The days stretched into something shapeless. I stopped counting them after Lira died. Maybe months passed. Maybe only weeks. I couldn't tell anymore. The seasons here didn't change just the faces of the hungry.
I lived the way stray dogs did: on instinct, on whatever scraps fell close enough. The first few mornings after her death, I still woke expecting her voice, half-turned to ask if she'd found work, if she'd eaten. Silence was always the answer. It grew louder with time.
When my stomach started to cramp so hard I couldn't stand, I learned to work. Not honest work the streets didn't care for that. I hauled barrels for the taverns, scrubbed floors for the stall owners, carried buckets for guards who never said thank you. Most days, I didn't get paid. Sometimes, I got kicked. But I survived, and that was supposed to be enough.
The hands that used to tremble from hunger turned into tools. They stopped feeling. The skin cracked, bled, and healed again, rougher each time. I didn't hate it. Pain meant I was still real.
Nights were harder. The city never slept, but it forgot people like me when the sun went down. The alleys filled with noises footsteps that didn't belong, whispers from people who didn't want to be seen. I'd curl up under broken carts or beside chimneys where the heat still lingered. The smell of smoke covered the rot.
Once, a thief tried to take the shoes I'd found. We fought. He was bigger, but hungrier too. In the end, we both bled, I kept the shoes. They didn't fit, but I wore them anyway.
Sometimes, I watched the soldiers march past in their neat rows, the mana stones on their armor glowing faintly in the dark. People cheered for them, even in this part of town. I didn't understand why. Maybe because soldiers got to eat. Maybe because they had a purpose.
I didn't. Not yet.
Everywhere I turned, the world seemed built to remind me of what I didn't have mana, home, family, a name that meant something. I'd seen other kids awaken early, feeling the first sparks of magic by ten or eleven. They were taken to the city's Awakening Center, where mages measured their light, gave them colors, told them who they could become.
I wasn't one of them. I couldn't feel anything. No warmth in the chest, no hum beneath the skin. Just emptiness. Sometimes I pressed my hands against my ribs, hoping to feel something a flicker, a heartbeat different from the ordinary one. Nothing ever answered.
By twelve, I'd learned not to expect much from the world. The old baker finally stopped letting me sweep his floors, said I was too big now, that I should "find some real work." Real work, in the slums, meant gambling, stealing, or dying.
I tried hauling stones at the quarry for a week. The pay was a handful of grain and water that smelled like rust. My shoulders tore open from the weight, and the overseer laughed when I collapsed. "You're not built for labor," he'd said. "You're built for dying slow."
He wasn't wrong. But I didn't die. I crawled away that night and never went back.
Sometimes, I stole food from the temple bins. The priests pretended not to see me. Maybe they pitied me. Maybe they didn't care enough to bother. I didn't care either way. Guilt and hunger don't mix well one always eats the other.
By the time winter rolled in, my body was taller, thinner, colder. The world had chiseled away everything soft. What was left could barely be called a boy.
But one evening, I saw something that made the air feel different.
A group of street kids, not much older than me, walking together with armbands the mark of the newly awakened. They laughed like they'd been chosen by the stars themselves. I watched them disappear into the south gate, toward the Awakening Center.
That night, I couldn't sleep. Their faces haunted me not because they were happy, but because they belonged. They had been seen. Measured. Named. Even if their grades were low, they had something I didn't: proof they existed in this world.
I sat up in the dark, feeling the cold settle in my bones.
Twelve years old. That was the age of awakening.
For the first time in months, I felt something other than hunger. Not warmth just a pull. A whisper that maybe, if I went there, I could finally know whether I was really alive or just pretending to be.
The decision came quietly, like most important things do. No grand vow, no storm. Just me, sitting under a broken lamp, staring at my hands and saying,
"Tomorrow."
Tomorrow, I'd go to the Awakening Center.
Tomorrow, I'd see if the world had left even a drop of mana for me.