's hands passed over this room every day, and the meticulous find things without looking for them. I had no good answers if the wrong person asked why I had written that page.
So it had to go. But the page was also the most useful thing I'd produced all day, and I wasn't in the habit of destroying the only good notes I had.
I tore the sheet in two, kept the half I wanted to keep, and started the other half over in a different writing entirely. How do the ceiling stones work? Why are the walls warm? What are the carvings? Short, curious, without a single load-bearing word in it. If someone bothered to read this, they found a recovering child being a little too curious about home, and that was perfect. I had a bandage and three missing days to point at, and I was going to point at them on purpose now.
I'd been under-answering so far, letting the injury carry my behavior one question at a time without ever calling it a plan. It was about time I made one. So, two pages. One for them and one for me.
The boy's version I left on the desk where he would leave it. The real half I'd hide somewhere nobody would find before morning arrived.
I went back to bed because the floor was freezing.
I wasn't tired. Three days of whatever a head injury and a body-swap did to a person had apparently left the tank full. I lay on my back in the dark with my eyes open and the one question I'd actually wanted answered all day.
Do I have it?
I'd already felt it twice, a prickling at the wall, and faint in my chest yesterday. I could find it again.
I let my breathing slow and tried what had half-worked last time: attention spread wide and left open, chasing nothing.
And I found it quickly this time.
It felt like a permeating presence: something in the tissue. It was strongest in my chest and thinned as I traced it along my arms, not toward any source, just less where there was less tissue.
In my right hand it was faint, almost gone. In the pads of the three left fingers I'd put to the groove, it was minimally more noticeable again.
Every anatomical comparison I knew failed. I couldn't point to anything on Earth and say that, it's that. Mana was entirely new.
Real, and in me. The games had taught me to expect a core behind the solar plexus, and the stronger reading in my chest nearly fit, but the signal faded smoothly with the amount of tissue instead of having an edge or a rim.
It was everywhere, scaling with mass. Which meant scaling with cell count, which meant every cell of this body, probably, like mitochondria sit in nearly every cell.
Some findings cost a career. This one had cost slightly more, and the rest of that memory had returned in pieces as the headache cleared.
In my first life the last things were a horn, the gravel, and the overcast sky, which I'd noted even then was better for photographs. The dying thought, the one I'd actually had, was I got the shot. That was the man I was. Three meters off a logging road, crouched over a fern, holding my breath for a butterfly that turned out to be undescribed, and pleased with the framing while a truck arrived.
A ridiculous way to die. I'd do it again.
This was the part where others would mourn. I lay still and waited for grief. Excitement came instead, because under my own skin was a new branch of science no one on Earth had ever studied, and I wanted to understand it more than I'd wanted anything since the butterfly.
The hunger for knowledge had crossed over with me. Maybe it was the only thing that I had.
I got up again and took a fresh sheet. The boy's page could keep its place on the desk. This deserved to be recorded properly, in my own hand with no child in it anywhere.
Mana is real. I can feel it. In the tissue, no anatomical correlate. Distribution scales with mass. Hypothesis: cell count. Need to map it. Need to understand the mechanism. Need... and I stopped, because the honest end of that sentence was just everything.
I folded the fresh sheet around the torn first one and worked both under the loose lining of the bottom desk drawer. They lay flat. The drawer closed over them like nothing.
The stack of paper had seemed generous an hour ago. Now it looked like a week, maybe. I was going to need a great deal more of it.
Morning would bring the servant. I wondered, would his OCD beat my hiding place?
I'd find out by breakfast.