The book stared back at him in a language he technically understood, he could read the words just fine, but the terms themselves were foreign.
Mana affinities.
Magic circles.
Runes.
All of it might as well have been written in another alphabet, for all the sense it made to him, and he didn’t even know which page to start on.
I guess I should figure out what affinities I even have.
According to the book, a mana affinity was the type of mana a person’s body was naturally attuned to.
Water, Fire, Wind, Earth, Metal, Lightning, and Wood were the most common; Light and Dark, rarer.
He kept reading.
A few pages in, the guidebook described a testing method — something called an affinity orb, sitting, according to the diagram, in a small drawer built into every apprentice’s desk.
Wren opened his and found the real thing waiting inside: dull grey glass, small enough to fit in one palm.
Focus your will into it, the book said, and it would answer back in color — whatever shade rose to the surface was your affinity, plain and simple.
Wren closed his hand around the orb and did exactly that.
He waited.
A few seconds passed.
Nothing.
Really, nothing?
I thought I did that right.
He gripped the orb again, harder this time, jaw tightening, willing something — anything — to happen.
Still, nothing.
Damn it.
If I can’t even manage this much, how am I supposed to get strong enough to survive in this world?
Wren set the orb down and collapsed onto the bed, staring down at his own hands, at the frail, untested body he apparently now called his.
The days since he’d arrived had gone by in something close to a blur.
A knock at his door each morning, always the same girl — small, delicate-looking, dressed in a maid’s uniform — telling him breakfast was ready.
The cafeteria, and real food waiting for him there instead of the thin grey slop he’d choked down for his first three days, or three years, depending on which version of his life anyone chose to believe.
Bread.
Meat.
A full glass of milk, more than he remembered ever being allowed at once.
He’d eaten like someone half-convinced it would all get taken back the moment he did something wrong.
Looking at it now, he wasn’t sure that fear had been unreasonable.
He glanced toward the door — the same door leading out to the same hallway he’d mopped for years without knowing it.
It wasn’t hard to imagine walking back out through it in a servant’s uniform instead of these robes, bucket in hand, if he couldn’t manage something as simple as making a piece of glass light up.
One test.
Everyone else in this tower probably passed it without a second thought.
He picked the orb back up and tried again.
This time, pain answered him — sharp, stabbing, grating, like something with an edge was trying to cut its way out of his own chest from the inside.
His knees buckled.
He dropped to the floor, one hand clutching at his ribs.
“AGHHH,” a ragged cry tearing out of him before he could stop it.
The orb slipped from his other hand and hit the floor.
The pain vanished as fast as it had come.
Wren knelt there for a moment, catching his breath, before he thought to look for where the orb had rolled off to.
He didn’t need to look far.
It sat a few feet away, glowing a dull yellow and gold.
Wren forgot the pain almost as soon as it left him, scrambling to his feet and snatching the guidebook back up off the desk.
Metal, the book called it — a discipline of extremes, capable of the hardest defense in the nine elements or some of the most devastating offense, depending on how a mage chose to shape it.
The orb’s dull yellow-gold, according to the diagram beside the entry, meant exactly what he was staring at on his own floor right now.
He flipped forward to the section on Metal properly and started reading in earnest.
Of the nine elements, Metal is among the most versatile — equally suited to raw defense and devastating offense, depending on the will and precision of its caster…
He kept reading, but one line stopped him cold.
One name stood above the rest as proof of Metal’s offensive potential: Michael Kaiser, a sword saint of ages past, whose mastery of the element pushed it beyond its own limits entirely — into something he named the Sharp extreme.
Wren read the line twice.
An entire school of magic, born from one person deciding an element hadn’t finished revealing what it could do.
He wondered, distantly, what that kind of certainty even felt like.
After the history, there was a section on usage.
Linked to the lungs, Metal magic draws its cost from breath and structure alike — untrained casting risks shallow, ragged breathing in the short term, and in prolonged use, a persistent tightness in the chest that some veteran Metal mages never fully shake.
Precision casting, however, allows a practitioner to redirect much of this cost elsewhere: into a grimoire, a modification, or the environment itself, rather than the caster’s own body.
Wren read that part twice as well.
Redirect the cost elsewhere.
So it wasn’t that skilled mages hurt less, it was that they’d simply learned where else to put the pain.
Finally, on the last page of the chapter, was a diagram, simply labeled, Metal mana gathering spell.
Wren held his breath.
Could he even cast a spell, would he be able to stay here if he couldn’t?
either way he had to try
Either way, he had to try.
He grabbed the notebook off his desk — the one filled with blank sheets of spellcasting paper — and carefully tore a single page free.
Then he set to work, copying the diagram from the book stroke for stroke, until only one line remained.
Here goes nothing.
He connected the final lines, closing the metal rune at the circle’s center.
The moment it closed, gold light flooded the room — not the dull, muted color from the orb, but something brighter, hungrier, streams of it pulling in from every corner like the circle itself was breathing it in.
Wren watched, breath caught, as the light gathered, thickened, and began to take shape.
Wren watched, breath caught, as the light gathered, thickened, and began to take shape — collapsing inward, slow at first, then all at once, until the golden glow guttered out entirely and left something solid sitting in the center of the circle.
A shard of metal.
No bigger than his thumb, dull grey-gold, warm to the touch when he finally worked up the nerve to pick it up.
It didn’t look like much.
It didn’t need to.
He’d made it.
Out of nothing, out of a scrap of paper and a diagram he’d never seen before this morning, he’d made something real.
His chest ached faintly as he sat back — not the tearing, stabbing pain from the orb, just a tightness low in his lungs, a reminder rather than a punishment.
He breathed through it anyway, slow and careful, and let himself feel something he hadn’t let himself feel since waking up in this tower with no name and no past worth speaking of.
I can actually do this.
He turned the shard over in his palm, watching faint threads of gold catch the lamplight, and thought about the guidebook still sitting open on the desk in front of him, about Michael Kaiser and a school of magic built from one man’s refusal to accept an element’s limits, about a Tower Master who’d looked at him like a puzzle he intended to solve whether Wren wanted to be solved or not.
None of it mattered as much, right now, as the small, solid proof sitting in his hand.
Whatever he’d been three years ago, whatever he’d done to himself three days ago, whatever waited for him when the new apprentices finally arrived — he had this much, at least.
A rune.
A shard of metal.
A door that didn’t lead back to a servant’s uniform and a mop.
Wren closed his fingers around it, and for the first time since he’d opened his eyes in this tower, let himself hope.
I do hope its actually good.