The ash fell like snow that wasn't cold.
Elarion didn't remember when he'd stopped crying. Maybe it was when the screaming ended. Maybe it was when the fires burned low enough that he could see the stars again through the smoke. He walked through what used to be a village his village where walls had become suggestions and roofs had become memories scattered across scorched earth.
Six years old. Barefoot. Half-starved.
He didn't call out for his mother anymore. The silence had taught him better.
His feet left prints in the ash, small and wandering, tracing meaningless patterns across the battlefield. He'd been walking for two days, maybe three. Time felt stretchy here, like warm honey. The sun rose and set, rose and set, and he kept moving because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering the moment the ground shook and the house came down and
He stumbled.
His knees hit the ground, and he stayed there, staring at his hands. They were gray with ash. Everything was gray. Even the blood looked gray under all this dust.
I want to disappear, he thought. I want to be nowhere.
Something shifted in the air around him a tremor so faint he shouldn't have felt it. Like the world hiccupping. The ash beneath his palms felt different suddenly. Smoother. Slicker. As if friction itself had forgotten how to grip.
He didn't understand it. He was too young, too tired, too broken to understand anything except that he was alone and the world had ended and nothing would ever be warm again.
He pushed himself up and kept walking.
The patrol found him an hour before sunset.
Lieutenant Kevran spotted the child first a small shadow moving between the corpses of siege engines, silent as a ghost. The boy didn't run when they approached. Didn't even look up. Just kept walking with that thousand-yard stare Kevran had seen on soldiers three times his age.
"Poor kid," muttered Sergeant Ollis, reaching for his canteen. "Probably the only survivor for miles."
Kevran dismounted, boots crunching on debris. "Hey there, son. You hurt?"
The boy stopped. Turned. His eyes were dark, enormous in his thin face.
"What's your name?" Kevran tried again, gentler.
The boy opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
No sound came out.
Ollis stepped forward, but the moment his boot touched the ground near the child, something wrong happened.
The sergeant's foot slid impossibly, violently as if he'd stepped on black ice. His leg swept out from under him with the certainty of physics betrayed, and he went down hard, armor clanging against stone. The impact knocked the wind from his lungs.
"What in the " Ollis gasped, struggling to rise. His hands kept slipping against the ground, scrabbling for purchase that wasn't there anymore.
Kevran froze, hand instinctively moving to his sword. But the boy hadn't moved. Hadn't even blinked. Just stood there, staring at them with those empty eyes.
The lieutenant's gaze dropped to the ground around the child's feet. The ash there looked... different. Disturbed in ways that didn't match the wind. Patterns radiating outward like ripples in water, but the ash itself was dry, undisturbed.
Ollis finally managed to stand, breathing hard, glaring at the perfectly normal-looking ground that had betrayed him.
"Did you see " he started.
"I saw," Kevran interrupted. His voice had changed. Sharper. More focused. He crouched down to the boy's eye level, studying him with new intensity. "What's your name, son?"
This time, the boy whispered something so quiet the wind almost took it.
"Elarion."
"Elarion," Kevran repeated, testing it. Behind him, Ollis was still brushing ash from his armor, muttering about cursed ground. But Kevran wasn't thinking about curses. He was thinking about the war. About the things he'd seen talented mages do when they weren't trying. About the kind of raw, unpolished potential that survived when everything else burned.
He glanced at the ground again. At the impossible slip. At the boy who couldn't have caused it but somehow had.
Friction manipulation, Kevran thought. Unconscious. Untrained. And strong enough to affect a grown man in full armor.
His hand moved away from his sword and extended toward the child instead.
"We're going to take you somewhere safe, Elarion. Somewhere with food and warm beds. Would that be okay?"
The boy stared at his hand for a long moment. Then, slowly, he reached out and took it.
His fingers were small and cold and trembling.
Kevran pulled him up gently, already planning the report he'd need to file. The coded phrases he'd use. The way he'd describe this encounter to make sure the right people paid attention.
Found one juvenile survivor, exhibiting signs of latent manipulation abilities. Recommend immediate intake and evaluation.
He wouldn't mention that the boy felt weightless, as if even gravity had started to forget him. Or that when Elarion walked beside him back to the horses, his footsteps made no sound at all in the ash.
Or that when Kevran glanced back at their trail, he could see his own boot prints clear as day
But the boy's had already begun to fade, as if they'd never been there at all.
That night, wrapped in a military-issue blanket that smelled like strangers, Elarion sat at the edge of the camp and stared up at the moon.
It was full and cold and impossibly far away.
He thought about his mother's voice. His father's laugh. The way his sister used to braid flowers into crowns that always fell apart.
He thought about how the world had ended while he watched.
He thought about how no one had come to save them.
I'll never be seen again, he promised the moon silently. I'll learn to disappear. Completely. Forever.
The ash beneath him smoothed itself without him noticing, friction dropping to near zero, as if the earth itself was learning to forget his weight.
And somewhere in the dark, Lieutenant Kevran watched the boy from across the camp and wondered what kind of weapon he'd just picked up off a battlefield.
What kind of ghost.
What kind of echo.